EDITOR: The war on Iran seems closer
For an Israeli government which has run out of options and has managed to alienate its few friends left, and for an USA President with lower than ever polls, and a mountain to climb at the November elections for Congress, it seems mad to invest in another war, just as it becomes clear what disaster the war on Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza really are. Yet, this is what seems to go forward, as the only new policy of the Obama administration. God save us from smart alecs like Barack…
How smart is this in comparison to the Dubya policies, you have to ask yourself?
Gaza aid flotilla to set sail from Lebanon with all-women crew: The Guardian
Arabic singer joins crew of nuns, doctors, lawyers and journalists for humanitarian mission despite Israeli warning
Israel’s deadly assault on a Gaza aid flotilla in June led to anger in the Muslim world and beyond. Photograph: Dita Alangkara/AP
A ship bearing aid for Gaza is preparing to leave Tripoli in Lebanon this weekend in the latest attempt to defy the Israeli blockade – with only women on board.
The Saint Mariam, or Virgin Mary, has a multi-faith international passenger list, including the Lebanese singer May Hariri and a group of nuns from the US. “They are nuns, doctors, lawyers, journalists, Christians and Muslims,” said Mona, one of the participants who, along with the other women, has adopted the ship’s name, Mariam.
The Mariam and its sister ship, Naji Alali, had hoped to set off several weeks ago but faced several delays after Israel launched a diplomatic mission to pressure Lebanon to stop the mission.
The co-ordinator of the voyage, Samar al-Haj, told the Guardian this week the Lebanese government had given permission for the boats to leave for Cyprus, the first leg of the journey, this weekend.
Israel says it is concerned a flotilla from Lebanon, with whom it has ongoing hostility, will smuggle weapons to Gaza. Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, has warned that Israel reserves the right to use “necessary measures” in line with international law to stop the ship.
But al-Haj says the mission is purely humanitarian. “Our goal is to arrive in Gaza,” she said. “It is the responsibility of the government to deal with the politics. We are not political.”
She said that once news of the flotilla was out organisers were inundated with requests to join the voyage, with more than 400 from the US alone. At least 10 Americans will be on board.
The boat has been stocked with medical instruments and medicines to take to the Palestinians.
In preparation for the voyage the participants gathered at a hotel in Beirut to discuss their plans. The logistics are many: minimal grooming, strict food rationing, and limited water supply.
“There will be no showers, no skirts and no makeup,” al-Haj told the group.
The participants are aware of the dangers, having followed the fate of another flotilla carrying aid for Gaza that was attacked by Israel in May.
Israeli forces landed on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel, killing nine activists on board. Al-Haj reminded the women to be prepared for a confrontation.
“Have blood tests in case we come under attack from Israel and you need a blood transfusion,” she said. She added that organisers were going out of their way not to provoke Israel.
“We will not even bring cooking knives,” she said.
Serena Shim, who is heavily pregnant, decided to join the voyage because of her belief that the blockade is unjust. “These people need aid,” she said.
Asked how they would react to an Israeli military assault, one activist, Tania al Kayyalisaid: “We are not planning to fight or attack – but we will not leave the St Mariam.”
Academic Boycott on Israel Flexes Its Muscles: The Washington Report
WRMEA, August 2010, Pages 44-45, Southern California Chronicle
WERE IT not for the eagle eyes of Nur Marsalha, a professor of religion and politics in England, perusing the program for the biennial conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS), Israel might have won a small victory in its efforts to legitimize its military occupation of the West Bank.
The May 27-30 conference at the Doubletree Inn in Santa Monica featured 66 panels, but Marsalha questioned the institutional affiliation of one particular participant: Ronen Cohen, who stated he was from Ariel University in Samaria, Israel.
Not only is Ariel University situated in Israel’s fourth largest illegal West Bank settlement, but it originally was a satellite campus of Bar Ilan University—until Israel’s Minister of Defense Ehud Barak rushed through its accreditation, without evaluating its academic qualifications.
As a result, a total of 120 academics registered their objections in a letter to ISIS arguing that the Ariel settlement is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power cannot populate a territory it occupies.
ISIS claimed that it was being victimized by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. In response, ISIS member Vida Samiian, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Fresno State University, explained: “We tried to present a resolution allowing the general membership to vote on the matter. ISIS leadership blocked this.”
While ISIS did remove “Samaria” as the site of the Ariel institution, it blocked Internet access to Cohen’s paper, titled “The Hojjatiyeh: The Real Bringers of the Islamic Revolution of Iran.” Meanwhile, the chair and three other participants on the “Shi’ism, Clerics and Movements of Revolution and Reform” panel dropped out, leaving Cohen as the sole remaining member.
Finally, days before the conference, three new participants and a chair were announced—too late to review their abstracts for the session renamed “Dialogues and Contentions.”
Incredibly, one of the new panelists was Judea Pearl, a UCLA computer science professor and father of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by extremists in Pakistan. The title of his paper, “Carving a Dialogue between Muslims and Jews,” was a misleading one for Pearl, who vociferously rants about Islamist violence. He is the polar opposite of Cindy and Craig Corrie, who have responded to Israel’s killing of their daughter Rachel with a message of reconciliation.
On the second day of the conference, when Cohen was scheduled to speak, about 20 concerned academics and activists handed fliers to people arriving at the Doubletree Inn. Many stood behind a cardboard apartheid wall and held signs stating that ISIS approves of apartheid.
“We don’t object to an Israeli participating in the conference,” stated economics professor Sasan Faymazman during the informational May 28 picket. But “why did ISIS include a paper from a settler institution? Why did ISIS block the membership from reading Cohen’s abstract which deals with a so-called nuclear Iran and its ‘threat to the Middle East or maybe to the world?'”
The picketing was a success, as Iranian-American photographers and reporters left the conference to interview dissenting scholars. Dr. Ahmad Karimi, a past ISIS president, confronted the picketers and voiced his objections to their accusations that ISIS supported apartheid. Agreeing that military occupation is wrong, he stated that the controversy will be reviewed at the Middle East Studies Association convention in November.
The incident gives notice to Israel that no trick to gain cultural or academic legitimacy is too small for Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) activists to uncover and expose. For more information, visit <www.usacbi.org>.
MPAC Media Awards
What do best-selling author Dave Eggers, the Emmy-award winning TV series “Grey’s Anatomy,” and feature films “Amreeka” and “My Name Is Khan” have in common? All are recipients of the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s (MPAC) 2010 media awards, presented May 1 at the Westin Bonaventure in Downtown Los Angeles. More than 600 members and guests gathered for the 19th annual event honoring film, TV and literary projects that cast Muslims in realistic roles.
Eggers has been the hero of the Arab-American and Muslim-American communities since July 2009, when he published his best selling book, Zeitoun (available from the AET Book Club), which chronicles the harrowing post-Hurricane Katrina ordeals of Abdulrahman Zeitoun. Accepting the award, Eggers recalled how, when he began to interview them, Abdulrahman and his wife, Kathy, protested “Who will care about our story?” Instead they became the first Muslim family many American readers came to know.
MPAC selected an episode from “Grey’s Anatomy” for its media awards because it focused on the deep faith of a Muslim lab technician (Faran Tahir) who insists on surgery for an inoperable tumor. In the November 2009 episode, entitled “Give Peace a Chance,” the Muslim patient makes du’a, and his faith enlightens the surgeon (Patrick Dempsey).
Accepting the award were Pakistani-American actor Tahir, executive producer Mark Wilding and writer Peter Nowak.
Bollywood director Karan Johar traveled from India to receive his MPAC award for his film, “My Name Is Khan.”Inspired by political events in the U.S., the feature film tells the story of Rizvan Khan, a Muslim afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome who travels to the post-9/11 U.S.
In the U.S., Khan falls in love with and marries a Hindu divorcee, helps a small town in Georgia cope with a Hurricane Katrina-like flood, and launches a mission to tell newly elected President Barack Obama that his name is Khan and he’s not a terrorist.
Cherien Dabis’ film “Amreeka” explores how someone from the West Bank starts life over in the Midwest. The screenwriter and director was applauded by MPAC for her tragicomedic view of a Palestinian divorcee’s rough awakening to life in post-9/11 America.
Dabis used her own experience of coming of age in the Midwest during the first Gulf war to tell the story of her fictional heroine, Munah, and her teenage son, Fadi. Dabis’ Palestinian parents emigrated to Ohio shortly before her birth. Her father was a highly respected physician until the first Gulf war began. Soon, the Arab-American family was treated like a pariah.
SAWA Fetes Syrian Stars
The Syrian American Women’s Association (SAWA) has been providing medical assistance to hearing-impaired children in Syria for a decade. On May 1, it celebrated its 10th anniversary with a gala dinner in the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.
Dr. Kamal Batniji, who has helped SAWA perform cochlear implants to deaf children in Syria, received the group’s Golden Heart award. Also receiving the award for their assistance were Dr. Hatem and Salwa Chehabi, Dr. Abdallah and Daad Farrukh, and Jim and Pricilla Khoury.
A highlight of the charitable organization’s annual event is the presentation of al-Ataa awards to Syrian stage and screen stars. This year’s recipients were actress Sulaf Fawakheri and producer/director/actor Jamal Soliman. Presenting the awards were Farouk Ubaysi and SAWA president Ilham Kalioundji.
Over the past year, SAWA provided eight cochlear implants to deaf children and donated 250 hearing aids. It also spearheaded the development and implementation of a speech rehabilitation curriculum at Damascus University.
Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.
MSU Appeals UCI Suspension Recommendation
The showdown for the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Orange County Jewish Federation and Israel’s Consul General in Los Angeles Jacob Dayan versus the Muslim Students Union (MSU) of the University of California at Irvine (UCI) took place June 14 when the Jewish Federation went public with a confidential UCI recommendation to suspend the MSU for one year.
At UCI, where Muslim and Arab students are equal in number to Jewish undergrads, creative MSU programs have outraged off-campus Zionist leaders. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education Office on Civil Rights determined ZOA complaints of UCI campus anti-Semitism were unfounded.
The conflict came to a head Feb. 8, when Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren spoke at UCI and his speech was interrupted 10 times by 11 students—two of whom had lost relatives killed during Israel’s 22-day blitzkrieg of Gaza (see May/June 2010 Washington Report, p. 36).
A delegation from the Orange County Jewish Federation traveled to Oakland, CA to present their allegations to UC Chancellor Mark G. Yudorf.
With the June 14 release of the recommendation of the suspension of MSU for one year effective in September, and an additional one year of probation, attorney Reem Salahi filed an appeal on behalf of the MSU. “Even the fraternity at UC San Diego which hosted the racist ‘Compton Cookout’ wasn’t suspended,” she noted. “It appears UCI is applying a different standard of punishment against the MSU than any other campus organization.”
Emphasizing that MSU is primarily a religious organization that provides prayer services on campus, Salahi said as many as 250 Muslim students would be affected by the suspension, leaving them without a voice or means of association.
“UCI is clearly caving into the pressure of these external organizations who seek to silence dissent and criticism of the Israeli state,” Salahi concluded. “Collectively punishing the entire Muslim population is truly chilling.”
Stated UCLA anthropology professor Sondra Hale: “This ruling will be a major setback to activist students everywhere and a blow to academic freedom, not to mention underscoring the degree to which officials of the UC system cater to outside proponents of Israel’s government policy.”—Pat McDonnell Twair
Jonathan Cook: Negev village torn down for second time: IOA
By Jonathan Cook in al-Araqib – 6 Aug 2010
Israel plans mass forced removals of Bedouin
Israeli security forces destroyed a Bedouin village this week for the second time in a matter of days, leaving 300 inhabitants homeless again after they and dozens of Jewish and Arab volunteers had begun rebuilding the 45 homes.
Human rights groups warned that these appeared to be the opening shots in a long-threatened campaign by the Israeli government to begin mass forced removals of tens of thousands of Bedouin from their ancestral lands in the northern Negev.
The High Follow-Up Committee, the main political body for Israel’s Arab minority, vowed this week to help rebuild the village for a second time and said it would call on the UN to investigate Israel’s treatment of the Bedouin.
Al Araqib village, which is a few kilometres north of the Negev’s main city Beersheva, has become a symbol of the struggle by about 90,000 Bedouin to win recognition for dozens of communities the government claims are built on state land.
In a test case before the Israeli courts, an inhabitant of al Araqib has been presenting documents and expert testimony to show his ancestors owned and lived on the village’s lands many decades before Israel’s establishment in 1948. The judge is expected to rule within months.
“Tearing down an entire village and leaving its inhabitants homeless without exhausting all other options for settling longstanding land claims is outrageous,” said Joe Stork, the deputy Middle East director of Human Rights Watch.
A force of 1,500 police, including a special riot squad wearing black balaclavas, entered the village early on Wednesday to pull down a dozen wooden shacks and a half-built concrete home. The local Aturi tribe had been in the process of rebuilding the village after it was razed by bulldozers a week earlier.
The Israeli forces also uprooted 850 olive trees, said Ortal Tzabar, a spokeswoman for the government’s Land Administration.
Yesterday Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens, demanded a criminal investigation into what it called “police brutality” during both demolition operations.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer, said assaults on villagers, confiscation of their property and the security forces’ decision to cover their faces and not wear identity tags were all designed to “instil fear” in the residents.
Taleb a-Sanaa, a Bedouin member of the Israeli parliament who was left unconscious on Wednesday after police dragged him from a tent in which he was staging a protest, warned that the government was risking “an uprising in the Negev”.
Six village leaders were arrested shortly afterwards when they refused to sign a paper committing not to return to al Araqib.
Awad Abu Freih, a village spokesman, said they remained defiant. “The authorities want to break our connection to this land so it can be turned over to Jews. They can keep destroying, but we will continue rebuilding. We will not leave.”
The first demolition of the village, late last month, came shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned his cabinet that the growth of the country’s Arab minority, already a fifth of the population, posed a “palpable threat” to the state’s Jewishness.
“The effect could be that different elements will demand national rights within Israel – for example, in the Negev – if we allow for a region without a Jewish majority.”
Last month the government announced a $50 million assistance programme to encourage army personnel to relocate to Jewish communities in the Negev.
The Bedouin’s increasing assertiveness about their indigenous status, which is backed by international groups, has led to a backlash from officials, who regularly refer to the Bedouin as “squatters” and “invaders” of state land.
Nili Baruch of Bimkom, an Israeli planning rights group, said a master plan currently being approved for the metropolitan area of Beersheva required “more house demolitions and more forced removals of the Bedouin population”, such as occurred at al-Araqib.
In addition, she said, the authorities had approved a special operation known as “Hot Wind” to carry out the demolitions.
The government’s conflict with the Bedouin dates back to Israel’s founding, when most of the Negev’s population were driven out of the new state.
With the highest birth rate in Israel, the surviving tribes have grown rapidly and now number 180,000, more than a quarter of the Negev’s population despite waves of state-sponsored Jewish migration.
Israel has refused to recognise most of the Bedouin’s traditional communities and insists they move into seven deprived townships built by the government several decades ago. Only about half have done so, with the rest insisting on their right to continue with their pastoral way of life.
Al-Araqib has become a particular point of friction because most of the Aturi moved into a nearby township, Rahat, in the 1970s, after their lands had been declared a closed military zone.
But faced with severe overcrowding in Rahat and no new land for expansion, many young families began moving back to al-Araqib a decade ago.
Like 45 other unrecognised villages, al Araqib is denied all services, including water and electricity, and its buildings are illegal.
A recent government commission found that tens of thousands of Bedouin buildings are subject to demolition orders, though until now individual buildings have been targeted, not whole communities.
Last month the Beersheva planning committee approved a scheme to recognise 13 Bedouin villages and force the other inhabitants into the townships.
In that plan, al Araqib’s lands are designated for a “peace forest” – funded by an international Zionist organisation, the Jewish National Fund – a move Mr Abu Freih said was designed to prevent the villagers’ return.
Ms Baruch said the authorities were demanding the inhabitants move to Rahat, even though no homes were provided for them.
Mr Abu Freih said other parts of the tribe’s lands nearby had been secretly settled by Jews in 2004. In a night-time operation JNF and government officials set up caravans that subsequently became an exclusively Jewish known as Givat Bar.
From 2002, Israel began a policy of annually spraying herbicide on al-Araqib’s crops, in an attempt to move them off the land, until the supreme court deemed the practice illegal in 2007.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
EDITOR: More news from Gaza you will not see on CNN, Fox News or the BBC
The Bomb: Out of gaza
August 2, 2010 by Adie
The bomb that hit the former Arafat Compound near the Gaza Beach road was said to be the biggest to hit Gaza City since the onslaught of ‘Cast Lead’: the 3 week Israeli bombing and ground attack of the Gaza Strip during the new year of 2009. In our visit to the bomb site yesterday, a graveyard for vehicles from previous bombardments, we saw the blast had blown an armoured car 20 metres from its original spot, sandwiching another car nearby. Like most people, such as those sitting at my table at the beachside café about 800m away from the strike, I had not experienced a bomb before, least of all one that weighed about one and a half tons, leaving behind it a crater the size of a small house.
It’s important to know what it’s like beneath the bombs.. the ferocious sound of the impact, all your senses consumed by a shattering force – what had previously always been solid around you shuddering to the point of falling and crashing. The immediate reaction was that our café was under intensive attack and I think anyone within 2 km would have thought the same about the building they were inside. Under no circumstances do you expect anything of such phenomenal power to shake the entirety of your surroundings – some of the clientele near the beachside of the cafe jumped under the tables, having previously been sipping arabic coffee of smoking shisha. My instinct was to sprint out towards the exit, but then I backtracked to get my laptop! Other people were displaying similarly frantic illogical activity around the table.
It became clearer the hit was further down the beach and we looked out to see swarms of people heading in from the many tables by the sea. The electricity went out, and over the next 10 minutes most people had left the building. As the lights flickered to come on again, another round of facial panic circled our table, your body and thoughts on edge, no controlling the quickening heart beat and unsteady movement. While I could never completely empathise with 3 weeks of bombing and the effect such devastation would have on me or the Gazans who endured it in 2009, certain things I could understand a lot more:
Why children were so traumatized from the ordeal, the total lack of security to absolutely everything that had all your life been so secure, the moment of impact’s deafening noise and vibration, what bombing and bombs really mean beyond the banal warspeak headline, beyond the sober statistics, beyond words that could never convey the feeling of the impact, the feeling of the injured, the families of the dead. This is Gaza. This is Iraq. This is Afghanistan. It really isn’t about the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Insurgents, Hamas, Police Colleges, Training areas. It’s about the people under these bombs, under this military occupation, under this seige.
Some things I don’t fully understand. How can such a destructive force be made on mass production and as Robert Fisk recently pointed out be so readily provided to this Israeli government? How can such investment around the world be made in devices so dedicated to the kind of mass murder that is incomprehensible until you feel one hitting the ground around you? Why Gaza, where people already live under a hermetic and suffocating siege, with no movement, very little hope for an independent livelihood, arable farmland made useless or unreachable by the regular Israeli shootings at the buffer-zone all along the Israel border, a population of mostly refugees, in refugee camp ghettos for 40 or 60 years yearning for a return to the land from where they were violently ejected by the nascent Israeli army, all those years passing and still no justice. They get these bombs too?
At least 17 injured by Friday night’s bomb, one ‘Hamas commander’ killed in Deir el Balah, like his wife and five children were killed during the ‘Cast Lead’ bombings over the new year of 2009. Those children like over 400 other children who perished under the bombs during those 3 weeks, and 3 more injured by last week’s bombing. The next day we saw a youth on a life support machine in the intensive care unit of Al Shifa hospital, shot with two others collecting scrap metals by Israeli occupation force snipers near the border early Saturday morning. Justice has no meaning for anyone near to what the Israeli judge, jury and executioner has in store.
We’re expecting more, noises of an escalation, Israeli F-16s are currently flying overhead.
Above – Flashback: Norwegian Doctor Mads Gilbert describing civilian casualties from Al Shifa hospital during Israel’s operation ‘Cast Lead’
Report: Hamas, Israeli officials meet in Netanya: YNet
London-based Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper says ex Hamas Minister Omar Abdel Razek met with Israeli officials this week. Razek dismisses report as ‘untrue’
London-based Arabic-language al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported Saturday that former Hamas Finance Minister Omar Abdel Razek, met with Israeli officials in Netanya, earlier this week.
Palestinian sources told the newspaper that a secret meeting was held between Israeli and Hamas representatives, but gave no reason for it.
Other Palestinian sources linked the meeting with the recent call by Hamas leaders in Damascus to their operatives in the West Bank, to kidnap Israeli settlers in order to aid in the release of Palestinian prisoners. The sources hedged that the meeting was meant to warn Hamas of the ramifications, via Razek.
The latter denied the report, saying that the information “was completely untrue and baseless. We are forbidden from entering the 1948 territories. We refuse to meet with any Israelis – even their reporters,” he said.
The newspaper alleged that Razek was driven clandestinely to Netanya from the village of Beit Iba, near the West Bank city of Nablus, and wad returned there afterwards.
It Wasn’t a War: Z Space
Kate Perkins interviews Norman Finkelstein about the “Gaza massacre,” the Goldstone Report, the public turn against Israeli policy, and the difference between “of” and “in.”
By Norman Finkelstein and Kate Perkins
The career of radical political scholar Norman Finkelstein might be described as a sort of heroic painting-into-a-corner. The son of Holocaust survivors, his life’s work has been dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy, ideology, and violence that sustains the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The dimensions of his emphatic anti-Zionism, expounded over the course of six meticulously researched and often polemical books on Israel, Palestine, and the legacy of the Holocaust, have made him a pariah in the mainstream and a hero amongst supporters of Palestinian liberation.
The high controversy around Finkelstein’s politics has penetrated university walls on more than one occasion, making his academic career fraught with defensive, uphill battles. I first met Finkelstein in 2007, in the eye of a storm of controversy surrounding his academic status at DePaul University. Despite his prolific and highly influential body of critical scholarship—and after first having been approved for tenure at DePaul by both department and faculty committees—Finkelstein’s tenure had ultimately been denied—minority dissenters had campaigned successfully against his appointment. Flanked by a supporting cast of speakers including Tariq Ali, Tony Judt, and Noam Chomsky (via satellite), Finkelstein stood before some one thousand six hundred people in the University of Chicago’s packed Rockefeller Chapel to make the case for academic freedom. Contrary to his reputedly prickly demeanor, he appeared extraordinarily collected and calm, his heavy brow furrowing only slightly over sharp, dark eyes as he prepared to publicly address the charges against him. (The university’s final word on the matter was that Dr. Finkelstein’s reputation for outspoken criticism of Israel and of Israeli apologists like Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz made Finkelstein unfit for tenure at DePaul, a school of “Vincentian values.”)
It was the culmination of a long struggle to advance his radical political critique of Israel and of the American Israeli lobby from within the academy. Now an independent scholar, Dr. Finkelstein remains a leading voice of dissent against the pro-Israel policies that underwrite an apartheid regime enforced by egregious war crimes and human rights violations. In This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion, his first book since departing from DePaul—he argues that Israel’s November, 2008 invasion of Gaza, which decisively ended a fragile ceasefire brokered by Egypt that June, marked the beginning of an unprecedented decline in public support for Israel. The book’s epilogue is devoted to the Goldstone Report, a document authored by renowned South African jurist Richard Goldstone that describes the damning conclusions of a U.N.-commissioned investigation into the Gaza invasion, including charges of war crimes against Israel.
In the wake of the bloody attack on the Mavi Marmara aid flotilla, Finkelstein’s argument has been affirmed as Israel wages a round of diplomatic gestures in response to an unprecedented international outcry. I spoke to Dr. Finkelstein by phone about the implications of diminished international support for Israel, the damning conclusions of the Goldstone Report on the 2008 invasion of Gaza, and what the turning tide of public opinion means for a peace process that has, historically, looked more like a state of war.
—Kate Perkins for Guernica
Guernica: This Time We Went Too Far looks at Israel through the lens of international public opinion—specifically, a severely damaged public perception of, and support for, Israeli policy after its invasion of Gaza beginning in November of 2008. How substantial is that change in public perception, and to what extent does it give critics of Israel a new kind of traction with respect to influencing policy?
Norman Finkelstein: There’s no question that public opinion is changing, and if you’re a person of the left, your goal is presumably to try to mobilize public opinion to affect elite policy; and I think now there are unusual, unprecedented opportunities to do so. Whether anything will come of it, well, that’s the challenge. It’s not enough for public opinion to shift; it then requires marshalling that public opinion, harnessing it, for it to have a political impact.
There are many issues, as everyone knows, in the United States on which public opinion leans very much to the left of elite policy, but that’s because public opinion hasn’t been turned into a political force. Having said that, it’s nonetheless a significant part of the battle to get public opinion on your side, before you try to harness it, and that part of the battle, it seems to me, we’re closer to winning now. Public opinion in the United States has shifted significantly, not just outside but also within the Jewish community.
If you are, as I am quite frequently, speaking at college campuses in the United States, it’s quite clear that support among Jews for Israel has dried up.
Guernica: How do you interpret this shift in public opinion, and what in particular do you see as being its most revealing indicators? Is it that the basis for dissent has morphed in some unprecedented way, or is there a kind of quantitative momentum to it that could be attributed to new critics, former supporters of Israeli policy becoming increasingly unwilling to defend its actions?
Norman Finkelstein: There’s no question—and all the poll data bear it out—that there’s a significant disaffection, or what’s called in the literature on the subject a “distancing” of American Jews from Israel. In particular, the younger generation, the under-thirty generation. If you are, as I am quite frequently, speaking at college campuses in the United States, it’s quite clear that support among Jews for Israel has dried up. You’ll find there is a handful of people that you might call the Hillel faithful, who will still have some public events in support of Israel, but barely anybody shows up for them, and when critics of Israeli policy speak, the “Hillel faithful” no longer really show up to protest, to demonstrate, to shout down, to hand out leaflets, because they realize how isolated they are.
Now, beyond the under-thirty generation, there are other significant indicators. Probably the most widely discussed recently was the defection of Peter Beinart, who was until recently Editor of The New Republic, which is a fanatically pro-Israel publication. Beinart wrote an article for The New York Review of Books saying how support for Israel is drying up among American Jews. The article received an absolutely huge amount of attention within the Jewish community precisely because Beinart is an orthodox Jew, not to mention that he used to be a senior editor at TNR. So this is what you would call a defection, and an influential one, at the hard core of support for Israel.
There are many other everyday indications, though, of American public opinion changing toward Israel. American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal. By “liberal,” I mean, basically, support for the rule of law, support for human rights, support for peace; and on all those counts—rule of law, human rights, peace—Israel’s record has become indefensible. Israel has become a lawless country with demonstrated contempt for human rights and, probably, at least in terms of visibility, the most warmongering country on earth today. So, for American Jews, who are overwhelmingly liberal—80 percent voted for Barack Obama, by far the highest percentage of any ethnic group apart from African Americans. And when you factor in income, it’s quite astonishing what percentage voted for Obama as compared to, say, Latinos, of whom about 63 percent voted for Obama and within which demographic income is much lower. And that’s because American Jews are, by and large, liberal; and it’s become impossible to reconcile Israeli policy with liberal values.
Nearly the whole of Israeli society managed to convince itself that the Israeli commandos were victims of a premeditated lynching on the Mavi Marmara.
Guernica: And the turn away from Israel that you’re describing, the “distancing” that marks the shift in public opinion, is something you and others have cited as comparable to that of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. By the end of apartheid there, though, it was clear that the domestic resistance movement—organized dissent within South Africa—was as important to ending the apartheid regime as the international pressure, insofar as the domestic resistance was able to effectively harness the momentum the anti-apartheid movement gained from international boycotts. I wonder what you would say about the state of dissent within Israel, and whether you read it as having undergone, or as being near to experiencing, a shift parallel to that of international public opinion since the 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza?
Norman Finkelstein: Well, of course, South Africa wasn’t freed of Apartheid until 1994, so I’m not implying that we’re at the endgame by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, the attitudes of the Israeli elites are pretty close to those of the South African whites during the years of international boycotts—this hunkering down, this belief that they’re the victims, the whole world is against them, that there’s a double standard, that they’re the victims of propaganda and conspiracy, and basically a complete contempt for international opinion. That’s basically where Israel is right now.
Judging from what I read in translation (a lot is now available in translation), the state of Israeli dissent is not a pretty picture. Nearly the whole of Israeli society managed to convince itself that the Israeli commandos were victims of a premeditated lynching on the Mavi Marmara. Israel launched a violent commando raid in the dead of night against a humanitarian convoy in international waters and executed nine of the passengers. It takes a peculiar talent in these circumstances to turn yourself into the victim.
As Israel becomes like South Africa, it’s increasingly becoming a pariah state, being excluded from culture at large. The other day, an Israeli friend wrote to me, “Can you believe it? They excluded us from a gay pride parade in Spain! We can only march as individuals!” She was so incensed at the absurdity of this. And I just felt like reminding her that for the past three years, Israel won’t admit toys into Gaza. But there is this anger as the momentum gathers, as Israel is being slowly but surely excluded here and there. My friend’s way of expressing this was, “The world’s noose is tightening around us.” But, no—Israel is tightening the noose around itself.
We have to be careful though not to reduce everything to [divestment]. It may acquire more significance, but I think the major fronts right now are international law and nonviolent civil resistance.
Guernica: It does seem to be an increasingly unavoidable dynamic between Israel and the rest of the world. For example, there’s the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, an international effort to force Israel to change its policies, which has expanded significantly since it emerged in 2005, not just in membership, but in its cultural dimensions—sports, the academy, consumerism, as well as its political-economic aspects. You don’t give much attention to BDS in This Time We Went Too Far, though, and I’m wondering what your view of that movement is. What, in your view, are the most significant indicators that the so-called Gaza War had an unprecedented and directly negative effect on the international perception of Israeli policy?
Norman Finkelstein: I think there are several strands of popular resistance and popular mobilization occurring. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is one. I don’t see it as being the main one, currently, except at some moments and some junctures it has the most salience; for example, if some popular or prominent musician decides not to perform in Israel on behalf of the BDS cause, but it’s just one of several strands of resistance.
A second, major strand is the mobilization of international law to force Israel to conform to what Israel’s apologists now call a “lawfare,” which in their minds is the same as warfare, but instead of military weapons, it involves the use of the law as a weapon. This was most prominently expressed during the mobilization of the Goldstone Report. There have been many examples of it, mostly taking the form of the international community exercising what’s called universal jurisdiction, where, when Israeli officials want to visit this or that country, they’re threatened with being held there for past violations of international law. So there’s serious concern among Israelis that their generals and their officials are not free to travel even in places like the UK, because they may be served with papers for having committed war crimes.
A third strand of demonstrated dissent consists in the various forms of nonviolent resistance that have emerged, as demonstrated in the villages that are being destroyed by the wall that Israel is building. Now there are popular mobilizations that are occurring along the fence and so-called “buffer zone” that Israel has created in Gaza. Then there is, of course, the form of nonviolent resistance carried out on the aid flotillas, and in particular there has of course been an enormous international reaction to the recent attack by Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara.
We have to be careful though, I think, not to reduce everything to BDS; it’s one of several strands, but probably the least significant, in my opinion. It may acquire more significance, but I think the major fronts right now are the international law and the nonviolent civil resistance.
Guernica: I want to return to the Goldstone Report, which you mentioned just now with respect to the impact of international law on Israeli policy. That report, of course, detailed the results of the UN fact-finding mission led by international jurist Richard Goldstone; it was an investigation into Israel’s conduct in, and basis for, the 2008 Gaza offensive that officially ended the ceasefire agreement brokered in Cairo in June of that year. You dedicate the epilogue of This Time We Went Too Far to the Goldstone Report, and you seem to interpret the effect of its public disclosure as amounting to something like a decisive lifting of the rock on the gruesome conduct of the Israeli military. Even so, Tariq Ali published an article in the New Left Review describing the Goldstone Report, essentially, as a whitewash, since it tones down the far more damning Palestinian eyewitness accounts detailed in the appendices of the findings. How would you respond to that argument?
Norman Finkelstein: Yes, I read that article. Of course, Tariq’s a friend of mine—he’s a terrific guy! But, look—for those who bothered to read it—the Report was really incredibly damning. It did limit itself in what it undertook to examine. It did not examine the legality of Israel’s attack on Gaza. There’s a distinction in international law between what’s called the justice of a war, and the justice in a war. The justice of a war basically refers to the question whether there is a right to attack in the first place. Justice in a war is concerned with whether the fighting happens in accordance with the international laws of war. In Goldstone’s report, he did not discuss the question of whether Israel’s attack was legitimate. He discussed the question of how Israel fought the war. I think his conclusions were pretty much as damning as they could get. He says that Israel launched a deliberately disproportionate attack “designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” I don’t know how much further he could go; he’s very clear in stating that all the evidence points to one conclusion—that Israel’s attack was designed, premeditated, orchestrated by the highest levels of Israeli society, that the senior-most officials of the Israeli military were involved in state terrorism, designed to terrorize the civilian population. That’s a pretty tough assessment.
Israelis themselves have said it wasn’t a war. People allow themselves to slip into this language, and it’s not even used by Israelis.
Guernica: State terrorism—and yet the Israeli invasion Goldstone investigated is still commonly referred to as the Gaza War.
Norman Finkelstein: Right—it wasn’t a war. Israelis themselves have said it wasn’t a war. People allow themselves to slip into this language, and it’s not even used by Israelis. As one Israeli I quote in the book said, “It’s a big mistake for Israel to say it ‘won’ the war, when there was no war. There were no battles…no military enemy in the field.” One Israeli soldier after another testified that they never saw an enemy in the field. And yet soldier after soldier kept using the same words, testifying that Israeli forces “used insane amounts of firepower.” How do you describe a situation where the attacker is using “insane amounts of firepower,” but there’s no military enemy? That’s not a war. That’s a massacre.
Guernica: Right, but describing it that way—as a massacre—would seem to address the justice of a war, rather than what you’re saying the Goldstone Report confined itself to detailing, that is, the justice in a war.
Norman Finkelstein: That’s debatable, but the upshot of the Report is an explicitly damning assessment that has had an unprecedented effect on public support for Israeli policy.
Guernica: To what extent, in your view, has the Obama administration’s comportment toward Israel since the Goldstone Report and, in particular, since the attack on the Mavi Marmara, reflected the American public’s diminished support for Israel?
Norman Finkelstein: Well, I think it’s too soon to expect a substantial change in elite opinion. Public support has to be mobilized effectively to change policy. You could say that there’s been some progress, at the lowest or ground level, public opinion. But pressure then has to be exerted on Congress; and then there’s the highest level, where policy is actually made, the executive branch. It’s very tough; and there’s no reason to be pessimistic, but without a distinct and visible mobilization of public opinion, there’s no reason to be excessively optimistic.
There have been some—I don’t want to call them ‘shifts,’ but there has been some movement in the Obama administration, mostly because they are concerned about losing Turkey. A new configuration of power is emergent in the Middle East—how substantial it is, and whether it will be able to withstand U.S. pressure, I can’t say—but clearly a new configuration of power is beginning to emerge along the axis of Iran-Turkey-Syria and, you might argue, Lebanon—versus the grouping of the regime leftover from the British Mandate period, which has been taken over by the U.S. and includes Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Iraq, although it’s not yet clear where Iraq fits into the picture. The U.S. is definitely concerned about this configuration of power, which is reminiscent of what in the nineteen sixties was called the ‘radical Arab regimes,’ back then headed by Nasser in Egypt, and Syria. Nowadays these regimes are less about the rhetoric, but they have substantial economies, and they’re well entrenched.
After the flotilla attack, some of the most influential, elite policy analysts, including Anthony Cordesman, who was a complete apologist for Israel after the Gaza massacre, came out swinging. Cordesman said that Israel has to bear in mind that it’s becoming a serious liability for the United States. For someone of that influence, that’s a significant shift; he’s saying that Israel is causing us trouble, and of course, he had Turkey in mind. So to that end, I think that at the elite level, we’ll begin to see some movement at the level of diplomacy and power-balancing. But what that indicates is that right now the U.S. isn’t reacting directly to popular pressure; it’s reacting directly to state pressure.
Then again, state pressure itself is a consequence of popular outrage. Erdogan’s very strong reaction to the flotilla bloodbath was itself the result of an accumulation of popular outrage. He spoke out very strongly against the Gaza invasion in an exchange with Shimon Peres—I think it was at Davos in 2009, during the Gaza massacre—that reflected the influence of the Turkish population’s overwhelming disapproval with Israel’s behavior in Gaza and elsewhere. So it’s not so easy to isolate these things as exclusively a state-to-state dynamic.
Guernica: What about Israel’s official state response to the Goldstone Report?
Norman Finkelstein: Israel hasn’t issued any formal response, because officially, it doesn’t recognize the Goldstone Report. It has issued some very substantial reports—by now, you could say it’s issued three—two very large reports, and one smaller report, on what actually happened and also on their progress in investigating war crimes allegations. The bottom line is that none of these reports have satisfactorily responded to the claims of the Goldstone Report, and none of these reports are very convincing. For example, with regard to Israel’s targeting of hospitals, Israel claimed that there were Hamas militants seeking refuge in the hospitals. But over and over again, international human rights investigations have shown that there is no evidence for that claim. Furthermore, these international human rights investigations have consistently found that the violent attacks on civilian infrastructures were carried out after Israeli forces had secured and controlled the area. These findings conclude that none of this damage was being inflicted by what in international law is called military necessity. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) points out in its last report, called “I Lost Everything,” HRW obtained satellite imagery both of what the area looked like before Israel took over and of what it looked like after. The preponderance of destruction occurred after they took over the area. And the case of the civilian deaths—almost all civilian deaths occurred where there was no military fighting going on, according to reports issued by both HRW and Amnesty International. The vast majority of civilian deaths occurred in places and situations where there was no fighting. Israel’s claims, in defense, that Hamas used civilians as human shields, have across the board been shown to be baseless by all the reports on human rights groups’ findings. There’s no evidence that Hamas engaged in human shielding during the Gaza massacre whatsoever.
As far as the justice of the invasion, which the Goldstone Report doesn’t address: during the period of the ceasefire, around October of 2008, there was one reported rocket attack on Israel. Remember, we’re not talking about roman candles and firecrackers. These are not military “rockets” and mortar; they’re the most primitive sorts of weapons. Those were not Hamas, but rather what Israel called “rogue terrorist organizations.” There’s no question that Hamas was, as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs put it, “careful to maintain the ceasefire.”
The ceasefire lasted until November 4, 2008, despite the fact that Israel had explicitly violated its terms of the ceasefire: Israel was supposed to gradually lift the blockade of Gaza in return for Hamas ceasing rocket and mortar attacks on Israel. Well, Hamas ceased its rocket and mortar attacks, but Israel didn’t lift the siege of Gaza. Then, on November 4th, while everyone in the U.S. was watching the presidential election unfold, Israel went in and attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinian militants and knowing full well that it would provoke rocket attacks, giving them a pretext to launch the invasion.
Guernica: The pretext being a typical basis for the kind of disproportionate violence Israel has exerted in the name of self-defense. The same rhetoric about security and self-defense has been trotted out by Israel after the attack on the aid flotilla, and provoked significant admonishments even from international apologists for the Gaza invasion, like Cordesman, as you mentioned earlier. Do you see, or expect to see, Israel changing its rhetoric in response to the increasing condemnations it’s facing?
Norman Finkelstein: I think Israel is going to try to prove that it has met all the demands of the international community, and that there’s no reason any longer for there to be any hostility directed toward Israel. They’re going to claim that they lifted the blockade, even though they won’t have done that. But in fact there are significant limitations to the lifting of the blockade; most crucially, Israel is still blocking any exports from Gaza, which means that the economy can’t resume there. If as a result of the crippled economy there has to be an increase in aid flotillas, what we can expect to see from Israel is another propaganda war—Israel is going to claim that these flotillas are unnecessary, just as they claimed before the attack on the Mavi Marmara that anyone who wanted to could just deliver any goods and that Israel would transport them to Gaza. Well, that was a complete lie. But they’ll continue to use arguments like that, and the propaganda war will be a new, or rather renewed, realm in the battle between popular resistance and the Israeli government.
For a time, though, things had been looking quite promising: it was popular resistance that was leading, and state actors who were lagging behind. State action was being set by popular resistance, namely the flotillas, and not by states. The so-called Quartet—Blair, et al—they were reacting to the initiatives of popular resistance. Now, they’ll try to recuperate and lead again, and it’ll depend on us to escalate the pressure, such that we remain a step ahead of policy elites, such that we’re leading and we’re determining, the next move.
EDITOR: Objectivity…
The next report is a paradigm of Israeli propaganda; due to the illegal closure and blockade of Gaza, its power plant keeps running out of fuel, leaving almost two million Palestinians without power. This is how it is reported in the Israeli press – the only innocent party seems to be Israel…
Gaza power plant shuts down, again: YNet
Strife between Gaza, Ramallah authorities render Strip’s power plant devoid of fuel
Gaza Strip’s sole power plant has been forced to shut down in the midst of a heat wave because of a lack of fuel, a senior Palestinian source said Saturday.
The plant, which provides 20% of Gaza’s power, has ongoing problems getting enough fuel due to disagreements with the rival Palestinian government in the West Bank.
The plant provides Gaza City and its surroundings with six to 10 hours of electricity a day. The rest of the densely-populated territory receives its electricity from Egypt and Israel.
The power plant has been shut down three times in the past for similar reasons.
Gaza’s Hamas rulers are meant to collect the utility bills and the rival Western-backed Palestinian Authority is supposed to buy the fuel.
Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib says Hamas isn’t sending enough money. The militant group denies the charge.