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on the road to purgatory .....

on the road to purgatory .....

 

Naturally enough it takes two astute American academics, Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby, to explain in the Financial Times that Iran isn't the real issue for Israel:

On Iran, Mr Netanyahu is convinced it wants nuclear weapons, and that this goal threatens Israel's existence. He does not think diplomacy can stop Iran, and wants the US to destroy its nuclear facilities. If Mr Obama refuses to order an attack, the Israeli leader would like a green light to do so.

Mr Obama and his advisers - including the military - see things differently. They do not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, but they do not believe a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel. After all, Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, and could obliterate Iran if attacked. US intelligence is also confident Tehran has not yet decided to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, US leaders worry that, no matter who does it, an attack would convince Iran it needs its own nuclear deterrent.

They are correct.

In fact, the Palestinian issue is the real existential threat to Israel. More than 500,000 Israeli Jews now live in the occupied territories, and continued settlement building will lead to a single state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. Given demographic trends, this "Greater Israel" could not be both a Jewish state and a full democracy. Instead, it would be an apartheid state, threatening Israel's legitimacy and long-term survival. As Ehud Olmert, former prime minister, said in 2007, if the two-state solution fails, Israel "will face a South African-like struggle for equal voting rights". And if that happens, he warned, "the state of Israel is finished".

Mr Netanyahu and Mr Obama have clashed repeatedly on the Palestinian issue, and each time Mr Obama has backed down. He is unlikely to press the issue between now and November's election. Instead, he will act as if the US and Israel remain the closest of allies.

If only this were true.

It seems that nearly every week we now read of liberal Zionists, often in America, suddenly realising that their beloved Israel, a nation they've publicly supported for years, has turned into Frankenstein's monster. No kidding. Here's the New Yorker editor David Remnick:

There is another state in the region [Israel] that is embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming. This is the State of Israel. For decades, its citizens-its Jewish ones, at least-have justifiably described their country as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Although Israel as imagined by Theodor Herzl and built by the generation of David Ben-Gurion was never intended to be a replica of the Anglo-American model-its political culture, even now, is closer to that of the European social democracies-its structures of governance are points of pride.

And yet, as an experiment in Jewish power, unique after two millennia of persecution and exile, Israel has reached an impasse. An intensifying conflict of values has put its democratic nature under tremendous stress. When the government speaks daily about the existential threat from Iran, and urges an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, it ignores the existential threat that looms within. Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French. The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle. But in Israel the threat is especially acute. And the concern comes not only from its most persistent critics. The former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned of a descent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.

The political corrosion begins, of course, with the occupation of the Palestinian territories-the subjugation of Palestinian men, women, and children-that has lasted for forty-five years. Peter Beinart, in a forthcoming and passionately argued polemic, "The Crisis of Zionism," is just the latest critic to point out that a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper.

The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, "east of democracy," Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish state; for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund; and for laws constricting freedom of expression.

A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state. Many of them did their military duty in the Occupied Territories; some learned to despise the Occupation they saw firsthand, but others learned to accept the official narratives justifying what they were made to do.

Last year, a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that fifty-one per cent of Israelis believed that people "should be prohibited from harshly criticizing the State of Israel in public." Netanyahu encourages the notion that any such criticism is the work of enemies. Even the country's staunchest ally, the United States, is not above suspicion. The current Administration has co-operated with Israeli intelligence to an unprecedented extent and has led a crippling sanctions effort against Iran, yet Netanyahu, who visits Washington this week, has shown imperious disdain for Barack Obama.

In fact, the President is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew. Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes. Wolf brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak in his synagogue, marched in Selma, and, in 1973, helped found Breira (Alternative), one of the first American Jewish groups to endorse a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu has distaste for such associations; his gestures toward Palestinian statehood are less than half-hearted. (After he spoke of giving Palestinians their own state, his father, the right-wing historian Benzion Netanyahu, shrewdly observed, "He supports it under conditions that they will never accept.") To Netanyahu, the proper kind of ally is exemplified by AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson-the longtime casino tycoon and recent bankroller of Newt Gingrich-who owns a newspaper in Israel devoted to supporting him. Netanyahu knows that young American Jews are split, with the growing Orthodox community solidly in his corner, and the less observant and secular majority-a majority that is increasingly assimilated and uninterested in Jewish learning-losing their attachment to Israel. The Prime Minister clearly feels that the fervor of the few offers him more than the disillusion and drift of the many.

"The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation," Obama has said. Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise; too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics. Such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream-and the process of democratic becoming-may be painfully, even fatally, deferred.

meanwhile .....

On March 4, 2012, 22 year old member of Young Jewish and Proud (the youth wing of Jewish Voice for Peace) Liza Behrendt stood up at the 2012 AIPAC Policy Conference in a breakout session called "The Struggle to Secure Israel on Campus" to call attention to the silencing of Palestinians- and young Jews who support them - on U.S. campuses.

Antony Loewenstein

a ghetto mentality .....

News flash: Israel is not master of its fate. It’s not terribly surprising that a country with less than 8m inhabitants is not master of its fate. Switzerland, Sweden, Serbia and Portugal are not masters of their fates. These days, many countries with populations of 100m or more can hardly be said to be masters of their fates. Britain and China aren’t masters of their fates, and even the world’s overwhelmingly largest economy, the United States, isn’t really master of its fate.

But Israel has even less control over its own destiny than Portugal or Britain do. The main reason is that, unlike those countries, Israel refuses to give up its empire. Israel is unable to sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank, or even to articulate them coherently. Having allowed its founding ideology to carry it relentlessly and unthinkingly into what Gershom Gorenburg calls an “Accidental Empire” of radical religious-nationalist settlements that openly defy its own courts, Israel is politically incapable of extricating itself. The partisan battles engendered by its occupation of Palestinian territory render it less and less able to pull itself free. It is immobilised, pinned down, in a conflict that is gradually killing it. Countries facing imperial twilight, like Britain in the late 1940s, are often seized by a sense of desperate paralysis. For over a decade, the tone of Israeli politics has been a mix of panic, despair, hysteria and resignation.

No one bears greater responsibility for the trap Israel finds itself in today than Mr Netanyahu. As prime minister in the late 1990s, he did more than any other Israeli leader to destroy the peace process. Illegal land grabs by settlers were tolerated and quietly encouraged in the confused expectation that they would aid territorial negotiations. Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward; the most charitable spin would be that the Israelis failed to exercise the restraint they might have shown in retaliating against Palestinian terrorism, had they been truly interested in progress towards a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu believed that the Oslo peace agreements were a mirage, and his government’s actions in the late 1990s helped make it true.

Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan’s, nor indeed North Korea’s. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel’s existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite. With brain-cudgeling predictability, Mr Netanyahu marked his meeting with Mr Obama by presenting him with a copy of the Book of Esther.

That book concerns a plot by Haman, vizier of King Ahasuerus of Persia, to massacre his country’s Jews, and the efforts of the beautiful Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, to persuade the king to stop them. It is a version of the same narrative of repression, threatened extermination and resistance that Jews commemorate at Passover in the prayer “Ve-hi she-amdah”: “Because in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

Mr Netanyahu is less attractive than Esther, but he seems to be wooing Mr Obama and the American public just as effectively. The American-Israeli relationship now resembles the sort of crazy co-dependency one sometimes finds in doomed marriages, where the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook. If Mr Netanyahu manages to convince America to back an attack on Iran, it is to be hoped that the catastrophic consequences will not be used to justify the attack that led to them.

Mr Netanyahu thinks the Zionist mission was to give the Jewish people control over their destiny. No people has control over its destiny when it is at war with its neighbours. But in any case, that is only one way of thinking of the Zionist mission. Another mission frequently cited by early Zionists was to help Jews grow out of the “Ghetto mentality”. Mr Netanyahu’s gift to Mr Obama shows he’s still in it.

 

Auschwitz Complex

'learning' from israel .....

The Hon Bill Shorten MP,                                          

Minister for Employment & Industrial Relations,         

Financial Services & Superannuation,

Parliament House,

CANBERRA.   NSW.   2600.                                                                                                  March 25, 2012.

Dear Minister,

I refer to an announcement made by the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, confirming that you will be leading an Australian government trade mission to Israel in April/May of this year.

I understand from the Chamber that your mission will:

“….. attempt to understand how is it that Israel - a country of 7.2 million people, a third of the size of Tasmania, sixty per cent desert, only sixty three years old with limited natural resources-produces more start-ups than large, peaceful & stable nations like Japan, India, Korea, Canada, the United Kingdom & Australia.

The mission will investigate Israel’s superannuation, tax reform, venture capitalism & seed fund models, as well as its innovation & entrepreneurship culture - beginning with a society of leadership & risk management.

The mission, specifically designed for senior leaders from business, government, policy & academia, particularly within the financial services sectors, will expose delegates to key Israeli influencers & enable a sharing of innovative business ideas & opportunities.

The mission is also a wonderful opportunity for delegates to network and interact with other delegates and form long-lasting, valuable relationships. In addition to the group program, individual meetings with a cross section of Israeli business, academic & political leaders can be tailored for individual delegates to achieve their personal objectives.

The mission will also include high level geo-political & economic briefings, & visits to Jerusalem & the Dead Sea. Partners are encouraged to join delegates for whom a separate tourism program will be arranged.”

Without intending any disrespect to you or our government, I thought I would write & share a few insights with you that would obviate the need for your trip, thereby saving you & your colleagues a great deal of valuable time, whilst sparing Australian taxpayers from further unnecessary expense.

It is a matter of public record that George Ball, the Undersecretary of State in the US government administrations of President John F. Kennedy & Lyndon Johnson, & Johnson’s Ambassador to the United Nations, routinely asserted that Israel receives gifts, grants & aid from the US government to the tune of US$14,692 per annum, on a per capita basis.

It is also a matter of public record that gifts, grants & aid to Israel from Germany annually amount to US$5,345 on a per capita basis, bringing the total annual value of gifts & grants from the US & Germany alone to US$20,000 on a per capita basis.

Of course, the above largesse stands in stark contrast to the annual value of gifts, grants & aid rendered to sub-Saharan African countries of US$43 and Latin American countries of US$50 on a per capita basis.

Needless to say, notwithstanding the extraordinary generosity afforded to the people of Israel by the citizens of the US & Germany, the annual per capita GDP of Israel is only slightly more than US$32,500, compared to Australia’s annual per capita GDP of US$66,500. Moreover, if the good citizens of the US & Germany were prepared to extend the same generosity to Australian citizens as they do to Israel citizens, then our annual per capita GDP would be closer to US$86,500, some 2.5 times higher than that of Israel.

Given the above numbers Mr Shorten, I certainly can’t see that Israel has anything to teach Australia, apart from, perhaps, how to be like mistletoe: able to persuade millions of people from around the world to underwrite its existence as a fascist & racist rogue state with no meaningful purpose. Certainly Israel could not survive if it was dependent on the same level of gifts, grants & aid that the world extends to other countries or was obliged to rely on its own endeavours.

Nevertheless, should you be determined to undertake your ‘trade mission’ to Israel, perhaps you could learn something of value & benefit to you, your government colleagues & the people of Australia?

Perhaps you could spend some time learning how multi-national companies, all of whom operate in Australia, such as Elbit Australia, Rafaul Australia, the Strauss Group, Investec, Ratheon Australia & Thales Australia are all proudly contributing to the genocidal behaviour of the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza & the West Bank?

Perhaps you could:

·                  visit the mother of Ayoub Asalya, who is still picking up fragments of her 12 year old son's body after he was hit by an Israeli surgical precision missile earlier this month;

·                  visit a Gazan hospital that is desperately trying to tend patients,  including premature babies &  dialysis patients, with  little electricity & medicines;

·                  in your role as  Minister for Employment, meet with the hundreds of thousands of desperate unemployed Gazans (50% of Gaza) struggling to survive  under  Israel's illegal blockade;

·                  spend a day in Silwan, East Jerusalem, with a Palestinian family while it is being  illegally evicted for the glorious Judaisation of Jerusalem, funded by the above businesses & Zionist Australians;

·                  go to Nablus to see how  Israeli economic policy works in Shuhada Street that is closed & emptied of Palestinian businesses  owned by now impoverished families;

·                  go to  Hebron & accompany Palestinian children as they endure verbal abuse & the physical assault of stones, faeces & urine being thrown by the pride of Israel, the illegal colonists, who are also being supported financially by Australian  Zionist Jews;

·                  pass through Israeli checkpoints  from Bethlehem  to Jerusalem alongside Palestinians & experience the  humiliation & delays in the heat of the day;

·                  visit a  Palestinian school & watch as the heroic Israeli military bursts in & kidnaps 11 year old kids, who won't see their parents for a month whilst they are under ‘administrative detention’;

·                  and why not take your delegates to visit 30 year old Hana  Shalabi, who is  dying on a hunger strike in support of principled stand for freedom & justice after she was  released &  re-arrested after the Shalit prisoner deal;

·                  or perhaps you & your colleagues could take a  tour of  Palestinian farms  that have had their orchards uprooted for the illegal Annexation Wall & illegal colonies that spread like  cancer across stolen Palestinian lands.

Yes Mr Shorten, we do have a great deal to learn from Israel, but it’s all bad & none of it is needed or wanted in Australia.

Along with 90% of Australians, I would urge you to concentrate your energies in persuading the Australian government to adopt policies that call on the Zionist government of Israel to immediately abandon its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories & that require Israel to immediately cease its criminal genocide against the Palestinian people.

Thank you for considering my representations.

Sincerely,

John Richardson.

Yes John... we need to wake up...

We should all watch "The Promise"... and think...

A number of organizations, including the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and the Friends of Israel Western Australia, urged viewers to complain about the series, reiterating negative comments that had been made about the serial in the UK.[96] One senator, Glenn Sterle of Western Australia, also joined criticism about the series, calling it "derogatory" and "anti-Semitic".[97] In January 2012 the most senior body of Jewry in Australia, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) filed its own 31-page complaint with the SBS television network,[98] claiming that the series "unrelentingly portrays the entire Jewish presence throughout the country, including modern-day Israel, as an act of usurpation by Jews who, without exception, are aliens, predators and thieves and who enforce their usurpation by brutal, racist policies akin to those inflicted by the Nazis upon the Jewish people", and compared the series to the infamous Nazi film Jud Süss.[98] The ECAJ rejected in its complaint the relevance or validity of the British Ofcom inquiry. The ECAJ also called for a halt to sales of the DVD of the series while the complaint is investigated.[99] The ECAJ position was given considerable coverage in the Australian Jewish News which headlined the complaint as "TV series The Promise akin to Nazi propaganda".[100] In contrast, Australians for Palestine has been strongly supportive of the series.[101] On 17 January the language of the ECAJ complaint reached the front page of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.[102]

Another opinion expressed by the Australian Jewish Democratic Society stated "We agree with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) that the Jewish characters portrayed are generally unsympathetic in comparison with the Arab characters. But we fundamentally disagree that this bias amounts to anti-Semitism... in our view The Promise is a worthwhile contribution to the debates about the intractable conflict".[103] Other debate over the series has been carried out, for example, on the online site associated with Australian Broadcasting Corporation's debate programme, The Drum.[104] The Australian Jewish Democratic Society also made available the full text of the OfCom decision as a contribution to open public debate. Prior to this release only parts had been available in the ECAJ submission or in the media [105] because Ofcom had not published it.

The SBS Complaints Committee met on 17 January, and took the view that there were no grounds to find the programme had breached SBS's code. In particular, it found "that the characterisations in The Promise did not cross the threshold into racism, and in particular that it did not promote, endorse, or reinforce inaccurate, demeaning or discriminatory stereotypes". Complainants were advised that they could take their concerns to the Australian Communications and Media Authority for external review.[106]In response to the SBS decision, the ECAJ said that it stood by its position, but would not be appealing SBS's conclusion.[107]


 

unauthorised west bank settlements

Israel's top court has rejected a deal between the government and Jewish settlers to delay evacuation of an illegal West Bank outpost until 2015.

The Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the post must be demolished by the end of the month, because it was built on privately-owned Palestinian land.

But the government appealed for the demolition to be postponed for three-and-a-half years.

The delay was to allow settlers to rebuild their homes at another site.

The court has extended the evacuation deadline until August.

Migron, north of Jerusalem and home to 280 settlers, is one of the largest unauthorised West Bank settlements.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17505709

lost in talk .....

Amira Hass in Haaretz on the international community's continual insistence to fund the Palestinians to remain occupied:

Israel's position in its periodic report to the donor-coordination group for the Palestinian Authority reminds one of the boy who kills his parents and then demands an orphan's pension. Israel describes the failings of the Palestinian economy as if the colonialist occupation is not their primary cause.

The authors of the report express the view that the dependence of the Palestinian Authority on foreign aid will not diminish in the coming years. In doing so, they are showing disrespect for the intelligence of the donor countries' representatives, who met last week in Brussels. Who better than these delegates knows the great service the family of nations is doing to Israel by providing massive, ongoing aid to the Palestinians? Taxpayers around the world are the ones who are relieving Israel of its obligations as an occupying power and repairing the damage it is causing. It turns out it's easier for the family of nations to fund the occupation than to force Israel to put an end to it. The guys in our finance and defence ministries - upon whose data the report is based - state, in fact, that the donor countries should get their chequebooks ready, because our policy this year won't be different.

With smug arrogance, the report's authors ignore Israel's complete domination over the resources essential to economic progress and expansion: land, water, time, a Palestinian population registry, currency, territorial expanse, air space, radio-frequency spectrums, territorial contiguity, banking services and television broadcasts, freedom of movement, border crossings, foreign nationals who are allowed entry and the duration of their stay, highways, and personal and communal security.

With all the precision of a shopkeeper, the drafters of the report recount all of the measures that Israel, in its great magnanimity, has taken "to support economic growth in the West Bank." But beyond all the means of support detailed in the report, there are the unmentioned hours wasted by Palestinian, American and European bureaucrats seeking to convince their Israeli counterparts to put them into practice.

Antony Loewenstein