What Did The Children Learn in School Today?

Posted on November 5, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

In 1963, temporarily banned from American television for his “radical” views, Pete Seeger toured Australia.  On a stage in Melbourne, he introduced a new song by a then 23-year old Tom Paxton. The lyrics began:

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie
I learned that soldiers seldom die
I learned that everybody’s free
That’s what the teacher said to me
And that’s what I learned in school today

Those are sentiments that drive every nation state as it seeks to shape the thinking of its children. Some states have long histories from which to develop those sentiments.

The modern state of Israel has an extremely short history. It came into existence in 1948 under trying circumstances, a tribal band of immigrants from Europe who had survived the Holocaust.

I was reminded of Pete Seeger singing Tom Paxton’s lyrics when I read an account in the Guardian, about a forthcoming book by Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan.

Peled-Elhanan is a mother, a political radical, and the daughter of the famous Israeli general, Matti Peled who in retirement, has become a leading activist in the Israeli peace movement.

She comes to her research from a family with deep connections to Israel’s history. Her brother, Milo Peled, is the author of A General’s Son, scheduled for publication by Just World Books in the Spring of 2012.

In her book, Nurit Peled-Elhanan describes images of Palestinians that Israel has included in its text books for children

They are called Arabs. “The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop,” she says. “The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.”

Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years.

Her book, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, will be published in the United Kingdom this month. She would like to find a Hebrew publisher. So far she had not found one.

Peled-Elhanan tells the Guardian she found a prevailing racism that saturates Israel’s early education textbooks.

Israel has a short history which it has built from ancient biblical stories and the recent horrors of the Holocaust. For nation building, the pairing was perfect. For stealing land, it was illegal, a distortion of  actual history and, for good measure, immoral.

Israel did what other new nations do; shape a narrative that rationalizes past conduct. Unfortunately for the nascent state, it entered history after colonialism had become passé.

Israel became a state just as western nations were relinquishing control of their colonies to carefully-chosen, and subservient leaders.

As a new colony in a period when the colony concept had passed its shelf life, Israel had to create an even more distorted narrative than the American colonialists who had more than a century to sell their tale of manifest destiny.

The compressed period of time in which Israel’s historical narrative was created, required outside help. Thanks to the tribal outreach that extended deep into the consciousness of the West, this late-stage post-Holocaust colonialism succeeded.

It succeeded because it was built around racism, an easy sell in the West, which needed to maintain control over “other”, non-white, populations.

It helped that most of those “others” belonged to a religious tradition, Islam, which colonial powers had never fully understood, nor trusted.

Peled-Elhanan’s book finds this scenario playing out in Israel’s textbooks:

People don’t really know what their children are reading in textbooks,” she told the Guardian. “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering.”

Fifty years after Pete Seeger sang Tom Paxton’s prophetic folk song, American culture retains sufficient belief in its own “manifest destiny” narrative to continue the expansion of worldwide American hegemony.

Hegemony fattens the profits of what Dwight Eisenhower described as our “military/industrial complex”, profiteers who just happen to belong to the 1% of our population now facing protests from the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The tribal nation of Israel (“we are a Jewish state”) links to the 1% through a common need to wage war. Next up on Israel’s agenda?  Iran, of course, as MJ Rosenberg explains in a recent Huffington Post piece.

A commonality of purpose ties Israel to two major influences in American society, the military/industrial complex and the Israel Lobby.

President Obama knows there is campaign money and media influence in that pairing. He also knows that he has inherited the leadership of a nation that, for the moment, at least, does not believe war is the answer to its problems.

This poses a problem for President Obama and for his friends in the industrial/military complex (the 1%) and for the current right wing government of Israel.

To solve this problem, until at least the start of his second term, Obama has seized upon drone warfare, which kills targeted “terrorists”, and nearby civilians, at no apparent personal cost to American families.

Death by pilotless drones remain largely outside America’s media orbit. It goes unnoticed by the Republicans running to replace Obama, and it is largely unreported by US media. Drones do not require “boots on the ground”.

Where are you Rachel, Ed, Chris, Fox News, and the non-cable networks? America turns its lonely eyes to you, and all they see and hear, are superficial tales of stumbling leaders.

Occasionally, however, a personal story of drone warfare breaks into an American media outlet.

Such a story of death by drone appeared this week in the editorial section of the New York Times, under the headline, “For Our Allies, Death From Above”.

It is a story that should be read in its entirety. It reads like a short story a future Joe Heller or Norman Mailer might write after the inglorious War on Terror finally ends.

The story, which is not fiction, but true, was written by Cliff Stafford Smith, an American attorney who works for Reprieve, an organization that advocates for prisoners’ rights.

Smith begins his account:

Last Friday, I took part in an unusual meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region.

Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey.

The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both a parliament and a courtroom: it is the time-honored way in which Pashtuns have tried to establish rules and settle differences amicably with those who they feel have wronged them.

At the meeting, Smith met a 16-year-old Pakistan boy named Tariq Aziz. The story ends with an American drone attack.  It is not an ending Americans, at their best, should tolerate.

On the Monday after the jirga, Tariq Aziz was killed by a CIA drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. Smith concludes:

The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.

My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory — as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970.

But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government.

And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile.

Israel flies American-supplied drones on a routine basis, killing Gaza civilians, at times entire families. Twitter messages from Gaza describe the sound of those pilotless, computer drones as they terrorize children and adults alike.

Further north, pilotless American drones continue to kill Pakistanis like 16-year-old Tariq Aziz along the Afghan border. (For more on Cliff Stafford Smith’s column on Tariq Aziz, read Glen Greenwald.)

Is there any wonder that the US and Israel are isolated from the community of nations?

The most recent proof of this isolation came in the UNESCO vote that admitted Palestine as a full member.

Phyllis Bennis, a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years.

She connects Israel’s influence over US foreign policy with the OWS movement. She explains the link in a Salon.com essay.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the 1 percent — the rich, the powerful, the ones who buy off our government, impose their wars, avoid paying their taxes, you know the ones. The 99 percent — the rest of us – are the ones who pay the price.

But there’s another 99/1 percent divide: over U.S. policy toward Israel and the whole world. Here the 1 percent are really on a roll. Right over the rest of us.

Bennis writes that this is the time for President Obama to say No to Congress by exercising his powers of the executive branch and the defunding by Congress of UN agencies. It is time for him to say to the 99% that he agrees that the nation suffers from the grip of the 1%.

UNESCO, of course, is only the beginning. But it could be the first step toward ending the control Israel has over both American foreign policy and our money-driven domestic politics.

Who knows, the Occupy Wall Street marchers just might lead us to recall, and act upon, the words with which Abraham Lincoln closed his first Inaugural Address:

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.   

And those are words which we should have learned in school, one day long ago, words of hope breaking forth from the darkness of ambiguity. After all, Abraham Lincoln did not live in happy times.

The picture of Nurit Peled-Elhanan is from Wikipedia. The video of Pete Seeger is from You Tube. The picture of Phyllis Bennis is from Split This Rock web site.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections, United Nations | 13 Comments

Palestine Enters UNESCO in 107 to 14 Vote

Posted on November 1, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

To mounting excitement and wild applause, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), voted 107-14 with 52 abstentions, to approve full Palestinian membership in the international body. The vote came on Monday.

Fully aware that the negotiations track pushed by the US and Israel does nothing but enhance Israel’s continued take over of Palestinian land,  Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has chosen to enlist the UN in Palestine’s request for justice.

The UNESCO vote is step one, and a hugely popular step it is, outside of the US.

In addition to leaving the US and Israel with a demonstratively shrinking number of friends in the international community, the UNESCO vote has far-reaching implications for the PLO’s earlier request to the UN Security Council, which requested full statehood membership in the UN General Assembly.

MJ Rosenberg was out Tuesday morning with his Huffington Post summary of the consequences of the vote to US interests. He starts with a dire warning from former Sen. Tim Wirth (D-CO), President of the UN Foundation:

The United States is on the brink of abandoning its decades-long leadership in several international organizations – a process that will fundamentally undermine American national security and economic interests.

Israel’s grip on the US Congress led to the passage of US laws in 1990 and 1994 that locked the US in a dangerous embrace with disaster.

The laws are strict. When Palestine is admitted to a UN agency, the United States must automatically stop paying its membership dues. The laws were written to prevent any future president from waiving these prohibitions, even if such a waiver is in the national interest to do so.

The US has made a deal with the destruction of its own national interest. Wirth adds:

UNESCO leads global efforts to bring clean water to the poor, promotes educational and curriculum building in the developing world, and manages a tsunami early warning system in the Pacific, among other important tasks.

Rosenberg points to this warning from Politico’s Jonathan Allen:

American tech companies — such as Apple, Google and Microsoft — and movie studios that use UNESCO to open markets in the developing world and rely upon an associated entity, the World Intellectual Property Organization, to police international disputes over music, movies and software.

Potentially, the damage can be much, much worse if Palestine seeks and gains recognition from such other critical U.N. entities as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The IAEA is the agency that the U.S. government has relied on to restrain nuclear weapon development (and proliferation) by Iran, North Korea, and others. The WHO works with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to protect us from potential pandemics like the Avian flu.

Those two Congressional fail-safe votes in the 1990s were written to keep Palestinians stateless. In Stanley Kramer’s prophetic film, Dr. Strangelove, this was called a “doomsday machine”. US reliance on its “negotiations” track has led this country to trigger the “doomsday machine”.

The American empire can no longer strike back. The laws passed in the 1990s has forced an automatic halt (on October 31, 2011) in US funding to UNESCO programs. This represents a loss of at least 23%, or $80 million a year, of UNESCO’s budget.

UNESCO must either drastically cut important programs, or find new funding sources. Among positive votes for the Palestine entry into UNESCO were Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia, a trio of financial centers for which an annual gift of $80 million will pose no problem.

By admitting Palestine to membership in UNESCO, the international community announces, “we will manage without the Yankee dollar”.

Let the US waste its billions on wars against small nations. The rest of the world prefers to take a different path.

The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), a Washington-based organization, released the three minute video above which shows delegates casting key votes in the UNESCO session. The video captures the emotion of a UN body willing to defy the American empire.

The growing excitement in the hall begins early in the video with the surprise announcement of a positive “oui” vote by Austria (pronounced in the roll call in French as Autrische). It took a few seconds for delegates to realize Austria was a “yes” vote.

The 59 abstention votes are not counted in the final tally, so they are irrelevant, except for the fact that they reduce the number of votes required to pass the resolution. Among the abstentions was the United Kingdom, a vote which was surprising since the Israel Lobby has almost as much control over UK politics as it does that in the US.

Canada, which also has a strong Lobby presence, joined the US and Israel in voting against the resolution. The total 14 negative vote count included anti-Palestine votes by Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, United States of America, and Vanuatu.

For the entire positive vote list, and the abstentions, click on the blog, The Human Province, which notes the split, no doubt dictated by both domestic and international politics, among European nations. The shrinking US influence in international affairs is reflected in the voting.  The Human Province concluded:

Most of these are no surprise, although it is worth noting the division in Europe, with Spain, France, Ireland, Austria, Finland and Greece voting “yes,” Germany, Czech Republic and Sweden voting “no,” and the UK, Italy and Denmark abstaining.  

It’s also probably worth noting that the US didn’t manage to get a “no” vote from such solid supporters as countries like Latvia (which voted “no” to bringing the motion to the General Assembly earlier this month but abstained today) and Tuvalu, Nauru and other island states that almost always support the US  in international forums. 

Sweden, which has a reputation for supporting human and civil rights, cast a surprising vote against Palestinian membership.

US and Israel trotted out the usual talking points to defend their votes. Since nothing they now say is new and has been shown repeatedly to be devoid of meaning, it is sad to hear how feeble the rhetoric is on a world stage.

The swagger of an AIPAC rally or congressional campaign oration fades rapidly when exposed to the enthusiasm of those 107 international positive votes at the UNESCO General Conference.

President Abbas’ decision to lead the Palestinian Authority and the PLO away from the dead-end track of “negotiations” into the United Nations track has worked. As a strategy to defy both the US and Israel, it was a remarkable step.

UNESCO membership brings with it both a way of showing UN backing for a Palestinian state and access to some significant UN units

The Institute for Middle East Understanding points out that “the PLO’s push for full membership to UNESCO was, in part, a litmus test of UN support for Palestinian claims to statehood”.

UNESCO membership means that Palestine is now in a position to become a member of several important UN bodies, none of whose membership rolls are subject to a US veto.

UNESCO membership also means that Palestine can become a member of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), as these bodies allow UNESCO members to become full members.

It also places the Palestinians in a good position to become members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where admission is similarly contingent on a majority or two-thirds majority vote.

If an increasing number of UN agencies admit Palestine as a member state, it strengthens their claim to statehood, internationalizes the Israel-Palestine conflict, and opens up avenues previously closed to the Palestinians to pursue grievances related to the Israeli military occupation of their lands.

In addition to these agencies, Mondoweiss points to the blog of former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who writes that the UNESCO vote sets a precedent for Palestine to join the International Criminal Court:

The UNESCO membership is crucial recognition of Palestine’s statehood, not an empty gesture. With this evidence of international acceptance, there is now absolutely no reason why Palestine cannot, instantly and without a vote, join the International Criminal Court. 

Palestine can now become a member of the International Criminal Court simply by submitting an instrument of accession to the Statute of Rome, and joining the list of states parties.

Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, identifies yet another benefit to a Palestinian state’s membership in UNESCO:

“The vote to accept Palestine into UNESCO is a long overdue recognition from international community that Palestinian culture is a part of the rich heritage of the Middle East and the world. The idea that this vote is a threat to Israel or the U.S. is another absurd example of how Israeli policy (with U.S. support) is directed at the erasure of Palestinian identity and culture in addition to the denial of political, legal and human rights.”

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland wilts under intense questioning from AP’s Matthew Lee, as she tries to defend her country’s automatic cut off of funds to UNESCO.  (For more on Matthew Lee versus the State Department, click here.)

To watch, listen, read (full text here) and mourn the level to which Israel has dragged American diplomacy down into Zionist darkness, click below, twice.

The exchange between Spokeswoman Nuland and Matthew Lee, is worth the double click.

If you want the CNN (edited) version of this exchange, with all of Lee’s questions deleted, watch below, and weep for the state of America’s controlled media. You will not have to click twice.

Posted in Middle East, Middle East Politics, United Nations | 19 Comments

Ahlam and Nezar, A Palestinian Couple Released in The Prisoner Exchange

Posted on October 29, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Two young Palestinians, Ahlam (left) and Nezar (right) Tammimi, were among the 477 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli prisons, October 18.

They were in the first contingent of what is supposed to become more than one thousand Palestinians released in an exchange for Israeli Sergeant Gilad Shalit.

The Western media covered the exchange as a story about the lone Israeli soldier involved. Television captured the dramatic scenes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeting the young man who had spent five years in an Hamas prison.

The Western public saw and read virtually nothing about the 477 Palestinians who were released from Israeli prisons, except for those stories that reminded the public that many of the prisoners, to use the term so popular among Israeli politicians, had “blood on their hands”.

This bias against Palestinians was so blatant that Jewish activist Noam Chomsky was moved to accuse the media of treating the released Palestinian prisoners as “unpeople”.

It is time to tell their stories, and to do so without apology.

Western media, taking its lead from the Israeli media, was eager to point out that many of the prisoners were involved in acts that led to the deaths of Israelis.

True enough, but it must also be pointed out that when Shalit was captured, he was part of an army which had been killing Palestinian for decades, civilians and militants.

Shalit was fully armed on patrol with two other IDF soldiers, moving along the Gaza-Israel border. In addition, during the five years Shalit has been in prison, the Israeli Air Force has continued its attacks on Gaza, resulting in many Palestinian deaths.

However one-sided this struggle has always been, it is still a war between the fourth largest military force in the world, and an occupied population, some of whom employ military tactics to resist that occupation.

This brings us to Ahlam and Nezar, two Palestinian prisoners who had known each other briefly before both were imprisoned. They are members of a large, extended Tammimi family.

They had both attended Birzeit University, at different times. As prisoners in separate Israeli jails, they connected again through a correspondence that traveled a circuitous route to the village of each of their parents, and then back to the Israeli prisons where they were incarcerated.

The picture above, from The Media Line’s Mid East News Source, is clearly a composite.

It was through their correspondence that Ahlam and Nezar determined they were in love. Ahlam tells the story of their courtship:

“Each letter would take a month to reach Nezar and another month [for me] to get his response back. I would place the letter in the mail and send it to my family. My family would send it to Nezar’s family. Nezar’s family would send it to him.”“Nezar would go through the same process to send me a letter. Our letters were so precious, they took so much time and they were our only means of communication.

We would share experiences, express our love and share our virtual dreams of being and living together after our marriage. After exchanging letters and falling in love we both decided to get engaged even if we were both jailed for life”.

The Media Line reports on Ahlam’s story of the letters, an account she presented “with a broad smile and a sparkle in her eyes”.

Now that they have been released in the October 18 prisoner exchange, Ahlam and Nezar want to somehow have a “big wedding—as soon as they can finally see each other”.

Their formal marriage came in August, 2005.

The fathers of Ahlam and Nezar arranged the necessary marriage documents and sent the couple copies of the marriage contract. Ahlam reports that Nezar sent her wedding rings but Israeli prison administration officials “confiscated them all”.

The first personal meeting the couple had after their marriage, came five years later, in March, 2010, when Israeli intelligence officers questioned them, together, “about the relationship between them and their future plans”.  (This meeting suggests that, at the time, Israel was evaluating potential prisoners for a swap for  Sergeant Gilad Shalit)

When Ahlam and Nezar were released on October 18, the IDF—not-so-helpfully–sent the couple to different locations. Nezar returned to a joyous hero’s reception in his home village of Al-Nabi Saleh, a farming center, where his extended family still lives.

Al-Nabi Saleh (The Prophet Salih) is an Arab village in a valley nestled next to a hill on which a Jordanian Taggert Fort once stood. This particular fort was part of a chain of forts the British built in Palestine during their Mandate period.

The fort had been abandoned until October, 1977, when Prime Minister  Menachem Begin allowed The Gush Emunim (bloc of the faithful), an orthodox Jewish group, to establish a settlement on the hill overlooking Al-Nabi Saleh.

Since his return from a meeting with President Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1977, Begin had allowed six Gush Emunim settlements to move into the West Bank, violating an earlier promise Begin had made to Carter. The Gush Emunim was–and remains–a radical religious group that maintains it has “a commission from God to recapture the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria”.

On the November, 1977, afternoon when I visited the area at the suggestion of the mayor of the city of Ramallah, I found that 18 Jewish orthodox families and 25 non-orthodox families had established themselves as the Jewish settlement Halamish, on Palestinian land. All of the families lived in the fort.

One of the wives from an orthodox family told me in her quiet Chicago, Illinois, accent, that she and her husband had moved to Israel to claim the land Yahweh had given them.

Prime Minister Begin did not officially “approve” of the six Gush Emunim settlements. But he had arranged to protect them. A small IDF unit was stationed on a hill nearby, their tents an early sign of a long-planned settlement movement sanctioned by and encouraged by, Prime Minister Begin.

Since 1977, Halamish has expanded from its original foothold in the fort to occupy almost half the historic lands of al-Nabi Saleh. Tensions have always been high between Halamish and Al-Nabi Saleh. The most recent clash has come over the issue of land confiscation of property and water.

The blog, JadaIiyya, reports on the source of the current protests by both Palestinians and internationals against the actions of the Halamish  settlers:

In December, 2009 settlers from Halamish expropriated the natural spring of ‘Ayn al-Kus on the south side of Road 465. Several weeks later, Halamish settlers burned down 150 of al-Nabi Saleh’s olive trees near the spring.

Ahlam, whose family also has roots in Al-Nabi Saheh, was born in Jordan, where her family had moved in 1967. As a condition of her release in the October 18 prisoner exchange, Ahlam was forced to fly to Jordan to join her parents’ family.

She was not allowed to travel with her husband to his family village, Al-Nabi Saleh. The couple was able to meet briefly at Cairo’s Airport’s Sheraton Hotel on their way to their separate destinations.

The Media Line reported on Ahlam’s time in prison and her welcome home in Jordan:

“I was placed in solitary confinement many times, sometimes for a reason and sometimes for no reason. The cell is so small and dark with dark walls and built underground. It’s just like being jailed in a tomb. If I hadn’t of turned to God, praying and Qura’an, I would have lost my mind.” Ahlam recalls.

“Let me share with you a funny story, I was sentenced with an extra year to my 16 lifetimes because I had a fight with an Israeli female prison guard. This incident kept me laughing for days, as if I would care less about an extra year added to my jail time of 1,548 years.” Ahlam says laughing.

Arriving in Jordan, Ahlam says she was overwhelmed when large numbers of family, friends and fans came to Amman’s Queen Alya airport to welcome her.

“I only met my family twice during my 10 years of jail time, which made me drown in despair sometimes. I missed them so much. Meeting my father and the rest of the family means the world to me,” Ahlam says in tears.

Ahlam says she already feels rejuvenated by being reunited with her family. “There is a whole new generation in my family that I missed out on. Photographs and names have turned into people that I am eager to know,” Ahlam adds happily.

This then, is the story of three prisoners carefully selected by Israeli officials to be released from prison. Two of the prisoners, Ahlam and Nezar, were separately arrested, charged and sentenced by military courts. Each was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Their “crimes”, for which a military occupying power had served as jury and judge, were identified and punished according to a military court in a system operated by an illegal occupation.

Israel sees the prisoners as threats to the security of the State of Israel. The Palestinians who were sent to jail, on the other hand, saw themselves as resisting an occupying army, taking actions they believed appropriate to deal with that occupation.

What Israel did is what all occupying, colonizing armies do. They punished those who resisted their colonizing.

Palestinians, for their part, attacked their “enemy” with the same zeal as did Jewish “freedom fighters”, such as the future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, when he fought British occupiers on behalf of what Begin and his fellow fighters saw as the freedom of the future state of Israel.

What this comes down to is a conflict of narratives, based on who is telling the story, the military occupiers or those who are resisting occupation/colonization.

Ahlam, 31, is younger than her husband, who is 38.  Her brother Fakhr Al Tammimi remembers his sister as “a rebellious child with a strong personality. She never took the easy way and always thought out of the box. My sister had Palestine in her heart and always wanted to go back there.”

Ahlam began her studies in media and journalism at Birzeit University in 1998, just before the Second Intafada began. As a student, Ahlam worked for Al-Milad magazine and  Al-Istiqlal television station, two local media outlets.

At Birzeit, Ahlam met a Palestinian student who inspired her. He was an Hamas member. In an interview with The Media Line, she said:

“I expressed my desire to join them. He told me he has to ask his superior because Ezzeldin Al-Qassam brigades have no female members. After a few days, he came with an approval, which made me the first female Ezzeldin Al-Qassam brigade member,” Ahlam explains.

Her crime, for which she was sentenced by a military court for multiple life terms, was for “choosing the location and securing transportation to reach that location” for Hamas member Ezz Al Din Al Massri, 20, who blew himself up in a Sabarro restaurant in Jerusalem in August 2001, killing 16 Israelis and injuring 150.

From Israel’s perspective, Ahlam played a role in causing a massive act of murder. She saw it, initially, as an act of war. And of course, war itself is organized, sanctioned murder.  There is no other way to describe it.  There is no simple answer to the question of what separates murder from deaths caused in combat.

US and Israeli drone attacks are acts of indiscriminate killing of both targeted militants and innocent civilians. The victims of such killings cry for revenge, which in turn, leads to more deaths. The entire process is, finally, a senseless cycle.

Many Israelis are angry that Ahlam and 476 other Palestinians who were on the “other side” in this conflict, have gained their freedom. They resent being reminded that their own Israeli military forces are guilty of killing Palestinians.

Governments work hard to justify what their armies do, demonizing the enemy and convincing their civilians that the cause the army fights for is just.  This does not, however, make it right.

The fact remains that a limited freedom has been granted to the 477 Palestinians.  Ahlan, like her colleagues who have joined her in leaving prison, now looks to the future. What Ahlam wants to do now is to find a way to unite with her husband,  Nezar, who was jailed in 1993 during his Birzeit University years.

Ahlam’s dream now is to settle down after a huge wedding. “All I dream about now is to live with Nezar, settling down and raising our future children”.

Nezar was sentenced to life in prison for belonging to a Fatah cell in 1993, which Israel claimed was responsible for kidnapping and killing an Israeli in the Jewish community of Beit El near Ramallah.

This then is the personal story, the life in prison, and  the courtship and marriage of Ahlam and Nezar, who now face an uncertain future.

Ahlam told The Media Line that her hope is that the couple will be reunited in Jordan, but if Nezar does not receive permission to enter Jordan, they will request permission to live in Gaza, hoping for the support of the Palestinian Authority, currently run by Nezar’s party, Fatah, and Gaza’s Hamas government.

Meanwhile, Ahlam is trying to adjust to the new developments in technology that emerged during the time she was in prison. She plans to communicate with her husband with the help of new technology.

“I was told that we can cam-chat with each other using motion picture and voice both at the same time, whatever that means,” Ahlam adds with a laugh, “It certainly sounds like a cooler way to communicate than the mobile telephone.”

Ahmad, who is also Nezar’s cousin, was released in the prisoner exchange. Ahmad and Nezar were both charged in 1993 with the same “crime”. Their story is told in the five-minute video below. The Youtube video was released by The Palestine Chronicle.

It covers two days in the village of Al-Nabi Saleh, one day before the prisoner release, and on the day two Tammimi family members are welcomed home.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 2 Comments

Palestinian Prisoners Are Not “Unpeople”; They Are Children of God

Posted on October 22, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

In a talk at New York City’s Barnard College the night the Hamas-Israeli prisoner exchange was announced, Noam Chomsky anticipated the one-sided media coverage of the exchange.

He charged the media with treating Israeli Jews as people, while dismissing Palestinians as “unpeople”.

Chomsky, who is Jewish, brings credentials to this issue as both an acclaimed linguistic scholar, and a strong advocate of Palestinian human rights.

To illustrate his point at Barnard, Chomsky described a front-page New York Times story, dated October 12, with the headline: “Deal with Hamas Will Free Israeli Held Since 2006

The Israeli, of course, is Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas for five years after he was captured June 25, 2006. Shalit, an Israeli army corporal, was on a patrol along the Israeli-Gaza border when he was captured.

Next to the Times story, Chomsky says, is a picture of four [Israeli] women, who are “kind of agonized over the fate of Gilad Shalit”.

The picture caption reads, he tells his audience, “Friends and supporters of the family of Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit received word of the deal at the family’s protest tent in Jerusalem.”

Chomsky adds:

Well, that’s understandable, actually. I think he should have been released a long time ago. But there’s something missing from this whole story. So, like, there’s no pictures of Palestinian women, and no discussion, in fact, in the story of—what about the Palestinian prisoners being released? Where do they come from?

We finally have pictures of Palestinian men and women released from Israeli prisons, What we do not have are the names of most of them. And we still do not know where most of them “come from”.

The woman in the picture above, shown with a man we must presume is her father, was taken at the Mukataa (headquarters) close by Yasir Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah and adjacent to what was once the headquarters in which Arafat spent his final months.

The photo caption does not explain the meaning of Mukataa for non-Arabic readers.  It also does not provide the name of the woman.. The picture, taken by Ilia Yefimovich for Getty Images, is available worldwide, but so far as I have been able to ascertain, it has not appeared in any American media outlet.

The initial CBS News story on the exchange focused on Shalit, the only Israeli involved, as a significant figure. They covered the Palestinian prisoners as a vague group, or as Noam Chomsky says, as “unpeople”.

An intense media campaign to free Schalit made him a national symbol in Israel, and all local radio and TV stations held special live broadcasts Tuesday, following every step of the exchange. The voices of Israeli broadcasters cracked with emotion as news of his return became clear.

CBS also reported that when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton heard the news of the exchange, she said the US was pleased the ordeal was over.

Then she added, “He was held for far too long in captivity,” leaving no doubt as to which “he” she had in mind.

Some Jewish writers in the blogosphere had a different take. One of these bloggers was Jerome Slater, a professor (emeritus) of political science and a University Research Scholar, at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

In his most recent blog entry, Slater writes:

While uneasy about the asymmetry of the Shalit deal between Israel and Hamas–a thousand Palestinian prisoners ( invariably described in Israel as “terrorists”) for one Israeli–the Israeli and the American Jewish media are also full of hymns of self-praise for us wonderful Jews: the “price” we paid was “a moral victory for Israel,” demonstrates our adherence to “profound Jewish values” such as “the pride in the value we place on every single human life,” is “a sign of humanity” that is “sadly absent in large parts of the world, especially in this region,” and the like.

The implication is unmistakable: we are different from them, the parents of the 1000 Palestinians, and the nation they represent, either did not grieve or had no right to grieve over their “children” in Israeli prisons, nor rejoice over their release.

To Slater this attitude is nothing less than “blatant racism and infuriating claims of moral superiority”.

He acknowledges that some of the Palestinian prisoners were bent on “the destruction of Israel”, but he is quick to add:

[S]urely many others were essentially soldiers in a just cause, national liberation and the creation of an independent state in a small part of Palestine.

On the other hand, Shalit was a soldier of a nation whose real cause (continuing the de facto occupation of the Palestinians and Jewish expansion into what remains of their territory) is unjust and whose “profound Jewish values” and “adherence to the dignity of all human lives” does not prevent it—stop me when you think I’m misstating the facts—from occupying, killing, repressing, imprisoning, blockading, and deliberately inflicting deep economic as well as psychological pain on another people.

Uri Avnery, the dean of Israel’s peace activists, brought immediate clarity to the issue.

Immediately after the Oslo agreement, Gush Shalom, the peace movement to which I belong, proposed releasing all Palestinian prisoners at once. They are prisoners-of-war, we said, and when the fighting ends, [prisoners of war] are sent home. This would transmit a powerful human message of peace to every Palestinian town and village. 

Israel refused to recognize their Palestinian prisoners as prisoners-of-war. Instead, Avnery explains further, they treated the prisoners as “common criminals or worse”.

Every single newspaper and TV program, from the elitist Haaretz to the most primitive tabloid, referred to them exclusively as “murderers”, or, for good measure, “vile murderers”.

One of the worst tyrannies on earth is the tyranny of words. Once a word becomes entrenched, it directs thought and action. As the Bible has it: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). Releasing a thousand enemy fighters is one thing, releasing a thousand vile murderers is something else.

Avnery acknowledged that “some of these prisoners have assisted suicide bombers in killing a lot of people. Some have committed really atrocious acts – like the pretty young Palestinian woman who used the internet to lure a love-sick Israeli boy of 15 into a trap, where he was riddled with bullets”.

Others, he notes, were sentenced to prison for life for belonging to an “illegal organization” and possessing arms, or for throwing an ineffectual homemade bomb at a bus hurting no one.

Then Avnery makes a critical point:

Almost all of them were convicted by military courts. As has been said, military courts have the same relation to real courts as military music does to real music. All of these prisoners, in Israeli parlance, have “blood on their hands”. But which of us Israelis has no blood on his hands?

The American media has been negligent in reporting this Palestinian prison story. According to The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), the Israel Prison Service reported, at the end of August 2011, that Israeli prisons held approximately 5200 Palestinians, including 272 prisoners held in “administrative detention without charge or trial”.

The IMEU, which is based in Washington, DC, is a valuable source for information on the Palestinian prison population held in Israel. It also reported this week that the Palestinian Center for Human Rights places the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons at more than 6,000. Other sources put the number as high as 8,000. There is no way to know for sure.

In addition, the IMEU reports, “[Palestinians] who are charged, are subjected to Israeli military courts that human rights organizations have criticized for failing to meet the minimum standards required for a fair trial.”

It is short-sighted for the US and Israel to assume that this prisoner matter has ended.

According to the Palestinian Monitor,  Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, sees the release of the Palestinian prisoners as “an incentive to continue the struggle for the more than 6,000 prisoners still in captivity”.

And as long as there are people like Noam Chomsky around to keep hope alive for those “unpeople” that Israel has locked away, they will not be forgotten.

In his talk at Barnard on the night the upcoming prisoner swap was announced, Chomsky called out the names of two brothers who have disappeared into the darkness of Israel’s prison system. He remembered the Muamar brothers. This is how he told their story:

There are also other people who have been in prison exactly as long as Gilad Shalit—in fact, one day longer. The day before Gilad Shalit was captured at the border, Israeli troops entered Gaza, kidnapped two brothers, the Muamar brothers, spirited them across the border, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, of course.

And they’ve disappeared into Israel’s prison system. I haven’t a clue what happened to them; I’ve never seen a word about it. And as far as I know, nobody cares, which makes sense. After all, unpeople. Whatever you think about capturing the soldier, a soldier from an attacking army, plainly kidnapping civilians is a far more severe crime. But that’s only if they’re people.

The Muamar brothers are not “unpeople”. They are children of God. They and all of their fellow political prisoners must be set free.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics | 13 Comments

Obama and the “Terror Plot Thriller”

Posted on October 15, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

There are so many doubts and questions surrounding the alleged Iranian-sponsored assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, that for Barack Obama to take a prominent role in announcing the case may prove to be a serious political and diplomatic mistake.

The American public loves intrigue and simplistic narratives, good versus bad. What they don’t like is to be lied to in the narrative. We were fooled once by the Iraq-WMDs ”mushroom cloud” campaign orchestrated by Bush-Cheney. As a result we are still fighting two seemingly endless wars in the Middle East.

By highlighting a “terror” plot that involved a Mexican drug cartel, the Saudi ambassador to the US, and a highly unstable potential assassin, Obama brought us Bush-Cheney, the Sequel.

As Obama announced the Justice Department action he promised “strong sanctions” against Iran. The Justice case alleges that an Iranian-American, Manssor Arbabsiar, was introduced to a man he thought had a connection to a Mexican drug cartel, very bad guys with assassination skills.  Arbabsiar’s “contact” to the cartel was, in fact, an undercover US Drug Enforcement official, who was was apparently setting up what IPS writer Gareth Porter describes as a standard FBI “sting”.

The indictment also includes Arbabsiar’s cousin Ali Gholam Shakuri, an officer in the Iranian Qods Force.  It is that elite army unit that allows the Department of Justice to claim that the plot has ties to the “highest” levels of the Iranian government. Obama said there was evidence that additional connections were made, but they have not been included in the indictment, and may never be, on security grounds.

(Language note: In Arabic, Jerusalem translates as Al-Quds; in the Persian language, Jerusalem translates as Al-Qods. Qods or Quds with the al is Jerusalem; without the al, the word is translated as holiness , sacredness, sanctity, sanctuary or sanctum. The spelling for the Iranian Qods Force in this posting, employs the Iranian army’s spelling.) 

A “sting” most often targets a major player believed to be a serious threat to American peace and security.  Arbabsiar may yet emerge as a serious player, but that is no reason why Barack Obama should be in the White House as the nation’s lawyer, announcing the case . He has an Attorney General to perform those duties. Criminal case announcements should be made in the Justice Department, not in the White House.

Instead of waiting for these criminal charges to make their way through the US judicial system, President Obama used a press event in the White House East Room, to address his domestic audience with tough talk about “sanctions” against Iran, a largely meaningless threat since we already have saddled Iran with “sanctions”.

Who is this dangerous Iranan-American at the center of this “terror plot thriller”?

The Washington Post spoke with an Arbabsiar friend, Tom Hosseini, a store owner in Corpus Christi, Texas. Hosseini has known Arbabsiar since the late 1970s, when both came to the United States as students.  The Post profile on Arbabsiar portrays the alleged assassin as someone who did not appear to be capable of carrying out a sophisticated death plot.

Hosseini wonders how anyone, especially an elite military organization such as Iran’s Qods force” the unit the US Department of Justice alleges was running Arbabsiar would be involved with his long time friend.

“It’s a puzzle,” Hosseini said. “Maybe somebody offered him some money. He doesn’t have the brain to say no.”

Within the small Iranian American community in this Gulf Coast city, Arbabsiar, 56, was well known and well liked. But he was also renowned for being almost comically absent-minded, perpetually losing keys, cell phones, briefcases, anything that wasn’t tied down. He failed at a succession of ventures from used cars to kebabs.

“He was just not organized,” said David Tomscha, who once owned a car lot with Arbabsiar.

University of Michigan Middle East scholar and well-informed blogger, Juan Cole, finds the government’s case against Arabsiar, “falling down funny”.

Under a heading that recalls a movie about public gullibility and a TV show about a less than competent secret agent, Wagging the Dog with Iran’s Maxwell Smart, Cole wrote on his Informed Comment blog:

That a monumental screw-up like Arbabsiar could have thought he was a government secret agent is perfectly plausible. I’m sure he thought all kinds of things. But that he was actually one is simply not believable.

OK, Qasim Soleimani, the head of the Qods Brigade special operation forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, may not be a nice man. But he is such a competent man that US officials in Iraq widely believed that he repeatedly outmaneuvered and defeated them there.

The allegation that Soleimani was running a hard-drinking incompetent with no memory and no sense of organization like Arbabsiar on the most delicate and dangerous terrorist mission ever attempted by the Islamic Republic of Iran is falling down funny.

This case has what the Guardian calls “the ring of a far-fetched Hollywood thriller”. Even the senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation admitted that “the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US did not fit with what was known about the methods and practices of the supposed perpetrators, the Al Qods force of the Revolutionary Guards.”

The Iranian government is obviously aware that the US and Israel have their own not-so-subtle motives in relating this “Hollywood thriller” to American and Israeli publics. The top Iranian leader has responded with his own not-so-subtle language.

The Associated Press in Tehran, reported Sunday that Iranian television news quoted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said, “If U.S. officials have some delusions, (they must) know that any unsuitable act, whether political or security, will meet a resolute response from the Iranian nation.”

MJ Rosenberg has serious reservations about the narrative the Justice Department has outlined. He writes on his blog, Political Correction:

At this point, it is impossible to say how serious the plot was and, more importantly, if it even had anything at all to do with the Iranian government. Are we ready to believe that the cold and calculating people who govern Iran are contracting out assassination plots with Mexican drug traffickers or that they would pick Washington as the best place to attack the Saudi ambassador (knowing that being found responsible for a major explosion in Washington would mean war with the Saudi Arabia and United States)?

This is not to dismiss the plot as phony or contrived. But after the Iraq war experience, it would be awfully stupid of Americans to simply accept without question anything we are told about nefarious Muslim states that must be stopped before a “mushroom cloud” appears over downtown Washington.

The Main Stream Media is an essential co-conspirator to our political leaders in this hyping of “terror” stories.  Andrew Kilgore, publisher of  The Washington Report, recalled one story that began in 1981, shortly after the start of Ronald Reagan’s first term.

Breathless articles about Libyan “hit [assassination] squads” began to occupy the front page of The Washington Post. For three weeks, Post readers—and the U.S. government—were obsessed with these squads, which reportedly originated in the Middle East, had reached Europe, and were currently in Canada, where they were poised to cross into the United States like a swarm of northern killer bees.

Five years later, after Reagan  was safely reelected to a second term,  the truth emerged. As narrative, the ending fizzled. Kilgore explained:

Manucher Ghorbanifar, a small-time Iranian exile working in Washington for Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, confessed in 1986 that he had dreamed up the hit squads. Why? “To hurt Libya, an enemy of Israel.”

Why does the American public keep falling for these thrilling, but questionable, tales? The media likes to peddle them and the public needs its circuses.

On the website, Reader Supported News, John Cook goes inside one media operation to demonstrate how this worked around the tenth anniversary of 911.

ABC News president Ben Sherwood. . . . told his staff in a morning conference call to stop reporting news of a potential terror plot timed to the 9/11 anniversary in such a “measured way” and to “turn this into a thriller.”

A few days before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, government sources raised the alarm that according to a single, uncorroborated source, at least three Al Qaeda operatives had been dispatched to the U.S. to strike Washington, D.C., or New York City on or around the anniversary.

How did the ABC News folks initially treat this information? Like a “news story.” They reported it, on the news.

Sherwood is smarter than that. “News stories” are boring! People don’t want “news.” They want drama! Action! Thrills! Which is why, according to a transcript of Sherwood’s morning conference call with ABC News staffers on the eve of the anniversary weekend that a tipster sent us, he told them to sex it up a little. . . .

Sherwood told his news staff to treat the story like a Hollywood movie script, as opposed to a boring old real story involving actual people and things.

Here’s how Diane Sawyer breathlessly recounted the story on World News Tonight two nights before the tenth anniversary of 911:

“We are a nation coming together tonight to remember 9/11 ten years ago, and to stand sentry on the new threat that has been leveled against the United States. As the clock runs down to the anniversary on Sunday, police, bomb-sniffing dogs, and National Guard are all out in force in New York and Washington, D.C.

Intelligence officials are poring over the names on flights from abroad, and ABC News has learned new details on this terror threat.”

Can you hear that clock ticking? Brian Ross’ report that night featured 24-style time-stamp graphics as he counted down the story:

“Thursday night, as the President arrived to address Congress, the FBI and the CIA were in high gear.”

To his credit, Ross also included this quote from former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, though he didn’t let it get in the way of the thrills: “So far, we haven’t been able to find any evidence in the real world that this report is true.”

As we now know, there were no “terror attacks” on the tenth anniversary of 911. But for much of the days preceding this anniversary, ABC had its “thriller”,  and journalism plunged more deeply into the darkness of entertainment posing as news.

In his prophetic 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman wrote that he considered his work to be both “an analysis and a lamentation”.

In his 2005 introduction to the paperback edition, Neil’s son Andrew writes that his father wanted his book’s lamentation to serve as a call to action. Our first action must be to refuse to be duped into a war against Iran.

The picture above is by Philip Scott Andrews of the New York Times.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics, Movies | 14 Comments

This Occupation is Brought to You by A Pattern of Racial Bigotry

Posted on October 8, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress, is withholding basic heath care from children who live in the world’s largest outdoor prison, the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Specifically, Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) (at left) “is keeping her House of Representatives committee from considering approval of $192 million in humanitarian program assistance”.

JTA, a Jewish news agency, reports:

The Americans for Peace Now website is reporting that other House Republicans also are holding the money, and that Republicans in the House and Senate are holding $150 million in security assistance to the Palestinian Authority.

Republicans and Democrats have warned that such money may be withheld if the Palestinians do not pull back from their attempt to gain statehood recognition through the United Nations and absent peace talks with Israel.

If this were happening in an American community, Child Welfare agencies would descend on the offices and homes of these American adults and demand that they release the children from an unsafe and unhealthy environment. They might even move to arrest some of the leaders, including Florida Congresswoman Ros Lethiene.

Unfortunately, for Palestinians in need of this assistance, there are no officials with authority to arrest members of the US House who are eager to punish Palestinians for their bold attempt to break the bonds of Occupation.

In another corner of the United Nations complex, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), that it should “think again” before granting Palestinians membership to the international agency. Palestinians are seeking to join UNESCO as a part  of their diplomatic campaign for statehood.

Forty out of 58 UNESCO board members now support the Palestinian request. The US is one of four members opposing membership. The request will be voted on at the end of the month. Secretary Clinton insists that “the decision about status must be made in the United Nations and not in auxiliary groups that are subsidiary to the United Nations”.

The US currently pays 22% of UNESCO’s funding. The BBC reports:

US Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger, who chairs the sub-committee that disburses US money for diplomatic purposes, said in a statement she would “advocate for all funding to be cut off”.

What Republican Congress members Ros-Lehtinen and Granger, and Secretary Clinton, are saying, is that the path to Palestinian freedom lies entirely in the hands of the Israeli Zionist government “through negotiations”.

These US power brokers are demanding that the Palestinians “negotiate” with Prime Minister Netanyahu. This would not be a negotiation for freedom, it would be a surrender to the Israeli government, whose leaders have demonstrated consistently that they fully intend to control every inch of land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Why does the US Congress, the US President, the mainstream media, and the leaders of the American religious communities, tolerate this violation of this country’s standards of fairness and compassion?

The answer is simple: The decision makers in these US institutions have been manipulated into sanctioning the racial bigotry that has allowed the Zionist leaders of the state of Israel to corrupt American foreign policy.

To be sure, there was much indigenous material to work with in this corruption project. Descendants of the European settlers who invaded what became the United States of America, have long been in the grip of racial bigotry. The enemy “out there” in the untamed wilderness were natives of this land who resisted the presence of white settlers when it became apparent that their intention was to conquer, not to share, the land.

The settler-pioneers who formed the United States had to live with what they had done. They justified their conduct  by lying to themselves.  They did this by declaring the Big Lie, that they were superior to the people whose land they conquered.

The modern state of Israel was born in the grip of this same Big Lie. The new state was created in the aftermath of the horrors of the Holocaust, and mixed with a “divine right” found in only one interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures which offers a specific way of reading the scriptures to manipulate a religious mythic history into a bigoted ethnic cleansing and  the subsequent military occupation of the Palestinian people.

In his dramatic speech delivered to the US Congress on May 24, 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, confirmed his control over the US Congress as he repeated the myth of “his” ancient people as validation for a modern land grab.

The Big Lie of racial superiority in the speech evoked 29 standing ovations from the combined US House and Senate membership, a shameful moment in American history.

The unvarnished truth is that shared racial bigotry, hidden and/or embraced,  and ignorance of the audience, shaped the speech delivered by Netanyahu and cheered by the US Congress. Here is a sample from the Prime Minister’s speech:

This is not easy for me. I recognize that in a genuine peace, we will be required to give up parts of the Jewish homeland. In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India. We are not the Belgians in the Congo.

This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace. No distortion of history can deny the four thousand year old bond, between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.

These words from Netanyahu are easily refuted, They are also rooted in the Big Lie, which grants nonexistent rights to a people who declare themselves to be superior on racial and/or religious grounds.

It is hard to imagine that a majority of the congressional members who cheered Netanyahu’s speech believe in, or even understand, the biblical literalism that stands behind his biblical shaping of an ancient history. Let us be gracious for a moment: Netanyahu has every right to believe his version of the Hebrew scriptures.

He does not have a right to impose this belief on those of us who do not believe in his brand of biblical literalism used for political purposes.

Do those members who cheered and stomped their feet know what they were endorsing? Would more than a handful of them be able to find the Bedouin Arab village of Tuba-Zangariya on a map of northern Israel, where Jewish extremists recently set fire to a local mosque, the most recent example of Israeli racial bigotry in action.

Would they care? These legislators and their fellow citizens, are easily manipulated by Israeli hasbara (propaganda) campaigns that employ the fear of being charged by others as bigots. Zionists know they hold a tool of control over US culture: The dreaded fear of being accused of anti-semitism.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who writes largely about world poverty, will, on occasion, bring his compassion into the Palestinian arena.  In a recent column he asks: “Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?” .

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.

Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future. Mr. Netanyahu’s latest misstep came after the Obama administration humiliated itself by making a full-court diplomatic press to block Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

At a time when President Obama had a few other things on his plate — averting a global economic meltdown, for example — the United States frittered good will by threatening to veto the Palestinian statehood that everybody claims to favor.

With that diplomatic fight at the United Nations under way, Israel last week announced plans for 1,100 new housing units in a part of Jerusalem outside its pre-1967 borders. Instead of showing appreciation to President Obama, Mr. Netanyahu thumbed him in the eye.

This is a strong indictment of Netanyahu, employing a clarity of thought that rarely reaches the American public. Kristof expects his column will evoke what he calls “a torrent of angry responses”:

I realize that many insist that Jerusalem must all belong to Israel in any peace deal anyway, so new settlements there don’t count. But, if that’s your position, then you can kiss any peace deal goodbye. Every negotiator knows the framework of a peace agreement — 1967 borders with land swaps, Jerusalem as the capital of both Israeli and Palestinian states, only a token right of return — and insistence on a completely Israeli Jerusalem simply means no peace agreement ever.

For me, Kristof makes the “final agreement” overly simplistic. He also grants far more to Israel than he should,  but his strong criticism of Netanyahu is a refreshing addition to the pages of the New York Times.

Israel has thus far been successful in its pattern of racial bigotry first, by placing the Palestinian population behind the prison walls of a military Occupation. And second, by manipulating an American foreign policy that follows Zionist dictates.

Did we go to war against Iraq and Afghanistan because we believed the lies of the Bush Administration? In part we did, but it was also a military decision influenced by the goals of the State of Israel and those supporters of Israel in the US, who believe the US and Israel have a common mission to make the world safe for Israeli and American expansionist control.

Former Senator Charles Percy, of Illinois, died September 17, 2011..  Percy was one of the last of that dying breed, a “moderate” Republican. He lost his Senate seat in 1984 to then-Congressman Paul Simon, a liberal Democrat. Zionist forces supported a conservative Republican against Percy in the primary, branding him as pro-Palestinian because he had been open to the US government “talking with” Yasir Arafat.

That, of course, was forbidden. Arafat was an Israeli-designated “terrorist”, an “untouchable” for American politicians. Later, Arafat became a “partner” for peace and Israel allowed him to return to a headquarters in Gaza where he was expected to act as Israel’s “sheriff” for the Occupied Territories. Arafat lost his sheriff’s badge before he died.  He was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas, who at the time was deemed a more acceptable leader to Israel.

Another political leader who has suffered public condemnation by Zionist forces (AIPAC leading the charge) is former President Jimmy Carter, who fortunately, is still with us and continuing to whirl about the world on missions for peace and humanitarian causes. A good friend sent me an Inside Story Youtube video on Carter’s 2008 travels in the Middle East,

This 13-minute video is still pertinent as we watch the unfolding of the Palestinian effort to secure acceptance by the United Nations. Carter’s openness to Hamas in this video is an example of what enlightened American leaders could do if they broke their bonds of Israeli control.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections | 12 Comments

Palestinians Are “Marching To Freedom Land”

Posted on October 1, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

A warning to the United States and Israel is embedded in a New York Times analysis entitled, “Arab Debate Pits Islamists Against Themselves”.

The warning lies in the reality that the Palestinian people are on the same march against the same obstacles that have stirred the quest for freedom throughout the region.

The warning is there, even as the Times editors chose to leave Palestine on the editing room floor.  Anthony Shadid, who co-wrote the analysis with David D. Kirkpatrick, may have wanted to include Palestinians, but it is a strong possibility the Times editors had a different agenda.

What the analysis delivers, however, demonstrates a deep understanding of the rise of a younger Arab/Muslim generation which seeks to balance secularism with Islam.

The people of Palestine know they are a part of this uprising. They, with others in the region, will not be denied. This is the “moment” when the Palestinian people are joining in the march to freedom land. Here is part of Shaddid’s analysis:

The moment is as dramatic as any in recent decades in the Arab world, as autocracies crumble and suddenly vibrant parties begin building a new order, starting with elections in Tunisia in October, then Egypt in November. Though the region has witnessed examples of ventures by Islamists into politics, elections in Egypt and Tunisia, attempts in Libya to build a state almost from scratch and the shaping of an alternative to Syria’s dictatorship are their most forceful entry yet into the region’s still embryonic body politic.

“It is a turning point,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar on Islamic law and politics at the University of Notre Dame who was in Cairo.

At the center of the debates is a new breed of politician who has risen from an Islamist milieu but accepts an essentially secular state, a current that some scholars have already taken to identifying as “post Islamist.”

Its foremost exemplars are Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey, whose intellectuals speak of a shared experience and a common heritage with some of the younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and with the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. Like Turkey, Tunisia faced decades of a state-enforced secularism that never completely reconciled itself with a conservative population.

A party formed by three leaders of the [Egyptian] Brotherhood’s youth wing says that while Egypt shares a common Arab and Islamic culture with the region, its emerging political system should ensure protections of individual freedoms as robust as the West’s.

One of three leaders of the youth wing, Islam Lotfy, argues that “the strictly religious kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the Koran is ostensibly the constitution, was less Islamist than Turkey”. He then points out, “It is not Islamist; it is dictatorship”.

The Palestinan people are significant players in this uprising. They, too, face a dictatorship, the US-backed Israeli government that controls every aspect of Palestinian life with controls that are illegal, immoral and ultimately, self-defeating.

The Palestinians have joined the “march to freedom land”. They now have their own self-governing plan.

On September 9, 2009, I wrote on this blog 

Another encouraging sign is the program Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (pictured here) has developed, a lengthy document describing a future Palestinian state alongside Israel, with borders along the 1967 Green Line.

In his [Washington] Post column, President Carter referred to the Fayyad program, [and to] Javier Solana, secretary general of the Council of the European Union, for the United Nations [who is] is a strong supporter of the two-state solution:

. . . Solana proposes that the United Nations recognize the pre-1967 border between Israel and Palestine, and deal with the fate of Palestinian refugees and how Jerusalem would be shared.

Palestine would become a full U.N. member and enjoy diplomatic relations with other nations, many of which would be eager to respond. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad described to us [the Elders traveling with Carter on a recent visit] his unilateral plan for Palestine to become an independent state.

The US and Israel knew this was coming. Jimmy Carter and Javier Solana told them. Salam Fayyad showed them his plan.

Which explains why the US and Israel have done all they could do to exacerbate the differences between the two opposing Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, hoping to prevent a unified Palestine from going to the UN.  Fatah and Hamas still have their differences, but they are unified in their shared need to be free of Israeli occupation. 

The Palestinians are now at the front door of the UN. Whatever finally happens there, and the betting is that the US will barricade the front door with another veto, the Palestinians will move forward.

John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, based in Paris, writes,

The number of UN member states extending diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine has now risen to 131, leaving only 62 UN member states on the wrong side of history and humanity.

If one ignores small island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, almost all of the non-recognizers are Western states, including all five of the settler-colonial states founded on the ethnic cleansing or genocide of indigenous populations and all eight of the former European colonial powers.

A few years back, neo-conservatives were pushing a propagandistic theory they called, “The Clash of Civilizations”, by which they meant “Western Powers versus Islam”. It was a fear tactic that fell apart upon closer examination. The neo-cons should have called their clash, “declining colonialist powers versus emerging states of the future”.

It is because of this “clash” between the past and the future,  that Palestine will take its place as a UN member in good standing. That will not happen in this session. The US has embarrassed itself by its veto and its shameful campaign to bully Security Council members into rejecting the Palestinian request for membership.

The veto will only further damage US influence in international affairs. It will delay Palestinian elevation to full UN membership, but in the long run, there is no question but that the US and Israel have lost this political struggle.

A new generation of Palestinians no longer tolerates the pro-Israel “road maps for peace” which were obviously designed as an Israeli cover for Israeli expansion. Even the current Palestinian leaders are rebuking the the Quartet—the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia—for making Tony Blair, former British prime minister, their official point man with Israel and the Palestinians, a bad mistake from the outset.

The bias Blair had toward Israel has finally led the Palestinian Authority to openly take note of Blair’s bias.  One Palestinian official, expressing his disapproval of Blair, paid him a back-handed compliment: “He is not as bad as Dennis Ross”, referring to the US point man for the region who has served three duplicitous diplomatic stints under three different US presidents.

The Palestinians are on the march for freedom. Sporadic outbursts of violence from Hamas have been pointless. The path of non-violent protests have been far more effective. BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) is having its strong effect, hitting Israel where it hurts, its international public image.

And that Gaza blockade that Israel tried to protect by killing eight Turkish citizens and one American citizen?  Gazans are sending out the word that they are ready again to receive visitors.  A remarkable statement,  “A Call from Gaza, to the People of Conscience worldwide to break the Israeli Blockade”, has been sent out, inviting other nations, with other ships, to come to Gaza’s shores.

The world now listens to Palestinian voices. When I first started regular visits to the region in 1973, those voices were barely audible.  Now they are being heard.

Prominent among voices that are reaching the outside community is Zoughbi Zoughbi, Director of Wi’am, The Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem. Zoughbi knows a great deal about resolving conflict peacefully. In a recent interview,  Zoughbi looks to the future:

Let’s put the world in front of its political responsibility once more. They have held on to the guilt they had for the Jewish people, which resulted in the UN resolution of 1947 that created Israel, but what makes us a lesser nation?

We are the victims of the victims of the holocaust, and thus its direct victims and we too need our home, our safe haven.

It is a symbolic victory on the General Assembly level but it will lead the Palestinians to think of different strategies for continuing their nonviolent struggles on the ground and to continue negotiations on equal footing.

The younger generations might start to believe that they are giving the leadership their last chance for negotiations and then they will start the 3rd intifada. It is worth mentioning that 75% of the population in Gaza is under the age of 30 and 60% of the population in the West Bank is under the age of 24.

The “victims of the victims of the holocaust” are “marching to freedom land”. 

President Obama and the US Congress, would be well-advised to fall into place in that march, because in the words of the African American spiritual, the Palestinians, one by one, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around”.

Joan Baez sings her version here:

Joan Baez’ version of this spiritual/civil rights song is from Youtube. The picture at top is  from a Ramallah rally, taken when President Mahmoud Abbas spoke after returning from speaking to the UN in New York. It is from Al Jazeera.

Posted in Middle East, Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections | 8 Comments

“Obama’s performance was pathetic,” But How Does President Perry Sound To You?

Posted on September 24, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M Wall

Let us be perfectly clear about this. It is true, as Robert Fisk wrote, “Obama’s performance was pathetic”. It was that, and much more.

President Obama’s speech to the United Nations this week was also embarrassing, and grossly insensitive to the reality of the Palestinians who have since 1967, suffered the pain, death and humiliation of  Occupation.

President Obama focused his speech on Israeli security, which has served as the excuse for Israel to continue its ever-expanding control over what is now called the West Bank and Gaza.

One reason the Obama speech was pathetic was that he studiously avoided uttering the word “occupation”. Instead, the President carefully parroted the ultra right wing Israeli narrative with even more vigor than he has used in previous talks to those annual AIPAC Israel-worshipping conferences.

The blame for this speech rests squarely on Obama. He chose his Zionist consigliere, Dennis Ross, as his in-house White House advisor. Ross has been protecting the Israeli narrative as the only Truth permitted in the White House, since he first emerged on the Washington scene as a Middle East “expert” for the first President Bush. Ross does not hide his proclivities, retreating to pro-Israel think tanks between stints in the White House.

Successive presidents from Bush One to Clinton to Obama, have allowed Ross and his Israel Lobby pals to corrode the ability of US political leaders to actually see or feel the suffering of millions of Palestinians who are incarcerated in ever-shrinking plots of their ancestral land.

The alternative? Before you totally abandon Obama, ponder this, how does a President Rick Perry sound to you? This Texas “good ole boy” has already demonstrated that he is an ultra Zionist. Unlike the former Texas governor who was president for eight years, Perry is prepared to preside over what those biblical End Times believers long for, an Israeli-owned Temple Mount to provide Yahweh with a platform on which to set off the final days.

O, Molly Ivins, why did you have to leave us so soon. 

Meanwhile, while Obama follows Ross down the Zionist primrose path, those keepers of the nation’s conscience, mainline religious leaders, paddle along in their interfaith fairy pond, desperately afraid of being called anti-semitic; right wing religious leaders criticize Obama for his lukewarm Zionism; main stream media peddles the Zionist narrative; and over on main street USA, an ignorant American public struggles to survive in a disastrous economy, oblivious to what right wing Zionists have done to our economic health. 

Imagine if all that changed. Imagine, for example, if the major Protestant denominations told the truth about the Occupation, and started preaching, instead, about justice, love and fairness. Imagine if those same denominations discovered they are called to be prophetic and decided forthwith to embrace BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) the Palestinian-inspired strategy that right wing Zionists detest because it has such a powerful non-violent bite.

Support for Palestinian statehood ought to be a slam-dunk. The Palestinian Authority has met, and far exceeded, all requirements for statehood. At the UN Friday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his moment to formally request what is without question, a status for Palestinians that is long overdue.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu followed Abbas to the podium and repeated his praise for President Obama’s earlier speech. He also seemed to enjoy telling the UN members that few in that room liked him. His speech, of course, was filled with what may only charitably be called “untruths”, as this analysis demonstrates. 

In its report on the speech, the Palestiian news agency, Ma’an, included this sobering reminder of the game the “great powers” will be playing to block Abbas’ request:

The Security Council could delay action on Abbas’ request, giving the mediating “Quartet” — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — more time to craft a declaration that could coax the two sides back to the table.

This delaying tactic was orchestrated by the US  to avoid an immediate Obama veto which would play badly at the UN.  What the US wants is for enough of the 15 members of the Security Council to join the US in voting against the Palestinian statehood request, giving Obama the cover of a Security Council 9 to 6 negative vote.

Israel has few, if any, supporters in the UN, as Netanyahu has acknowledged, so for the Security Council to provide Obama with his flimsy cover, some high-powered US pressure would need to be applied. Will pressure work this time?  I don’t think so.

And here is why: The Security Council has five permanent members: China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, and ten non-permanent members, which serve two year terms. Currently the non permanent members, with the year their terms conclude are Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011), Brazil (2011), Columbia (2012), Gabon (2011), Germany (2012), India (2012), Lebanon (2011), Nigeria (2011), Portugal (2012), and South Africa (2012).

To reject the Palestinian request for statehood and eliminate the need for a veto by the US,  9 members, including the US, would have to vote against Palestinian membership. Do you see eight nations joining the US in that list who would reject the Palestinians? I do not.

Meanwhile, as we await the Security Council vote, which may come next week, or next month, no one knows for sure, the big speeches are out of the way, which means the Palestinian story will once again be relegated to the back pages. This allows the American media to focus even more on the circus that has emerged from the Republican race for the presidential nomination, a race currently led by above-mentioned Texas Governor Rick Perry.

You probably did not read about it in your local paper, but Perry held a press conference in a New York hotel on the day Obama spoke to the UN, timed, Max Blumenthal reports, “to pre-empt Obama’s speech at the UN in which the President would reject Palestinian demands for statehood.”

At the press event, Perry trotted out a cast of characters that looks suspiciously like members of the “brain trust” Perry could elevate to White House power.

New York Democratic Assemblyman Dov Hikind, stood next to Perry at the Press event. Hikind is the former leader of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). The FBI has designated JDL as a “terrorist” organization, which was, according to Blumenthal, “responsible for bombing attacks on numerous Arab-American targets and a conspiracy to murder Republican Rep. Darrell Issa”.

At the press event, Blumenthal reported that Perry issued numerous stentorian condemnations of terror. He then handed the microphone to Hikind, who exclaimed, “I heard the Governor’s speeches and I said to myself, ‘He sounds like me!'” The two men then engaged in a sustained hug much to the delight of the assembled media.

This is the second time in recent months that Dov Hikind has surfaced in New York politics. Writing in both the Mondoweiss and the Beirut-based al-Akhbar web sites, Blumenthal looks back at Hikind’s involvement in the special election in New York’s 9th congressional district, won by a Republican, Bob Turner.

The NY Ninth CD was an overwhelmingly Democratic district until Democrat Anthony Weiner resigned over an internet fiasco. Turner, who had no previous political experience, received the endorsement of former Democratic New York Mayor Ed Koch, a widely publicized shift in party loyalty.

Turner also was endorsed by Democratic Assemblyman Dov Hikind, the same Democratic Assemblyman Hikind who is now strongly supporting Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry. Neither Perry nor Turner has publically expressed any misgivings over Hikind’s previous relationship with the Israeli settler leader Meir Kahane. According to Blumenthal:

Under Kahane’s direction, Hikind operated a front group with the JDL cadre [of] Victor Vancier (aka Chaim Ben Pesach), who served 10 years in prison  for carrying out numerous firebomb attacks on innocent people, and openly contemplated killing the renowned Palestinian professor Edward Said.

It is interesting to note, and a commentary not only on American Jewish-influenced politics, but also mainstream media coverage, that Hikind’s terrorist-related links were never mentioned in the election campaign by Turner’s Democratic opponent, David Weprin. Instead, Weprin and Turner both focused on who would be the best congressman for Israel.

Joining Hikind at Perry’s press event was Dr. Solomon “Joe” Frager, who was listed on official Perry press material, as the organizer of the press conference. Blumenthal provides Frager’s background:

Frager is the Chairman of the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, a front group for the Ateret Cohanim organization that steals Palestinian property in East Jerusalem and hands it over to fanatically religious Jewish families. They are the spearhead of Israel’s slow motion ethnic cleansing of Silwan and the Old City.

What then shall we do with this promising young president, who has humiliated himself, and the nation he leads, on the large UN world stage? Ralph Nader believes Obama should be challenged in the Democratic primaries.  Fortunately, for Obama backers, no one pays much attention to Nader these days, except the right wing Washington Times which eagerly offered Nader space to do his part in bringing in blocking a second Obama term.

Criticism of Obama’s continued capitulation to the Zionist right, gets scant attention in the Mainstream Media, which is why voices like Robert Fisk must be heard and heeded.

Fisk’s report in The Independent was harshly critical of Obama’s speech:

For the American President who called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, an end to the theft of Arab land in the West Bank – Israeli “settlements” is what he used to call it – and a Palestinian state by 2011, Obama’s performance was pathetic.

As usual, Hanan Ashrawi, the only eloquent Palestinian voice in New York this week, got it right. “I couldn’t believe what I heard,” she told Ha’aretz, that finest of Israeli newspapers. “It sounded as though the Palestinians were the ones occupying Israel. There wasn’t one word of empathy for the Palestinians. He spoke only of the Israelis’ troubles…”

Too true. And as usual, the sanest Israeli journalists, in their outspoken condemnation of Obama, proved that the princes of American journalists were cowards.

Fisk offers an encouraging (and youthful) example of informed commentary from a member of the younger Israeli generation, Israeli scholar Yael Sternhell (at right), who has written:

The limp, unimaginative speech that US President Barack Obama delivered at the United Nations….reflects how helpless the American President is in the face of Middle East realities.

Obama needs to hear criticism like this from Israel and from alternative US media. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once told a political leader who wanted him to take a progressive action, “Make me do it”.

We are called to make Obama move beyond his UN speech.  He will need all the “making” we can give, to help him escape from Zionist control.

Neither the Progressive cable pundits and most certainly not the Main Street Media, will be of any help in this effort.

That includes pundits like Chris Matthews, who anchors the MSNBC evening lineup. After Friday’s dueling UN speeches by President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu, there was ole Chris acting like the high school Senior Class president who was proud to have as his guest to “discuss” the Middle East,  the ever-charming, slick Israeli ambassador to the US,  Michael Oren, who proceeded to overwhelm Matthews with his usual list of  Israeli promises ( prevarications) that should bring the wayward Palestinians to another round of  “negotiations”.

Matthews is the TV dean of the PEPs (Progressives Except for Palestine). Fortunately, following him in the MSNBC lineup we have the ever-reliable Rachel Maddow, who a week before the dueling UN speeches, interviewed former President Jimmy Carter.  Not surprisingly for her, Maddow asked  Carter about the Palestinian bid for statehood, knowing full well what he would say. Carter was precise: It is time for Palestinian statehood.

Obama has a rough 13 plus months ahead of him before the 2012 election.  He is not likely to confront the media PEPs, nor any other part of the Zionist hasbara that has enveloped this country like a giant octopus.

This leaves us with the option of trusting that in a second term, Barack Obama will return to that 2008 promise, when, as Ron Suskind writes in his latest book, Confidence Men, we experienced that moment of  “dizzying ebullience when Barack Obama and his beautiful family stepped onto the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park as America’s First Family”:

It was a sensation of such intensity as to startle many across the country and around the world into believing in the promise of America, the original and long-burning beacon of the democratic ideal.

Al Jazeera posted a 25-minute news program, “Inside Story“,  Friday. Included are comments by US, Israeli and Palestinian observers.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections, Religion and politics | 15 Comments

Erdogan: “Israel is the West’s Spoiled Child”

Posted on September 17, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

On Tuesday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told an Arab League meeting in Cairo, Egypt, that a vote to accept a Palestinian state in the United Nations “is not a choice but an obligation.”

Later, on a Cairo television program, Erdogan declared: “Israel is the West’s spoiled child. To this day it has never executed a decision by the international community.”

The Turkish leader was on his second day of an “Arab Spring” tour which was obviously designed to gain Arab support for a Palestinian state application before the UN General Assembly, which meets in New York this week.

Both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will state their positions in back to back addresses before the UN,  Friday, September 23, setting up a confrontation between “the West’s spoiled child” and a captive population fighting to escape from a military occupation.

So desperate was the US to avoid having to cast its usual pro-Israel veto in the Security Council against the Palestinian Authority/PLO application for UN membership, that it has twice dispatched its pro-Israel diplomatic team, David Hale and Dennis Ross, to Tel Aviv and Ramallah to “persuade” Abbas and Netanyahu to agree to return to negotiations.

The Hale-Ross effort was a failure from the start. The two envoys returned to the region two times, knowing full well that Netanyahu would not budge from his rejection of  two Palestinian preconditions for talks: Stop building settlements and start negotiations along the 1967 Green Line border, both positions advocated in previous statements by President Obama.

In his Friday, September 16, televised address from Ramallah, President Abbas ended speculation that the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (both of which he heads) might yield to US-Israeli pressure and go directly to the General Assembly, bypassing the Security Council where the Obama veto was waiting. That will not happen.  Abbas is going for broke.  He will present his request to the UN Security Council, fully aware that the US will veto the request.

Speaking to reporters in Ramallah, Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said the plan delivered by U.S. envoys Hale and Ross did not meet the two Palestinian demands. This convinced President Abbas that the US was not serious in trying to negotiate peace.

“David Hale and Dennis Ross came with a paper that was the last straw that he [Abbas] could take,” Shaath said. “It seems that it was designed to be rejected.”

One problem the Palestinians had with the American proposal was that it “did not refer to disputed Israeli settlements as illegal, instead attributing their presence to demographic trends since 1967”.

This means that the two most recent Hale-Ross missions have failed, “forcing” President Obama to cast his Israel-lobby dictated, pro-Israel veto. It will not be the first veto President Obama has ordered to reject policies which Obama was on record supporting. The first Obama pro-Israel veto came February 18, blocking a resolution that condemned “Israeli settlements as an illegal obstacle to peace”.

Members of Obama’s own government have tried to alert the President to the danger of giving in to Israel’s every demand. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote recently for the Bloomberg web site that Robert M. Gates, the now-retired secretary of defense, warned Obama, directly, that Netanyahu was “an ungrateful ally”.

In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security — access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing — and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.

Senior administration officials told me that Gates argued to the president directly that Netanyahu is not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank. According to these sources, Gates’s analysis met with no resistance from other members of the committee.

When Obama casts his second pro-Israel veto, his action will further damage the President’s standing as an international leader. The glory days of his Cairo speech are over.  The veto will also move the issue to a larger stage, the UN General Assembly, where at last count, there are more than enough voting members who agree with President Erdogan that a vote in favor of admitting Palestine to the UN as a non-voting state “is not a choice but an obligation.”

The veto and the GA vote will guarantee that US prestige in the region, and indeed, around the world, will drop even further. And, what really distresses Israel,  once in possession of a non-voting membership status in the UN, Palestine receives the right to haul Israel and its leaders before the International Court of Justice.

As a result, Israeli officials will be reluctant to travel to any foreign nation, except the US, for fear of finding an ICJ official waiting for them,  subpoenas in hand.

This is not a good time for Obama to alienate an important part of his political “base”, those progressive and liberal voters, already disenchanted by Obama’s Bush-like foreign policy, who will find it difficult to wage a second Obama campaign of “change we can believe in”.

Few from that base are likely to vote for a Republican nominee for president, especially if the nominee is a product of the Christian Right. It is also true that Obama’s liberal/progressive base does not produce anything like the dollars AIPAC generates

When the US casts that veto at the UN, Obama will be rejecting an important segment of those progressive supporters who, in 2008, walked the streets for him and brought voters to the polls because they believed he would be a different kind of president. The PEPs (Progressive except on Palestine) won’t care, but peace and justice volunteers will.

By sticking with his “spoiled child” ally, Obama also further reduces the influence he once coveted in the Middle East. The new power states in the region are Egypt and Turkey, both of which were once Israel’s strongest allies in the Middle East.

If enough voting UN members yield to the US-Israel pressure and delay or prevent a Palestinian entry into its UN non-voting state status at the General Assembly, Turkey’s President Erdogan has already indicated that Turkey will refer the legality of Israel’s Gaza blockade to The Hague. According to Ha’aretz:

Edogan’s comments came a week after Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu first indicated that Turkey was to appeal the International Court of Justice in The Hague as soon as next week in order to probe the legality of Israel’s naval blockade on the Gaza Strip, saying that Turkey could not “accept the blockade on Gaza.”

“We cannot say that the blockade aligns with international law,” he said, adding that the stance taken by the Palmer Commission Report was the author’s “personal opinion, one which does not correspond with Turkey’s position.”

There are dissenting voices within Israeli society that support the Palestinians on this issue. Gideon Levy, veteran Israeli moderate and Haaretz columnist, asked in a recent column:

What will we tell the world next week at the UN? What could we say? Whether in the General Assembly or the Security Council, we will be exposed in all our nakedness: Israel does not want a Palestinian state. Period. And it doesn’t have a single persuasive argument against the establishment and the international recognition of such a state.

So what will we say, that we’re opposed? Four prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu among them, have said that they’re in favor, that it must be accomplished through negotiations, so why haven’t we done it yet? Is our argument that we object to it’s being a unilateral measure? What’s more unilateral than the settlements that we insist on continuing to build?

Paul Woodward asks in a posting on his blog, War in Context, “How Can Israel Survive Without Growing Up?” His conclusion:

And thus we see the contradiction which is Israel — forever pumping itself up, flexing its muscles and showing its neighbors that no one should risk messing with the mighty Zionist state, yet all the while knowing that without the protection of the United States, Israel’s survival would depend on a revolutionary transformation.

Absent American protection, Israel, for the first time, would have to seriously take on the challenge of getting along with its neighbors and not, as it has for the last two decades, simply use diplomacy as a facade behind which it can pursue its policies of territorial expansion.

Is the “West’s spoiled child” ready to grow up? And is the United States ready to see that its own patronage is what has allowed the Jewish state to trap itself in such a prolonged adolescence?

There is no way that a Republican president would do anything other than continue to enable Israel in its behavior as the “spoiled child of the West”. It therefore, remains for our incumbent Democratic president to put a stop to this knee-jerk Israel indulgence, either in this term, or in his second term.

The president should start by, first, firing those members of his White House team who have consistently favored Israel in his current and in previous administrations. He must fire the team that put him in the position of contradicting himself not once, but twice in seven months, by vetoing resolutions he supports.

In the city of  Washington, the President will have no problem finding experienced and able replacements who not only understand the difference between “illegal Israeli settlements” and “demographic trends since 1967”, but who grasp that difference both intellectually and existentially.

The picture of Turkey’s President Recip Tahyyip Erdogan is from the Associated Press.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 18 Comments

The Day The Bush War on Terror Began

Posted on September 10, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M . Wall

President George Bush’s War on Terror began ten years ago, September 11, 2001.

Murderous crime scenes in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, became spiritual staging grounds for an international war against what Time’s Tony Karon describes as “a tiny network of transnational extremists, founded on the remnants of the Arab volunteers who’d fought in the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union.”

It did not need to come to this.

The attacks on the US could have been a time to reinvent ourselves as a united people, bound together in our common grief.  But politicians, supported by a national media that was far more concerned with drama of what happened than why it happened, began to shape a different future, a worldwide attack on Islam.

Our crime scenes of death became shrines of memory designed not to mourn the dead, but to serve as spiritual support bases for the Bush War on Terror. The deaths of more than 3000 victims were exploited to create an evolving  narrative of  permanent international warfare.

Frank Rich wrote in New York magazine August 27, 2011:

The hallowed burial grounds of 9/11 were supposed to bequeath us a stronger nation, not a busted one. We were supposed to be left with a finer legacy than Gitmo and the Patriot Act. When we woke up on September 12, we imagined a whole host of civic virtues that might rise from the smoldering ruins.

Rich reminds us that Bush, a “still-green president” had a “near-perfect approval rating for weeks”. The nation was ready to build “a selfless wartime patriotism built on the awesome example of those regular Americans who ran to the rescue on that terrifying day of mass death, at the price of their own health and sometimes their lives”.

Instead we got “another hijacking—of 9/11 by those who exploited it for motives large and petty, both ideological and crassly ­commercial”.

The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration’s repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us. So devilishly clever was the selling of the Saddam-for-Osama bait-and-switch that almost half the country would come to believe that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University, wrote in a posting, The Price of 9/11: “President George W. Bush’s response to the attacks compromised America’s basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security”.

Three years ago, when Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist, and a colleague, examined the costs of the Bush wars, their conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, he writes, the costs have mounted.

With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

One glaring reason why the Bush-Cheney war machine could shape public opinion with such impunity in 2001 is that the main stream media had abandoned its journalistic responsibility to talk truth to power.

Looking back over my own 2001 files from those immediate post 911 months, I found a remarkable exception to that total media capitulation, a Newsweek essay published on November 18, 2001. The essay was written by David Gates under the headline, “The Voices Of Dissent”. The Daily Beast, Newsweek’s current online presence, has the essay on its site, here. Gates writes:

Since September 11, political dissent has seemed a decadent luxury, rather than a democratic necessity. The new united-we-stand orthodoxy holds that we’re all engaged in a war of unquestionable good against inexplicable evil–that, in fact, the attempt to understand the enemy’s perception of us is disloyal–and that bombing Afghanistan, approved by 90 percent of Americans, is both morally and practically justified.

These assumptions are worth questioning, if only for prudential reasons. But our official opposition party has signed on; so have most of the world’s leaders. And again, [few contemporary] writers get with the program.

Gates found, with some searching I imagine, John le Carre and Alan Gurganus, both of whom had written “to critique the war and the United States’ arrogance”

The most audible voices Gates identified, however, were those of Susan Sontag and Barbara Kingsolver, and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.

Sontag, the essayist and author of the National Book Award-winning In America: A Novel, drew a bizarrely fierce reaction for a 473-word New Yorker piece. She called the president “robotic” and added that the attacks were motivated by “specific American alliances and actions”.  Gates does not specify those allies and their actions, but ten years later it is possible to surmise she may have been alluding to Israel.

Gates writes further that since September 11, Kingsolver “has been pouring out editorials and essays”.

Her dissent, like Roy’s, is both moral and practical. “If our goal is to reduce the number of people in the world who would like to kill us,” she says, “this is not the way to go about it.” She resents having her patriotism impugned. “I’m speaking out because I’m a patriot,” she says.

“Because I love my country and I want it to do the right thing.” And she also resents being told–as she has been lately–that she should stick to writing novels. “It’s a nasty slap down that’s been used against those of us, particularly Arundhati Roy, who have spoken out,” Kingsolver says.

“As if the fact of our being novelists disqualified us for any other sort of speech. I can’t make any sense of that. Words are my tools. Words are what I have to offer.”

In that same 2001 file folder I found a column I wrote for the Christian Century‘s December 12, 2001, issue. It is available on the Century web site. Click here for the full column.

I quoted from the David Gates Newsweek essay, and added  these observations on how Bush’s War on Terror looked to me, and to many more Americans who were not being heard, in 2001.

Meanwhile, the president’s repeated insistence that the war against terror will last a long time indicates that he is listening to those who want him to extend the war to all nations that “harbor” what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has seen too many movies, likes to call the “bad guys.”

Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz, White House officials Condolezza Rice, Karl Rowe and Karen Hughes, and chairman of the president’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Pearle, are urging Bush not to stop with Afghanistan.

New Yorker writer Peter J. Boyer reports that Newt Gingrich, a member the President’s Defense Policy Board, is urging the president to “confront Iraq even while the engagement in Afghanistan continues, and go after terrorist operations in Somalia and Sudan as well.”

I called my December 12, 2001 column, A Moral Squint: Bombs and Chaos. The column began:

After a particularly heavy U.S. bombardment of the city of Kunduz, al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters initially refused to surrender. Northern Alliance factions argued over how to arrange the surrender of Kunduz, provoking one U.S. official to describe the situation in and around the city as “chaotic.”

His word reminds me of an exchange in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey demands that Thomas More support a papal dispensation so that King Henry VIII can legally divorce his queen, who has failed to produce a male heir.

When More refuses to intercede with the pope, the cardinal says, “You are a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat on without that horrible, constant moral squint. With a little common sense you could have made a statesman.”

To which More replies: “I think that when statesmen forsake their own private consciences for the sake of their public duties they lead the country by a short route to chaos.”

Our nation needs the wisdom of  writers these days who possess a “moral squint” and don’t hesitate to write and speak about it.

The picture at the top was taken September 11, 2001 by Marty Lederhandler for the Associated Press.  It ran on Tony Karon’s Time blog on September 8, 2011. The Empire State Building is in the foreground; the burning twin towers are at  the right.

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