Israel Makes Mahmoud Abu Samra A Shaheed

Posted on August 27, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Mahmoud Abu Samra was killed August 19 in an Israeli air raid near Gaza City. He was 13 years old. The Palestinian news service, Ma’an, tells the story of Mahmoud’s death:

Renewed air strikes across the Gaza Strip late Thursday killed a Palestinian teenager and injured more than a dozen others amid an escalation in violence that left some 20 people dead throughout the day.

Just after midnight Friday, Israeli warplanes launched a series of raids targeting Gaza City, the northern towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya, and Khan Younis in the south.

Gaza medical official Adham Abu Salmiya said an air strike on a home near the former intelligence services headquarters in Gaza City killed 13-year-old Mahmoud Abu Samra and injured 18 others.”

Mahmoud (at left in the picture above) is number 150 in the list of 173 men, women and children who have been killed  this year by Israeli forces.

Each person who dies in the struggle against the Occupation, is identified by Palestinians as a Shaheed, the Arabic word for “martyr”.

Some of the men killed are identified as members of the Gaza-based Al Quds Brigade, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad. The women and childen are all civilians. They are, also, all Shaheeds.

The website, Occupied Palestine | فلسطين | iRemember… | الشهداء  prints the names of the 173 Shaheeds who have been killed between January 1, 2011, and August 25. The site further indicates that this list includes only those deaths confirmed by media sources. The 173 are recorded in the order in which they died. The list grows as other deaths are recorded.

The site reports that Mahmoud died on April 19, after midnight, which would suggest he was killed in his sleep. The media stories that recorded the deaths may be accessed by clicking on each name listed on the site.

Israel, of course, does not launch air strikes on the spur of the moment. The Israeli air attack that killed Mahmoud after midnight, August 19, had the earmarks of another of those Israeli military strikes already on the drawing board, waiting for a trigger event to justify the action.

Israel’s December, 2008, Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza, was obviously a long planned military assault. At the time, Israel claimed the military assault was a “retaliation” against Gazan rocket fire.

On August 18, 2011, Israel was quick, once again, to blame Gaza “terrorists” (falsely) for the Eilat bus attack. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Israeli news agency, Ynet, “this terror attack originated from Gaza. We will exhaust all measures against the terrorists.”

The Guardian quoted Israeli officials flatly asserting that the PRC was responsible.  The officials even had a scenario that explained how “militants” traveled 125 miles from Gaza into Israel to carry out the attacks.

The Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) was responsible for the attacks near the Red Sea resort of Eilat. A large squad of militants crossed through tunnels from Gaza into Egypt, and then travelled 125 miles (200km) south through the lawless Sinai peninsula before crossing into Egypt north of Eilat, according to officials.

This scenario quickly collapsed, except in US media and political circles, where Israel’s initial cover story was adopted as the Gospel according to Ehud Barak.

American Jewish blogger Richard Silverstein does not believe in that Gospel. He has been tracking the phony Israeli scenario from the outset. He wrote in his Tikun Olam blog:

Al Masry Al Youm, an independent liberal Egyptian newspaper, reports “Egyptian authorities have identified three of the people responsible for carrying out a terrorist attack in Israel, just north of Eilat, on Thursday [August 18], in which seven Israelis were killed, according to an Egyptian security source.

The same source added that one of the men identified is a leader of terrorist cells in Sinai, while another is a fugitive who owns an ammunition factory.”

What is intriguing about this story is that it would explain many things which appeared to be discrepancies when the theory was that Gazans were involved. First, the Israeli bus driver said the attackers wore Egyptian army uniforms. Now, it might be possible for Gazans to get such uniforms, but it would be much easier for Egyptians to do so.

Second, the Israelis themselves have disagreed about the authors of the crime, with [Prime Minister] Netanyahu claiming the Popular Resistance Committee was behind it and the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) spokesperson specifically rejecting her boss’ claim.

All of which leads one to believe that the Israelis don’t have a clue who was behind it.

Israel’s neighbors also rejected the Ehud Barak version. They know the deceptive nature of their enemy. In the August 24, The Palestine Chronicle, Tammy Obeidallah, writes:

Of course, the Israeli spin machine claims the bombardment of Gaza was in response to the [August 18] Eilat operation, although there is no evidence that Hamas or the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) perpetrated the attack.

She adds:

Israel’s 63-year campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people is neatly packaged as ‘retaliation’ against ‘mortars fired by Palestinian militants’ or the hackneyed ‘homemade rockets.’ Mysteriously, the media never reports on these mortars or rockets until Israeli forces “retaliate” for them; then it serves as an excuse for continued genocide.

If Israeli strikes are ‘retaliation’ we are left to wonder just what the Israeli military was ‘retaliating’ for during the first four months of 2011, when 49 Palestinians in Gaza were murdered during Israeli raids, including a missile strike that killed three children in the same family, all under age 16. A fourth family member also died in that strike and 13 others, mostly children, were wounded.

Obeidallah further ponders whether or not the US main stream media would ever be interested in publishing the names of those Palestinians listed on the “I remember” Palestine Chronicle page. He assumes they would not.

After all, Mahmoud Abu Samra is just another Arabic name which the majority of news anchors could not pronounce correctly. At 13 years of age, his bright eyes and infectious smile were memorialized momentarily on a few social network pages, then joined the sea of images of dead Palestinian children, all victims of a 63-year genocide endorsed by most of the world’s nations.

One week after the launching of Israel’s phony “retaliation” cover story, which led to the death of Mahmoud Abu Samra, Ha’aretz reported that on August 25 that Israel and Egypt had agreed to conduct a joint investigation “of the events surrounding last week’s terror attacks in southern Israel which left eight Israelis dead.” 

Having reached a political arrangement with its powerful neighbor, the newly unpredictable Egyptians, Israel continued its attacks against Palestinian “militants” in the Gaza Strip, still claiming the strikes were “retaliatory”.

This time, Israel claimed it was attacking Gaza in response to the firing of more than 20 rockets at southern Israel since Wednesday. Five Palestinians have already been killed in this latest Israeli “retaliation”.

When a nation’s foreign policy is based on a platform of lies, deception becomes that nation’s constant obsession. Without the support and help of the nation it loves, the USA, that obsession becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

What would Israel do without the constant presence of journalists like the New York Times’ Ethan Bronner? Bronner can always be depended upon to serve as a conduit of Israeli spin to American readers.

Bronner, the Times Jerusalem correspondent, writes from the rarefied air of Israel’s government offices. He is always a reliable source of the latest Israeli spin. In his latest weekend update, published August 27, nine days after the Eliat bus bombing, Bronner examined the interaction between Middle East regional powers.

His conclusions are rather obvious: The current Egyptian government is not as Israeli-friendly as Egypt’s deposed dictator, Hosni Muburak, had been.  That would explain why Benjamin Netanyahu and his Congressional pals in Washington, were so upset when President Obama finally faced the inevitable and called on Muburak to step down.

We also learn another obvious fact: Turkey is not happy with Israel for reasons related to Gaza and Mavi Marmara. Bronner cannot bring himself to admit (he is writing an analysis, not a news story) that Israel has no qualms about killing Palestinians.

Turkey does not like to see Israelis randomly killing Palestinians and then telling the lie that radical Palestinians made us do it.  This is the tortured analysis Bronner offers to “explain” the big lie:

Last weekend, [Israeli] officials were contemplating a major military assault on Gaza. But that plan was shelved by the crisis that emerged with Egypt, by the realization that Hamas itself was uninvolved in the terrorist attack and by the worry about how such an assault would affect other countries’ views during the United Nations debate of a Palestinian resolution in September.

Those “other countries” include Turkey, of course.

The plan to create more Shaheeds (martyrs) in Gaza was “shelved” for political expediency? Bronner is finally given the freedom to write that Hamas was not involved (an admission slow to arrive in Israel’s ruling circles). He also was freed up to write that killing Palestinians would “affect other country’s views” when the UN vote is taken September 20?

Amira Hass, Ha’aretz‘ West Bank/Gaza correspondent, does not spend her time in Israeli government offices. She writes from Gaza where she finds persuasive circumstantial evidence that there were no Palestinians involved in the Eilat bombing.

It has been one week since the terror attacks near Eilat, and there is no sign of the traditional mourners’ tents for the relatives of militants killed by the Israel Defense Forces, or indeed any reports of Gazan families who are grieving as a result of IDF actions near the Egyptian border last Thursday. Nor were there reports of families demanding the return of their loved ones’ bodies for burial. A longtime social activist told Haaretz that even in the event that families were instructed to conceal their grief, news like that is difficult to hide in the Strip.

The absence of mourners’ tents reinforces the general sense in the Strip that the perpetrators of the attack were not from Gaza, contrary to Israeli defense establishment claims. Gazans also doubt that members of the Popular Resistance Committees and their military wing (the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades ) were behind the attack. Support for this view can be seen in a report on Monday by the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, according to which Egyptian security forces had identified three of the planners as Egyptians.

Bronner ignores the absence of mourners’ tents in his analysis. Instead he clings to the Israeli spin:

Israeli officials say they are certain from detailed intelligence that the Aug. 18 infiltration that killed eight Israelis was planned and carried out from Gaza by Palestinians associated with a small radical group.

Bronner also writes that “in its pursuit of the killers into Sinai and its assassinations of the group’s leaders in Gaza, Israel found itself with less room to maneuver than in the past.”  In short, Israel is not prepared to stop the killing, just bring it down to pre-August 18 levels.

Not much in the way of progress, but it is a reminder that Israel cannot depend forever on America’s vetoes to clean up the mess it creates for itself.

The social network picture (at the top of this posting) of Mahmoud Abu Samra and two of his friends, originally appeared in The Palestine Chronicle. 

Correction: An alert leader points to an error in earlier versions of this post in which I referred to Tammy Obeidallah of  The Palestine Chronicle,  as an “he”. That was an error. Tammy is a “she”.  My apologies, and my thanks, to my alert reader.  Jim Wall

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Avnery Reveals “The Return of the Generals”

Posted on August 20, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Uri Avnery, intrepid columnist, ageless Israeli peace activist, and retired IDF soldier, has seen, up close, the actions of every government Israeli voters have put in office since the nation was created.

He is not fooled by the antics, decisions and deceptions of the current Israeli right-wing government. Avnery peers into the soul of the Netanyahu-Lieberman team and reports back to his readers the dark visions he finds there.

With a wisdom that was sadly missing from US media following 911, Avnery  writes that the recent deadly exchange of fire in the southern Sinai gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the excuse he needed to change Israel’s public conversation. Avnery calls his posting, “The Return of the Generals”.

At the beginning of the week, Binyamin Netanyahu was desperately looking for a way out of an escalating internal crisis. The social protest movement was gathering momentum and posing a growing danger to his government. The struggle was going on, but the protest had already made a huge difference. The whole content of the public discourse had changed beyond recognition.

The city square of Tel Aviv has been covered with protesters living in tents.  There was danger the Arab Spring spirit would soon engulf the region’s so-called “Only Democracy”.

Talk of “security” was pushed aside. As Avnery put it, TV talk show panels, which had previously been filled with “used generals”, were now packed with social workers and professors of economics.

And then it happened. A small extremist Islamist group in the Gaza Strip sent a detachment into the Egyptian Sinai desert, from where it easily crossed the undefended Israeli border and created havoc. Several fighters (or terrorists, depends who is talking) succeeded in killing eight Israeli soldiers and civilians, before some of them were killed. Another four of their comrades were killed on the Egyptian side of the border. The aim seems to have been to capture another Israeli soldier, to strengthen the case for a prisoner exchange on their terms.

In a communications pattern familiar to American consumers of radio and TV news, discussions by economic experts about young people angry about jobs and housing were replaced by the “old gang of exes – ex-generals, ex-secret-service chiefs, ex-policemen, all male, of course, accompanied by their entourage of obsequious military correspondents and far-right politicians”.

Netanyahu was once again playing the role that allowed him to be seen as “the he-man, the resolute fighter, the Defender of Israel”. He became George W. Bush after 911, when the cowboy president from Texas grabbed a bull horn at Ground Zero and pledged to hunt down those dirty, murderous people who dared to attack the homeland.

After the Eilat clash Netanyahu sent his forces into action, not waiting for verification as to the source of the attackers. Richard Silverstein, writing on his Tikun Olan blog, finds that this attack handed Israel a “gift”.

This is exactly the sort of gift that Israeli rightists like Bibi Netanyahu love. Faced with a mounting internal crisis in the form of the J14 movement, Palestinian rejectionists have handed him his “Get Out of Political Crisis Free” card.

Yesterday’s attack in Eilat has fueled an Israeli reaction that can be described as uncontrollable fury, which has killed 14 including three children. Today [August 19], an Israeli drone performed heroically for the fatherland by incinerating a car (or in other reports a motorcycle) carrying a Palestinian doctor and his family to hospital seeking treatment for a sick child.

The doctor, his brother, and the doctor’s little boy were killed in the attack. Ynet announced: Oops, we missed. The drone was aiming for a terrorist cell traveling nearby. WAFA says the doctor’s brother was an Al Quds commander, which would mean that the IDF is willing to kill sick 2-year-old children in order to get alleged terrorists as well.

In a flash, Netanyahu had changed the subject, just as Bush changed the subject in 2001 from the economy to “security against terrorists”. The Israeli leader is not concerned with the truth.  He will leave that task to future revisionist historians. The Israeli leader wants only to fire up the fear of the populace and remind them that security is to be found only in the military prowess of the world’s fourth largest military force.

On his blog, War in Context, Paul Woodward posted a video clip of an interview with an IDF officer which suggests that the Israel retaliation attack on Gaza was carried out before Netanyahu could identify the culprits involved.  In the posted video interview with an IDF official, Woodward found that the government’s own military leaders did not know exactly who had attacked the Israeli bus.

So, the IDF says it “knows” the gunmen came from Gaza because they were using Kalashnikovs. That’s about as logical as saying they know they came from Gaza because they appeared to be Arabs.

Why then is Israel now bombing Gaza? Simply because it bombs Gaza every chance it gets. It bombs Gaza knowing that Washington will never object. It bombs Gaza because whenever Jews are killed the easiest form of revenge is to kill Palestinians — even when those particular Palestinians most likely have nothing whatsoever to do with the deaths that triggered this particular cycle of violence.

Why, indeed, is Israel once again bombing Gaza? One rather obvious answer is that the Israeli public must be persuaded that Palestinians are not to be trusted to form their own government. The pattern is obvious. Israel is in danger of losing the September 20 vote for Palestinian statehood in the United Nations General Assembly. Latest predictions from Palestinian officials: They are only three to five votes short of obtaining a majority in their favor.

Since President Obama is on record promising to veto a subsequent Security Council vote for Palestinian membership in the UN, there is no chance that this will be the year UN grants statehood status in response to the request presented by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Meanwhile, Israel maintains its stubborn posture in the battle of apologies in the region, rejecting the demand from Turkey that Israel apologize for its deadly assault by naval commandos that killed nine Turkish citizens traveling on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza on May 30, 2010.

When Israel refused to apologize for the attack Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel and has subsequently announced that “it would  launch a diplomatic and legal assault on Israel”.  Sources in the Turkish Foreign Ministry said Turkey would implement “Plan B”, which will include an anti-Israel campaign in UN institutions, with an emphasis on the International Court of Justice.

Turkey also plans to encourage the families of the raid’s victims to file suits against senior Israeli figures in European courts.

Also on the apology front, the Cairo News reports that Egypt has demanded an apology from Israel for the deaths of three police officers in the IDF attacks along the Egyptian-Gaza border this week.

Late Saturday afternoon, Israel took the unusual step, unusual for Israel, which rarely acknowledges mistakes, of “regretting” the deaths of the Egyptian police officers:

 Breaking a customary silence on the Sabbath, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, released a statement saying, “We regret the deaths of members of the Egyptian security forces during the terror attack on the Israeli-Egyptian border.”

Mr. Barak, who had seemed on Thursday to blame lax Egyptian security for allowing the attacks near the border, said that after an internal inquiry, an Israeli-Egyptian committee would investigate. And he went on to note the importance of the peace treaty with Egypt and his admiration for the judgment and responsibility of the Egyptian people.

These events all occurred after 81 members of the US House of Representatives returned to their home districts, basking in the warm hospitality of their Israeli hosts. One of those House members was Jesse Jackson, Jr.,  who, before he returned home, wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, which included these paragraphs:

Marwan Barghouti, even though he has been jailed since 2002, is an influential Fatah leader who is serving five life sentences for acts committed in the second intifada. He has called “on our people in the homeland and in the diaspora to go out in a peaceful, million man march during the week of voting in the United Nations in September.”

He told an Egyptian news service that a US veto would be a “historic, deadly mistake” and that there would be strong protests throughout the Arab and Muslim world and beyond. Does a convicted terrorist who has used violence in the past, and has not ruled out its use in the future, really have the moral authority and credibility to advocate a nonviolent march and be believable?

Good question, Congressman, which leads to a follow up question: You express such familiarity with the Israeli hasbara narrative, that your constituents might want to ask if you are also familiar with the Palestinian narrative which would provide you with a different take on the career of Marwan Barghouti.

Congressman Jackson, yes, he is the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., had previously expressed interest in receiving a direct appointment to the US Senate seat from the now-disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich, the seat which President Obama vacated to move to the White House. It was the “attempted sale” of that seat that pending appeals, is expected to send Blagojevich to a federal prison.

If Congressman Jackson still wants to run for that seat with the backing of the same AIPAC-related forces that funded his August visit to Israel, he would have to first win a Democratic primary and then compete with Republican incumbent Senator Mark Kirk. Why would AIPAC, a long time backer of Kirk, turn its favors to Jackson?

Kirk has his detractors in Illinois, as the lively video below, suggests.  Sing along, and if you are of a mind to do so, drop Senator Kirk a note and ask him about the “moral authority” of the IDF drone that killed “a Palestinian doctor, his brother, and the doctor’s little boy in Gaza”.

The picture at the top of this page is an AP photo that appeared in Salon.com.  It was posted there in a column by Glenn Greenwald.  The picture shows Egyptian demonstrators raising Egyptian and Palestinian flags to protest the deaths of Egyptian security forces killed in a shootout Thursday. The video at the end of the posting was uploaded to YouTube by The Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (CJPIP), based in Chicago.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 8 Comments

81 House Members Enjoy Hiatus In Israel

Posted on August 13, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Eighty-one members of the US House of Representatives—about 20 percent of the total membership—are enjoying a late summer week-long, all-expenses paid trip to Israel.

This hasbara (propaganda) trip happens every other summer (in non-election years), but this year’s excursion to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea comes at a time when voters back home are not thinking about Israel. They are worried about their under-water mortgages and disappearing 401Ks.

Instead of returning immediately to their home districts to answer questions about the US economy, 81 House members are flying to Tel Aviv to demonstrate their loyalty and devotion to a foreign power.  They are hoping, of course, as they bolster their standing with AIPAC, that financially-stressed voters will not be told that the 81 are enjoying an all expenses paid visit to Israel.

So far, the main stream media (MSM) has protected them. The only way to find out if your congress person is living in Israeli luxury for a week is to call his or her office and ask. The MSM has not bothered to identify the 81, except when a single member is mentioned in a fawning local feature story.

Allison Weir describes this bi-annual summer all-expenses hiatus trip as “extraordinary”, because “no other lobby on behalf of a foreign country comes anywhere near controlling such wealth or taking so many of America’s elected representatives on a propaganda trip to its favorite country”.

Weir, writing for the Anti-War blog, notes that most US media outlets ignored the story.

I could not find a complete list of the 81. Since this is not a Codel (congressional delegation) trip, the House website does not  offer any help. Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss found a picture released to the media from the Israeli Embassy, with no names attached.

Weiss assumes the picture is that of the Democratic delegation, since Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer shares front row honors with Israeli President Simon Peres. The picture is large enough for constituents to look for familiar faces.

(Sunday Update: Richard Silverstein, a dogged researcher who has been writing the liberal Jewish blog, Tikun Olam, since 2003, has identified 33 names on the list of 81.)

(Monday Update: Silverstein’s blog, for the moment, is off line. The original Silverstein posting of Tikun Olam with the 33 names is reprinted, in part, at the end of this posting as a Comment.)

The Washington Post provides the names of three Democratic travelers,  Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (Ill.), Betty Sutton (Ohio) and Mark Critz (Pa).

Otherwise, according to a survey by Weir, the Main Street Media has been respectfully silent and protective on the matter of the 81 who used their time away from Washington to visit sites holy to Jews and Christians, and to listen to lectures by Israeli leaders. Here is what Weir found in her survey:

The Associated Press, America’s number one news service, has decided not to report on a lobbying group taking 81 representatives to a foreign country in order to influence their votes.

Even though the trips are being reported by news media in Britain, Iran, India, Israel, Lebanon, and elsewhere, AP has decided to give the story a pass. When contacted about this, an AP editor in Washington, D.C., said AP knew about the trips and was “looking into it.”

Taking a similar tack, The New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, CNN, ABC, et al., failed to inform Americans about the trips.

When the Chicago Tribune learned that Jesse Jackson, Jr., was on the Israeli trip, it treated the visit as a human interest, feel good, story.

The Tribune used a short item from the Associated Press to inform its readers that Jackson was traveling abroad to evaluate how well Israel was handling US tax dollars which Jackson and his colleagues so generously send to Tel Aviv.

The Tribune story is a case study for a Journalism 101 class on how not to write a story involving a major congressional figure. Here is the soft story the Tribune ran on August 7:

Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is headed to Israel for an eight-day visit. Jackson’s office says he leaves Sunday and returns Aug. 15.

The Illinois Democrat is scheduled to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders as he discusses what he calls “the quest for a lasting peace in the region.” He has meetings set with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, prime ministers and others.

Jackson says he’s looking forward to learning about Israel’s business and commercial sectors as well as the latest tools and technology the country is using in its fight against terror.

The trip is being arranged and paid for by the American Israel Educational Foundation, a privately funded charity.

And that is all Tribune readers know about the journey of the 81. The AIEF is a “privately funded charity”? Nothing about the AIPAC parentage of the “charity”, and nothing at all about Jackson’s large number of traveling companions.

Josh Ruebner, national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, reports that in spite of the media’s protective cover, at least one Jackson constituent, is on the case.

Yali Amit, an Israeli-American constituent of Rep. Jackson, Jr. called his office to oppose his participation in the trip to Israel. He was told that Rep. Jackson, Jr. wants to learn what is happening there because of his position on the appropriations subcommittee that approves military aid to Israel.

Amit retorted that “you can’t learn what goes on there on a paid trip of a propaganda arm of the Israeli government.” And [Reuben adds] you certainly can’t learn about the devastating impact that these U.S. weapons have on unarmed Palestinian civilians, nearly 3,000 of whom were killed by the Israeli military over the last decade.

This year’s hasbara trip involved three separate delegations, two Republican and one Democratic; no bipartisanship here after those ugly DC scenes involving the debt ceiling.  The 81 members will visit with Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was last greeted enthusiastically by 29 standing ovations when he spoke before a joint session of Congress earlier this year.

The Jerusalem Post was quick to assure American tax payers that no US tax dollars would be used on the trips. (“Move along folks, nothing to see here”.)

All expenses for the 81 members and any spouses and staff members who choose to travel, are covered by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), better known as AIPAC’s education arm. We know all about AIPAC, but what is this AIEF?

The AIEF was created in 1990 as a supporting organization of AIPAC, America’s foremost pro-Israel lobby. Financial support for AIEF, a non-profit organization, comes from tax-exempt contributions, most notably from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

AIEF, according to its mission statement, “provides grant monies to educate opinion leaders about the U.S.-Israel relationship, to expand public awareness about issues affecting the Middle East and to encourage participation in public affairs, especially by students on college campuses where anti-Israel propaganda is rampant.”

So, strictly speaking, no direct US tax dollars are funding the 81 House members on their summer outing. But it is also true that the members are traveling on round-trip first class airline tickets ($8,000 per traveler) and enjoying an all-expenses tax-free paid trip with funds from a US tax-free non-profit organization.

But the question lingers: Do these transactions meet the requirements of the US tax code. The answer, from Legistorm, a website that tracks congressional travel, suggests that these clever partners, AIEF, which is in the education business, and AIPAC, which lobbies on behalf of the state of Israel, have found themselves a convenient “sleight of hand” tax loophole.

According to the latest publicly available tax return of AIEF, the organization has no paid employees — an astounding feat in itself for an organization that raked in more than $26 million in 2009 and a mind-blowing accomplishment for an organization running three huge congressional delegations in one month.

AIEF’s partner, AIPAC,  reports that in 2009, it very generously contributed more than $3.2 million of employee salaries to cover the staff costs of AIEF.

Legistorm also reports that two years ago, during the 2009 summer congressional recess, AIEF sent 50 lawmakers and staff members from both parties on a fully funded trip to Israel.  Included in the 2009 delegation were House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who returned with this year’s even larger delegation of 81 House members, and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who had business in Iowa and did not make it to Israel this August.

How tight is the Israel Lobby’s grip on Congress? What keeps these elected representatives coming back, year after year, like so many obedient children making their mandatory holiday visit to visit aging parents?

Allison Weir discovered one poignant story about an earlier traveler:

Not all those going on these trips are enthusiastic. The wife of one congressman who made a similar trip some years ago said that she and her husband had never been exposed to such pressure in all their lives. She said that at one point on their trip, her husband — a normally extremely tough man — was curled up in a fetal position.

There have been several internet hints that a few of the 81 will try and escape their Israeli minders long enough to cross over into the Occupied Palestinian Territories where they hope to experience the Palestinian narrative.

That could be a risky move, not for security reasons, but for their return flight home.  It is an abrupt shift from El Al Business Class to a middle seat in Coach. What happens to the campaign contributions these “escapees” had hoped to gain from making the trip in the first place?  These funds will dry up, quickly.

For their troubles any “escapee” who is exposed by the hasbara police, will still have the enormous advantage of bringing home pictures and memories of talking to real Palestinians, not Uncle Toms.  Inshallah, they will also bring back to the voters, a congress member with a heightened sense of self-worth.

The picture at top of  US House Speaker John Boehner and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, is from the Atlantic Wire.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics, Religion and politics | 19 Comments

It Is Time to Listen To King Hussein

Posted on August 6, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

From time to time, just as the Middle East political cauldron reaches one of its major boiling points, the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman sits down to write an open letter to the leaders of a particular Middle Eastern state, offering sage advice on what action Friedman thinks the leader should take.

Thus far, I have resisted following the Friedman letter-writing format. But the time has come for me to do my own version of Friedman speaking truth to the powerful.

I do not expect my communiqué to have the impact of a Friedman letter (his readership is larger), but I do have a suggestion that I think would be helpful to the six-member Palestinian delegation that will soon request full membership in the United Nations General Assembly.

I propose that they each read, very carefully, a new book, by Jack O’Connell, King’s Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East. 

Here is why I believe this book is important:

Jack O’Connell was a young CIA agent who was sent to Jordan by the agency to help preserve the monarchy of King Hussein, the father of the current King Abdullah. O’Connell was 37 and King Hussein was 22 when they first met.

This book was the memoir that King Hussein wanted to write. O’Connell relied on his own notes and records, and on long interviews with the King over the years that O’Connell worked as Amman CIA station chief.

Paul R. Pillar , a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the CIA, wrote a review of King’s Counsel for the Washington Post. Pillar teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of the forthcoming “Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy.” He describes O’Connell’s role as station chief:

O’Connell was heavily involved as an intermediary between Hussein and senior U.S. officials in the negotiation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, the framework for what was supposed to have been Israel’s withdrawal from territories it occupied in the 1967 war. O’Connell’s account makes it clear that the United States promised Hussein that withdrawal meant a full pull-out subject only to “minor reciprocal border rectifications.”

This paragraph alone should be marked and absorbed by the Palestinian delegation, before its members make its case to the 193-member UN General Assembly. In talking to other nations’ delegates, the Palestinians will want to insist that Israel’s claim to any West Bank land  along the 1967 borders must be rejected in any future agreement, except for “minor reciprocal border rectifications”.

Har Homa, for example, is not a “minor reciprocal border” adjustment.  It is rather, a colonial housing development that destroyed the forests which covered the Palestinian mountain once known as Jebel Abu Ghneim.

The 2011 General Assembly that meets to discuss a Palestinian request for membership should be reminded that on March 12, 1997, the GA passed the first of several resolutions by a margin of 130 to 2, with the two negatives votes cast by the United States and Israel. The initial resolution expressed “deep concern at the decision of the Israelis to initiate new settlement activity in the Jebel Abu Ghneim area,” using the Arabic name for Har Homa.

The initial resolution also labeled all settlement activity “illegal and a major obstacle to peace,” and urged that Israel “refrain from all actions or measures, including settlement activities, which alter the facts on the ground, preempting the final status negotiations, and have negative implications for the Middle East Peace Process.”

This Har Homa project, now a massive colonial housing development along the highway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, was built after King Hussein renounced any Jordanian claim to the West Bank and signed its peace treaty with Israel in 1994.

O’Connell makes it clear in his book that King Hussein was betrayed by both Israel and the US, as Israel continued “colonizing the occupied territory, and the Palestinians were left without a state.”

This betrayal was the price Hussein paid “to find out that the Israelis preferred land to peace and that the Americans didn’t care which of the two the Israelis chose.”

O’Connell adds that “in the king’s mind, no good would come” from this situation. He was right.

This book contains other remarkable examples of American resistance to Israel’s conduct. O’Connell writes at one point of a telegram from President Jimmy Carter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in which Carter told Begin that unless he stopped using US military equipment to shell PLO units, he would stop US military aid to Israel.

O’Connell writes that he personally doubted that Carter could carry out his threat because of the congressional support behind Begin.  But the Israeli leader could not be sure, so he stopped the raids.

Then there was speculation from O’Connell that when Carter said in a speech that the Palestinians had “the right of self-determination”, Israel began immediately to link all things Palestinian to “terrorist”. The label worked with the American media and the American public.

I will write more about the “self-determination” incident in a later posting, but for the purpose of this Friedman-style suggestion to the Palestinian six-member delegation that travels to the UN General Assembly in September, I will save that story for a second installment on O’Connell and King Hussein.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian delegation should listen to King Hussein and acknowledge what has long been obvious: Israel has never wanted to negotiate for any fair agreement with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.  Israel wants it all.

The UN General Assembly should recognize this reality and give Palestine a proper statehood with contiguous, realistic borders that will not hand over large Palestinian land masses to Israel.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 17 Comments

Israeli and West Bank Women and Girls Violate Israeli Laws In A Rosa Parks Moment

Posted on July 30, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

The New York Times‘ Ethan Bronner reports that West Bank Palestinian women and girls have again broken Israeli laws to go swimming in the Mediterranean Sea. This is Rosa Parks country, folks.

Bronner actually evoked Parks’ name in his report. Did his editors think we would not notice?

Blogger Philip Weiss noticed, and he made sure his Mondoweiss readers noticed. By including a brief reference to the iconic moment when Rosa Parks broke the law by sitting in the front of a segregated bus, the New York Times has connected the American civil rights movement to the Palestinian struggle for human rights.

Here is that connection: Rosa Parks deliberately violated an unjust Alabama segregation law. The Palestinian and Israeli women and girls who crossed the Israeli segregation border, broke Israeli laws.

Palestinians living a few miles from the coast reach adulthood without ever seeing or entering the Mediterranean Sea because they live behind a barrier of an occupation of their land that is illegal under international law.

Illegal entry in and out of Israel by Israeli and Palestinian women and girls violates Israeli law.  Rosa Parks violated Alabama segregation laws. For a group of Israeli and Palestinian women who went swimming together, this outing was their Rosa Parks moment.

Rosa Parks was 42 years old on December 1, 1955, when she refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. The segregation laws of Montgomery, Alabama, made Rosa Parks a criminal. An African American woman had crossed a barrier and sat in the front of a segregated bus.

Parks knew what she was doing. She was deliberately violating an unjust law when she joined a long line of rebels who sounded the call, “I’m as mad as hell, and I am not going take this anymore”.

That quote is a familiar line from the 1976 movie, Network. In that film, the cry was loud and noisy.  Today, the Palestinian rebellion is being conducted in different venues and in different voices.

In September, at the UN Security Council and General Assembly meetings, the call will go forth in an assembly hall as the Palestinian Authority asks for membership in the UN.

This summer, on the beach at Tel Aviv, different voices sounded. This is how the Times’ Ethan Bronner, describes those voices:

Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, the women and girls entered the sea, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy. Most had never seen the sea before.   .     .     .     / 

In the grinding rut of Israeli-Palestinian relations — no negotiations, mutual recriminations, growing distance and dehumanization — the illicit trip was a rare event that joined the simplest of pleasures with the most complex of politics. It showed why coexistence here is hard, but also why there are, on both sides, people who refuse to give up on it.

“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”

Hanna Rubinstein traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part in defying her government’s immoral laws. She could no longer remain silent.

Take heed, you United Methodist Conference delegates, and listen up, you inter-faith Presbyterian and Episcopal leaders, the New York Times has granted you permission to consider a simple question: Do you wish to be with “the Germans” who refused to know and who refused to act.  Or, will you join with women like Hanna Rubinstein and say, “I knew. And I acted”.

This Rosa Parks moment on the beach takes its place with those other Palestinian symbolic moments, the flotillas, the flytilla, the BDS movement, the resistance to the Israeli Wall.

According to Bronner, this latest act of defiance against Israel’s apartheid laws began a year ago. A single idea of an Israeli Jewish mother has become “a small, determined movement of civil disobedience”. It unfolded this way:

Ilana Hammerman, a writer, translator and editor, had been spending time in the West Bank learning Arabic when a girl there told her she was desperate to get out, even for a day.

Ms. Hammerman, 66, a widow with a grown son, decided to smuggle her to the beach. The resulting trip, described in an article she wrote for the weekend magazine of the newspaper Haaretz, prompted other Israeli women to invite her to speak, and led to the creation of a group they call We Will Not Obey. It also led a right-wing organization to report her to the police, who summoned her for questioning. . . .

Israeli police have questioned 28 Israeli women who have smuggled in their West Bank guests. Charges against them are pending. So far, none of the Palestinian women and girls have been caught or questioned by the police.

Together these Palestinian and Israeli women and girls are building a relationship in their common rebellion. Some of the Israeli women are high profile, including, for example, Hagit Aharoni, a psychotherapist,  the wife of the celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni, and a member of the organizing group behind the illegal swim outings.

The beachgoers on this most recent swim-in had dinner on the roof of the Aharonis’ home, five floors above stylish Rothschild Boulevard, where, on the day of the Palestinians trip into Israel, hundreds of tents had been pitched by Israelis angry with the high cost of housing.

Bronner asked Ms. Aharoni about her rebellion. She replied:

For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.

It takes many people and a great deal of courage and sacrifice to win a revolution. It also takes time, as Palestinians and their allies can testify, but this is one revolution, like the battle for African American civil rights, that will be won because as Martin Luther King, Jr., said so often, “truth crushed to earth will rise again.”

Next up: The September United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City, where the Palestinian Authority will formally request UN membership, and quite possibly, full statehood status.  The first step will be a request to the Security Council, which has a membership of 15. It is in this body that, even if the PA obtains the necessary majority of 8 votes, the US has announced that it will cast yet another pro-Israel veto.

How certain is it that the US will cast its veto?

In an interview with Pamela Falk, CBS News Foreign Affairs analyst, Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo, U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN said, definitively:

My government has been clear all along. The only place where permanent status issues can be resolved, including borders and territory, is in negotiations between the parties — not in international fora [forums] such as the United Nations.

Assuming the virtually certain US veto, the next step for the PA would be to go directly to the 193-member UN General Assembly, which now includes its latest member, South Sudan.  The GA requires a two/thirds vote for a resolution to pass. The PA currently reports that it is close to obtaining that necessary two-thirds majority.

The General Assembly would not be able to grant full membership to the PA because that would require Security Council approval, which a US veto would have prevented. The GA, however, does have the authority to upgrade the current Observer status of the PA.  What a majority vote for an upgrade would accomplish is that it would demonstrate to the world that two-thirds of the member states support PA statehood.

Whatever the outcome of the UN votes, the Palestinian revolution will continue in its steady, symbolic march to freedom. When Rosa Parks refused to move on that Montgomery bus, she acted for freedom. Rosa Parks moments will be repeated again and again, on the beaches of Tel Aviv, in flotillas and flytillas, and in all those other locations, too numerous yet to imagine, and in ways yet to be determined.

The picture above, on the Tel Aviv beach, is by Rina Castelnuovo. It was taken for The New York Times.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 14 Comments

How Would Murdoch’s Downfall Affect Israel? Don’t Ask the US Media

Posted on July 23, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

JTA columnist Ron Kampeas has been a lone voice in sounding the alarm to his Jewish readers:

“Pro-Israel leaders in the United States, Britain and Australia are warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.”

The Murdoch scandal has been extensively reported as a telephone hacking police story. Only in the JTA, the Global News Service of the Jewish People, has coverage of the Murdoch News Corp story sounded the traditional Jewish mother’s alarm: “uh oh, this will not be good for the Jewish people”.

Kampeas assumes, correctly I am sure, that his readers do have a strong interest in Murdoch’s “sudden massive reversal of fortune”. They have reason to be alarmed.

Without Daddy Murdoch’s formidable pro-Israel presence, that pesky UN September vote could tilt toward the Palestinians. After that, Israel-Palestinian border negotiations might find a disgraced Murdoch-controlled British government eager to prove its independence. Without Murdoch, Fox News will have lost its most reliable news producer.

Thus far, the Murdoch “hacking scandal” has reached ten former staffers and News Corp executives who have been arrested by British police. They are accused of “hacking into the phones of public figures and a murdered schoolgirl, and paying off the police and journalists.”

These allegations threaten to severely weaken Murdoch’s media empire, an empire the Australian built which now includes The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Australian. Murdoch also owns two major tabloids, The Sun in Britain and the New York Post. In the US, Murdoch owns and virtually writes the scripts for the Fox News Channel. Until he recently sold it, Murdoch also owned The Weekly Standard, the neo conservative magazine he created in 1995.

Admirers of Murdoch’s aggressive take-over of news outlets have praised him for revitalizing the news industry.  What they overlook is that his “revitalizing” has also lowered the standards of the journalism profession.  It is the Murdoch style to view the world through black and white lens, “West good, Muslim East  bad”.

For the Murdoch media empire, accuracy is never as important as racist sensationalism. Glenn Greenwald reports in his Salon column this week-end how both the New York Times and the Washington Post incorrectly blamed “Muslim extremists” for the Oslo, Norway, attacks, retaining on line, false racist accusations later shown to  be incorrect.

The Post’s Jennifer Rubin cited The Weekly Standard as a source for her false reporting, a dive into the Murdoch pool of sleeze for which the Atlantic’s James Fallows calls her to task.

Before the hacking scandal broke, Murdoch had expanded his empire into the Middle East, choosing, as no surprise, to connect with a Saudi prince Aljazeera recently described as ” the 26th wealthiest person on the planet, as well as the richest man in Saudi Arabia, billionaire Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al-Saud, a nephew of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia”.

Forbes magazine reports that Prince Walid has a net worth estimated to be at least $19.6bn.

Aljazeera also reports that the Prince is the second largest shareholder (at seven per cent) in News Corp, second only to Murdoch.  How close are the two men?

During a recent interview on his yacht with the BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Walid declared himself to be a “good friend” of Rupert Murdoch and his son James, and staunchly defended the men amid the ongoing News Corp scandal.

It is noteworthy that, while Prince Walid is the second largest shareholder in News Corp, Murdoch is also a major shareholder (ten per cent) in Prince Walid’s Rotana Media Group based in the Middle East. As recently as this May, Murdoch’s conglomerate took a significant stake in Prince Walid’s film, TV, and music business, a move that deepened the financial relationship between the two men.

The Saudi connection, however, will be of little help in Murdoch’s dealing with the British and possibly, the American, legal systems.

Kampeas writes that “Jewish leaders” fear that any reduction in Murdoch’s media influence could “mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.” Those “Jewish leaders” rely on Murdoch to reassure them that all is well in the world of political Zionism.

His publications and media have proven to be fairer on the issue of Israel than the rest of the media,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “I hope that won’t be impacted.”

These comments suggests that what happens to Murdoch in the future is significant to supporters of Israel not primarily because of the alleged immoral or illegal violations of the public good, but because of the potential impact on the pro-Israel voice of Murdoch’s media empire.

If there are US media outlets, other than JTA, which have included Murdoch’s Zionist zealotry in their hacking scandal stories, I have been unable to locate them.

The Big Three PEPs, (Progressive Except for Palestine) Maddow, Matthews, and O’Donnell, are progressive voices on MSNBC-TV, but they will absolutely not touch the sins of Israel, the third rail of American politics.

Rachel Maddow, my favorite of the Big Three, appeared uncharacteristically oblivious of what she was saying in her recent interview with Bill Moyers.

Writing on Consortium News, Marquette Theology Professor Daniel C. Maguire offered a list of Israel-related issues where “Rachel Maddow Dares Not Tread”. He began with a gentle priestly admonition:

To MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: On your show of July 14, you spoke of your complete freedom to say what you want on your show and Bill Moyers gently demurred, speaking of restricting forces that hover over journalists. Bill Moyers was correct. I cannot believe you don’t care, but you are not free to address on your show the political influence of the Israeli lobby (which is far broader than AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

For Maguire’s complete list, click here.

The Big Three constantly feast off the right wing shallowness of Fox news readers and commentators, but they do not venture even close to the linkage between Murdoch’s strong pro-Israel bias, and his threatened downfall.

Kampeas, on the other hand, is quite forthright about the linkage and its potential damage to Israel. Note how eager Kampeas is to cast Murdoch in a favorable light by citing “Jewish leaders”.

Jewish leaders said that Murdoch’s view of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors seemed both knowledgeable and sensitive to the Jewish state’s self-perception as beleaguered and isolated.

Murdoch has visited Israel many times, always meeting, of course, with Israeli leaders. He is equally well received by “Jewish leaders” in the US. In 2009 he was honored by the American Jewish Committee. 

On October 13, 2010, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (shown at right in this picture with Murdoch) hosted a dinner in Murdoch’s honor.

At that dinner, Murdoch said,

My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” Murdoch said last October at an Anti-Defamation League dinner in his honor. “When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century. Now it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel.

Murdoch is popular with conservatives in the US but highly unpopular with the progressive community, as the Nation magazine’s John Nichols was eager to demonstrate in his recent story on the scandal.

Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch has manipulated not just the news but the news landscape of the United States for decades. He has done so by pressuring the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to alter the laws of the land and regulatory standards in order to give his media conglomerate an unfair advantage in “competition” with more locally focused, more engaged and more responsible media.

It’s an old story: while Murdoch’s Fox News hosts prattle on and on about their enthusiasm for the free market, they work for a firm that seeks to game the system so Murdoch’s “properties” are best positioned to monopolize the discourse.

Even with such a strong progressive as Nichols, there is still no mention of Murdoch’s strong Zionist passions in his story of the scandal.

When he testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May of 2003, Murdoch was seeking to secure ownership of the nation’s largest satellite television company. Nichols writes that Murdoch was pressing for FCC rule changes that would allow him to own newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same cities. His goal was to ease controls so that “one corporation could dominate television viewership nationally”.

At that appearance before the House Judiciary Commitee, Murdoch’s reception, according to reports at the time, were “just short of fawning.”

Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner, who was, at the time, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, greeted Murdoch by thanking the media executive for developing the Fox News network. The chairman added: “When my wife doesn’t get a good dose of Fox News every day she gets grumpy. So there are some of us who appreciate what you are doing.”

Progressive writers like Nichols want to make it clear that the right wing Republican party has a deep affection for a strong man like Murdoch whose media empire is dedicated not only to making money but to the promotion of a conservative ideology.

Joe Nocera was equally disdainful of Murdoch in his July 18 New York Times  column:

You have to love the fact that when John Yates resigned on Monday as the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London — a k a Scotland Yard — he complained about the “huge amount of inaccurate, ill-informed and, on occasion, downright malicious gossip” that had finally forced his hand. . . .

When the writers and editors of the late, unlamented News of the World were busy bribing Mr. Yates’s police officers, what they wanted in return was — gosh! — malicious gossip. When they were hacking the phones of royal family members and murdered teenagers, they were seeking, you know, malicious gossip.

When the recently arrested Rebekah Brooks called Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, to tell him that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which she then edited, was about to reveal that his infant child had cystic fibrosis — information that Brown is convinced came from a hacked phone message — she was telling him the paper was going to print a piece of gossip that a more humane institution would have let pass. She might not have viewed this as malicious, but the Brown family certainly did. . . . .

 Laura Barnett‘s recent story in the London Guardian, describes Rupert Murdoch’s 102-year old mother Elisabeth Murdoch (shown at top with her son) as a mother who frequently stands in “firm maternal opposition to Rupert, 80, the second of her four children.”

In her native Australia, “Elisabeth is held in high esteem as one of the country’s most beneficent philanthropists,” a sharp contrast to the “sullied reputations of Rupert, and her grandson James”, both now under intense police scrutiny. 

When Elisabeth’s husband Rupert, Senior, died from cancer in 1952, she turned her attention to charity work. She became life governor of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne and helped to set up the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

Consistently, however, she has expressed strong disagreement with the policies of News Corp.  Nine years ago, for example, she told Julie Browning, author of A Winning Streak: The Murdochs, that her son’s purchase of the News of the World, “nearly killed me”.

In the US, Fox News, and more recently, the once highly respected conservative Wall Street Journal, have emerged as “house organs” for right wing Israeli governments.

If Murdoch self destructs, Israel will have lost a major weapon in its hasbara (propaganda) arsenal. Whether that is “good for the Jewish people”, depends entirely on your definition of “good”.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections | 5 Comments

Congress Blesses Israel’s Matrix of Control

Posted on July 16, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

The US Congress announced through two July votes that since the US and Israel are obviously the colonial bosses of the Middle East, the future of the Palestinian people must be determined through “negotiations” between unequal partners, an occupying military power and the captive population it occupies.

OK, so the resolution did not actually say that part about colonialism. But ponder for a moment what really happened in our national legislative halls this month.

By a unanimous Senate vote and a 407 to 6 majority in the US House, the Congress demanded that Palestinian leaders “cease all efforts at circumventing the negotiation process, including through a unilateral declaration of statehood or by seeking recognition of a Palestinian state from other nations or the United Nations.”

The Congress also demanded that President Obama “announce that the United States will veto any resolution on Palestinian statehood that comes before the United Nations Security Council which is not a result of agreements reached between the Government of Israel and the Palestinians”.

Furthermore, the Congress, in the words of its resolution, expects President Obama to “lead a diplomatic effort to oppose a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state and to oppose recognition of a Palestinian state by other nations, within the United Nations and in other international forums prior to achievement of a final agreement between the Government of Israel and the Palestinians.”

Stephen Zunes understands the American zeitgeist which produced the arrogance behind that resolution. He wrote:

Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are still trapped in an early 20th century colonialist mindset which believes that colonized people should only be allowed independence under the terms and conditions granted them by their occupiers.

We are all occupied by Israel’s army because we are, as Zunes notes, “trapped in an early 20th century colonial mindset”. To be trapped in a colonial mindset is to be linked to a a matrix of mind control that deadens our hearts, our minds, and yes, our souls. Not convinced? You still believe that our political leaders, our church leaders, and our media controllers tell us the truth about Israel?

Take note of what riles up the oppressors. Why else would the state of Israel react with such vehemence at the slightest effort to throw supportive and symbolic lifelines to the Palestinian people?  Recent example: The Israeli Knesset has just declared it to be a crime to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

That’s right, that innocent-sounding Palestinian-inspired effort to call attention to the connection between corporate profits and Israel’s occupation has made Israel chip away yet another hunk of high-minded idealism that once led Israelis to dub themselves as “the only democracy” in the Middle East.

Remember that, you delegates to church legislative bodies. You could end up in an Israeli prison cell if you continue to protest Israeli occupation. These people want us to be afraid, very afraid.

You congressional legislators who have come to love the perks and glamour of power, you thought you could be Mr. Smith in Washington doing what is good for your people? The moment a member of Congress endorses a check from supporters of colonialism, they lose their freedom to determine what is good.

It works this way, Madame and Mr. Congress member. Listen well. When AIPAC sends over its latest resolutions, don’t bother to read it.  Just sign and cast your vote the way you are told. When you have been ground down sufficiently, you will embrace Israel’s control the way you once accepted the control of the schoolyard bully who stole that piece of your Mom’s apple pie you brought for an afternoon snack.

You will get used to it, so much so that you will find yourself sending out lies and distortions to your voters and believing them, just as you expect the voters to believe them.

After a while, it becomes easy to send out such a letter the way Hawaii’s Democratic Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa, did recently.  The Congresswoman caught on fast. She is serving her first term in Washington:

Stuart Littlewood shared Hanabusa’s letter through the website, Intifada Palestine.

Littlewood reminds us just what is in Resolution 268, of which the congresswoman is so proud to have supported in her first term in office:

Resolution 268 actually states that “Palestinian efforts to gain recognition of a state outside direct negotiations demonstrates absence of a good faith commitment to peace negotiations.” It threatens withholding US foreign aid to the Palestinian National Authority if it presses ahead with an application for statehood in the United Nations in September. It also calls for the Palestinian unity government to “publicly and formally forswear terrorism, accept Israel’s right to exist, and reaffirm previous agreements made with the Government of Israel.”

Got that, you Palestinians? If you expect to keep your 40 acres and the mule, you must talk to no one but us. And, another thing, you must do so under our rules of engagement. Otherwise, as the Mafia guys in my town might say, “we know where you live”. Read Hanabusa’s letter carefully and take note of the deceptions and distortions members of Congress accept as the price for staying in office.

As the only democracy in the region, I believe that the United States has a special relationship with Israel… During my time in the House of Representatives, I will support our funding our ally and help to forward Israel’s efforts to keep their citizens safe, which currently stands at $2.8 billion in general foreign aid, and another $280 million for a missile defense system…

Our foreign aid to Palestine is intended to create a virtuous cycle of stability and prosperity in the West Bank that inclines Palestinians towards peaceful coexistence with Israel and prepares them for self-governance.  .  .  .  

Most recently, I became a co-sponsor of House Resolution 268, which reaffirms our support for a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulting in two states. This resolution is also in opposition to a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, as well as outlined consequences for Palestinian efforts to circumvent direct negotiations. This bill passed in the House on July 7, 2011 by a vote of 407 – 6…  

(House resolution 268 was sponsored by Representative Eric Cantor, the Debt Ceiling Republican point man. It was co-sponsored by virtually the entire House membership. Visit this site to see how your member voted; For the text of the resolution, click here.) 

In the essay he wrote for Truthout this week, Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, describes the history of  the colonial mindset which is so slavishly followed by the US Congress. Zunes calls his essay, “Congress and Its Colonialist Agenda”. He writes:

Up until the mid-20th century, Western attitudes regarding national freedom essentially went like this: the independence of white Western nations (Great Britain, France, the United States etc.) was a given. Independence for nonwhite, non-Western nations (such as those in Africa, the Middle East and Asia), however, could only be under conditions granted by the occupying powers.

The time at which these nations could be free, their specific boundaries and the conditions of their independence could only be reached through negotiations between the colonial occupiers and representatives (if approved by the colonial powers) of the conquered peoples. 

The time for freedom, the ” specific boundaries” and what will constitute independence, must be negotiated, which is to say, handed down to the “conquered peoples” by their conquerers.  Any suggestion that a “third party”, say, the United Nations, might be able to suggest a more equitable arrangement for the “conquered peoples”, must be resisted vigorously.

There have been many Israelis who have felt the painful burden of having to impose their will on a captive people. These Israelis have spoken out, written about, and sought to reverse the uglier aspects of this occupation, but they have not prevailed against successive hardline conservative governments that buy the US Congress and shape the US media, all with one aim, to deny the reality of colonialism in the 21st century.

President Obama is no stranger to colonialism nor to racial hatred. We keep hoping his sensitivity to oppression will influence him to take his decision-making away from slavish adherence to Israel’s dictates.  Thus far, he has been a huge disappointment. When he was elected and basking in the adoration that engulfed him in Chicago’s Grant Park, that long-ago night in 2008, we thought the matrix was about to crack.

But even before he was sworn into office, the signs were ominous. The President-elect sat by without complaint as President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert completed their dirty business in Gaza, carrying out an invasion which did not end until a few hours before Obama’s inauguration.

Then came the appointments. Obama added no one to his inner circle who might have at least suggested to him that Palestinians are people who have been continuously brutalized.  Instead, he brought in people like Dennis Ross to guide his Middle East policies.

The American media pontificators give Ross a free ride.  Not so the liberal wing of Israel’s media, as Stephen Walt (of Mearsheimer and Walt fame) points out in his blog for Foreign Policy:

In case you missed it, veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar has written a scathing denunciation of US Middle East policy — and long-time Middle East advisor Dennis Ross — in Ha’aretz. His bottom line is that Oslo is over, yet the United States is still trying to convince the Palestinian leadership to buy into a diplomatic process that has been a cover for continued settlement building and has manifestly failed to bring them a state. The key passage:

“It would be tough to find a bigger expert than Ross on the myths and illusions related to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. For years he has been nurturing the myth that if the United States would only meet his exact specifications, the Israeli right would offer the Arabs extensive concessions.”

During the years he headed the American peace team, Israeli settlement construction ramped up. Now Ross, the former chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute, is trying to convince the Palestinians to give up on bringing Palestinian independence for a vote in the United Nations in September and recognize the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people — in other words, as his country, though he was born in San Francisco, more than that of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was born in Safed. . . .

Ross is trying to peddle the illusion that the most right-wing government Israel has ever seen will abandon the strategy of eradicating the Oslo approach in favor of fulfilling the hated agreement. In an effort to save his latest boss from choosing between recognizing a Palestinian state at the risk of clashing with the Jewish community and voting against recognition at the risk of damaging U.S. standing in the Arab world, Ross is trying to drag the Palestinians back into the “peace process” trap.

There are reports out of Ramallah that the Palestinians may decide not to go forward in their appeal to the United Nations in September. If this is true, and we hope it is not true, then look for the US-Israeli matrix of colonial control to tighten even further.

The picture at top is from Aljazeera. The children are in Gaza. The time is December, 2008, taken during the Israeli invasion.

Posted in Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections | 6 Comments

Netanyahu Panics When Folks Like Kathy Kelly Come to Visit Palestine by Sea or By Air

Posted on July 9, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

When the Israeli government discovered that a large contingent of American and European activists were coming to visit Palestine, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went into his full military stance.

He made one huge mistake. He forgot to ask: What is the enemy’s goal? If he had asked himself that question, he would have known that the overarching purpose of the flotilla and the flytilla was to draw attention to the harsh and ugly reality that Israel maintains absolute military control over the lives of Palestinians living under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.

Did he not know, could he not have realized, what a burden it is for the New York Times to cover up the harsh and ugly reality of occupation when Israel so dramatically shuts its doors to anyone it brands as “pro-Palestinian”?

In its report on the airport blockade, The Times was forced to use a headline that said the visitors were blocked from attending a “conference” in Bethlehem. That did not come out very well for Netanyahu. The Israeli line was that the visitors were blocked because they were a threat to Israeli security. Both the Times and Israel know that “conferences” are held in Bethlehem all the time without all this fuss.  

How is this flytilla different? Could it be because this “conference” was clearly intended to draw world attention to Israel’s treatment not only of Palestinians, but also to its behavior toward friends of Palestinians?

The Times inserts a brief observation that Palestine has no airport of its own. And why, pray tell, an astute reader will want to know, is there no airport in Palestine? The Times does not say. It also fails to mention that Israel will not permit Palestinians to build their own airport. Nothing gets built in occupied Palestine without Israeli approval.

In her Friday story, the Time’s Isabel Kershner reported that Israel was aware that the air travelers had been invited by Palestinian activists to come to Bethlehem for a week of “fellowship and actions”.

Most of the foreigners who planned to fly to Tel Aviv and join the “Welcome to Palestine” initiative were either deterred from trying to come or were prevented from boarding flights to Israel by foreign airlines, on instructions from the Israelis.

The Palestinian hosts decried the Israeli measures, but also chalked up a small victory.

Fadi Kattan, a Palestinian organizer, said at a news conference in Bethlehem that he was “pleased — sadly pleased” that the episode had exposed what he described as Israel’s draconian anti-Palestinian policies.

Netanyahu’s initial response to this planned event proved once again that a man in a panic does not think clearly. Instead of letting the party go forward, Israeli authorities put together a “no fly” list of “peace and justice” passengers believed to be “threats” to Israel’s security.

Outside groups are frequently invited to Palestine to travel to Bethlehem and other parts of both Israel and  Palestine to talk, pray and plan. Religious types often get through passport control clutching a Bible or a guidebook to the “holy sites”. It also helps if you know the name of an Israeli rabbi, just in case you get into a second round of questioning. But this time was different. Both sides knew the game was on.

Ha’aretz reported:

Over the past few days, hundreds of police officers were deployed in and around the airport near Tel Aviv. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toured the base of operations at Ben-Gurion with his internal security minister, the police chief, security branch representatives and immigration officials.

Netanyahu demanded that European airport authorities do to air passengers what the Greek Coast Guard did to the flotilla, halt them at the alpha point. Knowing some passengers would make it to Tel Aviv, Netanyahu took personal command of his second line of defense, Ben Gurion airport.

Ben Gurion authorities had to sift through the long line of American and British Bible tour groups, Christian pilgrims, business travelers, and the European Holy Land travelers, to find those dangerous passengers who made it through the security net.

Al Jazeera reported that “of the 600 Tel Aviv-bound pro-Palestine activists who wanted to fly Friday, the majority were prevented from boarding their flights”.

The Palestinians and their international allies had set Netanyahu up.  He fell for it hard in his response to the Freedom to Enter flytilla campaign which originated in Bethlehem under local Palestinian leaders like Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Netanyahu’s overreaction to the international flotilla left him looking like the town bully who gets his way with other nations by using his Daddy’s money.  In the case of both the flytilla and the flotilla, Netanyahu is the big loser.

Kathy Kelly is shown in action in the picture above, holding her weapon, a microphone. She was one of those passengers who made it to Tel Aviv. She was already well-known to Israeli officials, just as she is well known to her many friends and admirers elsewhere, including those of us in her home town of Chicago, Illinois, where the author of this blog, in the interest of full disclosure, must confess to having known, and admired her, for more than two decades.

Kelly was among the passengers on the Audacity of Hope, the US ship which was sailing to Gaza, when it was intercepted by the Greek Coast Guard. Undaunted, she wrote in The Palestine Chronicle that she would fly to Tel Aviv. She explained her reactions as she prepared to leave Athens:

I leave Greece tonight with sincere regret that I didn’t spend more time learning from these sturdy activists.

I, and another US Boat to Gaza campaign member, Missy Lane, will head to Tel Aviv, where we plan to be part of a “flytilla,” a new campaign which will bring hundreds of activists together in Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, all of us intent on reaching Palestinian refugee camps and/or visiting Gazan families.

Earlier this evening, a group of U.S. activists who’ve been able to remain longer, here in Athens, demonstrated at each of the heavily guarded streets leading to the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Greece. The Ambassador is hosting a huge festival tonight, in celebration of the U.S. July 4 holiday that commemorates independence.

Several Greek people passing us read our signs seeking freedom for Gaza and asked us to understand that as recently as one year ago, the government of Greece showed no sign of submitting to Israeli or U.S. pressure and allowed international flotilla boats to sail. But, now they are dependent on the whims of financial elites around the world. The IMF is prescribing draconian measures which will wreck their economy and make them subservient to the dictates of foreign multinationals.

Kelly and Missy Lane landed at Ben Gurion, where they were detained by airport authorities. No word yet on what will happen next to the two of them, though a swift return back home is likely.

Kelly, by the way, would be the first to insist that we acknowledge here that she is but one of more than 600 travelers who participated in both the flotilla and flytilla projects. There are many more Kathy Kelly stories among those peace and justice travelers to Palestine. And their number is growing. No wonder Netanyahu is in such a panic.

Here are the beginning words from the citation presented to Kelly from the Justice Studies Association when Kelly was awarded the 2011 Noam Chomsky honor for her work on peace and justice issues:

Kathy Kelly is a long-time pacifist and co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. A tireless activist whose efforts toward peace transcend borders, regions and time zones, writer Studs Terkel wrote of her: “She has visited more countries, cities and small towns not listed in Baedeker’s [travel guide] than anyone I have ever known.”

Born, raised and educated in Chicago – as a student at St. Paul-Kennedy High School, Kelly watched the film Night and Fog which exposed her to the horrors of the Holocaust. She also was exposed to the writings of Daniel Berrigan and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. All of this convinced her to make a commitment never to sit by and watch evil happen.

Now 58, Kelly has spent her life living up to her commitment. Over the last 30 years, she has helped the victims of war wherever they were – whether in Bosnia, Haiti, the West Bank, Iraq or Afghanistan. A war tax resister since 1982, Kelly has perhaps most notably used her resources (financial and spiritual) to provide medicine and other supplies to those trapped by the politics of militarism. Kelly co-founded Voices in the Wilderness, a peace group that highlighted the suffering of Iraqi civilians during the U.N. imposed economic sanctions of the 1990s. (To read the complete citation, click here.)

No American television coverage has yet to emerge from the flytilla. But there is clip available from the English language channel of RT (Russia Television), which provides an interview with Pippa Bartolotti, a British passenger who made it successfully through Ben Gurion passport control. 

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics | 12 Comments

Israel Battles Gaza Flotilla on Two Fronts

Posted on July 4, 2011 by wallwritings

By James M. Wall

A year ago, the Israeli Defense Forces handed Israel one of its worst media defeats in modern history.

Israeli commandos, filled with their government’s propaganda that Israel’s security was at stake, landed on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, ready for battle and determined to keep the ship from breaking Israel’s control over Gaza’s shores.

Nine Turkish citizens were killed, one of whom was a Turkish-American.

This year Israel took the job of boarding flotilla ships away from the IDF and gave it to the Greek Coast Guard. On the fourth of July, as Americans celebrated their Independence Day, Israel expanded its Gaza blockade to the Aegean Sea.

What led to Greece’s decision to become Israel’s Aegean Sea outpost? Deep Throat could have told you this was coming: “Follow the money”, specifically the $17 billion which Israel and the US knew Greece needed to escape from a monumental economic collapse.

One way diplomacy works is through negotiations.  Another way, when one side is facing default, is to transfer money from the more powerful nation to the economically-strapped nation, which agrees to give up some of its freedom to let the powerful nation have control over segments of its domestic and foreign policy decisions.

The $17 billion guaranteed,  the Greek government issued a blanket order: No flotilla ships may sail for Gaza from any Greek port.

The optimistically American named ship, The Audacity of Hope, left its port anyway, determined to break the blockade of Gaza. Right on schedule, the Hellenistic Coast Guard boarded the Audacity. (Greek commandos are shown in action above.) The only gifts the Greek commandos brought on board were enough side arms to subdue unarmed European and American peace activists.

Phillip Weiss, the ever reliable Mondoweiss chief, passed along this report from the website, The US Boat to Gaza, which explains what happened:

Members of the U.S. Boat to Gaza have begun an open-ended fast calling on the U.S. government to defend our right to sail out of Greece. The fast has begun in front of the U.S. Embassy at 91 Vasilisis Sophias Avenue in Athens. Fasters delivered an urgent letter to the Embassy and plan to sleep overnight outside the Embassy gates.

Passengers and U.S. boat organizers participating in the fast are: Medea Benjamin, Ken Mayers, Paki Wieland, Kathy Kelly, Ray McGovern, Helaine Meisler, Nic Abramson, and Carol Murry.  .  .  .

The departure of the US Boat to Gaza – The Audacity of Hope – was first delayed by a complaint filed by the Israel Law Center and shown to be frivolous. Greek authorities then inspected the boat but, until the boat set sail five days later, the results of that inspection has not been shared with the captain and his crew.

The Greek Coast Guard stopped The Audacity of Hope some 20 minutes after it had left the dock on Friday, July 1. The Coast Guard ordered the captain to stop the ship, which he did. Commandos with drawn rifles ordered the ship to return. It is now impounded at a military dock in Athens and the captain has been arrested.

The captain of the Audacity, John Klusmire, an American citizen from California, was initially held in a Greek prison. There were reports he had been deprived of basic necessities. The website, USTOGAZA, carries frequent updates on the Flotilla. The site has a tweet report that Captain Klusmire was released from jail on July 5.  Charges against him were still pending. 

For a report on John Klusmire from a member of his family, see Comment Number Three below. 

The second front where Israel is fighting against the Gaza Flotilla is in its constant struggle to maintain control over the American corporate media. Timed to reach readers before the ships were set to sail, two pro-Zionist columns appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, written by two different academic experts in international law, both of whom concluded that Israel was within its international legal rights to block the flotilla from “invading” Gaza’s waters.

The two columns were standard Israeli hasbara (Hebrew for explanation or propaganda) declarations.  Think Fox News or the Tea Party in this use of a single perspective to push an ideology, and you realize just how far American journalism has fallen in recent decades.

The Los Angeles Times was once an honorable and respected newspaper, but as James O’Shea tells the story in his book, The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers, when the Tribune Company bought the Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Company, it dragged the Times to the level of the Tribune, an arch conservative newspaper whose notion of public service relates entirely to its bottom line.

O’Shea, who has worked for both the Times and the Tribune, described the new media leadership of the two papers this way:

Instead of developing strategies to produce the kind of content that would protect their important asset—the public trust—they depreciated it like an aging Linotype.

Neither the Tribune nor the Times offered a Flotilla perspective along with the hasbara columns. Half the story is not the entire story, especially when the news columns fail to report what is happening to Americans attempting a peaceful protest abroad. A newspaper which is reduced to serving as a conduit for propaganda is no longer a newspaper.

It is also not a “free press”. Cynthia Boaz, writing in TruthOut.org, describes what this form of so-called journalism has done to the profession:

There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship – the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.

The Tribune column was written by Robert P. Barnidge Jr., a lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Reading in England. Barnidge has previously written for the conservative Washington DC paper, the Washington Times and frequently contributes to the web site of the American Association of Middle East Studies. Barnidge concludes that Israel may, under international law, intercept ships attempting to enter Gaza waters.

A clue to the perspective of the AAMES is found in the views of its board chair, Bernard Lewis, a strong proponent of the now largely debunked Clash of Civilizations worldview. This way of viewing the relationship between Islam and Western powers gained popularity during the buildup to the US invasion of Iraq.

The Los Angeles Times op-ed column, by Amos Guiora, ran July 2, the same day Robert P. Barnidge’s column ran in the Chicago Tribune. Ira Glunts knew this was just not right.  He explained in Mondoweiss:

Amos Guiora had an op-ed in the LA Times yesterday which seeks to justify the Israeli blockade of Gaza and its plans to stop the Freedom Flotilla. The arguments Professor Guiora employs are standard Israeli hasbara which makes you wonder why the paper chose to print this uninspired and hackneyed piece.

Guiora, who is an Israeli citizen, was born and educated in the US, is identified only as a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of Freedom from Religion: Rights and National Security.

What the newspaper does not reveal is that Guiora spent 18 years in command positions in the Israeli Defense Forces, having risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps. This omission has been brought to the attention of the editors, but there has not been any correction made.

In addition to these two op-ed columns, there were the usual Zionist-friendly stories from the New York Times‘ Jerusalem-based correspondent, Ethan Bronner. In one story he reported that Gaza’s economy was rising from the ashes, which to Gaza residents sounds more like they are living in a Soviet-style Potemkin Village than the reality that actually exists in a walled-in Gaza surrounded by armed guards.

A week later, Bronner was back with a column which pretends a balance.  Its distortions are blatant. He claims the Gaza Flotilla sees itself as a modern-day version of the Exodus, the ship which tried to bring Jewish European refugees into British-controlled Palestine at the end of World War II.  The Leon Uris novel and the film that followed were early examples of hasbara, propaganda designed to convince the world of the righteousness of Israel’s creation as a state.

The Exodus spin is without merit because the purpose of the Audacity of Hope is to bring hope to Gaza, not refugees. Bronner shamelessly recalls the Exodus because it is iconic to the Israeli public and to its American supporters.

In the cargo of the Audacity of Hope is a collection of letters from Americans and Europeans reminding Gazans that they must not give up  hope because they are not alone. A threat to Israel’s security?  Depends on how you define security.

Prior to their attempted departure from Athens, passengers aboard the Audacity of Hope came together to produce a short video, To Gaza with Love. Many familiar names and faces are involved in this journey designed “to challenge oppression” in Gaza.

Posted in Media, Middle East Politics | 10 Comments

Netanyahu Owns the US Congress; Soon We Will Know if He Also Owns Gaza and the UN

Posted on June 25, 2011 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

We need look no further than the politics of the state of Israel to see what extremist religion can do with power. The Tea Party in the US, which will determine the winner of the presidential Republican nominating process, is ready to show the world that God wants a final say in US political decision-making.

The Tea Party has emerged as a carbon copy of ultra right wing Zionist forces in Israel. The Tea Party and right-wing political Zionism share a single-minded religious worldview that religious ideology can, and should, exercise absolute control over its citizens.

On June 3-4, at Ralph Reed’s annual Faith and Faithful gathering in Washington, speakers praised God and Israel in equal measure.  Only a few weeks had passed since the leader of a foreign nation came to Washington at the request of Congress.

That leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed Americans how to combine religious ideology with political power. The peoples’ representatives cheered mightily to demonstrate their loyalty to a foreign nation operating under a religious ideology that served the interests of political power.

Ralph Reed invited Republican presidential aspirants to speak to his organization of Christian faithful. Sure, they were also there to talk politics.  But their politics are inseparable from their ideological devotion to the modern state of Israel.

Philip Giradi discovered how closely Reed’s speakers adhered to the script of political power and religion.

Support for Israel was on the menu du jour in nearly every speech and for every panel. It dominated the conference. One panel had as its subject “Israel: surrounded yet undaunted in the face of evil.”

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s oddly named Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, spoke for fifteen minutes about Israel, saying “If we want God to bless America, then we have to bless the Jews. God gave that land to his chosen people forever. That issue is settled by God almighty…Michele Bachmann produced a standing ovation when she cited a “shocking display of betrayal of our greatest friend and ally Israel.” She added “I stand with Israel…President Obama…does not speak for us on the issue of Israel.”

The Reed gathering was just one of several recent Washington displays of love for Israel. Soon we will know what impact that love will have on two major international events.

The first is the arrival of a flotilla of peace-oriented ships off the coast of Gaza. The second is the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly where Palestinians will seek admission, as a state, to the UN General Assembly.

The last effort of a flotilla to breach the blockade of Gaza led to the deaths of nine passengers, May 10, 2010. One of the passengers killed by the Israeli military was Furkan Dogan, who held dual Turkish-US citizenship. There was no official American objection to any of the killings, including that of Dogan, who was born in Troy, New York.

One year and one month after the Israeli raid that killed nine passengers in May, 2010, a much larger flotilla sails this week to Gaza.

Ali Abunimah, writing about the flotilla in the Electronic Intifada, was dismayed by Hillary Clinton’s response:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to lay the ground – indeed almost provide a green light – for an Israeli military attack on the upcoming Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which will include the US Boat to Gaza.

Among the passengers aboard the American boat will be 87-year old Kindertransport survivor Hedy Epstein, and author and poet Alice Walker. In all it is expected that about 10 ships, carrying 1000 people from over 20 countries will take part.

Here’s what Clinton said in remarks at the State Department on 23 June:

“Well, we do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza. Just this week, the Israeli Government approved a significant commitment to housing in Gaza. There will be construction materials entering Gaza and we think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.”

Clinton must know that Gaza is not part of what any country recognizes as ‘sovereign’ Israeli territory, and therefore neither are Gaza’s territorial waters. Any boats entering Gaza’s waters would not in fact be entering ‘Israeli waters’ as Clinton claimed.”

Clinton’s attitude toward the flotilla does not portend a favorable US response when Palestinian UN membership comes before the General Assembly in September

If the GA does vote to refer the membership issue to the Security Council, the US will most likely veto the proposal. The US has no veto in the General Assembly, which is why Israel is working feverishly to persuade European Union nations to vote against the proposal in the GA, and to put pressure on smaller nations to vote against it.

Meanwhile, while the flotilla heads to Gaza waters and diplomats face the September vote, Prime Minister Netanyahu holds three trump cards, any one of which would derail any future peace agreement.  

First Card: Israel will not negotiate in any forum with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. Since there can be no Palestinian government that does not include Hamas, negotiations are impossible.

Second Card: Netanyahu insists there can be no “right of return” for Palestinian refugees who wish to move to, or be compensated for, former Palestinian land in what is today the state of Israel. No Palestinian leader could survive as a leader if he or she gives up that right before any final negotiations begin.

The right of the return of refugees is codified in international law. It is also one of those sacred rights symbolized by the keys retained in Palestinian homes wherever Palestinian refugees currently live.

Third Card: Israel will not negotiate with the PA until it recognizes Israel as a “Jewish State”. This is the card Uri Avnery has correctly dismissed as “nonsense”.  This demand for a “Jewish state” was not a part of any Palestinian-Israeli negotiation until it was introduced into the conversation in 2007.

Yonatan Touval was a senior policy analyst with the Geneva Initiative, an Israeli nonprofit organization, when he wrote in a New York Times op ed column, May 12, 2009:

While the demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist was unique (after all, it is non-states that customarily seek such recognition from already existing states), the more recent demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state is dangerous. It must be resisted by those who care about Israel’s long-term strategic interests.

Israel’s leaders had never sought such recognition from any party, friend or foe. The 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, which Begin signed, only expresses mutual recognition of the “sovereignty,” “integrity” and “political independence” of both parties. The peace treaty with Jordan that Yitzhak Rabin concluded in 1994 uses the same language. No mention of Israel’s Jewishness appears in either treaty.

In fact, it was only on the eve of the Annapolis conference in November 2007 that then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert first trotted out the Jewish card, conditioning his participation on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Fortunately, the international community did not respond and Olmert abandoned his demand.

Not only is this recent addition to Israel’s demands without precedent in the international community, it also ignores the fact that 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs live as citizens within the boundaries of Israel.

In their book, Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within, Ilan Peleg and Dov Waxman write (page 19):

All too often, people are completely unaware of the large number of non-Jewish citizens of Israel–around 1.8 million people–who make up a quarter of the country’s total population of 7.5 million. One in four Israelis, in other words, are not Jewish.

The vast majority of this significant non-Jewish population are Arabs, who at the end of 2009 numbered 1,526,000, more than 20 percent of Israel’s population.

Pelig is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College and servesas a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.,  His co-author, Dov Waxman, is associate professor of Political Science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Their book is a rich resource for information on “Israel’s Palestinians”, the designation, by the way, preferred by Palestinian citizens of Israel instead of the official Israeli government terms, “Arab Israelis” or “Israeli Arabs”.

Peleg and Waxman write specifically on the impact that defining Israel as a Jewish state, would have on Israel’s Palestinians. They resist it. According to the authors, “The redefinition of the state has become the central demand of the Palestinian minority [within Israel].”

As the state’s Jewish identity has become a major point of contention domestically, it has also been inserted into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinian Authority officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a final peace agreement. 

Such recognition, however,is unlikely to be granted against the objections of the Palestinian minority in Israel–underlining the connection that we emphasize in this book between Israel’s external and internal Palestinian problems.

President Obama grew up as a member of a minority community. Existentially, morally, and intellectually, he knows that the rights of a minority must be respected in a democracy, if that democracy ever expects to become “a state for all its citizens”.

The picture of Prime Minister Netanyahu is from the Palestinian Ma’an News Service.  The picture of Michele Bachmann is from the New York Times.

Posted in Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections, Religion and politics | 10 Comments