Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Uri Avnery, veteran and venerable Israeli peace activist, captured the moment:

What is happening now in Egypt will change our lives.

As usual, nobody foresaw it. The much-feted Mossad was taken by surprise, as was the CIA and all the other celebrated services of this kind. Yet there should have been no surprise at all – except about the incredible force of the eruption. . . .

The turmoil in Egypt was caused by economic factors: the rising cost of living, the poverty, the unemployment, the hopelessness of the educated young. But let there be no mistake: the underlying causes are far more profound.They can be summed up in one word: Palestine. In Arab culture, nothing is more important than honor. People can suffer deprivation, but they will not stand humiliation.

In Egypt, as the life-changing events unfolded, courageous Western journalists were on the scene, under attack from President Mubarak’s forces in his last desperate attempt to hold on to power.  They came there because they knew the revolution that began in Tunisia had reached Egypt.

These journalists were not in Gaza during Israel’s attack on a trapped civilian population in December, 2008. They were not there because Israel barred them from entering Gaza. More importantly, they were not there because their editors, conditioned to faithfully follow Israel’s narrative, did not send them there.

The Israeli control over its narrative finally, and definitively, imploded in Cairo in 2011, because of the courage and determination of the Egyptian people in Tahrir Square, where what happened, in Uri Avnery’s words, “will change our lives”.

Among the journalists who risked their lives in Tahrir Square was New York Times columnist  Nicholas Kristof, who concluded his Friday column:

Whatever Mr. Mubarak is planning, it does feel as if something has changed, as if the Egyptian people have awoken. When I needed to leave Tahrir Square today, several Egyptians guided me out for almost an hour through a special route so that I would not be arrested or assaulted — despite considerable risk to themselves. One of my guides was a young woman, Leila, who told me: “We are all afraid, inside of us. But now we have broken that fear.”

The lion-hearted Egyptians I met on Tahrir Square are risking their lives to stand up for democracy and liberty, and they deserve our strongest support — and, frankly, they should inspire us as well. A quick lesson in colloquial Egyptian Arabic: Innaharda, ehna kullina Misryeen! Today, we are all Egyptians!

Kristof eloquently describes what is now fully exposed as a brutal dictatorship, whose collapse sends a warning to the shaky thrones of the Middle East, from Tel Aviv to Damascus, Amman, and Riyadh in the Levant, and in the Arab states in the Maghreb of North Africa.

Who are the ehna (the we) that Kristof calls to be Egyptians (Misryeen) innaharda (literally, in the light of this day)?

We encompass the kullina (all of us) who are called to support the bravery, the fortitude, the remarkable restraint, and the demand for freedom expressed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square this past week.

And, most importantly, the ehna are the kullina who must now join those Misryeen and demand “enough and no more”.

The revolution came suddenly, at least it did for those who were not paying attention. It started in Tunisia, as Noam Chomsky wrote in In These Times:

“The Arab world is on fire,” al-Jazeera reported on January 27, while throughout the region, Western allies “are quickly losing their influence.”

The shock wave was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that drove out a Western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in Egypt, where demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator’s brutal police.

What say the ruling powers about this “fire” as the largest domino in the region prepares to fall? The Christian Science Monitor reports this reaction in Israel and within the Palestinian Authority leadership:

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority officials fear the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt might prompt Cairo to ease access to Gaza, and help Hamas consolidate its rule there.

Egypt has the keys to Gaza’s only border not controlled by Israel. That leaves President Mubarak’s successor, whoever it may be, with the option to open up the stifled territory of 1.5 million to trade and civilian traffic, or to continue the restrictions that weigh on the economy and the Islamic militant government there.

The US is struggling to find its footing. Marc Lynch, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, writes on his Foreign Policy blog that President Obama must walk a delicate line between the US’s long alliance with Egyptian rulers and the passionate protests that are overturning the establishment.

What do the protestors expect from Obama? Lynch writes:

Their protest has a dynamic and energy of its own, and while they certainly want Obama to take their side forcefully and unequivocally they don’t need it.

What they do need, if they think about it, is for Obama to help broker an endgame from the top down — to impose restraints on the Egyptian military’s use of violence to repress protests, to force it to get the internet and mobile phones back online, to convince the military and others within the regime’s inner circle to ease Mubarak out of power, and to try to ensure that whatever replaces Mubarak commits to a rapid and smooth transition to civilian, democratic rule. And that’s what the administration is doing.

The administration’s public statements and private actions have to be understood as not only offering moral and rhetorical support to the protestors, or as throwing bones to the Washington echo chamber, but as working pragmatically to deliver a positive ending to a still extremely tense and fluid situation.

Israeli leaders are largely silent, after initially demanding, unsuccessfully, Obama’s full support for Mubarak.

Israel relied on Mubarak to police Gaza’s southern border, thereby tainting Egypt as a partner in the crimes Israel has committed against Gaza.

Israel’s generated fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, as usual, is exaggerated. The government that succeeds Mubarak’s dictatorship may not be as strongly influenced by the Brotherhood as Israel has warned.

Hannah Allam writes from Cairo for McClatchy Newspapers, that even the Muslim Brotherhood was behind the curve, when the fire started:

The Muslim Brotherhood, long relegated to the fringes of Egyptian politics, is playing a growing role in the popular revolt against President Hosni Mubarak, but is still defining its goals for the country, according to political analysts familiar with the Islamist movement.

Under the one-party regime that Mubarak ran for three decades, the mostly mainstream Brotherhood was officially outlawed but generally tolerated. Still, it went on to become Egypt’s best-organized political movement, claiming 400,000 members.

That would be 400,000 Brotherhood members in a population of 83 million Egyptians. Long demonized by the US and Israel as a fundamentalist party akin to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Brotherhood has its fundamentalist element (as do the Republicans, with their “Tea Party”), but the Brotherhood, and the rest of the Egyptian population, have the potential to create a Middle Eastern democracy more along the lines of a secular Turkey, than one that would follow the Taliban model.

Hannah Allam spoke with Alaa al Aswany, an acclaimed Egyptian novelist, about the role of the Brotherhood in any future Egyptian government. Aswany supports the anti-government protesters. His response:

“The role and influence of the Brother Muslims have been exaggerated intentionally by the Egyptian regime for years, just to send the message to the West that either you accept the dictatorship in Egypt or prepare for another Taliban or Hamas in power. This is not true at all.”

Rami G. Khouri, Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon, is a reliable Palestinian scholar on Arab affairs. He urges patience.

On February 4, he wrote:

The process at hand now in Tunisia and Egypt will continue to ripple throughout the entire Arab world, as ordinary citizens realize that they must seize and protect their birthrights of freedom and dignity. . . .

The Americans needed 300 years to transition from slavery to civil rights and women’s rights. Self-determination is a slow process that needs time. The Arab world is only now starting to engage in this exhilarating process, a full century after the false and rickety statehood that drunken retreating European colonialists left behind as they fled back to their imperial heartlands.

It takes time and energy to re-legitimize an entire national governance system and power structure that have been criminalized, privatized, monopolized and militarized by small groups of petty autocrats and thieving families. . . . .

Make no mistake about it, we are witnessing an epic, historic moment of the birth of concepts that have long been denied to ordinary Arabs: the right to define ourselves and our governments, to assert our national values, to shape our governance systems, and to engage with each other and the rest of the world as free human beings, with rights that will not be denied forever.

Former US President Jimmy Carter delivered a peace treaty (some would say, forced a peace treaty) on Israel and Egypt in 1979. Both nations responded by building up their respective military forces with US funds, at the expense of their own public. Israel, for its part, showed its gratitude to Carter by immediately violating its Camp David agreement, expanding its settlements in occupied Palestinian land.

Since leaving office in 1981, Carter has become increasingly vocal in his anger over this betrayal. Israel responded, with the support of its American media, political and business allies, by attacking Carter.  The latest attack–a law suit against Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid–was launched by six citizens of Israel, two of whom hold dual citizenship as Americans.

Jason Ditz, writing for Anti-War.com, treated the bogus law suit with the disrespect it deserves:

In a move that calls back to the attempt by Texas cattlemen to sue Oprah Winfrey for “defamation of beef.,” an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” allegedly defamed Israel.

Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner insisted that Carter’s book violated New York State’s Consumer Protection Laws by asserting things, largely that Israel was not inherently reasonable and Syria was not inherently unreasonable, that “even a child” knows is untrue.

The Washington Post, consistent with its adherence to the Israeli narrative, greeted the lawsuit with a seriousness it did not deserve. In the Post’s Political Bookworm column, Stephen Lowman wrote, ironically, during the Tahrir protests:

From the outset, Carter’s book was criticized in some quarters for being one-sided. For instance, in his [2005] review for The Washington Post, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.”

This too, for Carter, will pass. Meanwhile, the 1979 peace treaty Carter orchestrated with Israel and Egypt, has been exploited and manipulated through suppression of the Egyptian population, and the humiliation and brutalization of the Palestinian people. That could not last. The Tahrir Square uprising demonstrated why this is so.  We are all Misryeen today.

The picture above from the New York Times, was taken Friday, February 4, in Tahrir Square by John Moore of Getty Images.

by James M. Wall

When President Obama spoke in Tucson Wednesday night, he called on Americans to

. . . expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

Commenting on the speech that remembered the victims of the Tucson murders, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that the President’s words

spoke to our desire for reconciliation. . . .But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are.

Krugman pointed to the nation’s differences on how best to order its economy. He makes a cogent and valid point. It is a point that applies as well to another “great divide”, one that confronts the President as he and his advisors address the serious and volatile standoff between Israel and Palestine.

The Peace Talks ended when Israel refused to agree to a 90 day halt of settlement construction. The two opposing sides have gone their own way. Israel continued to expand its grip on Palestinian land and people; the Palestinians looked for, and found, new friends in Europe and Latin America. At last count, 110 United Nations members have recognized Palestine as a state.

In Washington, the President reshaped his White House team to deal with the problems looming ahead in the second half of his term. Signs of hope for peace in that reshaping have thus far been anything but encouraging.

For a leader who speaks eloquently about looking forward, President Obama still looks to the past, stacking his peace squad with personnel from previous Clinton and Bush administrations. There are very few signs of the “moral imagination” the President called for in Tucson.

What the President needs are new Middle East White House viziers with “moral imaginations”. The Nizámu’l Mulk (d 1092 CE) wrote an entry for the Medieval Sourcebook on the topic, On the Courtiers and Familars of Kings. In that entry he described a vizier:

Whenever the question is one appertaining to kingship, or campaigning, or raiding, or administration, or supplies, or gifts, or war and peace, or the army, or the king’s subjects, and the like matters, then such question had better be decided with the aid of the vizier and the great experts in these faculties, and the elders of experience, in order that affairs may follow their proper course.

To put it in more modern terms, a vizier must know the territory, not just of one side in dispute, but of all those affected by the king’s decisions. He or she must know the terrain, the culture, the customs, the religion, the history, and the emotional make-up of the people who are affected by the president’s actions.

A new set of viziers on this issue should not only know “about” Palestinian culture, but be “of” it as well, in order to match the Zionist passions of Obama’s current planners for peace.

The Arab world knows about viziers. Wikipedia explains: “The vizier was the highest official in Ancient Egypt to serve the king, or pharaoh during the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.”

Barack Obama is not without candidates who could have served his administration as modern day viziers who bring with them an understanding of both the words and the music of the Palestinian perspective.

The President had known Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian-American scholar. Said taught Obama in 1981 when the President was an undergraduate student at Columbia.

David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, contains a reference to a time in Obama’s college years that can only be seen as an historic missed opportunity. Obama and Said were together for an entire quarter in the same classroom. Said was a 46-year old professor; Obama a 20 year old undergraduate already showing intense intellectual curiosity. Remnick writes:

Obama’s academic emphasis was on political science–particularly foreign policy, social issues, political theory, and American history–but he also took a course in modern fiction with Edward Said.  Best known for his advocacy of the Palestinian cause and for his academic excoriation of the Eurocentric “Orientalism” practiced by Western authors and scholars, Said had done important work in literary criticism and theory.

And yet, Said’s theoretical approach in the course left Obama cold. “My whole thing, and Barack had a similar view, was that we would rather read Shakespeare’s plays than the criticism” [a fellow student] said.

Said’s major book, Orientalism, was published in 1978, three years before Obama took Said’s course in literary criticism.  Obama, a bright young political science student, was already demonstrating an intense curiosity in intellectual matters.

There is no indication, however that his curiosity extended into asking his professor about Said’s thesis that the western academic mindset treated what was for Said a pejorative term,  the “Orient”, as the “other” which was separate and inherently “inferior” to the more enlightened and advanced West.

Obama’s life experience up to that point in his life demonstrated to him that the circumstances of his birth placed him in both the white, and the “other”, community. He has written and spoken eloquently of his own awareness of living in those two worlds. Said’s “orientalism”  was there to be explored at Columbia. It appears, however,  to have been a connection he failed to explore.

However, when Obama taught in the Law School at the University of Chicago, he became friends with Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American scholar who is now the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. (Pictured here).

Obama and Khalidi were close enough so that when Khalidi was being honored before he left Chicago for New York, State Senator Barack Obama was the main speaker at Khalidi’s going away dinner.

That dinner later emerged as a campaign issue during Obama’s primary struggle with Hillary Clinton, when Obama’s relationships at the University of Chicago were first used to paint him as a political radical. Khalidi was linked in that “radical attack” on Obama with Professor Bill Ayers, a former Weatherman, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s outspoken United Church of Christ Chicago pastor.

When Obama became president of the United States. he unfortunately did not turn to his colleague Rashid Khalidi for counsel on the Middle East. Instead, he continued the practice of his two presidential predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and surrounded himself not with viziers, but with courtiers.

Nizámu’l Mulk gives a definition in that same Medieval Sourcebook on the subject, On the Courtiers and Familars of Kings which includes this 11th century definition of a courtier:

The courtier should be essentially honourable and of excellent character, of cheerful disposition and irreproachable in respect of his religion, discreet and a clean liver. He should be able to tell a story and repeat a narrative either humorous or grave, and he should remember news.
He should also be consistently a carrier of pleasant tidings and the announcer of felicitous happenings. He should also have acquaintance of backgammon and chess, and if he can play a musical instrument and can handle a weapon, it is all the better.

Courtiers, the President has in abundance. They are the usual suspects, veterans of previous Middle East negotiations, competing with one another to sell their version of how to end the conflict. And all are members of the pro-Israel Washington courtier team.

When the signal sets off the alarm that a “vizier” is slipping into the White House, the intruder is removed. The courtiers know how to protect their turf.

For an example of the protective instincts of the Obama White House courtiers, see L’Affaire Freeman, an essay I wrote for Link magazine’s July-August 2009 issue.

The essay describes the successful fight to prevent Charles W. (Chas) Freeman from joining the Obama team. The fight began February 19, 2009. and ended March 11, 2009. when Freeman, as I wrote

gave up his appointment to chair President Barack Obama’s National Intelligence Council (N.I.C)—the same Council that provided President George W. Bush with the flawed intelligence he used to rationalize a decision he had already made to invade Iraq. . .

The work of the N.I.C. is very important to American foreign policy, but because of the nature of its intelligence gathering assignment, it is not a high profile position. It is, rather, one of those groups in government that works behind the scenes to provide guidance to the president and his foreign policy team. The Council serves as a clearing station for intelligence collected by 16 U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies.

By winning that 2009 battle over the appointment of Freeman, the President’s courtiers cut him off from a potential vizier who threatened to undermine Israel’s power base in the White House.

As the White House restarts its peace efforts with a reshaped White House team. Who they gonna call? Who do you think? The Ghost Busters, of course.

Laura Rozen wrote, January 13, in her Politico blog:

With U.S. Middle East peace efforts at an impasse, the Obama administration has sought new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the peace process.

One task force has been convened by Stephen Hadley and  Sandy Berger (pictured here), former national security advisers to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, to offer recommendations on the Middle East peace process to the National Security Council.

A second effort, led by Martin Indyk, vice president of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, held meetings this week with senior NSC Middle East/Iran adviser Dennis Ross, Palestinian negotiator Maen Erekat and Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, among others.

Take a closer look. One task force has been convened by Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley, veterans of the Clinton and Bush White House administrations, which means they are drawn from 16 years of negotiations run by two administrations which were strongly pro-Israel.

The second task force is led by Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel. He is meeting with Obama’s current Middle East/Iran adviser Dennis Ross. Both Indyk and Ross are well-known old Washington hands with strong affection for Israel.  Indyk has also met with Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, who has taught in the US, and, oh yes, Palestinian negotiator Maen Erekat, someone who is not expected to advise.

Nathan Guttman wrote in the US-based Jewish publication, Forward:

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process may be near collapse, but the Washington turf wars surrounding it are still going strong, according to sources involved in the negotiations.

The administration’s top Middle East hands — special envoy George Mitchell and White House adviser Dennis Ross — are increasingly at loggerheads, these sources say.

Mitchell has worked, unsuccessfully, for two years to resolve the conflict as Obama’s point man in the region.  Dennis Ross, is described by Guttman, as one of the administration’s “top Middle East hands”.

Whatever differences there may be in the turf wars within this group of courtiers, with the exception of Mitchell, they all share a vigorous partiality to Israel.

It is still not too late for Obama to ask Rashid Khalidi for recommendations for Palestinian and other Arab academics, who might bring a semblance of balance to the strong pro-Israel set of advisors that still battle for Obama’s favor at the negotiations table.

If Obama really wants to bring hope to the Palestinian people, he could start by including some Palestinian viziers in his future peace strategy. It would be a signal that change has finally come to the Obama White House.

The picture above of the mosque, is on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea on the Gaza coast. It is from the Palestinian Ma’an News Service.

by James M. Wall

If you relied on your local newspaper to tell you how things went in Bethlehem this Christmas season, don’t believe what you read.

Newspapers across America relied heavily on an Associated Press story to inform their readers that “Bethlehem Celebrates its Merriest Christmas in Years”.

It did not ask the people who live and work there.

The same optimistic headline ran over the same upbeat AP story, in US newspapers from Lafourche Parish, Louisiana to both major dailies in Washington, DC.

By virtue of its tight control over the AP bureau in Jerusalem, the Israeli government took advantage of a lazy, parsimonious American media and an equally lazy and complacent American public to guarantee yet another distorted portrait of life in the land Jesus made holy.

A Google search reveals more than 1300 references to that “Bethlehem is merry” AP story. Editors in Marietta, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; San Diego and San Francisco, California, to cite a few of them, relied on that Israeli-approved version that readers could smile over as they stripped open their Yuletide gifts and downed their cholesterol-packed eggnog.

In Jerusalem, the “merry Christmas” lie that blanketed the US, was received as one more “well done” effort  by those Israeli officials who work hard to whitewash the brutality with which Israel’s army rules Palestine.

Bethlehem was anything but “merry” this Christmas because its citizens continue to live in a prison behind a 30 foot high wall, not a “security barrier”, as every US newspaper called the wall in its AP story.

The AP story also reports, without blushing, that Israel “allowed” 500 citizens from Gaza, to go through the “security barrier” to reach the Church of the Nativity. Was there not a single copy editor in America who knew that they were using the barrier term dictated by the ruling occupiers?

Here is the opening of the AP story as it entered homes across America on Christmas weekend. If you do not weep for the state of American journalism when you read it, you have made one too many Israeli-sponsored trips into Palestine.

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The traditional birthplace of Jesus is celebrating its merriest Christmas in years, as tens of thousands of tourists thronged Bethlehem on Friday for the annual holiday festivities in this biblical West Bank town.

Officials said the turnout was shaping up to be the largest since 2000. Unseasonably mild weather, a virtual halt in Israeli-Palestinian violence and a burgeoning economic revival in the West Bank all added to the holiday cheer.

By nightfall, a packed Manger Square was awash in red, blue, green and yellow Christmas lights.

Merrymakers blasted horns, bands sang traditional Christmas carols in Arabic, boy scout marching bands performed and Palestinian policemen deployed around the town to keep the peace.

A group of 30 tourists from Papua New Guinea, all wearing red Santa hats, walked around the nearby Church of the Nativity, built on the site where tradition holds Jesus was born. Both church officials and the Palestinian president voiced hopes for peace.

As you read the complete story in the Washington Post, note carefully how the AP shapes the story:

The first reference to “Palestine” is not in the friendly reference to Bethlehem’s location in “this biblical West Bank town”, but in the lie that refers to “a virtual halt in Israeli-Palestinian violence and a burgeoning economic revival in the West Bank all added to the holiday cheer.”

A virtual halt? That is the official Israeli line, but it is not true; there is no “halt” from the Israeli side.  What about these air strikes reported by the Palestinian Ma’an newspaper two days before Christmas?

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — Two Palestinians were reported injured on Tuesday afternoon when Israeli warplanes dropped a single missile on an area used by members of Hamas’ armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, medics confirmed.

The strike was the second round of the day, with jets striking eight sites across the Gaza Strip shortly before sunrise on Tuesday morning. The earlier strikes injured two fighters and one civilian, a security guard in a nearby dairy factory.

The latest strike hit west of the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, where at least three of the strikes earlier in the day also targeted.

Spokesman for medical and emergency services in Gaza Adham Abu Salmiya said the two injured were transferred to the Abu Yousif An-Najjar Hospital in Khan Younis.

A statement from the Israeli military said the strike targeted a “Hamas terror activity center,” and noted that “A direct hit was confirmed.”

The story also reports “rocket fire” from the Palestinian side, a “projectile” to which the Israeli Air Force responded with low-flying war planes attacking an “area” in which Hamas has been known to be located. Is this proportional? Fighter planes against random rockets? Of course not. Does the US media point this out? Of course not.

The AP Christmas story focuses on the crowded hotels inside Bethlehem. No doubt that benefits local hotels, but as the London Guardian notes, Israel benefits more than Palestine from the tourist trade.

“It is true that this is a record year and that we have never received so many tourists in Bethlehem. The problem is that we only get 10% of the tourist revenues. The rest stays in Israel,” complains Palestinian tourism minister Khouloud Daibes. A total of 1.4 million people have visited Jesus’s birthplace this year, a 60% increase compared with last year. According to the minister, 70%-80% of this year’s tourists are one-day visitors.

The London Independent is even more pessimistic about Bethlehem’s economic progress:

Hoteliers argue the easing of restrictions are largely cosmetic and fail to address the bigger issue of permanent access for tourists. “We don’t want only the seven days of Christmas. We want it all year round,” said Amir Jaber, director of sales at the Jacir Palace Intercontinental in Bethlehem.

Some agencies bringing groups from cruise ships that dock at Ashdod and Haifa are thinking of dropping Bethlehem from their itineraries altogether because of the unpredictable delays, Mr Jaber claimed.

Israel’s civil administration declined to comment on border procedures, saying only that 2010 was a “record-breaking year” for tourism in Bethlehem, thanks in large part to Israel’s confidence-building measures.

But not everybody is benefiting. At an iron gate that cuts off Palestinian access to Rachel’s Tomb to protect the Jewish worshippers, only five out of the 60 or more shops that once stood here remain. The area is one of the most lawless in an otherwise safe town because the Palestinian police are prevented by Israel from operating here.

Just off Manger Square, souvenir vendors watch with frustration as the tourists streaming out of the Church of the Nativity head back to their buses for the drive back to Jerusalem.

James J. Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute,  wrote an essay for the Jordan Times which compares the Bethlehem of 2000 years ago with today:

While the kings of old, we are told, were able to travel from afar bearing gifts to honor the newborn child, one can only imagine the difficulties they would encounter today dealing with Israeli soldiers at the King Hussein bridge.

Having endured their interrogations, myself, I can hear the kings answer hours of questions, such as: “Where are you from?”, “Who are your parents, grandparents?”, “Why are you here?”, “Who are you visiting?”, “What are these gifts for?”, and on and on. In the end, it is doubtful whether those hapless “kings from the East” would have gained entry.

That Joseph, Mary and Jesus were able to flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s vengeful wrath was possible back then. Today, that option is unlikely. The barrier/wall that encapsulates the West Bank and the closure of Gaza would make such a trip impossible.

Finally, as I reflect on the birth of Jesus, I cannot help but think of the nearly 400 babies who would be born on Christmas day to Palestinian parents in the West Bank and Gaza. I think as well of the number of those who will perish at birth because of inadequate medical services (some babies have been put at fatal risk at checkpoints, because Israeli soldiers would not permit their delivering mothers to pass).

And I think of Mary, 2000 years ago, and am grateful that, despite all she endured, there were no checkpoints blocking her way to Bethlehem.

Look not to the American media for the truth about this Christmas season in Palestine. Look instead into your own soul and ask the simple question: When will the American media wake up to the fact that it has been deceived by the government of Israel into doing its bidding?

By James M. Wall

A new Palestinian parliament was elected in the Occupied Territories on January 25, 2006.  One month from this Christmas, Palestinians should have been celebrating the fifth anniversary of that democratic, internationally-monitored, election.

There will be no celebration in January, 2011.  Instead, Bethlehem, the West Bank, and Gaza still wait for the democracy that was stolen from them.

Palestinians remain trapped in a military occupation the Israeli government forced the world to accept because the “wrong” party won.

For one brief shining moment, before the 2006 results were rewritten to fit the Zionist narrative, democracy lived in the land where Christ was born.

In a story of rare candor for a major American news outlet, on January 26, 2006,  the Washington Post reported the elections fairly. The Post began its coverage:

The radical Islamic movement Hamas won a large majority in the new Palestinian parliament, according to official election results announced Thursday, trouncing the governing Fatah party in a contest that could dramatically reshape the Palestinians’ relations with Israel and the rest of the world.

In Wednesday’s voting, Hamas claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, giving the party at war with Israel the right to form the next cabinet under the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah.

Fatah, which has dominated the legislature since the previous elections a decade ago and the Palestinian cause for far longer, won 43 seats. A collection of nationalist, leftist and independent parties claimed the rest.

The Post writer had not received the Israeli media narrative when he wrote that lead. He reported the election as it happened, giving his readers the facts and speculating on the impact the Hamas victory would have on future relations between the Palestinians and Israel.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was shocked at the election results. Israeli intelligence had assured her that Fatah would win. She had not counted on having to deal with a non-subservient Palestinian leadership.

Israel claimed to be as surprised as Rice, which was unlikely, since Israel had its own intelligence agents swarming all over the occupied territories.

Israel had agreed to tolerate the election, knowing that if Hamas won, the results could easily be manipulated to fit the scenario Israel would write.

The election results were revised to fit the standard “terrorism” narrative. It works this way: When Israel does not win a war or an election, it simply rewrites the script to conform to whatever fits Israel’s preferred story line.

Israel’s version, which a compliant  world media, endorsed, quickly converted victorious Hamas legislators like Jabalya refugee camp resident Youssef Shrafi, at left, from a family man to a “terrorist”.

This Reuters photo ran next to the January 26, 2006, Post story.  This picture may well represent the last time an Hamas politician was correctly identified in an American newspaper as a family man.

Israel could not allow Hamas to be seen as a political party that had won an election the way parties do in a democracy. Hamas had to be peddled as a “terror” organization that is a theat to world peace, a narrative pattern that continues to this day, as Israel and its US neoconservative allies pound the war drums against Iran.

On election day, 2006, I was in Bethlehem, where I watched long lines of voters participating in the core event of a democracy, choosing their leaders.

The Bethlehem city council already had a majority of Hamas members, and on the day of the election, the green colors of Hamas dominated the square outside the polling place I visited.

I walked into the polling place and saw election judges checking credentials.  One official asked me, politely, to move away from the voters; no electioneering inside the polling place. I told him I understood.

The picture above, of political posters plastered neatly on a building in downtown Bethlehem, was one I took on election day. Hope was in the air. There was joy that a people living under military occupation might soon come together to slowly and no doubt, painfully, build their own stable, peaceful, country.

So Israel did what it always does. It played the fear card and arrested half of the victorious Hamas legislators before they could be sworn in. Many of those arrested still languish in an Israeli prison five years later.

Following Israel’s script for the next five years, Israel, the US and the European Union refused to accept the results of the 2006 election.

The electoral map below tells the story of the legitimacy of the election. Hamas district legislative winners are in green. Fatah is yellow.

Immediately, Israel took over the story. Since the Hamas legislative majority had been deemed by Israel and the US to be a “terrorist” organization, all outside funding was funneled to the now minority Fatah party, which remained under Israeli control.  Cutting off the funding was intended to starve the Hamas political organization, leading to it failure.

But Hamas did not fail, not even after Israel sealed the Gaza strip.

An ongoing economic blockade and periodic military assaults on Gaza’s civilian population, in “retaliation” for home-made rockets fired into Israel by non-Hamas forces, also did not lead to Hamas’ defeat.

Hamas simply hunkered down; its army defeated Fatah in a US endorsed civil war in which Fatah’s army was funded and trained by the US military.

Israel became an even more isolated military fortress, threatening its neighbors and encouraging the US to come over and save the world from the deadly non-existent Iraqi WPDs. With that successful enterprise completed, Israel turned to the nuclear threat it insists it sees in Iran..

Five years after that brief 2006 shining moment when democracy threatened to break out in Palestine, the military power that is Israel stands alone in the Middle East, a nuclear-armed behemoth that has abandoned any pretense of democracy even as it continues to cling to the fiction that it is the “only democracy” in the region.

The US did its part for Israel, taking advantage of a divided Palestinian political structure.  The US lured Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas into agreeing to “talk” to Bibi Netanyahu, a man who likes to talk so long as nothing is said that would deter his goal to extend the state of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

A few weeks before the fifth anniversary of the 2006 legislative election, another Christmas season is upon us.

Church congregations will gather together and sing traditional hymns, celebrating the birth of a child in a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, a little town that is no longer little, living within an Israeli-built wall, with limited access to the outside through Israeli-controlled check points.

In most of those churches, on Christmas Eve, members will sing O Little Town of Bethlehem or Silent Night with little thought of those Palestinians who, for a brief, shining moment almost had a democracy in which they might have finally been able to move freely throughout the land of Palestine.

When church congregations see their own small children stand around a manger scene in the front of the sanctuary, their eyes wide as they await the arrival of the wise men from the east, will any of them pause, even just for a moment, to wonder what life is like today for children in the land where Jesus was born?

This two minute clip reports on a Palestinian family living under military occupation in Palestine, five years after the 2006 election, and two thousand years after the the birth of the Christ child. The video was produced by the Israel-based human rights organization, B’tselem.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was interviewed by a Boston Globe reporter in 2007. The South African leader was asked by the reporter what he had seen and heard in the Holy Land on his recent visit there.  He responded:

Some people cannot move freely from one place to another.  A wall separates them from their famlies and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school.

They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleageured by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape.

I grieve for the damage being done daily to people’s souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.

In a folder encouraging visitor to visit Bethlehem in 2010 and 2011, the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights reports:

A recent United Nations report stated that the wall and other measures imposed by Israel have “reduced Bethlehem’s development space, limited its access to resources, severed Bethlehem’s historical links to Jerusalem and restricted the urban area’s potential for residential and industrial expansion.”

These measures have severely damaged Bethlehem’s tourism industry, a major part of Bethlehem’s economy, a city still waiting for its stolen democracy.

by James M. Wall

Leave it to linguist Noam Chomsky to provide a precise description of President Obama’s latest diplomatic failure.

Washington’s pathetic capitulation to Israel while pleading for a meaningless three-month freeze on settlement expansion—excluding Arab East Jerusalem—should go down as one of the most humiliating moments in US diplomatic history.

Few observers were fooled by the “stop the settlements” offer, least of all Noam Chomsky, who can smell a linguistic rat faster than most of us.

Chomsky has been a teacher of linguists since 1955 as the Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He is also a consistent critic of American imperialism.

In his analysis of the Obama offer, Chomsky does not limit Zionist influence on US politics to the Israel Lobby. He looks for the money trail.

That gift of $3 billion for fighter jets is “another taxpayer grant to the U.S. arms industry, which gains doubly from programs to expand the militarization of the Middle East.”

Chomsky knows that an American emotional attachment to the state of Israel, while an important factor, is hardly enough to push US foreign policy decisions into two wars and a possible third war against Iran.

U.S. arms manufacturers are subsidized not only to develop and produce advanced equipment for a state that is virtually part of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment but also to provide second-rate military equipment to the Gulf states—currently a precedent-breaking $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, which is a transaction that also recycles petrodollars to an ailing U.S. economy.

Israeli and U.S. high-tech civilian industries are closely integrated. It is small wonder that the most fervent support for Israeli actions comes from the business press and the Republican Party, the more extreme of the two business-oriented political parties.

Martin Indyk was born in London, England, but grew up and was educated in Australia. He immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1993.

Recently, he wrote in the Financial Times:

Few seemed to even notice when the Obama administration quietly announced this week that it had ended the effort. Washington’s focus has shifted to a more promising negotiation with Congress over renewing tax cuts.

Israel has moved on to the next crisis – a police sex scandal here, a natural disaster there. In the West Bank, life is good: 11 per cent growth, low unemployment and Palestinian police maintaining order.

Even in Gaza, a new normalcy is taking hold, albeit under repressive Hamas rule. Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran still swear they will liberate Palestine through violence, but in the meantime they do nothing to upset the current calm.

Life in the West Bank “is good” and “normalcy” has returned to Gaza? What would lead an experienced diplomat to reach a conclusion this unrelated to the reality of life in the West Bank and Gaza?

Over the years Indyk has shown a strong affinity for appointed positions that have enabled him to be a good friend to Israel. He served as US ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs during the Clinton Administration.

His Wikipedia entry concludes that Indyk “is arguably best known as one of the lead U.S. negotiators at the Camp David talks.” These were the talks that led to the “generous offer” Israel and the US made to Yasir Arafat, an offer that was neither generous nor an authentic offer.

Indyk has served a deputy research director for AIPAC. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center in Washington.

In his FT analysis, Indyk concluded, “WikiLeaks has now revealed the world’s worst kept secret: Arab leaders care more about Iran’s threat than about the Palestinian cause,” repeating the conventional US-Israel spin that WikiLleaks “proves” the need to attack Iran.

Arab leaders may support such an attack, but the Arab public does not. Chomsky writes:

The Iranian threat is not military, as the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence have emphasized. Were Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capacity, the purpose would be deterrent—presumably to ward off a U.S.-Israeli attack.

The real threat, in Washington’s view, is that Iran is seeking to expand its influence in neighboring countries “stabilized” by U.S. invasion and occupation.

Whatever the ruling dictatorships may prefer, Arabs in a recent Brookings poll rank the major threats to the region as Israel (88 percent), the United States (77 percent) and Iran (10 percent).

Noam Chomsky has written that his goal as a linguist, “is to find the principles common to all languages that enable people to speak creatively and freely”.

He also believes the goal of language is to enable us to find the “human essence” in one another. A worthy goal, of course, but where will we discover sufficient open dialogue among leaders willing to bring “human essence” to our current political situation?

We could begin with those 26 former European Union leaders who have just issued a letter that “urged the union to impose sanctions on Israel for continuing to build settlements on occupied Palestinian territory”.

The former leaders said Israel “like any other state”, should be made to feel “the consequences” and pay a price for breaking international law.

The letter sent to European governments and EU institutions, asks EU foreign ministers to reiterate that they “will not recognise any changes to the June 1967 boundaries and clarify that a Palestinian state should be in sovereign control over territory equivalent to 100% of the territory occupied in 1967, including its capital in East Jerusalem”.

We may look also to those younger Israelis who no longer want to live in a country that is deliberately isolating itself from the world community.

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, writes:

Israel’s increased isolation from the world community has begun to lead young Israeli citizens to leave Israel and move to the US and European countries.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of Israelis applying annually for permanent residence in the United States doubled between 2000 and 2009.

Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak both have adult children living here. And it’s not just the U.S. An Israeli friend recently told me that there are so many young Israelis in Berlin (Berlin!) that when he goes there and runs into acquaintances from Tel Aviv, they don’t even act surprised.

There is also an increasing number of world governments willing to support the formation of a Palestine state unilaterally, unrelated to the “peace talks” that have ended because of Israeli intransigence.

Press-TV reported on the International Middle East Media Center website:

Bernard Valero, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, revealed on Tuesday [December 7] that France welcomes the formation of a Palestinian state, becoming the first European country to do so.

Over the past week, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay have all announced that they recognize a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.

More than 100 countries, mostly from across Asia and Africa, have so far recognized an independent Palestine within its ’67 borders. Other emerging economic powers such as China and India have already done so.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington Friday night, where she called for a “clean start” in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Settlements, she said, should be dealt with as part of efforts to determine the borders of a future Palestinian state. Her remarks, reported by the Palestine Monitor, were not encouraging to Palestinians.

Clinton said that the Obama Administration intends to treat the settlement issue as part of the wider border dispute, which strongly suggests “that certain settlements, and thus large swathes of Palestinian land, will be incorporated into Israel following any future peace deal.”

Also of concern to the Palestinians was Clinton’s comment, “we will deepen our support of the Palestinians’ state-building efforts, because we recognize that a Palestinian state, achieved through negotiations, is inevitable”.

The Palestine Monitor wrote: “If the past 43 years have taught us anything, it is that a Palestinian state through negotiations is anything but inevitable.”

Clinton’s Saban speech is not hopeful. Instead, she is is practicing the anti-freedom George Bush policy which Noam Chomsky exposed in the title of his 1992 book, Deterring Democracy.

The picture at the top is from The Palestine Monitor.