Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman began his Sunday column (June 6) with a vintage Friedman response to the murderous Israeli assault on the Mavi Marmara.

The assault that lead to the deaths of nine men on the Mavi Marmara was, for Friedman, a “sideshow” to the real “ball game”, the creation of a “two state” solution.

Friedman’s column demands a closer examination.

Beyond Freeman, there are other voices to which attention must be paid: Israeli peace veteran Uri Avenry, Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and Senator John Kerry (D-MA).

Friedman’s reaction to the attacks on the Gaza-bound Flotilla opens with a return to his days as a young foreign correspondent.

When I covered the 1982 Lebanon war, I learned something surprising about wars: they attract all kinds of spectators, meddlers, do-gooders and do-badders.

They use the conflict and the attention it generates to play out their own identity issues, passions and biases.

My favorite in Beirut was a gentleman who showed up in August 1982 as the Palestinian guerrillas were sailing out of Beirut harbor. His name — I am not making this up — was Arthur Blessitt, the “Sunset Boulevard Preacher.” He had walked to West Beirut from Israel to pray for peace, dragging a 13-foot-long wooden cross with a little wheel on the bottom.

Arthur was harmless; some of the others, though, were mendacious, which prompted me to promulgate this rule: I adore the Israelis and Palestinians, but God save me from some of their European and American friends.

Their grandstanding interventions — like those blockade-busters sailing to Gaza or the wealthy American Jews who fund extremist settlers’ housing purchases in Arab East Jerusalem — often fuel the worst trends on either side and divert our energies from the only thing that is important: forging a two-state solution. . . .

By bringing Arthur Blessitt back on stage in his historical drama, Friedman takes a swipe at a Christian “preacher” from 1982 who was so out of touch with reality that he thought nothing of dragging a cross, a 13-foot-long wooden cross, from Israel to Beruit.

Isn’t that a ridiculous image to contemplate? Surely, Friedman is not hinting that this wierdo from California is putting on his own Passion Play. Surely, Friedman would not make fun of a moment in Christian history which is sacred to Christian believers everywhere. Would he?

Friedman chose to ignore the presence of a second ship in the Gaza-bound convoy, which was later boarded without incident and hauled to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

That ship was the Rachel Corrie, named quite aptly in memory of the 23-year-old American volunteer Rachel Corrie, who was run over and murdered in Gaza by a  Caterpiller bulldozer in 2003.

Israeli peace veteran Uri Avnery had high praise for the strategy of a peace ship delivering essential material to Gaza. He writes a weekly column for Gush Shalom:

The idea of a flotilla as a means to break the blockade borders on genius.

It placed the Israeli government on the horns of a dilemma – the choice between several alternatives, all of them bad. Every general hopes to get his opponent into such a situation.

The alternatives were:

To let the flotilla reach Gaza without hindrance. The cabinet secretary supported this option. That would have led to the end of the blockade, because after this flotilla more and larger ones would have come.

To stop the ships in territorial waters, inspect their cargo and make sure they were not carrying weapons or “terrorists”, then let them continue on their way. That would have aroused some vague protests in the world but upheld the principle of a blockade.

To capture them on the high seas and bring them to Ashdod, risking a face-to-face battle with activists on board.

As our governments have always done, when faced with the choice between several bad alternatives, the Netanyahu government chose the worst.

Ha’aretz, the moderate Jerusalem newspaper, asked Canadian poet and writer Margaret Atwood to write on the current political situation in Israel out of her own background as a novelist and literary theorist.

In May of this year, Atwood was honored with Israel’s $1,000,000 Dan David Prize, which she shared with Indian author Amitav Ghosh, at Tel Aviv University.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) had asked Atwood to boycott the award. It was PACBI that persuaded Elvis Costello to cancel his scheduled trip to Israel.

Atwood refused to cancel. She told the PACBI ,”we don’t do cultural boycotts”. Her refusal was a setback for the Palestinian boycott campaign, but her recent visit to the country led to the invitation to write for Ha’aretz. The timing could not have been better.

Atwood, the author of 40 books, is a major Canadian poet, critic, essayist, and novelist. One of her best known novels is The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1986.

In 1987, Janet Karsten Larson wrote an essay on The Handmaid’s Tale for the Christian Century magazine, Margaret Atwood’s Testaments: Resisting the Gilead Within. Larson described Atwood’s ability to connect literature, politics, and human survival.

Since 1972, when Atwood published Survival, a critical study of her own national literature, and Surfacing, a novel about a woman’s recovery of identity, this powerful writer has been acclaimed for her canny exposures of sexual politics and modes of human survival.

In one edition of the novel, Valerie Martin writes in her introduction:

The novel is a dystopian vision of a future in which Christian fundamentalists have executed the President, machine-gunned the Congress (blaming the assassinations on Muslim fanatics), suspended the constitution, and created a new social order in which women are, at best, commodities. . . . there is a continual state of war, and sectors run by the fundamentalists have been rechristened the Republic of Gilead.

Atwood’s essay for Ha’aretz, The Shadow Over Israel, begins:

Recently I was in Israel. The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people.

The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal. But… there was the Shadow.

Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage? Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?

“Every morning I wake up in fear,” someone told me. “That’s just self-pity, to excuse what’s happening,” said someone else. Of course, fear and self-pity can both be real.

But by “what’s happening,” they meant the Shadow. I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.”

It haunts everything. The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears.

The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.

The attempts to shut down criticism are ominous, as is the language being used. Once you start calling other people by vermin names such as “vipers,” you imply their extermination.

To name just one example, such labels were applied wholesale to the Tutsis months before the Rwanda massacre began. Studies have shown that ordinary people can be led to commit horrors if told they’ll be acting in self-defense, for “victory,” or to benefit mankind. . . .

The response from members of the US Congress to Israel’s attacks on the relief convoy, was consistent with the views of one of the Senate’s most respected members, John Kerry, Democrat from Massachusetts.

The Senator told ABC news’ Jake Tapper that he “doesn’t believe Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. . . there are obviously tensions with repect to certain policies”, Israel “has every right in the world to make certain that weapons are not being smuggled in after the thousands of rockets that have been fired on it from Gaza.”

Kerry’s endorsement of Israel contradicts the judgment of Meir Dagan, director of Mossad, Israel’s intelligency agency, who told Israeli media, “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

There is no consensus in these four views on the assault: A New York Times columnist, a veteran Israeli peace leader, a novelist, and an American politician, three shapers of opinion, and one US political decision maker.

Which one holds the most power?

The picture from the Flottila is from Free Gaza.

By James M. Wall

Scroll down for two Updates

In its Thursday afternoon internet coverage of Israel’s murderous attack on the Gaza-bound Flotilla, the New York Times spins its story with praise for Israel’s openness to change.

In the story, written by Isabel Kershner, the news is buried that one of the nine passengers killed in the assault was an American citizen.

The story opens with a headline praising Israel for seeking a solution to Gaza’s suffering:

“Israel Seeks ‘New Ways’ to Supply Gaza, Official Says”

By early morning Friday, the Times internet site offered an even more positive headline:

“Israel Signals New Flexibility on Gaza Shipments”

JERUSALEM — After insisting all week that its blockade of Gaza was essential to its security, the Israeli government is now “exploring new ways” of supplying the coastal enclave, an official said Thursday.

In the face of unrelenting international outrage over a deadly raid on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza this week, the official said that Israel was determined that every ship heading to the enclave be inspected to prevent the smuggling of rockets and other weapons.

But at the same time, the government wants to facilitate the entry of civilian goods, said the official, who described the latest thinking within the government on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The apparent change of heart follows reports that senior officials in the Obama administration were calling for a “new approach” in Gaza and had concluded that the blockade was untenable.

Once the reader absorbs this “new approach” that the Obama administration wants, there comes the first mention of the dead American citizen, age given, and long residence in Turkey included, but so far, no name.

The Times‘ report informs us that the news of  the “new approach” was

accompanied as well by reports that one of the nine people killed in the raid on the flotilla this week was a 19-year-old United States citizen of Turkish descent who had lived most of his life in Turkey, officials in Turkey and Washington said Thursday.

Further down in the story, after a mention that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu had spoken with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Times reports that  all passengers on the ship, including the wounded and the dead, were transported to Ashdod, the Israeli port to which the ships were towed.

Their names were withheld for 24 hours. All cameras and cell phones from the passengers were seized by the IDF. Their families were not notified. No one knew for certain who lived or who died.

This delay was deliberate, totally in character for the IDF, which wanted to get on top of the story. The  narrative control had been easier during Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008-09.

The control quickly disappeared.  Virtually no media outside the US, was taken in by the Israeli spin that told the story that when IDF commandos took control of the six ships, they had been shot at and beaten by iron clubs. That may have been true, but it was hardly the final word on what happened when military commandos attacked civilian ships.

The IDF as victim was paraded before a world audience that had heard the story before. This time the story flopped. The only exceptions were Israel’s true believers in the US media and in the US Congress.

One egregious example of blind political loyalty came from a group of Jewish American progressive politicians led by New York Democrat Anthony Weiner. (pictured here).

On Tuesday, June 1, with Israel still firmly in control of its version of the attack, the Politico‘s Jake Sherman wrote:

While the Obama administration takes a wait-and-see approach to the newest crisis in the Middle East, some Democrats in Congress stand firmly behind Israel’s raid of a Turkish flotilla en route to Gaza.

New York Democratic Reps. Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Gary Ackerman, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.) have all vigorously supported Israel’s boarding an aid ship bound for the blockaded Gaza — an act that resulted in ten deaths and a UN condemnation.

In the Thursday afternoon Times story,  several paragraphs later there is this incomplete item:

The bodies of the nine dead were flown to Turkey overnight along with hundreds of activists, many of them Turks, who were detained when the Israeli Navy towed the ships to shore on Monday.

How were the “hundreds of activists, many of them Turks”, transported to Istanbul?  The Times does not say, other than that were “flown to Turkey overnight”.

Only in the Turkish media do we find that Turkish military transports entered Israeli air space, landed, loaded the attack victims, living and dead, and flew them to Istanbul.

Finally, in paragraph ten of the early afternoon version on the web,  the Times gives the name of the dead American citizen. The Friday morning print edition omits Dogan’s name. It makes no reference to the details of how he died.

This is from the earlier internet story (omitted in the print edition):

Reports in the Turkish press identified the American citizen who was killed as Furkan Dogan, 19, who was born in the United States before returning to Turkey with his family as a young child. A United States official in Washington confirmed that an American was among the dead.

There were pictures of Dogan available to the Times (none were used), including the one above, which the Associated Press obtained from the Dogan family. The picture was taken when Furkan Dogan was 17.

Early Friday morning, Dogan’s name had disappeared entirely from both the Times internet story and from the Friday print edition. The only American citizen to die in the Flotilla attack, is referred to as a 19-year-old American citizen. His name is not included.

In the Turkish newspaper, Zaman, Dogan is identified  by name. Zaman also includes details on how Dogan died.

The details come from Turkey’s Council of Forensic Medicine, which examined the dead bodies.

The findings have not yet been announced. It will be a few weeks before the experts get back all the results, but initial statements from doctors confirm Yıldırım’s account of the shootings at close range.

According to İHH official Ömer Yağmur, who spoke to the doctors, 19-year-old Furkan Doğan was killed by four bullets to the head — all fired at close range — and one bullet into his chest, also fired at close range.

He said Doğan was studying at a private high school in Kayseri [his home town] and hoped to become a doctor in the future.

The day after the Flotilla was attacked the UN Security Council met to discuss appropriate action by the world community. The London Guardian reported:

The United States has blocked demands at the UN security council for an international inquiry into Israel’s assault on the Turkish ship carrying aid to Gaza that left nine pro-Palestinian activists dead.

A compromise statement instead calls for an impartial investigation which Washington indicated could be carried out by Israel. Turkey pressed for the security council to launch an investigation similar to Richard Goldstone’s inquiry into last year’s fighting in Gaza which prompted protests from Israel when it concluded that Israel and Hamas were probably guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ankara wanted the investigation into the raid on the Mavi Marmara to result in the prosecution of officials responsible for the assault and the payment of compensation to the victims.

But in hours of diplomatic wrangling, the US blocked the move and instead forced a statement that called for “a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards”.

The US representative at the security council discussions, Alejandro Wolff, indicated that Washington would be satisfied with Israel investigating itself when he called for it to undertake a credible investigation.

This sounds more like a cruel joke than an honest proposal. Israel’s record is clear.  It does not need any investigation from within or by an international body.  But that attitude is not shared by strong voices from within Israel, where criticism of Israel’s actions can be brutally frank with conclusions rarely heard from US media pundits

For example, in his regular Ha’aretz column, one day after the assault on the six ship Flotilla, Gideon Levy reminds his readers that Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2008-09, was designated by the IDF as Operation Cast Lead.  In his column he dubs the Flotilla assault, “Operation Mini Cast Lead”.

Like in “Mini-Israel,” the park where there is everything, but smaller, Israel embarked yesterday on a mini Operation Cast Lead.

Like its larger, losing predecessor, this operation had it all: the usual false claim that is was they who had started it – and not the landing of commandos from helicopters on a ship in open sea, away from Israeli territorial waters. There was the claim that the first act of violence came not from the soldiers, but the rioting activists on Mavi Marmara; that the blockade on Gaza is legal and that the flotilla to its shores is against the law – God knows which law. . . .

Israel will pay a heavy diplomatic price, once which had not been considered ahead of time. Again, the Israeli propaganda machine has managed to convince only brainwashed Israelis, and once more no one asked the question: What was it for?

Why were our soldiers thrown into this trap of pipes and ball bearings? What did we get out of it? If Cast Lead was a turning point in the attitude of the world toward us, this operation is the second horror film of the apparently ongoing series.

Israel proved yesterday that it learned nothing from the first movie. Yesterday’s fiasco could and should have been prevented. This flotilla should have been allowed to pass and the blockade should be brought to an end.

This should have happened a long time ago. In four years Hamas has not weakened and Gilad Shalit was not released. There was not even a sign of a gain.

And what have we instead? A country that is quickly becoming completely isolated. This is a place that turns away intellectuals, shoots peace activists, cuts off Gaza and now finds itself in an international blockade.

Once more yesterday it seemed, and not for the first time, that Israel is increasingly breaking away from the mother ship, and losing touch with the world – which does not accept its actions and does not understand its motives.

Yesterday there was no one on the planet, not a newsman nor analyst, except for its conscripted chorus, who could say a good word about the lethal takeover.

The BBC also has its share of blunt-talking journalists, as may be seen and heard in this BBC interview with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev:

Update I

In a separate story carried in Friday’s print edition, the Times refers to Furkan Dogan as one of the “victims” of the Israeli raid.

Among the dead was a young man with dual American and Turkish citizenship, Turkish and American officials said.  He was identified as Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old who was born in Troy, NY, and lived there as a small child, but later moved back to Turkey.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Washington that American officials “had spoken to the family to express condolences and offer consular services.”  She also reported that two other Americans had been wounded in the raid and “in a subsequent protest”.

Update II

Blogger Lawrence of Cyberia has postedthe names,with pictures, of the nine passengers killed in the Flotilla raid.. The blog will be updated as more information is made available. The posting includes links, some in Turkish. Click here to proceed to the page.

by James M. Wall

The Nakba has claimed another victim. This time it was not the death of one of the millions of Palestinians driven from their homes by the 1948 creation of the modern state of Israel.

In this case, the loss was a private home on Princesses’ Street in Baghdad, Iraq, an ending that might have passed unnoticed under a pile of rubble, in spite of that home’s importance in the cultural history of both Palestine and Iraq.

The house was destroyed on April 4 by a suicide bomber.

The home once belonged to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a Christian Palestinian born in Bethlehem. Its destruction received no attention in the American or the world media until May 22, when a story appeared in the New York Times, writtenby Pulitzer Prize winning, 41 year old writer, Anthony Shadid.

Shadid. a Lebanese American journalist, has covered the region for the Times since he left the Washington Post, where he earned his Pulitzer for stories written during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.

Shadid describes Jabra as an artist who, during his lifetime, offered his home as a bridge between cultures:

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was a renowned Arab novelist, poet, painter, critic and translator who built [his home] along the date palms and mulberry trees of Princesses’ Street nearly a half-century ago.

Jabra’s career was celebrated at the time of his death in 1994, but like so much of Palestinian culture and history since 1948, and now increasingly, of Iraqi cultural history as well, Jabra’s name, sixteen years after his death, is much less known in the Arab world.

Jabra’s second memoir, Princesses’ Street: Baghdad Memories, begins with the Nakba:

I was nineteen years old when I arrived at Port Said after a long night’s ride by train from the city of Jaffa…

Jabra had left Jaffa, on the coast of what is now Israel, as part of the refugee exodus which forced Palestinians to leave what became the new state of Israel.

This new state continued to expand, using military force to expand the Nakba, first to build a greater Israel; and then, by setting itself up as a vulnerable nascent nation in the region, to encourage George Bush to invade and occupy Iraq.

When Jabra’s house was destroyed, among the dead were Raqiya Ibrahim and her son Jaafar, both Jabra relatives. Two months after the blast, their blood could still be seen splattered on the walls of the ruined structure.

Before his death in 1994, Jabra entrusted Raqiya with both the house and his large collection of papers and books, most of which were destroyed in the bomb blast and the fire that followed.

In his Times story Shadid offered this tribute:

Rarely have a house and a man seemed to intersect so seamlessly.

Born in 1919 to a Christian family, Mr. Jabra settled in Baghdad after the 1948 war that his fellow Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe. He had already earned a degree from Cambridge, would soon study at Harvard, and in his ensuing years here he joined the sculptor Jawad Salim and a remarkable generation of other artists who made Iraq a pioneer in Arab culture.

Mr. Jabra was among the most prominent, as a writer whose acclaimed work modernized the Arabic novel and a linguist who translated everything from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

“He was a living example of the process of translation, of taking one culture and literally carrying it across a cultural divide and placing it in another culture,” said Roger Allen, a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who was a friend of Mr. Jabra’s and helped translate two of his better-known novels.

Shadid’s book, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War, was published n 2006.He is at work on a third, which will be about his family’s ancestral village in Lebanon.

Shadid opens Night Draws Near with the same terse descriptive power with which he tells the story of the destruction and history of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s home:

“Baghdad is a city of lives interrupted, its history a story of loss, waiting, and resilience…”

Shadid was 25 years old when Jabra died.  It is clear from his subsequent career that, while he may not be aware of it, he transmits the tradition of Jabra, who, at the time of his death at 74, had written 60 literary works in Arabic and English.

In addition to his own writings, which includes two memoirs,

[Jabra] translated thirty books from English into Arabic, among which were several of Shakespeare’s plays: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and Creolanius. Some of his works in Arabic were translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, Slovac and Serbo-Croatian.

Jabra’s life and career provided a bridge within the world of art, linking writers through translations, a talent which prompted New York ‘s Columbia University to award him the 1991 Thornton Wilder Award for Translation.

Anthony Shadid is an American reporter with a sensitivity to the Arabic culture, an attribute rarely found among his colleagues writing for US publications.  This is evident in his work which was described by a former professor, Greg Downey, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as a journalist who gives “voice to people and cultures while untangling the complexities of conflict.”

In the Jabra report, Shadid provides this information on Baghdad as a cultural center during the final years of Jabra’s life:

In between his studies, Jabra taught English literature at Ar-Rashidiyyah School from 1944-1948. At the same time he was the director of the Arts Club in Jerusalem.

In 1948, the year of Al-Nakba, he emigrated to Iraq, where he became actively involved in its thriving cultural life. A few years later, together with Jawad Salim he established the Baghdad Group for Modern Art. Between 1948 and 1952, he taught literature at the University of Baghdad.

Jabra was driven from his homeland by Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a military tactic planned well before 1948, and still ongoing, designed to eradicate or displace not only millions of Palestinians but also to subjugate tradition and history in the collective memory of an occupied people.

These two writers do not deal with the same eras. There is no record that they ever met. But each man brings to his writing an awareness of Arab culture, history and potential which is reflected in their work.

At one point in Night Draws Near, Shadid, the journalist of the duo recalls conversations he had with Mohammed Ghani, one of Iraq’s best-known sculptors, who knew Baghdad in the days before Iraq became so isolated from the rest of the world, following the first Gulf War:

“No one comes here,” he told me. “They’ve all stopped coming.”

Isolation plays a wicked game with pride.  The  ostracism it brings is distressing, particularly to those accustomed to society and its civilities. As Ghani pointed out, few people came to Baghdad during the terrible years of the UN sanctions.  . . . Iraq was a nation under house arrest as the world hurtled forward.

The isolation of Jabra’s birth place, the Palestinian territories, began in earnest in 1967 when isolation became as much a way of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as it was to become in Iraq.

Two culturally rich Arab Muslim populations, each with sizable, but declining Christian communities, continue as occupied populations.  Their military occupiers, the US and Israel, claim they want Palestinians and Iraqis to have the freedom to govern themselves, but the freedom they offer is severely restricted.

Subservience is the response the powerful always expect from the less powerful. However, as Jabra’s translations of Shakespeare and Faulkner would reveal to any reader in any language, subservience is never an acceptable response from a free people.

The picture above of what was once the Jabra house in Baghdad, was taken by Holly Pickett for the New York Times. The banner offers condolences for those killed in the April 4 bombing.

by James M. Wall

The White House hosted two recent meetings with a carefully selected group of 15 American rabbis, Orthodox, Reformed and Conservative. Note carefully, the 15 rabbis are religious leaders.

The first meeting in the White House was on April 20. The second meeting was held May 13. Both sessions were designed to allow carefully chosen White House officials to explain President Obama’s feelings about Israel.

From reports that have surfaced in Jewish media circles, the meetings were a success.

The JTA sent out the story, just as the White House expected it to do. The JTA originally stood for Jewish Telegraphic Agency, an appropriate name for 1917, when the agency was formed.

Ron Kampeas reported the story for the very modern JTA:

Jack Moline, a Conservative rabbi at Congregation Agudas Achim in Alexandria, Va., initiated the meetings after a talk he had with his friend Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, about the Obama administration’s perceived deficit of friendliness toward Israel.

The two meetings, the first of which was held last month, were part of a charm offensive after relations between the Obama and Netanyahu governments hit a low in early March, when Israel announced a major building start in eastern Jerusalem during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden.

After the first meeting with the President’s team, the rabbis returned to their local congregations to spread the word.

Aaron Rubinger said in a May 8 Shabbat morning sermon at Congregation Ohev Shalom, a Conservative shul in Orlando, Fla. “I do not believe the president is abandoning Israel or has any intention of abandoning Israel.”

Rubinger seemed even more upbeat in an extensive interview with Heritage Florida Jewish News after the second meeting this week.

He had gone into the first meeting, he said, “with grave concern that even the public perception of too much space between Israel and the U.S. might give a signal to Iran that the U.S. was not as committed to Israel’s security as previous administrations were.”

Now, he said, he was assuaged. “We are mending and moving beyond this controversy,” he said.

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg of the Orthodox Boca Raton Synagogue in Florida told JTA he left the first White House meeting still wondering if the administration is on the right track.

He remains “cautiously optimistic” because of the depth of commitment to Israel he heard from White House officials.

“I left with a clear impression that these individuals have a real passion about Israel,” even if he did not agree with them on tactics, Goldberg said

The team the president assigned to meet with the Jewish religious leaders included Rahm Emanuel, the president’s Chief of Staff, whose loyalty to Israel is well known, and Dennis Ross.

Ross is the special assistant to President Obama and senior director of the Central Region at the National Security Council (NSC).

In March, 2010, after the settlements conflict arose between Israel and the US, Laura Rozen wrote in Politico, that the White House debate became heated over how to respond to Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on settlements.

Dennis Ross argued that “Washington needs to be sensitive to Netanyahu’s domestic political constraints including over the issue of building in East Jerusalem in order to not raise new Arab demands”.

Other officials in the meetings, including some aligned with Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell, argued that “Washington needs to hold firm in pressing Netanyahu for written commitments to avoid provocations that imperil Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.”

Since those heated debates in the White House, President Obama has been busy “reaching out” to Israel, a strategy of which the two meetings would appear to be a part.

The fact that George Mitchell did not meet with the rabbis while Dennis Ross did, suggests that in conversation with the American Jewish community, the Ross position prevails over the Mitchell position.

The Jerusalem Post reported on an important Ross contribution to the meeting:

Dennis Ross, who runs the administration’s Iran policy, tried to allay fears during the meeting that by calling for a nuclear-free Middle East, US policy regarding Israel’s alleged nuclear capabilities was changing.

Since 1995, Ross explained, the administration’s policy, supported by Israel, was to push for a nuclear-free Middle East in conjunction with comprehensive peace.

The second most important figure in the meetings was, of course, Rahm Emanuel.

After the second meeting, the Jerusalem Post reported that Emanuel said the Obama administration has “screwed up the messaging” about its support for Israel over the past 14 months, and it will take “more than one month to make up for 14 months.”

During the elections there were doubts about President Obama’s support for Israel, and now they have resurfaced,” Emanuel said, according to one of those who participated in the meeting. “But concerning policy, we have done everything that we can that is in Israel’s security – and long-range interests. Watch what the administration does”.

As for Israel and a nuclear-free Middle East, the Post reported that Emanuel said:

“We understand Israel’s full layer of deterrence.”

Also in the meetings, though apparently not saying anything that the Post chose to report, were two other officials with responsibilities to relate to the international and US Jewish communities: Dan Shapiro, the deputy national security adviser who supervises policy for Israel and its neighbors; and Susan Sher, the chief White House liaison to the Jewish community.

Shapiro has served as a political advisor and lobbyist specializing in Middle East foreign policy issues, with a particular interest in Israel. Wikipedia calls him the National Security Council’s top Middle East expert.

Susan Sher is from Chicago where she and First Lady Michelle Obama worked together at the University of Chicago Medical Center.  She joined the Obama administration as an associate counsel. In June, 2009, she became Michelle Obama’s chief of staff.

No doubt this was a good team to assuage the  political concerns of the visiting rabbis.

But wait a minute.  These are religious leaders from across the country. Were they not just a little concerned with issues like human rights for Palestinians? Does the future of an earthly kingdom transcend God’s instructions to follow his commandments?

These religious leaders sat with President Obama’s leading experts on the Middle East and all they discussed was Israel’s security?

There are moral issues here, which were apparently ignored entirely in two meetings in the White House.

No published reports have yet to surface that reflect any discussion of ethical or moral concerns over the continued occupation of Palestinian land and people.

Rabbi Jack Moline told Ron Kampeas:

The [Obama]officials “spent a considerable amount of time emphasizing that the United States is addressing Israel’s security concerns in a manner that [Israeli Defense Minister Ehud] Barak called better than at any previous time.”

Kampeas concluded: “The rabbis in attendance — whose congregations ranged from Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas, the Northeast and the South — seemed receptive and took the message home.”

Is there nothing the state of Israel did in its invasion of Gaza that made even one of these 15 rabbis pause and ask the Obama team not to forget that they represent the Hebrew tradition in their local communities?

These are scholars who study and preach from the Hebrew scriptures.

What an opportunity they missed by not asking the White House officials to take a message to the President, a message like this one from Amos, 5:23-24:

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters,

and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

The picture above is an official White House photo by Pete Souza. Rahm Emanuel is at left; David Alexrod stands in the center.

By James M. Wall

Enough already with the euphemism of “conflict”, which so conveniently covers up Israel’s absolute dominance of  US policy in the Middle East.

This is no conflict; it’s the Occupation, stupid.

Rachelle Marshall cuts through the garbage piled up by American politicians and media, starting in 1947. It is not really all that complicated, as she points out in the April issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

American Middle East policy has been weighted in favor of Israel ever since President Harry Truman rejected the advice of Secretary of State George C. Marshall and pushed through a resolution at the U.N. General Assembly giving most of Palestine to the Jews, who were then a minority of the population.

As the new state of Israel proceeded to expel the original inhabitants and seize more of their land, Washington turned a blind eye—and footed the bill.

Sixty-two years later, this harsh reality of history has been ignored, obscured and finally, all but obliterated, by the creation of a narrative that has blinded the American public to the price it has paid to create and sustain a massive act of injustice.

The conflict narrative was built around facts of history–especially the Holocaust, an horrific by-product of World War II–which were easily woven into a tale transmitted to a gullible Western public, which increasingly appears to be the English-speaking segment of the West, including the US, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Peddlers of that narrative were snake-oil salesmen in Western media, politics, military, and Christian communities, which swallowed the portion of the Israeli narrative that fit their own immediate agendas.

Media likes its stories simple; politicians like to talk to people who like to talk and who bring them money; the military is always eager to develop new weapons on a battlefield; and the churches, well, they were easily bought off, not by contributions but by free travel and release from guilt.

Did the fellow just write that the followers of Jesus, the man of peace, and Amos, the Hebrew prophet, were bought off?

Don’t act so shocked. You know the drill: Give religious folks something to feel guilty about and offer them cheap grace.

They will love you forever, especially if you toss in a few free overseas trips that allow them to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and Paul without having to walk along the Jericho Road and come upon a man who had been beaten, robbed, and left lying by the side of the road.

To really appreciate the manner in which the Israeli narrative has been peddled–a campaign which will be studied in Harvard Business School propaganda classes for generations to come–we need to look closely at Christian travelers who are the targets of this campaign.

Think of these Christians as existing in two flavors.

The first flavor is that church leader who longs to cultivate the magic of “interfaith” dialogue (the mainstream church flavor, cool and sweet). Speak to this flavor group about their church divesting from companies that support the Occupation, and they respond: Can’t do that; have to protect our fragile interfaith dialogue.

The second flavor is spicy, giving off that feeling of absolutism with a bite. This flavor is  the fundamentalist Christian flavor, church folk who love Israel as the rightful recipients of a “promise” Yahweh made eons ago.

The spicy flavor group believes that promise may now be claimed by a secular modern political state which adopted the name, Israel in 1948. It is an ethnic state, not a religious one, a concept Yahweh must be having a hard time trying to figure out.

Come to think of it, does this action describe an idolatrous people, substituting a secular modern state for Yahweh?

Don’t trouble the fundamentalist spicy folk with such theological conversations, and don’t trouble them with New Testament piety about loving your neighbor.

The spicy flavored Fundamentalists are eager to get ready for that “great getting up day” when unconverted Jews will not survive the return of Jesus. In their thinking  the Promised Land becomes a staging area for the Second Coming, a joyous time reserved for Christians alone.

Both of these American religion flavors are easy targets of the narrative that focuses unceasingly on a “conflict” which they believe, with various degrees of sophistication, dates back to a distant past. It doesn’t.

Only with the birth of colonial Zionism in the late 19th century did “conflict” within Palestine between Jews and Arabs emerge.

The picture at the top of this posting was taken in Gaza during the Gaza Freedom March, December 31, 2009. These children cry out not to be forgotten in the land of Jesus and Amos.

This is not a conflict, my friends. It is an Occupation created and enforced by superior military power over a imprisoned population.

It is an Occupation institutionalized behind a Wall that is not about security but all about protecting the Israeli public and the outside world from seeing what Israel’s right-wing rulers do daily in their name.

As folks like the Christian Peacemaker Teams report to us constantly, what is not being seen, and certainly not reported in US media, is a brutal, death-dealing, racially-oriented Occupation carried out by an Israeli government unrestrained by any outside power.

The first line of defense for the Occupation is the American Congress.

In the Introduction to his new book,Silent No More: Confronting America’s False Images of Islam, former Congressman Paul Findley describes his first awakening to the power of pro-Israel loyalties in Congress.

Findley writes that Ed Franklin, a constituent from the congressman’s downstate Illinois district had been falsely imprisoned on charges of espionage in Yemen.  The year was 1974.  Franklin’s family appealed to Findley.

The US had no relations with Yemen, which at the time was a Communist state that in 1990 was united with the Yemen Arab Republic to form the Republic of Yemen.

Like most Americans at the time, my image of the Middle East was gloomy, and official Washington did nothing to relieve my foreboding.  The US State Department viewed the government in Aden (Yemen’s capital) as the most radical of all the regimes in the Arab world.

No American official had entered the country since the June, 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and this meant I would be without the protection of the US government and would have no diplomatic assistance once I arrived.

While pondering whether to make the trip, I asked a senior diplomat what the State Department would do if the South Yemen regime put me in jail too.  His unsettling answer, “We would try and find another congressman willing to go there and try to get you out.”

Findley made the trip and to his surprise was well treated by Franklin’s captors. He was received at the airport by Yemeni officials. He was provided housing in a government guest house. Three days later the congressman met with the country’s president, who informed him that his constituent would be released into Findley’s custody.

That was the beginning of Findley’s involvement with the world’s Muslim population, which at the time, much to his surprise,  exceeded more than a billion people. He began to educate himself about the Muslim religion and culture.

He determined that he would work to eradicate the “grossly distorted public perceptions of Muslims” in the West.

Six years after his trip to Yemen, his 1980 Democratic opponent for Congress portrayed him as “anti-Semitic” because of his efforts to “bring justice to the Palestinians.” He was defended on that false allegation by Jewish colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans.

Findley won that election, but two years later, after 22 years in Congress, he lost his seat to Richard Durbin, who later ascended to the US Senate seat vacated by Paul Simon, thanks to strong support from the Israel Lobby, which did not like what it saw in Findley’s openness to the Muslim community.

Findley stands in stark contrast to Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who recently attacked President Obama for calling on Bibi Netanyahu to freeze settlement building around Jerusalem.

In March, 2009, two months after taking office, President Obama chose Charles Freeman as his National Intelligence Council Director. Schumer did not approve. He said Freeman had been too critical of Israel. Schumer prevailed and Obama withdrew the nomination.

Later Schumer bragged that he had a hand in making the White House “do the right thing.”

At the time, Greg Sargent wrote in the blog, Who Runs Gov that Schumer touted himself as a giant killer in a statement his office sent to the media, quoting Schumer:

“Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position. His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration. I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

On his blog, the Washington Note, Steve Clemons commented on Schumer’s interview on a recent right wing Jewish radio program in New York.

Schumer’s screed gets to the edge of sounding as if he is more a Senator working in the Knesset than working in the United States Senate. This is the 2nd time I know of that Schumer has publicly crossed the line when it came to zealously blaming his own government and colleagues in delicate matters of US-Israel-Palestine policy.

During the third of three major efforts of the George W. Bush administration to get the recess appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton confirmed in the US Senate, Senator Schumer launched a passionate personal campaign to help Bolton succeed.

Clemons was active in the successful effort to block Bolton’s move from a recess appointment to full Senate confirmation. During his short term as UN ambassador, Bolton was openly disdainful of the UN as an institution.

Schumer passionately supported Bolton, a well-known Republican neo-conservative, going against his own party’s opposition to Bolton.

In his book, Findley reflects on his loss to Durbin, now the Illinois senior senator,  in 1982:

If I had won re-election that year, I probably would never have explored Islam or written this book [which includes stories of leading Muslims in American society]–or two books on US-Israeli relationships.

That is a positive attitude for Findley to adopt, but one does wonder: Is the Israel lobby that far reaching in its future planning to determine in 1982 it had to replace Findley with a young Dick Durbin?

At any rate, AIPAC knew Findley had to go. His eyes had been opened. Best to keep him off the Jericho Road.

The picture at the top is of Gaza children during the Gaza Freedom March.  It is from the Sabbah Report. All links to other sources are in color or underlined. I encourage readers to click on these links to explore this topic in greater detail.

For example, you may order Paul Findley’s book from Amazon by clicking on the book’s title above. Also, click on the link for that “great getting up day” for a short rendering of some great choral music. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer on “cheap grace”, click on “cheap grace” above.