Category: Israel 2003-08

This, from AP:

Israel has stopped targeting Palestinian militants for death, according to Israeli security officials, fulfilling a key Palestinian demand for a truce to end four years of violence.

The whole of that story is really interesting. It includes an account of a phone interview that Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal gave to an AP reporter in Beirut today. (Which mentions some of the main points I noted in my previous post here.)
Security coordination in Gaza is going ahead, and Saeb Erakat has said that he and some Sharon aides have started preliminary discussions about setting up a Sharon-Abu Mazen meeting.
The Israeli irredentists are also organizing to “resist” being evacuated from Gaza and the four small West Bank settlements on Sharon’s “first to evacuate” list.

Sometimes, when you’re running a well-funded colonial venture, you have to put up with having the most disturbing kinds of riff-raff queueing up to take part… But I suppose from the point of view of some Israelis, just so long as the riff-raff in question aren’t, ahem, actually Palestinians seeking to return to their ancestral homes and homeland, then you’d be prepared to put up with them?
But Russian anti-Semites being given help to immigrate to Israel?? Now that’s what I call a story… And Lucy Ash of BBC radio gives an interesting glimpse into it at the end of this piece, which was first aired yesterday.
Her piece is a broad look at what’s been happening to the numbers of the Russian Jews (and non-Jews) who have migrated to Israel in a huge wave since the fall of the Soviet Union. While she leads with some reporting about the high numbers of recent Russian immigrants to Israel who have been “returning” to their earlier homeland, it was this part, lower down in the story, that caught my eye:

Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.
He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.
The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.
“The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy,” Mr Gilichensky said. “It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.
“But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.
“But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel.”

Ash added that the Israeli Attorney-General has launched a criminal investigation into,

Continue reading “Neo-Nazis in Israel”

Ze’ev Schiff is a crusty old guy, one of Israel’s founding generation, and I admit I’ve grown very fond of him and his wife Sara over the years. We disagree on a number of things, but agree on many others; his heart is in the right place, and he’s often quite ready to think outside the box.
I admit, at earlier points in the present intifada, his writings seemed to get a little hard-line for my taste. On the other hand, he’s always been a real gentleman, and he even tried to help me get into Gaza last February.
Now, he’s back in fine form with a good new column in today’s Ha’Aretz. It’s titled “Time for an Israeli initiative.”
He starts by writing that Israel has had– and missed– four “major opportunities [since 1967] for a significant change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Then, he notes,

From the past, we have learned that when we get an opportunity for a major change, it usually arouses fear and trembling in the hearts of the politicians.
Instead of demonstrating courage, the tendency is to freeze everything and to wait until perhaps we receive divine confirmation for the step. And, in the meantime, the window of opportunity is closed. Past experience teaches us that we can also create opportunities when we reach a crossroads, like the present one, when Arafat’s leadership and his domination of the Palestinians are fading away.
At the moment we have to wait and avoid direct involvement in the coronation of kings, which we tried to do in the 1982 Lebanon War. Nevertheless, we have to prepare an Israeli initiative.

So here’s the initiative he proposes. It must, he writes, focus on two principal elements:

Continue reading “Good sense from Ze’ev Schiff”

In the world of political ‘spinning’ as in combat–and especially, perhaps,
in the political spinning that surrounds combat– there is
a really handy maneuver some people use which is to launch a diversionary
attack.

You’d think that Sharon and the leaders of the IDF had taken a lesson right
out of Karl Rove’s playbook with the way that over the past few days they spun a massive campaign aimed
basically at diverting world attention from the vastly disproportionate
and escalatory campaign they launched against northern Gaza at the end of
last week.

The diversion? To accuse the UN relief agency UNRWA of allowing one
of its ambulances in Gaza to transport a rocket to the front-line on behalf
of the Palestinian militants…

Continue reading “Diversionary spin (again) in Israel”

The following came in from the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which have maintained a team of nonviolent witnesses in Hebron (al-Khalil) in the southern West Bank for many years now. You can learn more about CPT’s principles at their website.

At about 7:15am on the morning of Wednesday September 29, Chris Brown and Kim Lamberty of Christian Peacemaker Teams were attacked by settlers while accompanying children to school. The two of them were walking a group of
children from the village of Tuba to the village of Tuwani along a road
where the children have experienced harassment from settlers in the past. A
group of five settlers came out of an outpost of the nearby Ma’on settlement
and attacked Brown and Lamberty with a chain and bat. All of the children
were able to get away to their homes without injury.
The settlers pushed Brown to the ground, kicked him in the chest and whipped
him with a chain. He has bruises and cuts on his chest and face and is
experiencing trouble breathing. They kicked and beat Lamberty’s legs. She is
not able to walk and has significant pain in her left arm and a cut on her
chin.
Lamberty and Brown were taken by ambulance to Soroka hospital in Beersheba
for treatment.

The ready recourse by many Israeli settlers to the use of direct physical violence–in addition to the much deeper structural violence that they perpetrate by being key participants in Israel’s broad colonial venture in the occupied territories–is a very worrying feature of the situation there.
So too is the laxity with which the Israeli authorities tend to treat instances of phsyical violence perpetrated by the settlers.
Today’s Ha’Aretz has this story, updating the tale of settler Yehoshua Elitsur, accused by police of having gratuitously killed Sa’al Jabara, a 44-year-old Palestinian man, near his settlement on Monday.
The police, who are expected to recommend that Elitsur be charged with manslaughter, had requested that he be kept under house arrest or some other form of surveillance pending the completion of the legal proceedings against him. But the Kfar Sava Magistrates Court–inside Israel– which has been hearing the case, turned down the police’s request.

Continue reading “Alert! Christian peacemakers attacked by Israeli settlers”

Such interesting news yesterday about the FBI “investigating a mid-level Pentagon official who specializes in Iranian affairs for allegedly passing classified information to Israel…”
That WaPo account there names the chief suspect as Larry Franklin, described as a desk officer in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia Bureau, which is run by neo-con William J. Luti.
(The NYT doesn’t name the suspect, and says he worked for the Pentagon’s #3 guy, Douglas Feith. Feith and Luti are strongly pro-Likud figures who were both heavily involved in creating the “alternative intel universe” that produced the “justifications” for launching the invasion of Iraq. Feith is more senior that Luti.)
The accusation is that Franklin handed Israel classified assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Much more stunning than that: un-named “law enforcement officials” (presumably from the FBI) told the WaPo and other media that the documents were handed to Israel via AIPAC, the hitherto unassailable “armored bulldozer” of pro-Israeli influence in US political life.
There are at least four intriguing aspects to this story:
(1) That the suspect works in such a strategically sensitive and politically controversial shop in the Pentagon, and was presumably under the protection there of an extremely politically powerful boss– whether Feith, or Luti. Is someone trying to “get at” one of those two more powerful figures by taking down his protégé first?
(2) That– given the already existing, extremely close links at all levels up to the very highest between the national-security policymakers in this administration and in Sharon’s Israel — Israel would have felt the need to do any extra-curricular spying at all! Israel security officials already have the virtually free run of the whole Pentagon! To put it bluntly: why would they need to suborn Larry Franklin when they already have Dougie Feith in their pocket (with the full permission of Feith’s superiors)?
(3) That people in the FBI are willing to publicly finger AIPAC. That takes guts! They must, presumably, have some extremely conclusive evidence. Otherwise, expect to see the FBI’s budget shut down completely with a single snap of AIPAC’s fingers in next year’s budget, should AIPAC decide to counter-attack.
(4) That the government has apparently given Franklin and his associates a few days more leisure between announcing their intention to arrest them, and actually doing so. The WaPo piece says: “arrests in the case could come as early as next week, officials at the Pentagon and other government agencies said.”
This last aspect of the case is truly mind-boggling!

Continue reading “The Israeli spying accusation: big questions!”

I am quite unequivocally against the killing of all people. Period.
Recently, we have learned that extremists among the Israeli settlers, including some of their so-called Rabbis have been threatening to kill Ariel Sharon if he should order any evacuation of settlements from the occupied territories. (An eery echo of what happened to Rabin. Therefore, a threat to be taken seriously.)
I am totally against the killing or harming in any way of Ariel Sharon. By anyone, from whatever side.
But I have to note that in recent years Ariel Sharon has participated in and spearheaded a policy that has quite intentionally and deliberately undertaken the killing of at least another 149 of God’s children, with considerable additional deaths caused “collaterally” in those operations.

[From B’tselem’s statistics for the period Sept. 29, 2000 through June 30, 2004: “At least 149 of the Palestinians killed were extrajudicially executed by Israel, 90 of them in assassinations carried out by the Israel Air Force and 59 of them in assassinations carried out by ground forces. In the course of these assasinations 100 additional Palestinians were killed, 90 of them minors.”]

So okay, because of that stunning and atrocious record, I admit I felt tempted to say when I heard of the threats against Sharon’s life, “Well, he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.” But that is fatalistic and inhumane. Even Sharon is capable of grace, capable of an inner transformation.
Actually, Rabin was a good example of that. From Mr. “Break their bones” in 1988 to Mr. “Oslo Accords signer” just five years later.
Yossi Alpher, an Israeli friend with whom I have discussed war and peace issues intermittently for the past 15 years, has a new article in the New-York-based Jewish weekly, Forward, about the threats against Sharon.
In it, he warns:

Continue reading “He who lives by the sword…”

You’ve probably read a lot from time to time about various pro-Israeli organizations slamming the BBC for being “anti-Israel”. Well now, the Mass Media Unit at Glasgow University, in Scotland, has published a new study that shows that, in the case of BBC One news and ITV News–the two major t.v. news organizations in the UK–just the opposite is the case.
The press release announcing the release of the study says:

The study suggests that television news on the Israel/Palestinian conflict confuses viewers and substantially features Israeli government views. Israelis are quoted and speak in interviews over twice as much as Palestinians and there are major differences in the language used to describe the two sides. This operates in favours of the Israelis and influences how viewers understand the conflict.

Focusing on the two channels’ new programing since the start of the current intifada, the researchers, “examined around 200 news programmes and interviewed and questioned over 800 people.”
Why am I not surprised by the findings? perhaps because I have worked in the Anglo-Saxon media for so long and have certainly seen the chilling effect that “silencing” organizations like FLAME, CAMERA, etc have had on nearly all the major media outlets here in the US, and only slightly less so in Britain. I certainly appreciate the fact that the Christian Science Monitor, being owned by a church rather than subject to the pressures of advertisers, has been ready to keep my columns running for all this time; though I know that they have come under great pressure for doing so.
I’d love it if the Glasgow Media Unit would turn their same methodology onto the major t.v. news outlets here in the US. I am sure the results would be even more depressing.
Anyway, here, in digest form, were their major findings on the British t.v. news programs:

Continue reading “Israel and the BBC”

Read this.
Then, if you have the stomach for it, see how President Bush referred to Israel’s actions in Rafah at the AIPAC conference yesterday.

Oh boy, has Ariel Sharon been given plaudits in the west for his “courageous” decision to withdraw from Gaza…
Trouble is, too few policymakers in the west have any real understanding of the difference between Sharon’s dedication to pursuing his policies in both Gaza and the West Bank on a totally unilateral basis, and the pursuit of any kind of a negotiated peace.
Al-Jazeera has a very moving little 20-pic slideshow on its English-language website that shows what “unilateral” really means for the people of Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.
“Where they make a desert, they call it peace” (Cornelius Tacitus, about the actions of those early empire-builders, the Romans).