Israel-2009 – Page 5 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Just how inept is Ross as a ‘Mideast expert’??

Short answer: extremely.
In case anyone is in any doubt, they should read the transcript of what Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the end of his meeting with Hillary Clinton in Washington yesterday.
The core of what he said there:

Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and– we believe– will not achieve peace. Temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace.

This is a resounding slap in the face for the approach of using lengthy “interim” periods and “confidence building measures” (CBMs) that was a hallmark of Israeli-Palestinian conflict management (not conflict termination) diplomacy, as practiced by Dennis Ross for eight years under Pres. Clinton.
CBMs, of course, were a concept first developed in great detail in US-Soviet diplomacy in the ramp-down phase of the Cold War. That, indeed, was the field in which Dennis got his core academic training. He later rebranded himself, never terribly credibly, as a “Middle East expert.” His main credential in this new field ended up being the abysmal record he racked up as a failed “peacemaker” for those eight years in the Clinton administration.
Oh, and then there was the term he served as founding president of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute from 2006 through earlier this year… Did that make him a “Middle East expert”, I wonder?
This whole concept of CBMs has made an eery comeback into Washington’s Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since the arrival of Dennis Ross in the White House at the end of June.
Laura Rozen blogged last week that she had,

seeking confidence-building measures toward Israel

Coincidentally– or not– one of the big campaigns that AIPAC is currently running is to get US legislators to sign onto a letter “urging” Obama to push Arab states to give up-front CBMs to Israel…
Arab leaders and their citizens have seen this movie before.
In the 1990s, many Arab states moved to end the “secondary boycott” they had previously maintained against international companies doing business with Israel; and some, like Qatar, even took some other small steps toward “normalization” like opening an Israeli trade office in their capitals. That was entirely predicated on Israel making the real progress that was mandated by the Oslo Accord to concluding a final-status peace agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), before the defined deadline of May 1999.
Never happened. The deadline came and went. The Israeli government just went on waffling, with the ever-eager help of Dennis Ross in the White house. And the Israeli government also kept on shoe-horning additional tens of thousands of new illegal settlers into the occupied territories each year…
In the piece that Roger Cohen has in tomorrow’s NYT magazine on US policy toward Iran, there is a telling vignette that reveals just how deeply Dennis Ross does not qualify as anything even approaching a “Middle East expert”:

On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

Dennis Ross, let’s remember, supposedly dealt closely with the Saudis throughout the eight years he was Pres. Clinton’s chief Middle East adviser. He also dealt closely with them, though in a subordinate role, when he worked for Sec. of State James Baker during and after the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war.
But then, he didn’t even really know to deal with them at all, come 2009? He just talked (and talked and talked…) at the Saudi monarch– and couldn’t even deal with the few, to-the-point questions that the king came back to him with?
I don’t know if he tried to raise the issue of CBMs-for-Israel with King Abdullah during that meeting. But evidently, this issue has been pitched to Riyadh as well as other Arab capitals in recent weeks.
And now, Prince Saud has come to Washington to give a definitive and very public answer on the CBMs question.
Of course, it riles the heck out of many Americans, including especially many members of Congress, that they can’t just wave the wand of economic aid over the big Arab oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia to get to do what they (and AIPAC) want them to do….
Also significant: In that same State Department transcript, Sec. Clinton uses a significant– and in my view, significantly flawed– way to describe the US’s role in the current Israeli-Palestinian pre-negotiation.
She said,

In order to get to the negotiating table, we have to persuade both sides that they can trust the other side enough

This is completely, still, that same “trust-building” or “confidence-building” approach to mediation/negotiation that was used to such dismally unsuccessful effect during the Bill Clinton administration when– acting on Dennis’s advice– Pres. Clinton saw his role as only that of a facilitator trying to build “trust” between the two parties.
No. The US is not just a “facilitator”. The US is a party with a strong and direct national interest in getting all the strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict speedily and finally resolved in a way that is sufficiently fair to all sides that the outcome is sustainable for many generations to come.
So the role of the US “mediator” is not just to “persuade” and nudge the countries to the point where they can “trust each other” (and to do this prior to the negotiation starting???) But rather, the US role should be to:

end

implementation

In other words, it is at that stage– the stage of implementing the different phases of a final peace whose full content has already been agreed– that the sides themselves can really start to build the “confidence” or trust of the other side…. And the US and its peace-monitoring partners can certainly help that process along.
But to imply that you need full trust between the two sides to the dispute before you expect them even to sit down at the peace table?? That’s nuts!
The process of so-called “confidence building” that Dennis Ross was so happy to see dragging on for years and years in the 1990s did not end up building up any trust at all. Just the opposite. It built mistrust– on both sides. Not least, because people still locked into the dispute on the ground had no idea where the final process was heading– so every little altercation between them became a huge existential issue that had to be fought over “to the death.”
And meanwhile, Ross’s good friends in the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute were able to implant thousands of additional settlers into occupied Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. How “lucky” for them, eh?
This time, someone should tell Sec. Clinton– and best of all her boss, the president– that you don’t need to build full trust between the sides before the negotiation starts.
What you need to build is a healthy and realistic recognition from each of the parties that:

So now, Pres. Obama, let’s get on with it.
I also note, parenthetically, that Saud al-Faisal seemed to be placing more emphasis on getting the final peace negotiations started than on getting Obama’s demand for a complete Israeli settlement freeze implemented. I think that’s the right emphasis.

Tax-exempt US group sends western Jews to Israeli settlements

Nefesh b’Nefesh is an organization that is tax-exempt in the US that woks to help implant US-origined and European-origined Jews as settlers in Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Big kudos to Mairav Zonszein for writing about NBN in The Nation today.
Zonszein co-publishes the relatively new Ibn Ezra blog with Joseph Dana. The two of them are American-Israeli activists in the great Ta’ayush (‘Coexistence’) organization.
Dana has also posted a good 5-minute video of some interviews the two of them conducted during a recent NBN arrival ceremony at Ben Gurion airport, here. To really understand it, you need to know which of the place-names the NBN people they interview are inside Israel, and which are settlements. Many of the destinations mentioned for NBN-sponsored immigrants are indeed in the occupied West Bank.
Somebody here in the US needs to seriously challenge NBN’s tax-exempt status! On this page on their website they brag about the close relationship they have with the Government of Israel.
Including this:

Nefesh B’Nefesh is the sole NGO that has authority to certify Proof of Residency for the Bituach Leumi (National Insurance Institute) and is deputized to utilize a portable passport control scanner for the Israel Border Police.

How on earth can an organization like this claim to be “non-political”? And why should I and other US taxpayers be giving a tax break to an organization that is openly defying both international law and our government’s firmly articulated policy regarding expansion of the settler population?

How occupations end

We here in Washington DC currently have a front-seat view of how a country undertakes the ending of the military occupation by its ground forces of another country’s territory.
Today, Iraq’s elected PM Nuri al-Maliki will be meeting with Pres. Obama in the White House. Top on the agenda of their talks will doubtless be continuing disagreements over the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (SOFA) that the two governments concluded last November, which mandates a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Yes, there have been some disagreements between the two governments over how the WA will be implemented. But seeing how the US is now in the process of pulling its troops out of Iraq over the next 30 months can inform us a lot about some of the issues involved in ending Israel’s continuing military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve actually seen a lot of military occupations being brought to an end. This is not rocket science. Here’s what we now know:
1. An occupation can end as a result of an agreement negotiated between the occupying power and a “sufficiently legitimate” governing authority representing the occupied area’s indigenous residents; or the occupying power can attempt a unilateral, essentially un-negotiated withdrawal. A third alternative: Of course, occupations can also be ended– as the German occupations of European countries, the Japanese occupations of Asian countries, and Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait all were– by the direct application of military force.
2. Examples of the second (unilateral) kind of withdrawal include the US’s withdrawal from the portions of southern Iraq it occupied in the course of the 1991 Gulf War, and Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from just about all of southern Lebanon. The Us withdrawal from Iraq occurred in the context of a ceasefire agreement the two governments hastily concluded; but that agreement did not end the overall state of hostilities between Saddam’s government and the US.
3. Unilateral withdrawals, because they do not end the state of hostilities between the parties, merely rearrange the furniture for the continued pursuit of those hostilities.
4. The “withdrawal” from Gaza that the Israeli government claims it undertook in 2005 did not, actually, end Israel’s formal status under international as the occupying power in Gaza, since Israel retained its control over all Gaza’s contact points with the outside world and over Gaza’s air-space; it also retained the “right” under international law to send its troops back into Gaza whenever it wished.
If Israel had not still been seen, under international law, as the occupying power in Gaza, last December’s massive Israeli assault against the Strip including the large-scale incursion of Israeli troops into it would of course have been seen as an international aggression, triggering the intervention of the UN Security Council under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. That did not happen, because Gaza is still under the same Israeli military occupation that it has been continuously since 1967. What happened in 2005 was not the ending of Gaza’s occupation, but a rearranging of the way Israel organized it.

Continue reading “How occupations end”

Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda: Nuttier every day!

These are just two of the nuttier arguments currently being made by Israeli and extremist pro-Israeli propagandists. The first is a claim from a pamphlet that was distributed to IDF troops for some months, until recently. The second, which simply assumes that all his listeners will share his own inherent racism against citizens of Saudi Arabia, is an argument made by Ron Dermer, director of policy planning for Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu.
You could say that the increasing nuttiness of the arguments made by propagandists/hasbaristas close to Israeli official circles is an indication of their panic and desperation, now that it’s become clear that some of their earlier claims won’t hold up to the light of day. (“The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world”; “No-one wants peace more than the government of Israel”; etc etc.)
That interpretation of what’s happening may well be valid. But we should remember two other things, too. First, there are apparently plenty of well-connected pro-Zionist people both in Israel and elsewhere who apparently believe claims as outlandish as these ones. Second, Israel’s pro-settlement extremists still command plenty of real coercive power– and they seem increasingly inclined to use it as it becomes clear their claims to be allowed to roam freely and settle over all of the West Bank are meeting an unprecedentedly firm challenge from the US government.
On the extent of the belief in the hasbaristas’ outlandish claims, Haaretz’s Ofri Ilani tells us that the booklet containing the one about the “Vatican-Hizbullah” connection

the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

the chief rabbi of Safed

Ilani reports that the “story” in the booklet,

is narrated by a man named Avi, who says he changed his name from Ibrahim after he left Hezbollah and converted to Judaism. Avi says he was once close to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and describes Hezbollah’s purported close relationships with the Vatican and European leaders.

In the booklet, “Avi”– ~~who quite likely doesn’t exist, and never has~~; scroll down to Richard Silverstein’s comment about him– also purports to describe the close links between Hizbullah, various rich European organizations and individuals, and

all sorts of Israeli organizations that erode the standing of the IDF … We have a special budget for encouraging [Israeli] politicians and journalists who serve our purposes. Every opinion piece that conforms to our position is rewarded generously.

So right there we see the “Avi” booklet embodying in its own text a link with the campaign we have seen being waged for a while now by official and semi-official bodies in Israel against the human rights groups– some of them, gasp, European-financed!– that have been working to document the rights abuses by all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To claim that because a human rights organization raises money from Saudi citizens (while also working with them to build their capacity to improve their government’s rights performance), that in itself makes the work of the organization suspect– or, in Ron Dermer’s ridiculously overstated words, that it “speaks to the collapse of the human rights community”– is equally nutty. But this argument, too, is perhaps believed by significant numbers of people in Israel and elsewhere who have been fed on a steady diet of anti-Arab racism for many years now.
Regarding the continuing, actual capability and propensity of extremist Zionist groups to accompany their anti-Arab propaganda and ideology with acts of clearly racist violence, we need only read this account of what some settler extremists did near Nablus today:

The racist propaganda produced by extremists in and close to Israel’s current government authorities is bad enough, in itself (even if it appears to most sane people to be quite plainly nutty.) But the potential of this propaganda to whip up acts of continuing racist violence should also not be under-estimated.

Netanyahu spokesman uses racist attack against HRW

For many years now, successive governments of Israel– and their blind-love cheering sections in western countries– have tried to “shoot the messenger” when human rights groups or international bodies like, erm, the UN, have criticized official Israeli practices.
So at one level it’s nothing new that Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev yesterday slammed Human Rights Watch’s objectivity, claiming it had “lost its moral compass.”
HRW’s sin? A delegation from the organization went to Saudi Arabia in May to raise money and to work with local rights activists on brainstorming strategies for addressing some of the Kingdom’s own very large-scale human rights problems.
Oh, it’s that old “tainted Arab money” story again. How racist can Regev get?
Let’s be clear here: Neither in Saudi Arabia nor anywhere else has HRW ever raised money from governments. I’ve been on the organization’s Middle East advisory committee for 17 years. I would never have gone on if they’d been an organization that accepts government funding– from anyone.
HRW’s fund-raising dinner in Riyadh was hosted by a private individual.
The report linked to there was by Nasser Salti of Arab News. He focused a little on the part of the presentation made by the HRW team where Middle East division head Sarah Leah Whitson described some of the work HRW has done on Israel. He also noted that,

Keeping with its mission of even-handed criticism, Human Rights Watch has also leveled criticism at other states in the region, including Saudi Arabia. The organization recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers…

Knowing Sarah Leah as I do, I am confident that her presentation at the dinner was professional and even-handed.
HRW does fund-raising events like this all the time— mainly in the US, but also in other countries around the world. It has, as it happens, a particularly rich network of long-time Jewish-American donors.
So what is wrong with trying to raise money for worldwide human-rights work from people in Arab countries??
Would Mark Regev prefer that wealthy Saudis who want to engage in philanthropy do so by donating to the Taliban?
I don’t know how much money HRW netted from Sarah Leah’s visit to Saudi Arabia. But one other clear result of the brainstorming she and her colleagues were able to do with Saudi counterparts there was this well-researched report, which HRW published last week, which calls for an end to Saudi abuses of their millions of migrant workers, who face what the report called “slavery-like conditions.”
Perhaps Mark Regev is indifferent to the fate of those millions of people?
He told the Jerusalem Post,

“If you can fundraise in Saudi Arabia, why not move on to Somalia, Libya and North Korea?… For an organization that claims to offer moral direction, it appears that Human Rights Watch has seriously lost its moral compass.”

This is a really pathetic argument. As Sarah Leah herself pointed out to the JP reporter, it is always quite necessary, in human rights work, to distinguish between a government and its people, and “Certainly not everyone is tainted by the misconduct of their government.”
Regev’s attack against HRW is, it seems, just part of a broader attack the Israeli government is planning against HRW and Amnesty International.
The JP reporter, Herb Keinon, writes,

The Israeli government will probably also be working in close conjunction with a new, Jerusalem-based group called “NGO Monitor” (which is funded, for what it’s worth, by the Weschler Family Foundation, Newt Becker of Los Angeles, and Ben & Esther Rosenbloom Foundation of Baltimore.)
When I was in Israel in February/March I did make, as JWN readers knew at the time, several attempts to get myself accredited as a visiting reporter with the Israeli government’s press office in Beit Agron, West Jerusalem. Sadly, they claimed they’d never heard of The Nation (!!!) and I never got it.
But the helpful young man in the GPO office there, Jason, pressed upon me several brochures from “NGO Monitor” and urged me to do a story about their “revelations.” (He really wasn’t terribly swift… )
Anyway, Regev’s use of the old “Arab money” canard is one that should absolutely be exposed for the racist thinking that it is.

Max B. “feels the hate” in Tel Aviv

The gifted video-journo Max Blumenthal has now brought us a vivid picture of the racist hatred that is so freely expressed by some young people in Tel Aviv.
This adds to Max’s growing “hate in Israel” library. The first installment was “Feeling the hate in Jerusalem”, which he released last month.
In Jerusalem, Max was interviewing mainly a bunch of pampered and drunk visiting young Jewish Americans. This time, his subjects include some young, apparently raised-in-Israel Jewish Israelis participating in some kind of street festival. Max notes that one of them described Pres Obama as “a Nazi, a Muslim, and a ‘Cushi,’ which is Hebrew slang for ‘nigger.’ When questioned about the source of his opinions, one teenager proudly declared himself a ‘gezan,’ or a racist.”
… Anyway, go see for yourself what kind of racist hate-speech seems to be considered quite okay to use in the public discourse in today’s Israel.
Great work, Max!

Younger Israeli peaceniks: Dov Kheinin

One Israeli/American friend commented on my BR piece that it seemed I interviewed mainly Israeli peace movement people who are over 65. He suggested–and I agreed– that it would have been excellent to interview, among others, Hadash (Communist Party) MK Dov Kheinin.
Another friend then pointed to this very informative interview in English with Kheinin, that was published in February 12. Two days after the Israeli election, if memory serves me well.
It was conducted by phone on January 6, that is, while the assault on Gaza was still raging; and it was posted by Josh Nathan-Kazis.
The whole interview is very important. But here’s just the beginning:

… What is your position on Israel’s actions in Gaza?

What do you make of Meretz’s initial support for the bombardment, and the support of the mainstream Jewish Israeli left?

Why is it that they supported the bombardment and your party doesn’t? Are there political considerations that exist for them that don’t exist for Hadash?

Hadash is often grouped in the media with the Arab parties, and your voters are mostly Israeli Arab. What does it mean for Hadash to be a mixed Jewish Arab party?

Big thanks to the friends who drew the interview to my attention.

My piece on the decline of the Israeli peace movement

… is now up on the Boston Review website, here.
I found it a really tragic article to work on. I have admired the Israeli peace movement since its inception. I still think its finest hour was when it mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets of their cities in September 1982, to protest the role Defense Minister Sharon and the IDF had played in orchestrating the massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
From the late 1980s through 1993 I worked pretty closely with Naomi Chazan and other leaders in the movement, particularly in organizing and facilitating some of the early contacts with various Palestinians and Arab-state nationals in which these women and men started hammering out the details of what a viable two-state solution might look like and how it could be achieved.
Naomi is one of the smartest, most dedicated, as well as most fair-minded (un-chauvinistic) Jewish Israelis whom I have ever had the privilege of knowing.
The Jewish-Israeli peace movement still has many extremely inspiring and dedicated people in it. I have written about some of them here at JWN over the years. But the political and social weight of the movement within Israeli society has declined very steeply since 1982.
In the BR article I pinpoint the singular role that I think Ehud Barak played in deflating the movement– to be precise, with the fatwa he issued in December 2000, in which this man, who had been elected 18 months earlier on an explicitly pro-peace platform, ruled that he now judged that Israel had “no Palestinian partner for peace.”
But I also describe four long-term reasons for the movement’s decline:

One factor I was not able to explore in the article– which got cut very heavily along the way– was the fact that over recent years a lot of pro-peace Israelis have actually moved away from the country. It’s not just Amos Oz and the late Amos Elon moving to Tuscany, or wherever. It’s the whole cohort of younger pro-peace Israelis who are now turning up in the US (and Europe), including many who now blog from here in “the west.”
I guess I can understand (and sympathize with) why they make this choice to emigrate from Israel. But their emigration does have the effect of leaving Israeli society even more heavily under the influence of the ethno-nats and the religio-nats than it would otherwise have been.
One thing the BR editors cut out of my piece was the observation I had made that though, at the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza last December, the (once proudly pro-peace) Meretz Party in Israel for a crucial few days gave its support to the war effort, the US branch of the Meretz publicly expressed its opposition to the war from the get-go.
(I think Meretz USA later tried to fudge the fact of that disagreement with the “mother party” in Israel.)
For me, this points to an interesting broader change in the dynamics between Jewish-Israeli society and Jewish-American society. Until very recently, the pro-peace movement in Israel was always a far broader and weightier presence in Jewish-Israeli society than the pro-peace movement in the US has been in Jewish-American society. A huge chunk of Jewish American society was– probably since the 1960s, if not earlier– what Phil Weiss and others have described as “PEP”, “progressive, except on Palestine.”
Throughout those long decades, you would frequently hear from Jewish Americans some version of this argument: “Though I might well have concerns about some aspects of the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, still, it’s the Israelis who are on the front-lines, and therefore we Jewish Americans can’t undercut them by expressing our concerns openly.”
… And meantime, in Israel, the pro-peace activists were frequently out on the streets protesting their government’s policy. They were founding organizations like Peace Now, B’tselem or Yesh Din, or the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions that threw great energy into documenting, publicizing, and organizing against Israeli abuses in the occupied territories. Those Israeli movements were (and still are) crucial voices of conscience; and for many long years they really made a difference.
Okay, perhaps not enough of a difference… But a difference, all the same.
And now? They are still a voice of conscience– a function that, as Quakers know, is never to be under-estimated. But they have nothing like the social and political weight in Israeli society that they once did.
But meantime, Jewish-American society is now more willing than ever before to adopt political positions that are in direct contradiction to those of the government of Israel; and important voices in Jewish-American society are more willing than ever before to criticize the Israeli government’s policies openly.
This is certainly true regarding the settlements issue; and I hope it proves true regarding other issues on the peacemaking agenda, too.
There is one further wrinkle in this new dynamic. Though Jewish-American critics of the actions of (this) government in Israel are a much larger force within Jewish-American society than they have been for many decades, the mainstream US media remains, in general, much less hospitable to views critical of Israeli government government policies than the mainstream Israeli media are.
However, the rise of the blogosphere has certainly “evened out the playing field” of the US political discourse on matters Israeli and Palestinian. So yes, while there are all kinds of staunchly pro-Netanyahu commentators out there in the US (and Israeli) blogosphere, there are also numerous strong voices– Jewish and non-Jewish– in the US blogosphere that are highly critical of Netanyahu and vocal in calling for a fair and durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
So anyway, do go and read my BR piece. I see you can comment on it there… But you can also comment on it here. Your choice!
(After a few days maybe I’ll see which discussion looks more interesting; and I might close the JWN one down at that point.)

More great blogging from N. Sheizaf on the ‘Wall’ ad

Maariv journo Noam Sheizaf, who blogs at ‘Promised Land’ (!) has a couple more great posts on the Israeli cellphone ad question.
In this one he argues that a “big” ad like this one for Cellcom was most likely conceived and designed by high-ups in the advertising company– and that they would have designed it to appeal to the broadest possible zeitgeist in (Jewish) Israeli society.
He writes,

although some people in Israel find this commercial to be in bad taste, even offending, the Israeli mainstream sees nothing wrong with it – in fact, some comments on the internet even regarded it as one that advocates peace, since instead of fighting, the soldiers and the (unseen) Palestinians are having fun playing soccer.

Indeed, commenter ‘Michael W’ tried to make exactly that argument here on JWN an hour or so ago. That, despite the facts that– as I noted in that same discussion– no Palestinians are ever visible in the ad at all; and if the ad does have any “Palestinian” references in the story-line, they are mainly that,

But of course, the Palestinians and their misery remain invisible. Which of course was also one of the major goals Sharon had in building the Wall. As one commenter someplace has also noted, the Palestinians also remained completely unheard in the ad.
In this PL post, Sheizaf notes that the cellphone ad topic has gotten some interest in the Israeli blogosphere and elsewhere– including the WaPo. But not yet anywhere in the Israeli print media.
He also notes this:

immediately after I offered jewlicious.com as an example of some American liberal Jews’ tendency to adopt and defend right-wing politics and extremely unliberal ideas when it comes to Israel, there was a post on the site describing the commercial as “cute”.

How people ‘see’ Israel’s Apartheid Wall (contd.)?

The indefatigable Adam Horowitz published a post at Mondoweiss yesterday drawing attention to the sick ad an Israeli cellphone company is running that makes the Apartheid Wall seem like just a harmless (or even ‘fun’) natural feature of the landscape.
Maariv’s Noam Sheizaf also blogged about the ad yesterday.
You can see a clip of the ad there. It shows some on-duty Israeli soldiers kicking a soccer ball around in the shadow of the Wall’s 30-feet-high concrete fastness. Not shown: the Palestinians caged in on the other side.
The punch-line is, “After all, what are we all after? Just a little fun.”
Unspeakable.
When you see the Wall, especially the places where it goes anywhere near built-up Palestinian areas and is studded with looming concrete watch-towers, the overwhelming image that might come to your mind, as it does to mine, is that of the fence-and-watchtower system around a concentration camp.
The cellphone ad was made by the US-based advertising company McCann Erickson.
Can you imagine they’d make a similar ad using images of Bergen-Belsen as the “fun” location?
It’s interesting, though, the different ways that people “see” the Wall. When I was having lunch with my friend Yossi Alpher in Tel Aviv in March, I said something like, “But Yossi, you have to admit the way the Wall looks, it just looks so savage and inhumane– just like the old images of the Nazi camps in Europe!”
“Really?” he said, with his usual mild manner. “Do you think so? I think when most Israelis look at the Wall it just reminds us of all those old black-and-white pictures from our history books of the earliest Zionist settlements, which were all based on the ‘fence-and-watchtower’ model. We just don’t see it like the Nazi camps of Europe. It looks familiar and reassuring to us”
Actually that’s a pretty sad commentary on Israeli/Zionist history. The reason the early Zionist settlers in Palestine– like the early European settlers in North America, too– needed stockades and watch-towers was because (1) there were already people living on the land being settled, and (2) those indigenes did not (to say the least) welcome the incoming settlers with open arms.
But Yossi’s observation also pointed to the continuity of the Zionist land-grabbing project. After all, if the present Wall were built within Israel’s own pre-1967 borders, then (1) only a small number of Palestinians and only small numbers of other people around the world would object; and (2) the Wall would not need to be nearly so high, or studded so savagely with watch-towers, because if it were constructed inside Israel, and the Israeli army and settlers had pulled out of all the land to the east of it, then there could be a peace between the two peoples, with or without a peace agreement.
But no. Precisely because the Wall is part of a continuing attempt to fence off and grab Palestinian land from deep inside the West Bank (including east Jerusalem), that is why, in the Israeli view, it “has” to be that tall, and that brutal. Because there is resistance to that land-grabbing project– both from Palestinians and from billions of other people around the world.
So yes, there is a continuity with the longer history of the Zionist project.
But why should anyone else in the world, apart from the oh, perhaps four-five million Zionists, be expected to put up with this constant and arrogant stealing of the land of others? They shouldn’t.
And why should anyone in the world think that this Wall is just a “fun” backdrop for a cell-phone ad? Beats me.