Category: Israel 2010

Settler extremists on Facebook

Here’s a good report on the settler extremists’ extensive presence on Facebook.
It includes things like this:

    The Givot Olam outpost, east of Nablus, also opened a Facebook group. They posted a picture from a wedding where two young men are seen dancing with M-16 rifles. Right-wing activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir of Hebron also have Facebook profiles, where they share their opinions on current events.
    Bentzi Gopstein, who is a member of the Kiryat Arba Regional Council, operates the Facebook group “The Jewish idea – Rabbi Kahane’s philosophy.”
    “We disseminate the ideology of Rabbi [Meir] Kahane,” he explains. “I started it about six to eight weeks ago, and we have about 600 members. We put up a ‘Daily Kahane’ – a statement by the rabbi every day on the situation…

How much of this publishing activity is legal under Israeli law, I wonder?

Israeli general warns about settler violence

The IOF officer in charge of the West Bank region, Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrahi, recently told a group of the officers under his command that extremist settler activity could “set the West Bank ablaze”, according to this recent, un-bylined news report in Haaretz.
Mizrahi reportedly warned that, whereas the IOF feels it can maintain decent working cooperation with representatives of the big, “official” settler body, Yesha, settlers in some of the unauthorized settlement outposts

    “don’t believe in us at all as a state. They want something else, and when someone doesn’t know the limits anymore you don’t know where it will end up.”
    Mizrahi said the army and the Palestinian security forces, trained in Jordan by Keith Dayton, an American general, have been cooperating, but that Israeli soldiers still need to know how to fight them if the need should arise.
    “This is a trained, equipped, American-educated force,” Mizrahi said.

The report included this assessment from Mizrahi about the probability of a broad, violent Palestinian uprising in the West Bank:

    “I don’t think something will happen anytime soon, unless there’s a very serious incident on the Temple Mount or in the Cave of the Patriarchs,” he said [using the Jewish names for the principal Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem and Hebron]. However, he said he was “very anxious” about an escalation being set off by settler violence.
    “Most of the settlement movement is fine, very normal, but a mosque set on fire and another mosque set on fire adds up,” Mizrahi said.
    Defense officials are concerned over a series of mosque burnings in the past six months, including a fire that destroyed books and prayer rugs in a mosque near Nablus that firefighters said earlier this month was caused by arson.

The brigade-wide training exercise at which Mizrahi spoke was for the Kfir Brigade. The report said that it

    focused on urban warfare – including the capture of a simulated Arab city – and pitted Israeli troops against Palestinian security forces.
    Senior officers present at the exercise, the most extensive session the infantry brigade has undergone since it was founded just over four years ago, said Monday there were no indications that Israel would have to fight the security forces.
    However, the army said it needs to be prepared for all eventualities.
    … In the training exercise, three battalions went from house to house, where they faced Israel Defense Forces soldiers posing as members of the regular Palestinian security forces, Palestinian civilians or reporters.
    Until now, soldiers serving in the brigade have been serving only in the West Bank, but Armored Corps commander Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel said the exercises would enable the brigade to fight on the Gaza and Lebanon fronts as well as in the West Bank, if necessary.

The Haaretz report made a point of noting, however, that it is not just the settlers who engage in illegal (and presumably, also, potentially destabilizing) violence against West Bank Palestinians: Kfir Brigade units engage in it, as well–

    It should be noted that the main perpetrators of crimes against Palestinians belong to the Kfir Brigade, according to statistics on Military Police investigations, which the Israel Defense Forces provided to the human rights organization Yesh Din.
    The Military Police is investigating a variety of crimes in the territories, from the killing of Palestinians and the illegal use of firearms to abuse and plunder.

This news report has an odd structure. As noted above, it has no byline, at least in English. The part reporting Mizrahi’s remarks seems to have been written by someone present when he made them (though it could also have been ‘reported’ from a recorded version provided by a participant in the event other than the Haaretz writer.)
It was also significant that the writer made a point of putting the Kfir Brigade’s own record of unjustified violence onto the record there, as well.
But I think the most significant aspects of the report were to learn that the IDF is indeed training for how to confront the Dayton forces (or any other well-trained Arab force that is operating in a predominantly urban environment)… and to hear from this high-ranking Israeli general that he judges that the extremist settlers “don’t believe in us at all as a state.”
If this assessment of the extremist settlers is one that’s predominant in the high ranks of Israel’s security services, wouldn’t you expect to see them imploring the government to do something concrete– arrests, detentions, disarming– to shut down the capabilities of these potentially extremely destabilizing networks within the West Bank?
Well, perhaps you shouldn’t expect to “see” them arguing for this. But if the government were truly concerned about preserving the stability of the West Bank, you would expect to see it taking actions to suppress the capabilities of the extremists… We really haven’t seen that happening yet.

Livni shows a little real vision on the Iran issue?

I just read this account, from the BBC’s Tim Franks, of what looked like some kind of cross between a ‘war-game’ and a panel discussion about Iran’s nuclear program, held yesterday at Israel’s close-to-power ‘Inter-Disciplinary Center’ (IDC), in Herzliya.
Well-connected and high-level participants from both the U.S. Israeli took part in the event, though not, apparently, any currently serving officials in either government.
Franks wrote this about Tzipi Livni, the head of Israel’s main opposition party, Kadima:

    Ms Livni directed particular criticism at the current Israeli Prime Minister’s Benjamin Netanyahu repeated warnings about a second Holocaust.
    “The role of leadership is to give an answer to this kind of threat,” she said, rather than to stoke worry.
    “Israel in 2010 is not the Jews in Europe in 1939.”

Franks also wrote that Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said that, time and again, during ‘war-games’ or consultations of this type held jointly between Israeli and American participants,

    a marked difference of emphasis would emerge from the role-playing, with the Israelis favouring military action as a ‘first course of response’, and the US tending to look at alternatives.
    In that context, there was a particularly striking contribution from Dan Halutz, the previous chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, and another participant in the day of war-gaming.
    He argued strongly not just for talk of military pre-emption, but diplomatic pre-emption.
    He said that the Iranians should be isolated from the rest of the Muslim world, which, he claimed, was “by and large more concerned than Israel is about a nuclear Iran.”
    The way to do that, he said, was clear: a comprehensive regional peace settlement. “The price is known, all the files are ready.”

Ah, Dan Halutz! The guy who was so certain back in July 2006 that he knew exactly how to “isolate” Hizbullah from the rest of the Lebanese population!
What an idiot. Why should anyone consider him an expert on anything to do with the politics of the Muslim countries of the region?
Still, it sounded like an interesting gathering.
And I find it interesting that some high-level Israelis are willing to talk so openly about the way they see the ‘linkage’ operating between the Iran situation and the need for Israel-Palestine peacemaking. This, though Israel’s willing armies of hasbaristas inside the U.S. body politic are still so absolutely adamant that no-one in the west should assert that there’s any linkage between the two issues at all…
My assessment is that current PM Netanyahu also believes that there is and should be linkage between the two– but that he sees it operating in a way that’s almost 180 degrees turned round from the view Halutz was expressing. I think Netanyahu’s real view is something like the following:

    1. He may well believe that Iran is aiming at, and may get to, the possession of a nuclear weapons capability within the next few years. But he isn’t really very scared by that prospect– despite what all his armies of hasbaristas are yelling in the west– because he knows full well that Israel’s own nuclear arsenal is completely well poised to destroy Iran and come to that the whole world if Israel chooses what we might call the “Samson option”. (The hasbaristas, of course, are not allowed to make any mention at all, however indirect, of Israel’s own NW capability.)
    2. Nonetheless, Netanyahu is very happy indeed to keep tensions high around the Iranian nuclear program, and to carry on inciting/pressuring the U.S. to escalate these tensions (including by delivering threats that if the U.S. doesn’t act ‘forcefully’, then Israel just might have to launch its own military strike against Iran)– primarily because keeping the attention of U.S. officials focused on ‘containing’ and threatening Iran prevents them from giving due attention to what’s happening on the ground in occupied Palestine. It’s all an elaborate distraction ploy!
    3. Therefore, meanwhile, as American officials are fussing around and devoting huge resources to ‘containing’ and combating Iran, Netanyahu’s government is very busy indeed continuing with its policy of colonizing the West Bank and shutting up all its rightful Palestinian owners inside the increasingly overcrowded open-air pens called “Oslo”. Every time Americans dare to challenge that policy, Netanyahu distracts their attention to Iran. And any Americans appeals to the idea that what Netanyahu’s doing in the OPTs might be making the fight against Iran harder is met with squeals of outrage from the hasbaristas to the effect that there really cannot be any “linkage” between these two issues.

Bottom line: Whereas Halutz judges there is cross-issue linkage, but within that picture assigns the need to counter Iran a higher priority than the need to preserve the entire, continuing settler-colonial project in the West Bank, Netanyahu judges there is linkage but assigns the need to preserve the settler-colonial project a higher priority than the need to do anything to actually counter Iran.
… Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that the “initiative” on the Iran issue seems to be slipping out of the hands of Washington and into the new hands of Turkey’s Erdogan and Brazil’s Lula, backed up by the broad network of supporters that both those leaders have around the world.
Is Netanyahu perhaps already planning the launching of Israeli dirty tricks against both those governments?

“Another Acre and Another Goat”

    I am very happy to be able to publish this essay by veteran Israeli peace activist Amos Gvirtz of Kibbutz Shefayim. The essay vividly captures the continuity in the conduct of the Zionist settlement movement in Palestine from pre-state days to the present. It also captures, as Amos puts it, “the continuation of the slow and ongoing implementation of all the components of the ‘Nakba.'” Thanks, Amos! ~HC

Another Acre and Another Goat
By Amos Gvirtz
During my childhood in the 1950s I still heard echoes of the argument (from pre-state days) between the Zionist Labor Movement and the Zionist Right. The Labor Movement people criticized the Zionist Right for declaring the intention of the Zionist Movement to inherit the Land of Israel. They argued that these declarations would arouse Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise. In their view, the state-in-the-making should be built quietly, according to the slogan “another acre and another goat.”
When one sees and hears what’s going on in the occupied territories today, one can only conclude that the same approach characterizes our own times as well, together with the same old argument between quiet action and declared intentions. Except that today, instead of buying land, it is taken by force. Along with the building of settlements, Palestinians are expelled and their houses destroyed. All these things are done on a small scale – after all, our entire existence depends on the international community that supports us. If Israel were to act on a larger scale, that support would decline. Only in the context of a war does Israel allow itself massive action, as was the case in the “Cast Lead” operation in Gaza, where the IDF killed 1400 people and destroyed more than 4000 homes!
Whoever follows these things in the news, hears from time to time about small land confiscations near settlements, for security needs or for paving a road. The very existence of the separation barrier (“the wall”) serves as a means for stealing land. After the separation barrier is built, as the years go by, additional lands are taken from their Palestinian owners on the grounds that they are not cultivated – even if there is no possibility of cultivating them since many landowners are denied permits to cross the barrier and work their lands. And if the IDF doesn’t confiscate the land, then land-greedy settlers attack Palestinian farmers. The IDF protects the attackers and expels the farmers. After three years when Palestinians are unable to or do not dare to enter their lands, the lands are officially declared “state lands” because they have not been cultivated.
It’s the same story with home demolitions. First they confiscated the granting of building permits from Palestinians by disenfranchising the work of the Palestinian building and planning committees. After that the Israeli authorities practically stopped granting building permits to Palestinians. And then, when thousands of Palestinian families had no choice but to build without permits, they were issued demolition orders. The demolitions are carried out little by little over time, so that the media loses interest.
The policy of expulsions works in a similar way. Permanent residency is denied to people who marry local Palestinian residents, even if they live in “Area A” (the Palestinian cities) which are under the full control of the Palestinian Authority. Even after decades of married life, these non-resident spouses are required to go abroad every three months and return to their families as tourists. Sometimes they are not allowed to return at all. It seems that the State of Israel wants these families to leave their homes in the occupied territories in the wake of the spouses who are denied residency.
And so it seems that we have returned to pre-state days. Israel has eradicated its borders with the occupied territories, ignores international law and international norms, and systematically acts to annex the West Bank and the Golan Heights. For this purpose the State steals lands, builds settlements, destroys houses and expels people.
In the 1980s the country was up in arms: The racist Rabbi Meir Kahane succeeded in becoming a Knesset Member! He announced in a loud voice what Israel was doing little by little. The shock was great. Legislation against racist incitement was passed – not, of course, against racist actions – and Kahane’s party was declared illegal. If a law against racist actions had been legislated, we would be in danger of placing Israeli governments outside the law.
On the eve of Holocaust Day, the headline in the Israeli newspaper “Ha’aretz” informed us of a military order issued by the Head of the Army Central Command that would enable the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank. At this point I will take the risk of saying something that is prohibited among us: that’s how it started in Germany. They spoke about the transfer of Jews from Europe. Only when they realized that this was impossible did they decide on the “final solution.”
These days Knesset Members are busy initiating legislation that will prohibit commemorating the “Nakba” (the Palestinian catastrophe) of 1948… The only thing lacking is the initiation of legislation that would prohibit the continuation of the slow and ongoing implementation of all the components of the “Nakba.”

When will this nation be ‘ready’ to govern itself?

Scandals of bribery and administrative and sexual impropriety continue to plague the highest levels of Israeli society. (Not to mention war crimes.)
The latest, about former Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski, is here.
Everyone in the region is asking: When will this nation be politically and administratively ‘mature’ enough to be allowed to govern itself?

Obama’s ‘Nuclear Security’ showcase, Israeli nukes, etc

The police helicopters have been droning overhead for a couple of days here in Washington DC, as scores of world leaders sit with Pres. Obama at the ‘Nuclear Security Summit’.
(But not Netanyahu. We’ll come back to him later.)
This morning I was having a meeting with a prominent former U.S. diplomatist who recalled how, back in the first months of the GWB administration, Secdef Rumsfeld had been making a huge issue out of the need for ballistic missile defense, convening summits and the like.
“But then,” my friend said, “it turned out that a bunch of Saudis had discovered that an airplane full of fuel could be even more deadly than a ballistic missile– especially if it had a guidance system as sophisticated as that provided by the human mind… It’s the same thing today. They’re all barking up this nuclear security tree, when there are so many other potentially very lethal materials lying around.”
Oh well. I guess Obama and his people have been trying to make a point… including by convening this gathering to which everyone except Iran, Syria, and North Korea gets invited.
But actually, isn’t that rather a childish “point” to seek to make? “We’ve got more friends than you have! Nanny-nanny-boo-boo!”
… Well, and then speaking of potentially very dangerous actors on the world scene who might one day get hold of the ingredients for nuclear weapons, there is of course Israel.
Oops! My silly mistake! Israel of course already has an advanced nuclear arsenal that may well be one of the three most deadly on the planet.
Just a couple of days ago, I blogged here that, just as the ‘elephant’ of the undue influence that dedicated pro-Israeli political appointees have long had on the making of U.S. Mideast policy is now coming ponderously out of the room of silence in which it was previously caged, then surely it must be time that that other big ‘elephant’ of which no-one in U.S. polite company like to speak– the fact of Israel’s own massive nuclear arsenal– should also be brought into the light of day.
Little did I know that that very evening, veteran Israeli commentator Yaron London was putting finishing touches to an op-ed in which he made exactly that same argument. (English translation here, thanks to Didi Remez.)
London was writing that it is time for Israel to end its long-pursued policy of “nuclear ambiguity”:

    Who are those interested in maintaining the ambiguity? The United States, with which, according to foreign sources, we have reached an agreement that it keep its wide eyes shut, and the Arab countries, which are unenthusiastic about getting drawn into a nuclear arms race.
    But the value of ambiguity has long since passed. Iran is certain to become nuclear, or will perhaps be stopped “half an inch before tightening the screws” from actually getting the bomb. The argument that Iran should not be denied a nuclear weapons so long as this is not being denied from Israel — if we are to believe foreign sources — has found a receptive international audience.
    …The age of nuclear ambiguity is coming to an end and it will be followed by an age of open debate. It is time that more people be allowed to take part in the debate which is most critical to our very existence.

Interesting…
One source that London linked to was this news report in Yediot Aharonot on April 10, which quoted a recent Jane’s report on the topic in these terms:

    the Israeli strategic force could be deployed by the Jericho 2 missile, which has a range of up to 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles), or the five-year-old Jericho 3, which reaches up to 7,800 kilometers.
    It is also believed to be able to deploy by air, using F-16 fighter jets, and even by sea through its submarine fleet, providing an opportunity for a second strike if its land systems are attacked.
    Israel acquired three diesel-powered Dolphin-class submarines in 1999-2000 which are capable of launching adapted Harpoon cruise missiles fitted with nuclear warheads.
    In addition, Jane’s says some observers believe Jerusalem has developed tactical nuclear weapons such as landmines and artillery shells.

Oh, and then I can’t help but juxtapose that sobering report with the photo in this news report today from Maan News in Bethlehem.
The report starts:

    Israel’s military said the bodies of two “heavily armed” Islamic Jihad operatives were found in the Gaza Strip late Tuesday, hours after they were killed in clashes near the Al-Bureij refugee camp…

Okay, so the IOF had apparently gone into the Gaza Strip after killing these two guys (and maybe beforehand, as well, in order to kill them?) But anyway, the photo, which was provided by the Israeli military, shows the “heavy armaments” it said it found on their bodies.
Of course, there is absolutely no way of verifying that the men were ever armed with these items, which seem from the photo to include only two folding-stock Klashen’s, eight Klashen bullet-magazines, and some other unidentifiable objects. We have to take IOF’s ‘say-so’ on this.
But even if they were carrying these weapons– let’s think about the armaments the IOF invasion force no doubt had at its command!
What, no pictures of those items?
And then, not far away, is the nuclear facility in Dimona…
How much longer do Israelis think that westerners will continue getting taken in by all their extremely dishonest arguments? Do they think we’re all idiots?

But is the U.S. able to secure Palestinian-Israeli peace?

Tuesday, veteran WaPo columnist David Ignatius published a very insidery report to the effect that Obama is considering rolling out a specifically “Made in America” plan for a final peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
This would– as David noted– be quite an abrupt reversal of the painstakingly incrementalist, strongly ‘CBM’-focused approach pursued thus far by special peace envoy George Mitchell. (It may also signal that Mitchell himself might be on his way out?)
David’s story got picked up on the news side of yesterday’s WaPo, as well as the NYT. The writers of most of these stories made a point of quoting one of the former Natinal Security Advisers Obama has been meeting with as saying that “everyone knows” what the main shape of any possible two-state-based deal would be… Namely, something like the “Clinton parameters”, which was a “take it or leave it” peace plan presented by Pres. Bill Clinton to both sides in late December 2000, less than one month before the end of his presidency.
Last night, Daniel Levy had a piece on The Middle East Channel, in which he writes,

    The spectrum of a plan’s possible content essentially looks like this: At one end, a comprehensive regional peace plan including an Israel-Syria deal, and implementation of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative’s offer of comprehensive normal relations with Israel; in the middle, a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement addressing all the core issues and with some regional add-ons; and at the minimalist end (yet not to be sneezed at), a deal that fixes two states, an Israeli-Palestinian border delineation, and security arrangements, but defers closure on all details of, for instance, refugees, Jerusalem’s Old City, and an end of claims. Even a one-sentence frame of reference might move the ball forward dramatically. It could read like this:

      Establish a border based on the 1967 lines with an agreed, minimal and equal one-to-one land swap taking into account new realities on the ground (settlements close to the Green Line), whereby the Palestinian state is on 100 percent of the ’67 territory and is demilitarized with security arrangements overseen by a multinational deployment.

Unlike Daniel Levy, I have grave doubts whether having the U.S. President announce that a “frame of reference” is from here on out U.S. policy would do very much to push anything forward, at all.
Hulloo!! Hasn’t anyone noticed that the world has changed a lot since December 2000? The most salient changes are

    (1) The situation on the ground has changed considerably over these past nine years. There are maybe 100,000 more Israeli settlers in the West Bank than there were then. There is the Wall/Barrier. There’s the long-running siege of Gaza and the separation between Gaza and the West Bank. There’s the lunge Israeli opinion has made deep to the ethnonationalist right… Ariel Sharon’s murder of the institutions of Oslo in 2000… The death of Yasser Arafat and the collapse of Fateh… etc etc.
    (2) The Palestinians and other Arab parties have seen so many prior promises about ‘deadlines’, ‘firm U.S. commitment to peace’, etc, come and go that just another announcement on its own, without any accompanying action, is not going to shift anything.
    (3) Most importantly, the balance of world politics has shifted considerably since December 2000, too. The U.S. is no longer the unquestioned king of the hill. Even if Washington should prove able to shake itself free of the pressures of the Zionist lobbies (whether Jewish Zionist or Christian Zionist)– which is a big ‘if’– I don’t see how on its own it would be able at all to rally the kind of regional coalition needed to make this peace happen.

Let’s be clear. This whole picture whereby the U.S. has come to be seen by far too many Americans (and some non-Americans) as “the only” power capable of brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace is really out-dated today. Successive administrations in Washington have worked vigorously, and very successfully, ever since the days of Henry Kissinger, to secure and then maintain American domination of the peace diplomacy. (And ways too many American pundits have grown up over the past 35 years with that being their only frame of reference. It just seems only ‘natural’ to them all!)
But it hasn’t worked.
Well, put it this way: It hasn’t worked in terms of securing a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis. And it hasn’t worked for the Palestinians, who have seen the misery, dispossession, dispersal, and oppression in which they live continue or increase almost uninterruptedly throughout those 35 years. You might say it has worked, however for those participants in, and supporters of, the whole project of gaining ever greater Jewish colonial settlement in the land of Mandate Palestine, that is, the whole project of Zionism.
It certainly hasn’t worked for the real interests of the American people.
Clearly, it’s time for something new. Like taking the whole issue back to the U.N. Security Council where it rightly belongs, and where it should and can be addressed on the clear basis of international law and international legitimacy. No more of this unworkably complex business of redrawing loopy boundaries around illegal Israeli settlements and requiring millions of Palestinians to simply sign away their rights.
Levy’s suggestion of “deferring closure on all details of, for instance, refugees, Jerusalem’s Old City, and an end of claims” looks like a real non-starter. Right up there with the idea of a “shelf agreement” that Olmert and Livni came up with, during Annapolis. (Remember Annapolis?) Palestinians and Israelis, both peoples, desperately need to see an end to the conflict. And that can be won only by securing final status agreements on all these issues and thereby the settling and end of all outstanding claims.
Can any president in Washington be successful in heading up a process that secures these things? I doubt it. Back to the Security Council.

Too much to blog about, #1: Anat Kam

The ‘Anat Kam’ story has been developing a lot over the past week. It’s the story of two Haaretz journalists, Anat Kam and the older Uri Blau, who have been hounded and gagged by the Shin Bet for having leaked– about a year ago!– some serious stories about how the Israeli security forces developed a protocol for sending troops in on the ground to assassinate wanted Palestinians in cold blood and then cover it up.
The best coverage of this story, without a doubt, has come from West Coast U.S. blogger Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam. read his latest post, up today, and then read back from there. (Or, probably, forward as well, as the story develops.)
The case has so many angles it’s hard to know where to start.
One is the whole phenomenon of this ‘gagging’, which seems to operate very much like ‘banning’ in the old South Africa. Except in the old S.Africa, the ‘banning’ orders slapped onto Winnie Mandela and hundreds of other activists were at least public knowledge. Wheras in the case of Anat Kam, the gag order itself is subject to a security blackout and she has been rendered– far more than Winnie Mandela ever was– into a complete non-person.
(Blau escaped, with help from his bosses at Haaretz, by being sent to London. But the Shin Bet got ahold of his computer in Israel.)
Another strange aspect of this case is the bit-part played in it by Judith Miller, of all people. Yes, the same woman who played such a role in helping peddle the fabricated evidence that jerked the U.S. political elite into supporting the invasion of Iraq is now playing, in a small way, a bit of a good role in this story.
Richard has been writing about the story for more than a week now on his blog– and has done so despite much personal agonizing over whether this was the right thing to do, or whether it might jeopardize Ms. Kam’s situation even more. But then on Sunday, Judith Miller got a big piece about the Anat Kam affair published in Tina Brown’s ‘Daily Beast’, which is much more of a crossover journalistic operation, straddling the divide between personal blogs and the MSM.
What she wrote was, in general, pretty good. Sh went a bit overboard when she described Israel as “a nation that prides itself on its vibrant discourse and a free press”… I mean, it’s a country in which military censorship is omnipresent. (Which means, for example, that journos of all nationalities who’re based there aren’t allowed to report on any Palestinian projectiles that fall on Israeli military bases, as many do… leaving readers with the impression that they all fall on civilian areas.)
Until yesterday, the Israeli media referred to the whole Anat Kam affair only using elliptical references and by writing ‘hypothetical’ stories about “what would happen if there were a country that did something like this?” This, though it’s a small country and all the journos there (and just about everyone else, too) already knows what’s been going on.
Then yesterday, Yediot Aharonot reprinted the J. Miller story and left in the big black slugs imposed by the censorship. (You can see it here.)
But as Richard and others have noted, Israel has a very lively “Web 2.0” crowd; and on Facebook and Twitter etc there’s been a lot of commenting on Anat Kam’s gag order.
This far, just about all of the commentary in the media has been on the “freedom of the press” aspects of the whole affair. And there’s been precious little discussion of the underlying revelations that provoked the state’s actions against Blau and Kam. They are deeply shocking– much more shocking than the question of temporarily ‘gagging’ someone. Namely that the Israeli security forces– not sure if this was the IDF/IOF or the Border Police, or which units– had been systematically sending units into, I believe, the West Bank with orders to kill certain named suspects, and then make up a story that they’d been been shot “in the heat of combat” or shot “trying to escape”, or whatever.
Just like poor Steve Biko– or those hundreds of other South African freedom strugglers who were either targeted for assassination in the streets or were shot while in the custody of the security forces, or were shot shortly after leaving the formal custody of the security forces.
That is a story we cannot lose sight of.
Richard wrote about that a bit here.
Thanks for your great work, Richard.

Aluf Benn on how Netanyahu misread America

Benn has a great piece in Friday’s Haaretz about the overweening self-confidence with which PM Netanyahu launched his ‘triumphal visit’ to AIPAC this week– and how seriously he misread the situation in Washington:

    Netanyahu hoped things would turn out differently when he set out Sunday night to make a serious show of strength in Washington. By means of his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, the prime minister wanted to prove to Obama that American Jewry and Congress are backing him in face of the administration’s demand to stop construction in the settlements in the West Bank and to desist from judaizing East Jerusalem. Apparently the premier believed the public opinion polls that said Israel is more popular than Obama in the eyes of the American public.
    … [Netanyahu] notes frequently to aides, politicians and journalists that Israelis don’t understand America like he does. That they see only the president and the administration, and don’t understand the power of Congress, the lobbying groups and the think tanks.
    This week the premier put his experience and outlook to the test. But Obama also had received a shot in the arm. Just hours before meeting with Netanyahu, he had signed the health care reform law for which he had fought so hard. That was the president’s test… the president emerged as a winner and a hero. Thus, after months of eulogies by politicians and public disappointment with his performance, Obama is perceived once again as the leader of the pack.
    Netanyahu, by comparison, is perceived as a pushover when he concedes to his partners and political rivals.

I hope this is true…

“Israel’s ‘consensus on Jerusalem’ has cracked” — Ben Meir

Today’s Haaretz carries a very significant op-ed from Yehuda Ben Meir, a former MK from the National Religious Party who, looking at the results of two recent polls asks,

    Who would have believed that we would reach a situation where more than 40 percent of the public supports a construction freeze in East Jerusalem and only half say building should continue? The significance of these surprising numbers is that the Jewish consensus on united Jerusalem has been cracked, if not shattered.

The polls he cited were:

    a Haaretz-Dialog poll, [in which] 48 percent of the respondents said Israel should continue building in all parts of Jerusalem, even if the price is a rift with the United States, while 41 percent said Israel should stop building in East Jerusalem until the end of negotiations with the Palestinians, [and] a Mina Tzemach poll, where 46 percent said building in East Jerusalem should be frozen and only 51 percent opposed such a move.

The present significance of these findings lies in the argument, very frequently made by Israel’s defenders here in the U.S., that “the administration shouldn’t put any pressure at all on the Israeli government because it will only cause Israeli voters to dig in their heels and become more hard-line, and the attempt to use pressure will therefore backfire.”
In fact, the last time a U.S. president attempted to use some (though not many) elements of real pressure on an Israeli government, which occurred under Pres. Bush I and Secretary of State James Baker in 1991-92, the attempt proved notably effective in Israeli terms. In the Israeli elections of June 1992 the Israeli public, seeing the pressure from Washington and assigning an appropriate value to the maintenance of strong relations with the U.S., voted out the inflexible, Likud Party government of Yitzhak Shamir and voted in Labour’s Yitzhak Rabin, who was perceived– quite rightly– as being a much more successful manager of Israel’s always vital relationship with the U.S. administration.
(The Bush-Baker campaign of calling Israel to some degree of account for its performance on the perennial issue of settlement building also did not, contrary to what the AIPAC types and neocons claimed, prove to lead to Bush I’s failure in his elections in 1992. What had the most effect then was, as we should all remember, “the economy, stupid!”)
Yehuda Ben Meir migrated from the U.S. to Israel in 1962. His current views place him at the leftward end of the spectrum of “nationalist-religious” thinking in Israel. I certainly hope he has a wide following there.
He writes,

    The Israeli public knows the difference between historical Jerusalem and those Arab neighborhoods that have never been part of the city. Therefore, the entire Jewish people, and the U.S. government as well, fully supported the restoration of the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City because this was justified. It embodies the revival of the Jewish people in their land, as well as their connection to the sites of their heritage and their right to possess them. Dispossessing Arabs of their homes and attempts to take over clearly Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem are not accepted by the world, including most American Jews, and according to the poll results, not even by a large part of Israel’s Jewish population.

I find the claim about the U.S. government “supporting” the restoration of a Jewish synagogue in the Israeli-occupied portion of the city interesting. Let’s hope the U.S. government gives equal support to the restoration of the hundreds of Christian and Muslim holy places and cemeteries in the area of 1948 Israel, eh?
But that’s a side-issue. The main issue is that, according to the poll figures Ben Meir refers to, the recent apparent sparks of a possible U.S. campaign to start once again holding Israel to account for its (actually illegal) program of settlement building in the occupied areas have not caused the claimed “backlash” in Israel… Indeed, they may well even have spurred more Jewish Israeli voters to think deeply and sensibly about the value of the vast amounts of support they get from Washington (and from my tax-dollars.)
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One last note: Many opinion polls in Israel report only the views of Jewish Israelis, ignoring the views of the 21% of the country’s citizenry who are ethnic Palestinians– or, they report the views of the two groups separately. It is not clear whether the two polls Ben Meir cited asked their questions of all Israelis, or only of Jewish Israelis. But the way he interpreted the results makes it seem as if he was referring only to the reported views of Jewish Israelis. The views of Palestinian Israelis should, of course, in any society claiming to be democratic, be given proportional weight to those of Jewish Israelis.