Category: Israel 2010

Max Blumenthal on N.Y. ‘Lawfare Project’ conference

Blumenthal went to this seven-hour conference, held Thursday by the ‘Lawfare Project’ in New York, and has written a great blog post about it at Mondoweiss.
The Lawfare Project has activities in both Israel and the U.S., that are designed primarily to discredit all those human rights activists and organizations worldwide that have criticized Israel’s actions, to criticize those provisions of the laws of war that they consider somehow “unfairly” hamper the armies of states that they judge to be “democracies”, and to work to overturn those provisions.
Sound familiar? Yes, of course these last two things were a big part of what Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, David Addington, and John Yoo tried to do after 9/11, as well. They were arguing then– and the Lawfare Project is arguing now– that in the “unprecedented” circumstances of today’s worldwide war between the forces of “good” and of “evil”, the “old” norms and existing body of laws of war, which seek evenhanded application between all warring parties and seek to provide protections, in particular, to the citizens who are the victims of war, need urgently to be revised– and pending that, worked around.
How very sad, therefore, to see that one of the three co-chairs of Thursday’s conference was the Dean of Columbia Law School, David Schizer. Blumenthal has a seven-minute video clip from his speech, in the blog post.
Go read Blumenthal’s whole post, which is extremely well researched, as well as well written.
The flier for the conference notes that,

    This program has been approved in accordance with the requirements of the New York State Continuing Legal Education Board for a maximum of 6.5 Transitional and Non-Transitional MCLE credits: 1 Ethics and 5,5 Professional Practice.

Ethics???
I think it’s outrageous and tragic that the Dean of a once-fine law school like Columbia is lending his prestige to this highly anti-democratic and anti-humane campaign (a major aim of which is to trash Judge Goldstone and block demands for implementing his report.)
But at a broader level, many of the developments within the Jewish liberal establishment in the U.S. are fascinating, because we are now seeing for the first time ever, I think, sharp debates within this establishment over the morality of actions taken by the current Israeli government and also, underlying that, over the morality of many of these very same tactics and strategies as have been used in Palestine by the Zionist settler movement throughout its entire 115-year history there.

The Biden factor: Iraq, Palestine– and Israel

Breaking news: late Wednesday evening in Cairo, Abu Mazen and his buddies at the Arab League decided there will be no ‘proximity talks’ between the PLO and Israel.
I’m kind of interested in the way Abu Mazen is getting Amr Moussa to front for him these days. It does indicate a serious lack of his own confidence in the depth of his support among Palestinians… But that matter is tangential to the main story here, which is–
The Amazingly Unsuccessful ‘Diplomatist’ Joe Biden!
Biden, lest we forget, is the man who in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last July, publicly gave Israel carte blanche to attack Iran whenever it wanted.
Biden was also, back in the pre-2003 day, one of Ahmed Chalabi’s main supporters in the U.S., and an enthusiastic backer of the idea of partitioning Iraq.
Since he became Vice-President, Biden has had a role “orchestrating” Washington’s Iraq policy on behalf of the president… Well, we’ve seen how that’s been going… To be fair, that is not as horrendously badly as it might have been going… But it hasn’t been going brilliantly, either– certainly not as brilliantly as most of the US MSM have been saying.
Biden has not done a particularly good job there, I think.
But he has really been bombing in Palestine.
Yes, of course we can and should lay the primary blame for what’s been happening in Jerusalem this past couple of days squarely on the Israeli government, the body that greeted Biden, on his first visit to Israel as vice-president, with not one but two announcements about the construction of new settler housing.
Notable that Yossi Sarid writes in Thursday’s Haaretz that,

    Don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu for one moment when he says he “never knew” [about the 1,600 new settler housing units announced Tuesday.] The Jerusalem planning committee is only too aware of what the bosses want, and the government has decided to step up construction in greater Jerusalem. Dispossession and taking possession, kicking out and moving in – that’s what it’s all about.

Sarid also gave us these additional details about Biden’s time in Israel:

    This is one visit Joe Biden will not quickly forget. First he was compelled to sit through 25 minutes of an annoying speech in his honor by our president. Shimon Peres really believes that he is the destination for pilgrims from all over the world who drink in his musings and are intoxicated by his vision.
    Later, Biden was given a certificate memorializing his mother, but the glass broke. Once again, Bibi didn’t pay attention, leaned on it and shattered it. No fear, his speeches have always diverted attention from such mishaps. And finally, to add a finishing touch of infuriating disgrace, the Haredi neighborhood Ramat Shlomo was dumped on the vice-presidential head.
    Truth be told, the Obama administration just about asked for this slap. In Jerusalem, the lesson has been learned that the White House doesn’t fulfill its obligations – it just goes through the motions by issuing insincere rebukes.

Insincere rebukes, indeed.
Juan Cole and Pat Lang, two very seasoned analysts of Middle eastern dynamics, are just two of the people who say that, on hearing of the new settlement construction, Biden should simply have ordered up his plane and left Israel, rather than sitting there, going through the rest of the charade of the visit, while saying something on the record about how the Obama administration “condemns” the new construction.
I’m assuming Biden decided on this course of action after consultation with Washington. (He took 90 minutes to decide what to do.) Do he and his boss the Prez have no idea how disgusted most of the people in the world are with the fact that, though from time to time Washington might say something critical of Israel– meantime Washington never holds Israel to serious account, for anything, including “grave breaches of international humanitarian law” like implanting its settlers into occupied territories?
And the U.S. Congress continues to shovel money to Israel. U.S. diplomacy continues to get completely bent out of shape by defending Israel’s actions in every international forum, at every turn, and by zealously pursuing Israel-driven agendas throughout the entire Middle East, including with regard to Iraq and Iran.
And these actions by the administration and Congress put the lives of U.S. service-members deployed around the world, often in pursuit of Israel-driven agendas, in significant additional risk.
Regarding Biden, Pat Lang has this intriguing little vignette in his latest post:

    I was in Biden’s senate office on one occasion when Biden’s Zionism boiled over in a truly repulsive display of temper. I was there with my Arab employer to visit the senator… The Arab made some pro forma positive reference to the “peace process.” Biden flew into a rage, grew red in the face and shouted that this was an insincere lie and that his guest knew that it was only Arab stubbornness that prevented “little Israel’ from living in peace. His “guest” sat through this with what dignity he could manage. I would have walked out on him if I had been alone.

Assuming that the vignette’s true– and I tend to trust Lang on that– it reveals quite a few disturbing things about Biden. Not just the guy’s knee-jerk pro-Israelism, which is endemic just about everywhere in Congress, with a few notable exceptions. But also his evident lack of any diplomatic skills. I mean, why fly into a pro-Israeli rage like that if an Arab guest should happen to mention the “peace process”? What on earth good was he hoping to achieve by doing that? Nothing that I can think of– except to vent his own feelings.
… And meanwhile, George Mitchell, Mr. “Senior Peace Envoy”, has completely dropped off the map.
It is honestly not clear to me at all, right now, what it is that Obama and his people are hoping to achieve in the Arab-Israeli arena. Their entire “peace diplomacy” is in shambles. It’s as if Obama really doesn’t care any more about any of the lofty– but oh-so-important– goals he articulated back in the first days and weeks of his presidency. But he should realize that letting his “peace diplomacy” fall into disarray, as he has now done, is something that will have consequences far, far beyond Israel and Palestine. And quite possibly, more rapidly than anyone in Washington realizes.

Obama, Biden cave to Netanyahu

So Vice-President Biden arrives in Israel– and the very same day the Israeli government announces it will build 112 new apartments in the settlement of Beitar Illit.
This despite PM Netanyahu’s “pledge” to halt the building of settlements in the West Bank (outside of East Jerusalem) for ten months– and despite the Israeli government’s broader commitment to halt all settlement construction under the 2002 Road Map.
Does Biden get on the next plane out of the country the moment he heard of the Beitar illit plan?
No.
The Israeli defense ministry said building the 112 apartments was needed “to plug a potentially dangerous 40-yard gap between two existing buildings.”
But oh my gosh! I understand that there are still a few other places in the West Bank where there are gaps between one settlement building and another… Or– even more dangerous!– gaps between one settlement and another! Evidently all these “gaps” need to be built on immediately! How can the settlers possibly be secure at any point before the whole occupied West Bank is covered with their apartment blocks???
(Irony alert.)
Honestly, if the Obama administration accepted this form of argumentation, as apparently it did, then it is being run by people who are either extremely stupid or irresponsible to the point of criminality.
I’m trying to get my head around why they feel they need to cave so completely to the Netanyahu government. It cannot only be the prospect of the upcoming mid-term elections here in the U.S. Could it be that Netanyahu is threatening that, unless the US goes along with his plans in the West Bank, then he cannot be responsive to the requests they make of him for restraint regarding Iran?
If so, this is outrageous blackmail. Obama and Biden should call Netanyahu on it immediately.

New life for Israel’s anti-occupation left?

Didi Remez has a great post today about the gradually snowballing effect of the weekly anti-occupation demonstration’s in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district.
He writes,

    Thousands of demonstrators, Jewish and Palestinian, from a wide range of backgrounds and with diverse political views came out in a show of force to protest injustice. Writing about “Sheikh Jarrah and the birth of a coalition,” Jerry Haber at Magnes Zionist captures the unique stripes of this emerging movement…

Remez’s post and Haber’s are both really worth reading. They seem to indicate that a new, more focused of anti-occupation activists is growing up in Israel– which is highly welcome, given the demoralization, decimation, and general political failure of the older generation of “peace” activists.
Note that difference, between Israelis who struggled for an amorphous form of “peace” with their Palestinians and the new generation that is more focused on ending the injustice of Israel’s nearly 43-year-old military occupation of Palestinian (and Syrian) land.
This reminds me of something I heard the older-generation French-Israeli activist Sylvain Cypel say in Washington a couple of years ago. He recalled that back when he was a social activist in France in the 1950s,

    we were all very concerned about the situation in Algeria, and called for many years for ‘peace between France and Algeria’. But our movement never got any real traction until we switched from calling for ‘peace’ with Algeria to calling clearly for an end to France’s illegal and repressive rule over Algeria. That was when we started to have an effect on the political system inside France.

That advice certainly resonated with me, from my years growing up in an end-of-empire Britain. “Peace” with India, or Kenya, or Botswana, or whatever??? Heck no! What Britain needed to do in those colonial situations was quite evidently Just Get Out.
Same with Israel in the OPTs today. There, a whole industry has grown up around the loosey-goosey theories that thousands of outsiders have about “peacemaking”, “confidence building”, etc etc etc. That can come! I’m not against it for a moment. But what people need to focus on, surely, is the structural issue of military occupation, and how to end it, pronto.
Otherwise this “peace-processing” business can just go on and on and on– as we have seen already!– for decades! (While the colonists continue to enjoy and consolidate their illegal gains.)
… I see from that Wikipedia page that Cypel is supposed to be working for Le Monde in New York these days. I wonder if I could contact him there. Any ideas?

As’ad AbuKhalil, the Mossad, and Israel’s KoolAid

As’ad AbuKhalil has an excellent piece on the Al-Jazeera English website, in which he examines all the hasbara-fueled myth-making around the alleged prowess of Israel’s Mossad.
As I noted in this reflection on the recent Dubai affair, Israel’s spymasters and policymakers made the two fatal mistakes therein of underestimating both the capabilities and the intentions/commitment of the leadership of Dubai’s police authorities. It seems to me that this under-estimation could well have resulted from the Israeli leaders having drunk too much of their own KoolAid about the alleged “invincibility” of the Mossad.
After the debacle he presided over in Amman in 1997, current Israeli PM B. Netanyahu should have been well aware that Mossad can and does make some serious mistakes! But no, since he and his key security advisers hang out only with people, including many Americans and other westerners, who worship the ground the Mossad stands on, he had evidently forgotten that inconvenient fact.
It’s a pity that in his piece, As’ad didn’t include the Amman affair in the list of Mossad debacles he presents. To be quite fair in his use of evidence, I think he should have referred, too, to the killing in Damascus two years ago of longtime Hizbullah strategist Imad Mughniyeh, which was almost certainly organized by the Mossad. But even if you put all Mossad’s claimed “successes” in their practice of the arts of violence, subterfuge, and cruelty into the hopper along with their many evident failures, it is still clear that the Mossad is very, very far from being the “all-knowing, always very smart” spying and secret-ops outfit that its many propagandists paint it as.
At the root of everything, though, is the serious misjudgment, made by so many colonial administrations in the past, that their side and their people are so smart, and all members of the indigenous majority so basically dumb and ineducable, that the use of subterfuge, alleged “smarts”, and prestidigitation will always enable to the “smart, colonial minority” to outwit and prevail over the indigenous majority.
That hasn’t worked anywhere since the 19th century. Back then, the ability of colonial administrations to monopolize the flow of information meant they were almost completely unhampered in their implementation of large-scale extermination projects in locations far from the bastions of their home “civilization”. And they were therefore able–and nearly always oh, so willing– to kill and oppress the indigenes on a massive scale in pursuit of their colonialist projects, and also to twist, divide, and manipulate the indigenes without anyone back home being easily able to “report on”, or really understand those dreadful facts.
But guess what, Israel! We are no longer in the 19th century! Within the region of which you’re a part, you may dominate everyone else on all the steps on the ladder of military escalation, right up to, of course, very advanced nuclear weapons… But military might on its own is of no use in the 21st century. And meanwhile, other actors in the region have considerable amounts of strategic, civilizational, and tactical smarts– and they have access to all modern means of communication.
In fact, these days, the myths you continue to propagate about the alleged superiority of everything Israeli, including the capacities of your Mossad, clearly stand in the way of you being able to make realistic judgments about the capabilities and intentions of your neighbors in the region, and therefore about the true balance of forces there. By continuing to try to rely on force, coercion, and manipulation rather than genuine peacemaking and seeking viable, sustainable ways to become integrated into the region as a Jewish state within it, you are in fact just making the failure of the whole “Jewish state” project even more probable. So carry on drinking the KoolAid of your own alleged “superiority”, if that is what you want to do… But don’t be surprised if increasing numbers of people around the world refuse to drink it with you.

Israel Ballet bombs (artistically) in DC

The Israel Ballet, which reportedly receives around $1 million annually in funding from the Israeli government, gave a performance Saturday in suburban Washington DC that was panned by influential WaPo dance critic Sarah Kaufman.
She wrote,

    One could hear the dancers rejoicing from the stage Saturday after the curtain fell on the Israel Ballet… [A]s the audience filed out of Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring Performing Arts Center, the dancers’ commotion seemed tinged with relief that the three-hour-plus event was over.
    If so, they were not alone.

About the performance itself, she wrote,

    The performers danced with a firm correctness but no joy. Standing behind their partners, awaiting a cue for a lift or a turn, a few of the men looked bored. Throughout the evening, the men and women alike lacked a sense of presentation, which was odd given the intimate dimensions of the 500-seat theater. They shouldn’t have had a problem with projecting in that small space, yet they came across as unfocused and distant.

It is quite possible that the dancers’ ‘distraction’ came from the sheer weight of distinctly political expectations that have been laid upon their current US tour. It’s the company’s first US tour in 25 years, and it’s been aggressively marketed, e.g. here, by the Israeli Foreign Ministry as part of its “Rebrand Israel” campaign.
I’ve seen no reports that the performance at Montgomery College was greeted with any protests. But protesters were out in force during earlier appearances in Brooklyn, NY, and Burlington, Vermont. In Brooklyn, the always inventive protesters organized by Adalah-NY had a small troupe of women dancers in blue-and-white tutus, and people handing out mock ‘programs’ to ballet-goers as they went in. (Scroll down here.)
I guess the intention of the hosts at Montgomery College was to try to make sure the ballet company felt warmly welcomed at the college… by making the numerous lengthy speeches that, according to ballet critic Kaufman, took up a full hour before the first pointe shoe hit the stage. The speechifying seemed to rile a good portion of the ballet-lovers who had turned up– including, apparently, Kaufman herself.
She wrote,

    The evening’s languor wasn’t entirely the company’s fault. The dancers took the stage nearly an hour after the appointed start time, once the capacity crowd endured politician introductions, speechifying by campus officials and heaped-on praise for endless donors to the college. It made one wonder if the ballet wasn’t in some way a play for the pockets of culture-loving Jews. The least they could have done, one man near me grumbled, was to have a plate of hamentashen in the lobby.
    The greater lack of sugar was on the program…

Ouch. It really seems the lengthy ‘welcoming’ backfired, doesn’t it.

Iran “calling” Israel’s nuclear-related blackmail?

Speculation is reportedly rife among Washington insiders over why, a couple of weeks ago, the Iranian authorities moved nearly all their stockpile of low-enriched uranium from its previous, deep-underground bunker to a very vulnerable-looking above-ground facility.
But here’s one possible explanation for the move that immediately occurred to me, and which was not among those listed in that article from Washington by the NYT’s David Sanger.
In moving the uranium to its new, very vulnerable position, perhaps the Iranian authorities are not so much “inviting” an Israeli attack, which is one of the possible explanations Sanger mentions (with the cynical goal that the attack might then strengthen the mullahs’ own political position inside Iran)… as calling out the political blackmail the Israelis and their supporters have been using worldwide, around the argument that “if the world’s governments don’t support much tighter sanctions on Iran, then it might be impossible to hold Israel back from attacking Iran’s nuclear stockpile.”
It seems entirely possible to me that, by trundling their stockpile up into its new position– which they did under the ever-present and watchful eyes of the IAEA inspectors who, lest we forget, have been monitoring Iran’s nuclear-tech programs from the get-go, unlike Israel’s– the Iranians may in effect be saying: “Okay, here it is. Go ahead, Israel!”
But with the aim, not as Sanger posits of quite cynically hoping that that attack take place, but of demonstrating to the world that when push comes to shove Israel does not actually dare do it.
Enlisting the aid of the relevant authorities is nearly always the best way to deal with blackmailers, in any realm of human activity. Iran undertook its move to greater physical “vulnerability” under the full protection of international legitimacy.
So does Israel dare attack now?
I very much doubt it.
And now, it can no longer so easily hide its decision not to attack behind “logistical” excuses such as “Well, it’s a very tricky thing to do, but we’re working very hard to find a way…” while its spokesmen and apologists worldwide also continuing saying, “but when we decide the time is right– which will be soon!– you’ll have to hold us back very hard and give us many additional benefits etc, plus step up those sanctions on Iran quite considerably, in order to prevent us from going ahead… ”
If this is indeed the thinking behind the Iranian move, then it looks very smart. It’s an excellent way to deflate all the rhetoric that’s been going around, internationally, to the effect that “If the Security Council members don’t adopt even more draconian sanctions against Iran, then no-one can predict what the Israelis might decide to do!”
… Your move, Israel.

The ultimate in chutzpah??

Israeli citizens living quite illegally in the settlement of “Ateret” in the occupied West Bank are now protesting the Palestinian Authority’s pursuit of a project to build the first-ever Palestinian “new town” just a few miles north of Ramallah.
Some of those settlers now have the chutzpah to complain that the new Palestinian town will “be a burden on the environment” of the West Bank… that it will contribute to traffic congestion… that its effluents might flow into West Bank valleys… and even that it “will only benefit Palestinian elites.”
The new town, to be named Rawabi, will have around 5,000 housing units, for a total population of around 25,000 people.
This is the first planned new town development the West Bank’s 2.6 million Palestinians have been allowed to build in 43 years of living under Israel’s foreign military occupation. During those years, their numbers have just about doubled.
And in those 43 years, successive Israeli governments have worked hard to implant more than 500,000 settlers, quite illegally, into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem.)
Are we supposed to be touched by the concern these settlers show for the interests of the West Bank’s environment and of those Palestinians who not members of the elite???
Nah. I am not touched. Let them all go home.

Leveretts on Israeli-Iranian ‘proxy war’

Shortly after I published this post earlier today about the Spy Wars underway between the Israeli team and the pro-Iranian team, I saw this post that Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett put up onto their bog.
They are just back in the US after a research visit that took them to Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
In Damascus, they met Khaled Meshaal. But they have thus far written about the meetng only that,

    It was notable that, in our meeting with him, Mishal did not say a word about the murder of a prominent HAMAS figure, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai last month.

Oh well, I hope they’ll be writing a lot more, soon, from all of their destinations on the trip.

Excellent BDS victory in Brussels!

Lengthy efforts by those trying to get targeted sanctions imposed against products made in Israel’s illegal settlements have won a great victory in the European High Court. It ruled today that setlement products cannot benefit from the free trade agreement the EU has with Israel.
Hurrah!
The case in question involved water-carbonating machines and syrup made by Soda-Club, which is based in the nasty, sprawling settlement of Maale Adumim. The German company Brita objected to paying import duty on these items. The Hamburg Finance Court had earlier ruled that Brita should indeed pay such duties. Brita appealed to the High Court– and the BDS forces won!
The court’s decision also noted that “the Israeli authorities are obliged to provide sufficient information to enable the real origin of products to be determined.” That is also important, given the misleading labeling many settlement-based manufacturers have engaged in.
Locating businesses inside the settlements has been important to Israel’s powerful pro-settlement forces because (1) they enable the settlers to work close to home, (2) they generate some tax revenues to help administer the settlements– in addition to the vast subsidies from central government, that is, and (3) they help “normalize” the whole idea and reality of settlements within the socio-economic life of Israel and its trading partners.
But now the EU, which is Israel’s largest trading partner, is saying a resounding NO! to that normalization.
(I should note that though I called this a victory for the ‘sanctions’ part of the BDS movement, strictly speaking it is not a sanction/punishment to make the settlers pay normal import duties on products exported to Europe. In truth, it is the withholding of a benefit/reward. But why on earth should Israel– or its settlers– get rewarded for anything??)