Just World News with Helena Cobban

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,

1. the Israeli soldiers are quite able to have a lot of fun playing with a soccer ball expropriated from the (quite invisible) Palestinians, and
2. since the soldiers are playing so very close to the Wall, they are most likely doing so on Palestinian land that has been expropriated from the Palestinians by the Wall.

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”.

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.

This is a very informative article by Haaretz’s Amos Harel on the close symbiosis that exists between settler activists– including those responsible for most of the so-called “illegal” or “unauthorized” settlement outposts– and high-level authorities inside the IDF and other organs of the Israeli state.
He writes,

The outposts are a continuation of the settlements by other means. The sharp distinction Israel makes between them is artificial. Every outpost is established with a direct connection to a mother settlement, with the clear aim of expanding the takeover of the territory and ensuring an Israeli hold on a wider tract of land. Construction in the outposts is integrated into the overall plan of the settlement project and is carried out in parallel to the seizure of lands within and close to the settlements.

He illustrates the cooperation of state authorities in the establishment and maintenance of the so-called “outposts” in the case of one called Migron:

Migron is surrounded by a fence, guarded and connected to the necessary water and electricity infrastructures. Its “ascent to the land,” even though it was done on private Palestinian property, and despite the fact that it was undertaken in a deceptive manner, has received backing and practical support from the state. The security establishment’s declaration to the High Court of Justice this week that it would take more than a year to implement the compromise agreement, whereby the inhabitants of Migron would be moved to the adjacent settlement of Adam, shows that this backing is still in place…
Behind every settlement action there is a planning and thinking mind that has access to the state’s database and maps, and help from sympathetic officers serving in key positions in the IDF and the Civil Administration. The story is not in the settlers’ uncontrolled behavior, though there is evidence of this on some of the hilltops, but rather in conscious choices by the state to enforce very little of the law.

Harel writes that the the Obama administration has held fast to the position that all the 100 “outposts” identified by the United Nations and by Israeli attorney Talia Sasson must be evacuated. (And not just the 23 or 26 outposts that PM Sharon’s security adviser Dov Weisglas agreed to evacuate, back in 2001.)
He writes that most of the present outposts were established during two waves of activity: between 1997 and 1999 (when, of course, Netanyahu was the PM), and between 2001 and 2003 (i.e., under Sharon– and notwithstanding Wesiglas’s 2001 promise to evacuate some of the ones that were already there.)
He adds,

During those years, the area of the settlements themselves increased. The symbiosis between the army and the settlers in the West Bank was at its peak then. Many of the terror attacks elicited “a suitable Zionist response” with the army’s encouragement: the establishment of a new outpost or the pushing back of the fence around an existing settlement.
The settlers’ moves were supported by surveillance cameras, protected roads, guards and often by declarations of a “special security zone.” To prevent infiltration, the area of the settlements was expanded and Palestinians from neighboring villages were prevented from approaching them. However, in the same breath, the moves were exploited for long-term goals, taking over and building on lands that were in large part private.
For nearly 12 years now, I have been intermittently covering the outposts, as part of my coverage of the army. Officially, the IDF doesn’t see the connection between the defense establishment and the settlers. Construction in the territories is ostensibly a matter for settlement reporters and nosy activists from Peace Now. In fact, this connection is at the heart of the settlement project.
In March 1998, during a tour, I was told by the commander of the Samaria Area Brigade, in an afterthought, that although the Gidonim outposts near Itamar were established without a permit, the Defense Ministry was acting to “launder” them. On that same day, Eli Cohen, the defense minister’s settlement adviser, was also touring the area. Queries put to the ministry by Knesset members were answered with evasive comments, but very quickly all the outposts in the vicinity were connected to all the necessary infrastructures.
Five years later, at the height of the Sharon prime ministership, a senior officer who had recently been demobilized after service in the territories volunteered to explain the facts of life to my colleague Guy Kotev and me. With the patience usually reserved for children who have difficulty understanding, he asked us whether we really believed that the outposts go up without the authorities’ knowledge. He related that the director general of the settler organization Amana, Zeev Hever (known by his nickname, Zambish) was visiting the prime minister’s residence at night to go over the maps with Sharon. “And after that you expect that we won’t give them guards and we won’t hook them up to the water system?” he wondered.

So it is excellent to also learn from Harel that he judges that Obama has remained adamant on the need for speedy evacuation of all the outposts.
(As a precursor to the evacuation of all the settlements, I hope.)
He notes the very dire effects of the laxness that the last two US presidents have shown on the whole Israeli settlement construction question:

During the 16 years since the Oslo process began, the number of Israelis living east of the Green Line (pre-Six-Day War border) increased from 110,000 to about 300,000 (not including East Jerusalem). The number of building starts in the West Bank in 2008 was 40 percent greater than during the previous year.

2008, lest we forget, was exactly the year-long period in which George W. Bush had vowed– during his speech at the Annapolis Middle east Peace Summit (remember that??)– that he would broker a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement before the end of his term in office.
How can anyone say that Israel’s PM Ehud Olmert was negotiating “in good faith” with the Palestinians during that year, if at the same time he was accelerating his country’s expropriation of, and construction upon, the Palestinian land and national heritage?
Harel ends with a sober reflection on the split, or warped, moral vision of all the people– inside and outside the state apparatus– who have participated in the settlement- and outpost-construction project:

Taking over the private property of someone who belongs to the neighboring people is a common phenomenon in the West Bank, even in recent years. We aren’t talking here about things that happened back in 1948. It is possible, of course, to describe these moves as a necessary part of the life-and-death struggle between the two peoples, in the name of which nearly all means are justified.
One of the most obvious things learned from every visit is the extent to which things are done in a planned way, to this day. It is hard to miss the destroyed terraces in the settlement of Adam or the sight of the sewage flowing from Psagot, not far from the Binyamin regional council building, straight into the wadi that runs to the adjacent Palestinian town of El Bireh. But in those very same settlements live upstanding citizens, who would not cheat the grocer of 10 agorot and who would go out in the middle of the night to help a neighbor stuck on a dark road. In the outposts live scores of officers in the career army and the reserves, who serve in elite units and win citations for their courage. At the same time, according to the official state data, many of them have built their dream homes, a modest mobile home or a more luxurious villa, on land that has been stolen from someone else by force.

Great work, Amos Harel.

There’s been quite a bit of commentary in the US blogosphere about the unsourced observation in this Haaretz article today that Israeli PM Netanyahu has been heard to refer to Obama’s two high political advisers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as “self-hating Jews.”
Be that as it may. It strikes me that the much bigger story in the article, which is by Barak Ravid, is the picture he paints of disarray and something approaching panic in the high ranks of Netanyahu’s administration.
This, at a time in which Pres. Obama and his team have been maintaining their firm pressure on Netanyahu to completely freeze Israel’s construction of its quite illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
So far, neither side has backed down in this confrontation– though Obama has not yet taken any of the real-world policy measures that are potentially at his command, to back up his demand on Netanyahu.
Their conflict thus currently has many of the aspects of a staring match. Who will blink first? Or will Obama do something else that might radically change the nature of this engagement?
Ravid starts out today’s article by reporting on a press conference the centrist Kadima Party– currently in opposition– organized yesterday, 100 days into Netanyahu’s premiership, under the banner “100 days, zero gains. It’s the same old Bibi.”
Netanyahu responded in what looked like a distinctly panicky way, dispatching five of his advisers to quickly hold their own counter-press conference– though with no clear and discernible theme.
Ravid:

An atmosphere of permanent crisis has surrounded Netanyahu’s bureau ever since he took office, so it was no surprise that the press conference also had an air of panic. The five advisers – National Security Adviser Uzi Arad, cabinet secretary Zvi Hauser, director general of the Prime Minister’s Office Eyal Gabai, political adviser Ron Dermer and Nir Hefetz, who heads the public relations desk – arrived at the meeting without a prearranged, uniform message. Over and over, they cut each other off.
… [D]espite the unified front they tried to present, it is clear that all of Netanyahu’s aides dislike each other: They are constantly badmouthing each other and blaming each other for leaks. Arad, for example, demanded that Hauser undergo a lie-detector test and is now demanding the same of Hefetz. And the latter two say “it is impossible to work with” Arad.
Compounding the problem is an inexperienced bureau chief, Natan Eshel, and a former spokesman, Yossi Levy, who is still clinging to his office and refusing to give it up to his replacement, Hefetz – who, for his part, is kept out of half the discussions.
Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office…

It was in this context that Ravid wrote,

To appreciate the depth of [Netanyahu’s] paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”

Now it is possible that Ravid was doing this reporting from a personal perspective that might be pretty much pro-Kadima.
Kadima, remember, stayed out of Netanyahu’s coalition because its leaders decided they wanted to hear Netanyahu firmly expressing support for the goal of a two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Which he finally did a couple of weeks ago, but only in a very circumspect way.)
There is certainly one way of looking at a possible US strategy wherein if Washington presses Netanyahu very hard on the settlement freeze and other peace-process issues, at some point his present rightist coalition partners would leave the coalition and Livni could step in and impose a few conditions of her own.
Or even take over completely as PM and form her own governing coalition.
Kadima did, after all, get one more seat in the February elections than Likud did. And unlike Labour leader Ehud Barak, who effectively broke his party in two because he was so eager to be Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Livni has done a good job of holding Kadima together, despite the party’s many apparent internal ideological contradictions.
I imagine it is this idea that a powerful and credible Livni is just waiting in the wings for his coalition to split that is spooking Netanyahu these days– and a big reason why he is so resentful of the pressure he evidently feels he is under from Washington.
Anyway, to me that’s the importance of Ravid’s story today. The “self-hating Jews” business strikes me– if indeed Netanyahu said it– as pretty par for the course within Israel’s famously hard-fighting political culture.