Tear down that wall

16Nov09

Great cartoon from Steve Bell:

via Luna17.

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian   |  4 Comments
Tags: apartheid, Steve Bell, wall

Twenty years after Berlin, Palestinians crack Israel’s wall

07Nov09

Ma’an News reports:

‘Marking the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians tore down a section of Israel’s wall in the West Bank village of Ni’lin on Friday.

During a weekly protest against the barrier, which cuts through the Ramallah-area village’s center and isolates residents from 60 percent of their farmland, some 300 demonstrators methodically dismantled a concrete section before Israeli forces opened fire.

[...]

“Twenty years ago, no one imagined that the monstrosity that divided Berlin would ever be taken down, but it took only two days to do it,” participant Muhib Hawaja told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

“Today we proved that we too can pull it off, right here and right now. That is our land beyond the barrier, and we have no intention of ceding it. We will triumph because justice is on our side,” he added.

“When one concrete part started to come down partially, the Israeli army arrived and started shooting large amounts of tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and even live ammunition,” said organizer Ahmad Mesleh. “Dozens of soldiers came through the gate and are currently following the demonstration into the village.”‘

Norman Finkelstein has argued that were Palestinians to descend upon the wall en masse, pickaxes in one hand and a copy of the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling in the other, Israel would find it very difficult to deal with. In that spirit, let’s hope this action by the protestors in Nil’in is but a taste of what is to come.

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian, Videos   |  2 Comments
Tags: Activism, annexation wall, Berlin Wall, Nil'in, nonviolent resistance, protest, West Bank

Noam Chomsky: Afghanistan invasion was ‘one of the most immoral acts in modern history’

05Nov09

Today Kim Howells, Labour MP and chairman of the British Intelligence and Security Committee, urged a withdrawal from Afghanistan – significant given that he was the former Labour foreign office minister and a strong supporter of the war. Support for the war is waning in both the US and Britain while, as Johann Hari points out (via), “[a]t the other end of the gun-barrel, 77 per cent of Afghans in the latest BBC poll say the on-going US air strikes are ‘unacceptable’, and the US troops should only remain if they are going to provide reconstruction assistance rather than bombs”.

Despite this, Obama is preparing to significantly expand US commitment in Afghanistan, while the air strikes – which according to counter-insurgency expert Lt. Col. David Kilcullen kill approximately 98 civilians for every two ‘insurgents’ – continue. October was the deadliest month thus far for US forces in Afghanistan, while, as lenin reports,

“The latest analysis [.pdf] from what used to be known as the Senlis Council says that 80% of the territory of Afghanistan currently experiences “heavy” insurgent activity. 17% experiences what they call “substantial” insurgent activity. And a mere 3% of the territory, in a region called Sari Pul where the dominant language is Dari Persian and the dominant ethnicity Uzbek, experiences only “light” insurgent activity. The number of insurgents, as estimated by the US, has risen from 7,000 in 2006 to about 25,000 today, which slightly more than the total number of insurgents reported killed.”

In this context, I thought it might be worth posting Noam Chomsky’s recent appearance on HARDtalk. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the program, it involves HARDman Stephen Sackur interrupting and talking over his guests or berating them with belligerent non-sequiturs in an effort to appear HARD. Nonetheless, Chomsky’s arguments – on Afghanistan and much else besides – are as important now as they ever were, so give these a watch.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part3:

You can watch/listen to his recent talks at SOAS (‘Crisis and the Unipolar Moment’) and the LSE (‘Human Rights in the 21st Century’), while you’re at it.

Further reading:

- Everything you have been told about Afghanistan is wrong, Johann Hari

- Afghanistan as a Bailout State, TomDispatch

- A ruined tea party, and a brewing inferno, Lenin’s Tomb

Filed under: UK, US, Videos   |  5 Comments
Tags: Afghanistan, HARDtalk, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Sackur

Defending Israel: shit just got impossible

30Oct09

So far this term the Cambridge Union debates have seen a bust-up between Edwina Currie and, well, everyone in the room and Michael Savage being disinvited after the “the socialist Brown regime” threatened to exile Julien Domercq to Glasgow. Against this background, and on the basis that calm, rational, good-natured disagreements about the Israel/Palestine conflict don’t exist, I snuck in to yesterday’s debate – on the motion, ‘This House believes that Israel demands too much and gives too little in the peace process‘ – expecting the fireworks to fly.

What transpired was an unimpressive and not particularly informed debate that rarely stuck to the topic, in the course of which the basic factual record was repeatedly shot in the face (metaphorically speaking) without so much as a hint of protest from those defending the motion. This was partly due to poor performances on the part of some of the debaters – I have a lot of respect for Jeremy Corbyn, for example, but he kept conspicuously diverting the issue from Israel’s political demands to its war crimes in Gaza without making a convincing connection between the two – and partly due to the limitations of the format, which doesn’t allow for a detailed ‘fisking’ of the other side’s factual claims. Even so, the motion was carried by a substantial margin, and although the audience was overly appreciative of the boilerplate ‘both sides are to blame’/'cycle of violence’-type narrative, prevailing sympathies were clearly with the Palestinians.

Lord Hannay and Jeremy Corbyn, speaking for the motion, gave an effective and vivid outline of life under military occupation, and the arbitrariness of repressive Israeli measures (although Corbyn described ‘Operation Cast Lead’ as a “disproportionate response” to the Qassam rockets, rather than as a straightforward massacre). What the motion cried out for was a Norman Finkelstein-style summary of what Israel and the Palestinians are respectively entitled to under the virtually unanimous international political and legal consensus, the latter determined by no less an authority than the International Court of Justice, followed by a brief account of the negotiations process up to this point. Michel Massih QC, who has been involved in efforts to prosecute Ehud Barak for war crimes, looked as though he was going to take this approach, opening with a statement about the importance of the law (which received much applause). Unfortunately he then veered off course to talk about falafel and the need for war crimes trials, which is a shame, because had he continued pulling at that thread, he could have very easily shown that Israel has never, in the history of the occupation, offered the Palestinians a state on the terms of the international consensus, and indeed that the only side ever to have offered to compromise on any of its rights is the Palestinian side.

Bar the representative of the Israeli government, Ran Gidor, the ‘pro’-Israel side was a shambles, reduced to trotting out the standard tired rhetorical tropes and tricks knowing full well – surely – that they stopped being effective a long time ago, at least since the attacks on Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza earlier this year. It was all there: the emphasis on Israel as a liberal, democratic paradise for gays and women (‘gaywash’), the portrayal of Israelis as Westernised and secular like us (‘we read the same books as you, watch the same TV shows’, as the Israeli representative put it) – and, implicitly, unlike the Palestinians, who are alien to us both; the regurgitation of the myth of Barak’s ‘generous offer’ (the two authorities cited were – who else? – Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross); the use of the treaty with Egypt to demonstrate that Israel seeks peace with its neighbours (ignoring the fact that Israel only withdrew from the Sinai after Egypt went to war to reclaim it); the insistence that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and got nothing but rockets for its trouble; the long quotes from Hamas’s charter, despite the fact that that document no longer forms the basis for the movement’s policies, and despite the fact that Hamas now explicitly accepts a two-state settlement based on the pre-June 1967 borders; the baseless dismissal of human rights reports – in this case that of the Goldstone commission – as ‘biased’; the repeated references to the “two-state solution” Israel generously offered back in 1947, to which the Palestinians and the Arab states responded by trying to, as one panelist put it, ‘finish what the Nazis began’; and so on and so on. One panelist even mentioned “Palestinian textbooks”, the I/P equivalent of cracking a “you are the Weakest Link” joke – no doubt if he’d have had more time he would have gone on to decry those dreaded “Arab radio broadcasts”.

Of course, no panoply of cheap rhetorical devices in the service of an expansionist Israeli state would be complete without the use of the ‘antisemitism card’ to disparage the Palestinian cause and justify Israeli violence. Serial ‘new antisemitism’-monger Denis ‘Gandalf‘ MacShane was there to oblige, delivering an incoherent rant that culminated in a demand from the audience that we accept the ‘right of gays to exist’. In his defence, MacShane was obviously drunk – he had to be escorted off the premises midway through the debate after accusing an Arab student in the audience of representing Hamas. When the student requested an apology, MacShane demanded, to loud boos from the audience, that he first apologise for the ‘deaths of all the Jews’ killed by Hamas.

MacShane’s racism aside, the ‘pro’-Israeli panelists clearly had their strategy worked out: they acknowledged that Israel had made some “errors”, solemnly declared every Palestinian death or injury to be a “tragedy” (while at the same time, disgustingly, berating Palestinians for having a ‘victimhood’ mentality), acknowledged that the occupation was “wrong” and professed a sincere desire for an “independent, viable Palestinian state”. Those words came from Ran Gidor, employee of Israel’s racist, expulsionist foreign minister, who was forced to pretend that Netanyahu, his explicit and oft-repeated rejectionism notwithstanding, actually favours a two-state settlement. When asked how he could reconcile this claim with Netanyahu’s refusal to halt settlement construction, Gidor responded that the settlements are Israel’s ‘bargaining chips’ not to be given away without a price. It is unlikely that anyone was fooled by this – one of the few advantages of having a Likud government in power is that people are much more aware of its rejectionist stance – and the fact that even the Israeli government representative felt obliged to express support for a two-state solution and opposition to the settlements reflects the significant improvement in discussion and awareness of the conflict in Britain. Israeli representatives don’t dare defend Israel’s actual position on the conflict anymore, because they know that that position is now widely viewed as indefensible. As I’ve written previously, the momentum of public opinion is swinging decidedly against Israel, a fact that this debate encouragingly, if frustratingly, affirmed.

In the spirit of which, another milestone in the improving discourse on this topic in the US was reached yesterday when Jon Stewart hosted Mustafa Barghouti and the Jewish-American peace activist Anna Baltzer on ‘The Daily Show’. Stewart stuck, as one would expect, to standard liberal pieties throughout – adopting the ‘both sides’ paradigm, taking Israel’s claimed ’security needs’ at face value, etc. – but the very fact that Baltzer and Barghouti were invited on in the first place is hugely encouraging. You can watch the full, unedited interview here, and help counter the inevitable backlash from the ‘lobby’ here.

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian   |  17 Comments
Tags: "peace process", Cambridge, Cambridge Union, debate, Denis MacShane, Hamas, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Stewart, Michel Massih, Mustafa Barghouti, Ran Gidor, The Daily Show

The ‘Spirit of the IDF’

30Sep09

Good to see the Israeli military is taking the recommendations of the Goldstone report on board:

‘The Israel Defense Forces should adopt a “Code of Ethics for the War on Terror,” because its existing ethical code is insufficient, according to Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, the head of Military Intelligence…

In 2003, Yadlin and [Prof. Asa] Kasha published an article titled “Ethical Counterterrorism,” in which they justified assassinating wanted terrorists even if it injured or killed Palestinian civilians…

In an interview with Haaretz in February, Kasher said that Cast Lead was conducted in the spirt of the proposed new code he co-authored with Yadlin, and that “the norms the commanders applied in Gaza were generally proper.”…

In this interview, he also said there is “no logic to comparing the number of civilians killed with the number of armed men killed on the Palestinian side, or the number [of Israelis] killed by Qassam [rockets] compared to the number of civilians killed in Gaza,” and that soldiers should not be forced to take extra risks, beyond those inherent in combat, to prevent harm to civilians. ‘

I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot better now.

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian   |  2 Comments
Tags: Amos Yadlin, Asa Kasher, Cast Lead, Gaza, IDF

Docs to watch

25Sep09

First up, American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein:

There’s a good review in the Daily Star, which begins:

‘A dissenting voice is a peculiar thing. For those with a stake in a political status quo, the more contentious the issue, the more the dissident must be silenced. How this is done depends on how confidently the political class controls the state.The more insecure the political class, as conventional readings would have it, the more likely it will resort to imprisonment and execution to eliminate domestic dissent. When the political class is secure – or faces institutional obstacles to the use of arbitrary coercion – it must resort to discrediting and ostracizing the dissenting voice.

“American Radical: The Trials Of Norman Finkelstein” is in many ways a study in how the American political class – specifically the segment of this class that advocates Israel’s state of exception in American foreign policy – goes about silencing its dissidents…’

Also, Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story is about to drop, and if his interview on Democracy Now! is anything to go by it could be his best yet. Here’s the trailer:

Filed under: US, Videos   |  2 Comments
Tags: American Radical, capitalism, documentaries, Michael Moore, Norman Finkelstein, US

Goldstone’s report on the Gaza massacre

25Sep09

Reading through the Goldstone report [.pdf], one theme becomes immediately apparent: the deliberateness of the destruction in Gaza. The authors keep returning to this point throughout the text, in a direct rebuke to those liberal apologists for Israel who insist, contrary to all the evidence, that whatever crimes the IDF committed in Gaza were accidental or, at most, incidental to the attack, the work of a few rogue soldiers.

In fact, reports the Commission, the targeting of industrial sites, water installations, houses, government buildings and other civilian infrastructure was “deliberate and systematic”. The report investigates several cases in detail – the “direct” and “intentional” shelling of Al-Quds hospital with white phosphorous shells; the “intense artillery attacks”, including the use of white phosphorous shells, on Al Wafa hospital; a flechette attack on a crowd of family and neighbours in a condolence tent; the destruction of Gaza’s only working flour mill “for the purposes of denying sustenance to the civilian population”; the “systematic”, “deliberate” and “wanton” destruction of chicken coops housing tens of thousands of chickens, which supplied over 10% of Gaza’s egg market; the “deliberate and premeditated” attack on a sewage lagoon; etc. – and places them in context of “a broader pattern of destruction”, which included the destruction of 280 schools and kindergartens, the “intensive shelling” of residential neighbourhoods “in the absence of any link to combat”, the repeated targeting of hospitals and ambulances, the “systematic destruction of civilian buildings”, the “widespread destruction of private residential houses, water wells and water tanks”, the repeated “intentional attacks on civilians”, the “systematically reckless” use of white phosphorous in densely populated civilian areas, and the wilfull destruction of “a substantial part” of Gaza’s economic infrastructure, including hundreds of factories (17 of 27 cement factories were reportedly destroyed or damaged), nearly one-fifth of Gaza’s greenhouses, its only cement packaging plant and its largest private fish farm (killing 20,000 fish in the process). It has been estimated that in total some 15% of buildings in Gaza were destroyed.

Amnesty International fieldworkers struggled to describe the extent of the destruction:

“Previously busy neighbourhoods have been flattened into moonscapes. Other large areas look like they’ve been hit by earthquakes. There is no lens wide enough to embrace the sheer dimensions of the devastation.

Orchards and road have been churned up by Israeli army tanks and armoured D9 bulldozers; the latter sometimes dragging plough-like hooks which ripped the roads behind them – just one example of wanton destruction. Buildings with no apparent military value have been destroyed in vast numbers.”

“In the industrial areas to the north-east and south-east of Gaza City there is total devastation; each factory has been methodically destroyed. At the cement factory near the Zaitoun district of Gaza City, we found the same. Every single vehicle – trucks, cement mixers, even the car of the factory’s elderly watchman – had been overturned, dragged through the yard and partially crushed”.

In short, as the UN World Food Program reports,

“it was precisely the strategic economic areas that Gaza depends on to relieve its dependency on aid that were wiped out.”

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights similarly concluded:

“It was obvious that IOF intended to erase any civilization features in the Gaza Strip. They deliberately and systematically destroyed the entire vital facilities to make Gaza go decades back.”

Israel and its apologists have tied themselves into knots trying to justify this colossal devastation on the grounds that every demolished house, factory, farm and chicken coop shielded a Hamas fighter, or a top secret underground Hamas base, or something. The UN report, however, is very clear: “in the destruction by Israeli armed forces of private residential houses, water wells, water tanks, agricultural land and greenhouses there was”, it concludes, “a specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance to the population of the Gaza Strip”.

Moreover “intentional attacks on civilians” were not isolated events but were rather, as the testimonies of IDF soldiers and previous human rights reports have indicated, systematic and reflective of policy. To give one example, large numbers of civilians, including women and children, were rounded-up and

“detained in degrading conditions, deprived of food, water and access to sanitary facilities, and exposed to the elements in January without any shelter. The men were handcuffed, blindfolded and repeatedly made to strip, sometimes naked, at different stages of their detention”.

Some Palestinians were taken to Israel, where they were tortured. In one case in north-western Gaza, Israeli troops

“dug out sand pits in which Palestinian men, women and children were detained. Israeli tanks and artillery positions were located inside the sand pits and around them and fired from next to the detainees.”

The report identifies a “common” feature of interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians:

“continuous and systematic abuse, outrages on personal dignity, humiliating and degrading treatment contrary to fundamental principles of international humanitarian law and human rights law”.

Taken together,

“[t]he conditions of life in Gaza, resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government of Israel … cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip in violation of international humanitarian law”. [my emph.]

This echoes the conclusions of the Arab League inquiry [.pdf] into the massacre, chaired by John Dugard, which characterised it as a “vigorous exercise of collective punishment designed either to compel the population to reject Hamas as the governing authority of Gaza or to subdue the population into a state of submission”.

In other words, as was clear at the time, there was no “war on Hamas”. There was a massacre of a civilian population, which involved the systematic commission of war crimes possibly amounting to a “crime against humanity”. This is an important point, so I’ll just repeat it: there was no “war” in Gaza. What we had was the world’s third or fourth ranking military power raining down shells, missiles and white phosphorous uninterrupted and effectively unopposed on a trapped civilian population for three solid weeks. Gaza has no anti-aircraft weaponry to speak of, so the IAF just bombed at will, conducting some 3,000 sorties in three weeks with no damage to even a single plane. Entire neighbourhoods were levelled. 35-60% of Gaza’s agricultural sector was destroyed. Thousands of homes were “systematically” demolished. Hundreds of buildings, including schools, clinics, UN facilities, government ministries and hospitals, were destroyed. People were instructed to leave, and when they did so they were killed. In one instance – described by the UN mission as a “wilful killing” and a “war crime” – over 100 members of the same family were told to gather in a building, which was then repeatedly shelled, while relief workers who tried to gain access to the dead and the wounded were fired on. What the UN report describes is not a “war”, it’s the terrorising and collective punishment of a civilian population.

The ‘Dahiya doctrine’

A couple of other points about the report are worth mentioning. Firstly, it explicitly and repeatedly accuses Israel of practicing terrorism:

“the treatment of these civilians constitutes the infliction of a collective penalty on those persons and amounts to measures of intimidation and terror. Such acts are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and constitute a war crime”

“the rounding-up of large groups of civilians and their prolonged detention under the circumstances described in this Report constitute a collective penalty on those persons … [and] amounts to measures of intimidation or terrorism prohibited by article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”

“[Israel] viewed disproportionate destruction and creating the maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals [i.e. terrorism]“

Needless to say, this makes a mockery of the Quartet’s refusal to engage Hamas on grounds that it remains committed to “terrorism”.

Secondly, the report draws a parallel between the Gaza massacre and the 2006 Lebanon war, noting that the “Dahiya doctrine” of disproportionate destruction of civilian infrastructure, named after the poor, densely populated suburb of Beirut flattened by Israel during the war, was clearly “put into practice” in Gaza. In Lebanon, the IAF inflicted “destruction on a catastrophic scale”, reducing “entire neighbourhoods to rubble”. “Entire families were killed” while fleeing the violence, while “Red Cross and other rescue workers” were prevented from accessing the dead and injured. The vast majority of casualties were civilians, around a third of them children. The “extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry” was, far from being incidental to the assault, a “deliberate and … integral part of the military strategy”. As in Lebanon, so in Gaza [.pdf].

Other parallels with the Lebanon war also suggest themselves, the flimsiness of the justifications offered for the attacks not least among them. Two years ago Israel saturated southern Lebanon with cluster bombs, 90% of which were fired in the last 72 hours of the conflict when both sides knew a ceasefire was imminent. Similarly, in Gaza,

“Israeli forces engaged in another wave of systematic destruction of civilian buildings during the last three days of their presence in Gaza, aware of the imminence of withdrawal”.

In both cases the aim was to maximise destruction, to send a message to the civilian populations under attack and to ensure a long and costly reconstruction process (which in Gaza has barely begun [.pdf] due to the closure).

As in Lebanon, Israel’s propaganda during the Gaza massacre has been exposed as not merely fraudulent but, in many cases, projection. In Lebanon, Israel justified the killing of civilians on the grounds that Hizbullah was using them as “human shields”. Human rights organisations subsequently refuted the claim, finding that if anyone was guilty of “hiding behind civilians”, it was Israel. Similarly, the Goldstone mission found “no evidence” that Hamas had used Palestinians as human shields, unlike Israel, which forced “blindfolded and handcuffed” Palestinian men to “enter houses ahead of Israeli soldiers” – a “war crime”.

During the massacre, Israel maintained for a long period that it was not using white phosphorous, even when doctors begun reporting unusual burns that went right down to the bone and newspapers published photos of white phosphorous being fired on schools and UN facilities. At one point Israel went so far as to accuse Hamas of using WP. The Goldstone report concludes that Israel was “systematically reckless” in its use of white phosphorous in “built-up areas”, including in attacks on hospitals, schools and UN facilities, as discussed above.

To justify its targeting of ambulances, hospitals and UN facilities, Israel typically claimed that Hamas fighters were firing from within the buildings. In one case, Israel even claimed that Hamas had turned a hospital into its headquarters. The UN mission “did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used … to shield military activities and that ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other military purposes”. It similarly rejects the claim that UN shelters shelled by Israel, including with white phosphorous, were used to launch attacks against Israeli forces.

Israel’s Sharpeville?

The Goldstone report contains little new information, for the most part merely confirming the conclusions of previous studies. It is, however, the most authoritative account of the massacre published to date. What makes it particularly significant is Richard Goldstone’s Jewish, Zionist and liberal background which, along with his status as an internationally respected legal figure, makes Israel’s reflexive dismissal of critical reports as “biased” and “antisemitic” even harder to sustain than usual (not that it hasn’t tried). As Gideon Levy writes, “the messenger is propaganda-proof. No one can seriously claim that Goldstone, an active and ardent Zionist, with deep links to Israel, is an anti-Semite.”

This is significant not because the inquiry’s recommendation that Israeli war criminals be prosecuted, whether through referral to the ICC or using universal jurisidiction, is likely to be implemented. We’re not at that stage yet, particularly given the Obama administration’s predictable and baseless denunciations of the report. The report will, however, further undermine public support for Israel in the US and Europe, boost the growing BDS campaign (we’ve already had a major success on that front, with the Trades Union Congress voting to condemn the Gaza massacre and support a boycott of goods produced in the settlements; meanwhile, Spain yesterday expelled a group of Israeli scientists from a state-funded competition on the grounds that their university is located in the illegal settlement of Ariel) and, crucially, make it increasingly difficult for American liberals and Jews to square their progressive values with support for the Israeli state. As Norman Finkelstein observes,

“It’s like the Sharpville massacre in South Africa. Now, Sharpville is not Soweto, but Sharpville was a turning point … Jews are overwhelmingly liberal in their sentiment. Seventy-nine percent of Jews in the last election voted for Obama. And what you’re seeing now is the breakup of Jewish support for Israel.

You saw during the Gaza massacre you had some of the old-timers like Alan Dershowitz, Michael Walzer, characters—Martin Peretz, characters like that, you know, kind of comical figures coming out supporting Israel. But if you looked at the younger Jewish—the younger Jewish constituency—bloggers like Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and so forth—they all opposed the Gaza massacre from almost like day one or day two. And then you had significant defections, like Andrew Sullivan, who—not Jewish, but still a significant figure, who also came out against the Gaza massacre.

So I think now what you’re seeing, especially with the Goldstone report, especially with his stature, especially because he’s Jewish, especially because he’s a liberal, what it’s signaling now, is the breakup of Jewish support and liberal support—and those are basically the same thing—the breakup of liberal Jewish support for Israel.”

This analysis is perhaps overly optimistic – particularly given the American liberal-left’s continued faith that Obama, his record thus far notwithstanding, is secretly planning to reverse decades of official policy and apply real pressure on Israel to end its rejectionism – but it is clear that the momentum of public opinion is swinging decidedly against Israel. Israeli propaganda just isn’t working anymore, and however many bogus diplomatic crises Israel contrives, however shamelessly the ‘new antisemitism’-mongers peddle their distractions, the now substantial and consistent body of literature condemning the Gaza massacre as a gross war crime isn’t going away.

A final point: Gaza is still suffering under an illegal siege [.pdf]. Thanks to years of neglect, overuse of the aquifer, the blockade and the January invasion, it is facing a critical water crisis, with high levels of sewage contamination and declining quality of drinking water (already, only 5-10% of water extracted from the aquifer meets international safety standards). The territory is undergoing an unprecedented economic collapse, with unemployment approaching 50% (some estimates place it closer to 70%) and 90% of the population living in poverty. Reconstruction has been extremely limited because Israel refuses to allow concrete and other building materials into the Strip. Three-quarters of the population – over half of which are children – are food insecure. 10% of the population has no electricity, while the other 90% experience power cuts of 4-8 hours per day. Thousands of people still have no access to running water. There is plenty we can do to ameliorate this situation, starting by demanding that our representatives endorse the recommendations of the Goldstone report and work to bring the siege to an end. I also recommend getting involved with the Gaza Freedom March, which has been endorsed by a long list of international and Palestinian figures and organisations.

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian   |  15 Comments
Tags: Cast Lead, Dahiya doctrine, Gaza, Goldstone report, hasbara, Lebanon, Obama, Richard Goldstone, UN, war crimes

The “British method”

27Aug09

Following a political campaign by the BNP, a Muslim man was abducted from his home in Essex and threatened at knifepoint to stop organising weekly prayer sessions at the community centre.

Asked to response, local BNP councillor Pat Richardson denied the BNP was behind the attack, explaining:

“Firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure”.

Filed under: UK   |  5 Comments
Tags: BNP, fascists, Islamophobia, Nazis, Pat Richardson, Racism

‘Israel’s Terror Inside’

25Aug09

Latest mini-doc from Max Blumenthal, via lenin:

As Noam Chomsky has observed, and as this video makes clear, ‘those who call themselves “supporters of Israel” are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction’.

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian, Videos   |  2 Comments
Tags: authoritarianism, Avigdor Lieberman, Cast Lead, Ezra Nawi, Gaza, Max Blumenthal, militarisation, New Profile, occupation, Racism

A culture of fear

16Aug09

Pankaj Mishra dissects the ‘culture of fear’ being manufactured by a recent spate of books and articles warning of an impending ‘Eurabia’:

‘Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. So what explains the rash of bestsellers with histrionic titles – While Europe Slept, America Alone, The Last Days of Europe? None of their mostly neocon American authors was previously known for their knowledge of Muslim societies; all of them suffer the handicaps of what the philosopher Charles Taylor, in his introduction to a new collection of scholarly essays entitled Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship, calls “block thinking”, which “fuses a very varied reality into one indissoluble unity”. Certainly, the idea of a monolithic “Islam” in Europe appears an especially pitiable bogey when you regard the varying national origins, linguistic and legal backgrounds, and cultural and religious practices of European Muslims. Many so-called Muslims from secularised Turkey or syncretistic Sindh and Java would be condemned as apostates in Saudi Arabia, whose fundamentalist Wahhabism informs most western visions of Islam…

… Eurabia-mongers from America seem as determined as tabloid hacks to strike terror among white Europeans about their local newsagent or curry house owner. “If the spread of Pakistani cuisine,” Caldwell writes, “is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapatti flour.”

Most south Asian cuisine consumed on British high streets hails from India or Bangladesh, rather than Pakistan. Caldwell, however, won’t let facts get in the way of the many eagerly consumed chapattis rising up his white British reader’s gorge, though a reference to Pakistan “in the 19th century” does make one wonder whether Caldwell can tell his brown folks apart. His grasp of European history, too, seems shaky: Italy, he tells us, is like Sweden in being “without an important colonial history”. Approvingly quoting Ernest Renan’s and Hilaire Belloc’s scaremongering about Islam as a threat to “white civilisation”, he seems to be unaware that these two writers also described Jews as inferior “aliens” in Europe. Remarkably, Caldwell, who is a senior editor with the neoconservative Weekly Standard, does not appear to know that Edmund Burke, from whom he derives his book title, had a rather exaggerated reverence for “Muhammadan law”.

Caldwell does claim to like Islam for its “primitive” vigour, which he speculates may just revitalise “drab”, materialistic Europe. Indeed, a very 1930s-ish obsession with sexual virility and racial purity runs through Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. Quoting from an essay entitled “White Man, What Now?” by the novelist Matthias Politycki, Caldwell wonders why Europeans today feel so “contemptible and small, ugly and asexual” before Asians and Africans. Like many fellow neoconservatives, he seems ultimately less worried about Islamic revolution, which he is probably clever enough to see as no more than a TV-friendly soundbite, than about Europe’s cheese-eating surrender monkeys who won’t prop up the dwindling power of the US.’

See also Lindsey German:

“[T]his isn’t about culture, it’s about race. Here’s a clue: ‘whites will be in a minority in Birmingham by 2026, says Christopher Caldwell, an American journalist, (read right wing neo con) and even sooner in Leicester’. So all the talk about culture, tradition, preserving ‘our way of life’ is a smokescreen – it’s about race and class. That’s why, according to these people, it’s acceptable for whites to live in Spain, or for relatively large numbers of French, Italian or Australian professionals to live in London, but not for workers who are Afro Caribbeans, Indians and Pakistanis to live in Birmingham.

Here the Muslims endure a double whammy. Long discriminated against on racial grounds, along with their black and Asian brothers and sisters of other religions or none, they also face racism in jobs, housing and education. But now their religion is used as code to attack blacks and Asians in the most reactionary way in Austria, the Netherlands, and increasingly here in Britain. Islamophobia has become the last ‘respectable’ racism in Europe, with those perpetrating it propagating the deceit that they are against religion not race.”

Filed under: European Union, UK   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Christopher Caldwell, demography, Eurabia, Europe, immigration, Islamophobia, Lindsey German, Pankaj Mishra, Racism