Israeli councillor is not racist ...... but

Here's an article from the Arab Association for Human Rights in Israel. Titled Racist law proposed in Nazerat Illit to 'judaize' city it's about proposals to restrict Arab rights in Nazaret Ilit.

Nazerat Illit is located in the Galilee and was established in 1953 on lands that were confiscated from the Arab city of Nazareth and the surrounding villages of Ein Mahel and Reineh. Recently, the ethnic composition of Nazerat Illit has become more mixed thanks to the increase of Arab families that have moved there from Nazareth and its surrounding villages. Furthermore, Nazerat Illit's jurisdiction expanded to include Arab neighbourhoods that were formerly part of Nazareth.

The number of Arab residents in Nazerat Illit presently stands at between eight and nine thousand, concentrated mainly in Al-Kurum (HaKramim) and Har Yona (originally Jabal Sikh). In spite of the Arab population's increase in the city, the recent administrative elections produced an absence of Arab representation at the municipal level.

Some Jewish political activists interpreted Nazerat Illit's growing Arab population as an invasion of the city. In October 2004, Avraham Maman, a member of the local council said, “Many Arabs from Nazareth are taking over more and more apartments in Nazerat Illit. There is not even one road in the city where 20 to 30 Arab families cannot be found; the leaders of the city must stop this invasion before it stops being Zionist and national… I am not racist and I have never been, but, many Jewish families are afraid of possible relationships between the Arabs and their daughters. Unfortunately, this thing has become common".

In September 2005, Maman, forced to sell his house because of heavy debts, said he would not accept any offer to sell his house to an Arab.

Recently, many people in the city have been calling for its 'judaization', based on a vision to increase the city's Jewish character. One voice representing those ideals is a member of the local council, and Likud member, Shimon Gabso. Gabso proposes a racist law, one that would forbid selling homes to Arabs, and would prevent Arabs from buying Nazerat Illit lands. The law would also implement name changes of neighbourhoods and streets – from Arab names to Jewish ones. In addition, under the proposed law, services to Arab neighbourhoods would be severely cut.

From Roland Rance.

Hamas offered Israel a 30 year ceasefire

According to Ha'aretz a former Mossad chief Hamas offered Israel a 30 year ceasefire back in 1997.

A few days before the failed assassination attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan in 1997, King Hussein conveyed an offer from the Hamas leadership to reach an understanding on a cease-fire for 30 years. That offer, intended for then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and conveyed by a Mossad representative, reached Netanyahu only after the botched hit.

This is just one of the details about past incidents that former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy reveals in his book, "Man in the Shadows," coming out in Britain on April 4, and soon to be released in Hebrew by Matar Publishing. In the book, Halevy discloses previously unknown details about security affairs from Israel's past.

Botched assassination

In September 1997, a Mossad squad tried to assassinate the leader of Hamas, Meshal, by drizzling poison in his ear. The attempt failed, two of the agents were captured and others found refuge in the Israeli embassy in Amman. Halevy recounts that King Hussein considered Israel's conduct a severe betrayal, made worse in view of the Hamas offer he had conveyed to Israel. Netanyahu called Halevy in to help calm Hussein, but the latter asked that Halevy not come to Amman, because he did not want a man whom he deemed a close friend to be involved in the nasty affair. Halevy set out nonetheless.

Relations with Amman deteriorated so badly that the king mulled demanding at a press conference that Israel turn in the Mossad agents who had fled to the embassy. If Israel did not turn them in, Hussein was seriously considering military action. Mossad discussed placating the king with various "gifts" for his army, such as night-vision equipment or upgrading some of his fighter planes.

Halevy thought otherwise. He suggested releasing Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli prison and transfering him to Jordan, where King Hussein would then order him returned to the Gaza Strip. Opposition was fierce in the intelligence agencies and the Israeli Defense Forces. Support for Halevy's idea came mostly from then-defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai, and it was ultimately approved by Netanyahu.

Today's Ha'aretz is here.

Israel Lobby - the empire strikes back

The London Review of Books has now published a crop of letters criticising the Israel Lobby article. I was surprised to see one letter from Daniel Pipes, an Israel Lobbyist par excellence. Of course he was disclaiming the existence of the Israel Lobby.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write: ‘The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel.’ This account is inaccurate in several ways (e.g. Martin Kramer had no role in founding Campus Watch), but I write specifically to state that no ‘Lobby’ told me to start Campus Watch. Neither the Middle East Forum nor myself has ever taken orders from some mythical ‘Lobby’, and specifically I decided to establish Campus Watch on my own, without direction from any outside source. I challenge Mearsheimer and Walt to provide their information that connects this ‘Lobby’ to my decision to establish Campus Watch.

Daniel Pipes
Philadelphia

So maybe, just maybe, they got a name wrong but did they really try to suggest that Daniel Pipes takes orders from a lobby group? A quick look at what they actually wrote suggests not:

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Oh yes, and there's one subscription cancellation.

Earthquake?

Oh honestly, what earthquake?

This one in the FT?

How about this one in the Guardian?

Or Yediot Ahronot?

Ha'aretz?

Actually amid all the hyperbole I heard an interesting thing on the BBC. Apparently this is the first time in Israel's electoral history that the main party will be depending on support from partners by whom it is collectively outnumbered. That, of course, doesn't bode well for stable government.

Israel's lowest ever election turnout

Here's Ha'aretz on yesterday's Israeli elections.

With the vote on 99.5 percent, Kadima had a less than expected 28 seats. Labor held at 20 seats, and Shas rose to 13, making the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party the third largest faction in the Knesset.

The Likud had hoped to block a center-left coalition, but with almost all of the votes in weakened to 11 seats, far below the figures the party had hoped and a far cry from the 38 seats it won under Ariel Sharon in 2003.

Avigdor Lieberman's Russian immigrant-dominated faction Yisrael Beiteinu captured 12 seats, positioning itself as the chief opposition party to head the nationalist camp.

In the largest surprise of the night, the Pensioners party won seven seats. The right-wing National Union-National Religious Party secured nine seats, with United Torah Judaism at six and Meretz at four. The Arab parties stood to win a total of ten seats.

Exit polls released as polling stations closed at 10 P.M. Tuesday showed center-left parties gaining a total of between 62 and 66 seats, with Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima winning 29 to 32 seats, Labor 20-22 seats, Meretz five and the Arab parties seven to eight seats.

Moshe Arens, or is it?

Here's a comment in Ha'aretz on the neglect of Israeli Jewish feeling towards the "Israeli Arabs" or Palesinians in Israel, to be politically correct. It's from Moshe Arens, former cabinet minister in Begin and Shamir's governments. Be surprised, be very surprised.

During the election campaign, the competing political parties are expected to address the major issues facing the country and state how they believe these should be handled. Has anyone noticed that one of the main issues facing Israel has been missing from this campaign? Some might even say that it is the most important issue, which if not dealt with could create insurmountable problems and overshadow everything being so hotly debated.

It is Israel's Arab minority. There are more than a million Arab citizens of Israel - Palestinians, if one is to be politically correct. Many of them are far from integrated into the fabric of Israeli society, and some feel a sense of alienation from the state, a feeling that can easily develop into hostility. This is not just a problem for the Arab minority in our midst - it could become a festering sore concerning all of Israel's citizens, Jews and Arabs alike.

Why has this problem been ignored by those competing for our votes? Is this just a continuation of the neglect that has characterized the attitude of the major parties toward Israel's Arab citizens throughout the years, a vain attempt to sweep this problem under the carpet? Not that efforts are not made every election to gather votes from Arab citizens, with promises that are forgotten the day after the votes are counted. A succession of Israeli governments have shied away from facing this problem.

But there is more than a suspicion that this time, it is not just neglect or a sense of mistaken priorities. Ignoring Israel's Arab citizens, the Palestinians in our midst, seems to mesh too smoothly with all the talk of disengagement and separation from the Palestinians living beyond the 1967 lines. The parties calling for disengagement are obviously playing on and even fostering a distaste for the Palestinians. Do they really expect the average Israeli citizen to differentiate between the Palestinians living on different sides of the green line? Do they care how Israel's Arab citizens react to all this talk of separating from the Palestinians and fencing them out? They surely know that it is not music to their ears.

Recent opinion polls among Jewish citizens seem to indicate that many do not want to have anything to do with the Israeli Palestinians. According to a poll conducted by Kadima, placing an Israeli Arab on its list of candidates would significantly reduce the number of votes the party would receive. Is all this the result of the disengagement syndrome, or is disengagement based on the innate feelings of many Jewish citizens toward Palestinians? In any case, there must be a considerable connection between the two phenomena.

But there may be much worse to come. Avigdor Lieberman has been aiming at the lowest instincts of some Jewish citizens by advocating for an Arab-free Israel - by placing Arab towns and villages outside the national borders and stripping the residents of their citizenship. His program, although clearly somewhere in fantasy land, seems to have been an effective political ploy: His party's popularity has been increasing weekly in the polls. As if that were not crazy enough, other political nuts have tried to draw attention to their hairbrained schemes and fringe parties by provocatively entering Arab neighborhoods and villages, and urging the residents to leave Israel. Hatred of Arabs seems to have become a hot political commodity in this election. All this can only lead to disaster if it is not stopped in time.

Where are the Israeli leaders who will courageously speak out against this xenophobia, even at the risk of losing a few votes? Who will explain to the public that Israel is a western democracy and should not deviate from basic democratic principles? That equality for our Arab citizens and integrating them into the fabric of our society is such a principle? It looks like we will have to wait for the next election before they appear.

I said to be surprised.

Herd of independent minds?

Here's Noam Chomsky in Znet writing, briefly, actually quite casually, on the Israel Lobby article. M-W deserve credit for taking a position that is sure to elicit tantrums and fanatical lies and denunciations, but it's worth noting that there is nothing unusual about that.

Take any topic that has risen to the level of Holy Writ among "the herd of independent minds" (to borrow Harold Rosenberg's famous description of intellectuals): for example, anything having to do with the Balkan wars, which played a huge role in the extraordinary campaigns of self-adulation that disfigured intellectual discourse towards the end of the millennium, going well beyond even historical precedents, which are ugly enough. Naturally, it is of extraordinary importance to the herd to protect that self-image, much of it based on deceit and fabrication. Therefore, any attempt even to bring up plain (undisputed, surely relevant) facts is either ignored (M-W can't be ignored), or sets off most impressive tantrums, slanders, fabrications and deceit, and the other standard reactions. Very easy to demonstrate, and by no means limited to these cases. Those without experience in critical analysis of conventional doctrine can be very seriously misled by the particular case of the Middle East(ME).

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I've reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can't try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don't think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy: in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters, which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.

So Chomsky's not impressed either but he, like Massad, avoids abusing the AS word.

Massad on the Lobby

Actually the Lobby's usually on Massad so this makes a change. Here's Joseph Massad in al Ahram criticising the Israel Lobby article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Like that of Adam Shatz and Daniel Levy it stands out for its honesty by comparison to the likes of Engage and a ragbag of other zionist sources.

While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies, the problem with most of them is what remains unarticulated. For example, when and in what context has the United States government ever supported national liberation in the Third World? The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.

So the perplexing thing is why the lobby spends so much on the political process.

One could argue (and I have argued elsewhere) that it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around. Indeed, many of the recent studies highlight the role of pro-Likud members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration) as evidence of the lobby's awesome power, when, i t could be easily argued that it is these American politicians who had pushed Likud and Labour into more intransigence in the 1990s and are pushing them towards more conquest now that they are at the helm of the US government. This is not to say, however, that the leaders of the pro-Israel lobby do not regularly brag about their crucial influence on US policy in Congress and in the White House. That they have done regularly since the late 1970s. But the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East. The pro- Israel lobby plays the same role that the China lobby played in the 1950s and the Cuba lobby still plays to this day. The fact that it is more powerful than any other foreign lobby on Capitol Hill testifies to the importance of Israel in US strategy and not to some fantastical power that the lobby commands independent of and extraneous to the US "national interest." The pro-Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel was a communist or anti-imperialist country or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world.

I think it's a little harsh to describe the Mearsheimer and Walt account as "fantastical" but my take is a lot closer to Massad's than to theirs. I wonder if the appearance of the M & W article is a prelude to a bit of a change in US policy in the Middle East.

Voices from the grave on Palestine 1967

Every so often I like to post resources for argument's sake. They are often quotes from the zionists of the past about zionist plans for Palestine and for those in the know act as a reminder and for those fooled by the plucky little Israel school of propaganda, act as an eye-opener. So this is a revisit to Cactus48, so called because sometimes the cactus is all that remains as evidence of zionist war crimes:

"The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was 'no threat of destruction' but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could 'exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.'...Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: 'In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.'

From Rabin:

I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.

Moshe Dayan:

Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan...[said] many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland...[Dayan stated] 'They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land...We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot.

And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.

Oh yes, you know how the zionists accepted partition and the Palestinians didn't? Well here's David Ben Gurion:

The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.

That was a bit of a diversion from the usual fare but it's worth keeping these statements to hand.

Anti-Canadianism?

Thanks to Deborah Maccoby for bringing this grotesque example of the Guardian's racism to my attention.

In the next few weeks the ice off Canada's eastern coast will be stained red as hundreds of thousands of seal pups are viciously clubbed to death, shot and skinned alive by hunters (Seal hunt gets off to a bloody start, March 27).

The annual Canadian seal hunt is the largest and most brutal slaughter of marine mammals on the planet. Despite worldwide protests that this hunt is no longer morally, economically or environmentally justifiable, the Canadian government continues to thumb its nose at the rest of the world.

This year 325,000 seals will die - more than 95% of these will be pups aged between two weeks and three months of age. Only external pressure will end this barbaric slaughter.

Paul McCartney, environmental groups such as International Fund for Animal Welfare and Respect for Animals, as well as hundreds of MPs of all parties all want Canada to see sense.

That is why we seek a trade ban on Canadian products here in the UK, and are spearheading the campaign on behalf of Respect for Animals and Humane Society International to convince British supermarkets to boycott Canadian fish and seafood products.

If readers agree that it must be halted, they should boycott Canadian fish products and urge their supermarket not to stock Canadian produce. By doing so we can send Canada a signal that enough is enough -we can halt this vicious slaughter on the ice.
Sally Banks
London
Ann Widdecombe MP
Con, Maidstone and The Weald
Glenys Thornton
Chair, All party retail industry group

I shouldn't worry too much about this as I'm sure some of our academics and authors will get together to "engage" with Canada to undermine this singling out of a great democratic nation.

Billy Bragg on Rachel Corrie

Interesting lyric based on Bob Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll. Awful song though. But that's just my opinion. Have a listen.

Joint Israel Appeal?

From the International Herald Tribune. Well actually they got it from the New York Times. It's a comment on tomorrow's Israeli election by Etgar Keret:

The parties my father votes for never get into Parliament. One year he'll vote for some economist with thick glasses who promises a revolution in tax law, the next year for an irate teacher with a ponytail who advocates a revolution in the school system, the year after that for a restaurateur in Jaffa who explains that only a new culinary approach can bring peace to the Middle East.

The one thing these candidates have in common is a genuine desire for fundamental change. That and the naïveté to believe such change is possible. My father, even at the age of 78, is naïve enough to believe this, too. It's one of his finest qualities.

In the last elections, my brother, a founder of the Legalize Marijuana Party, asked my father for his vote. My father found himself in a quandary. On the one hand, it's not every day that your son founds a political party. On the other, my father, who had a taste of the horrors of fascism during World War II, takes all his civic duties very seriously.

"Look," he said to my brother, "It's not that I don't trust you, but there are all these serious people who claim that grass is actually dangerous, and as a person who's never tried it, I can't really be sure they're wrong." And so, about a week before Election Day, my brother rolled my father a joint. "What can I tell you, kid?" my father said to me that evening during a slightly hallucinatory phone conversation. "It's not half as good as Chivas - but to make it illegal?" And so my father became the oldest voter for the coolest party in the history of Israel's elections. From the minute he said he would vote for it, I knew it wouldn't get into Parliament.

He shouldn't have inhaled.

Israeli elections: the other side of the wall

Here's an article by Yoav Peled from the Middle East Report Online* on the issues facing whoever wins the Israeli elections on 28/3. It details the various interests at play restricting the expected victor, Ehud Olmert's freedom of action and concludes by suggesting what Hamas might be forced to do.

Viewed from the other side of the wall, the main card that Hamas holds against Israel’s punitive measures, and any measures the West may impose, is its ability to declare the PA null and void for reasons of financial bankruptcy. Such a declaration will put Israel in a position of again being directly responsible for the lives of the Palestinians in occupied territory, as it was before the Oslo accords. Since April 2002, the PA has been a sham anyway, functioning as Israel’s subcontractor for running basic services for the Palestinians, such as they are, and enabling the “international community” to pretend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict between two autonomous political entities. If the PA ceases to exist, the true nature of the relations between Israel and the Palestinians as occupier and occupied will reemerge, and Israel will no longer enjoy the privilege of having all the power over the Palestinians without any responsibility for their wellbeing. The downside for the Palestinians, of course, will be the loss of international economic assistance that makes up much of their national income and translates into salaries that sustain a great portion of the Palestinian population. But the Palestinians pay a heavy political price for this money, and if Hamas is indeed as incorruptible as it claims, it may decide that the advantages of putting an end to the charade called the PA outweigh the costs. Given the Palestinians’ economic and military weakness, upsetting the applecart in this manner may be the only way forward open to them as the dual war initiated by Ariel Sharon marches on even in his absence.

*The Middle East Research and Information Project is is online here.

Zionists single out Israel

I'm just looking at Mike Marqusee's blog on the Guardian's comment is free space. He says, and I know he's not the first to do so, that whilst Israel's supporters accuse its opponents of singling Israel out it is Israel that singles itself out. He was responding to an article by John Mann where he wrongly, and tediously, conflates anti-zionism and anti-semtism.

I know many of those in Mann's corner criticise the boycott proposals for "singling out" Israel, but the reasoning here is tortuous. First, it's a complaint that can be made about any single issue campaign or almost any boycott of anything. Secondly, it is Israel's supporters who persistently "single out" the country by arguing that its "unique" situation excuses its monumental record of violations of human rights norms, international law and UN resolutions. Third, it seems not even occur to those who make this charge that people around the globe might "single out" Israel not because of hatred of Jews but compassion for Palestinians and plain unadulterated healthy outrage at the decades of injustice to which they've been subject.

Mann notes the anti-semitic hate mail he receives and links it - without supporting argument or evidence - to what he calls "the insipid [sic] growth of anti-semitism on the left under the cloak of anti-Zionism". As I'm sure he must know, the hate mail comes from all quarters. Every time I write about Israel I am inundated with abusive and threatening emails from Zionists. As a Jew, it's my experience that in London I am under threat not from Muslims or leftists but from the more fanatical wing of the Zionist movement.

Anti-Zionism may at times be a "cloak for anti-semitism" (just as support for Israel may be a cloak for anti-Arab or anti-Muslim racism) but Mann's method is assume that it is so unless proven otherwise. This is McCarthyism: the illogic of guilt by association, with the clear aim of de-legitimising or silencing part of the political spectrum.

I don't know what to make of the Guardian hosting blogs. Who has time to moderate the comments. Some are worth a look at but some are just absurd. Anyway have a see.

Rulers on the left, people on the right

I linked to and posted a chunk of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's Guardian comment piece here. I kept thinking about a paragraph I didn't post and it's this:

By now, the older political distinctions have anyway largely been eroded. As the sociologist Uri Ram has said (with a touch of ethnic sarcasm): "The major players in the socio-political drama taking place in Israel today are of the right: the socio-economic liberal right of the capitalist upper classes - called in Israel 'the left' - and the ethno-religious fundamentalist right of the labouring lower classes - called in Israel 'the people'."

This was in the context of the likely outcome of the coming Israeli elections where the imposition of Israel's expanded borders will be passed off by zionists in the western media as a move to the left.

Liberating Occupied Minds

Arthur Neslen has a book out called Occupied Minds and the formal launch is on Wednesday 29 March 2006 at Waterstones in Gower Street, London W1. Here's the full spiel:

At 1830, there'll be a meeting at Waterstones on Gower St with Arthur Neslen, journalist and author Daphna Baram, and former BBC Mideast correspondent Tim Llewellyn.

The after-launch party kicks off at 2000 at The Square, 21 Russell Square, London WC1, although there'll also be an overspill here from 1830 if we can't fit everyone into Waterstones.

At 2100, there'll be a screening of the Oscar-nominated (and unmissable) Palestinian film 'Paradise Now' + West Bank photo exhibition + music from DJ's Tania (who played at Punk Purim), Tabitha and others in the disco bar downstairs + food and drinks.

Entrance is by donation - £3 recommended, all monies to the Israeli activist group Anarchists against the Wall. Or you can come for free if you can help out with the door, cafe, bar or cooking rota

More on the Israel Lobby article

Here are a couple of useful antedotes to the hysteria that has greeted The Israel Lobby article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and published in the London Review of Books. One is by Daniel Levy in Ha'aretz. It's notable for disagreeing with aspects of the article whilst refraining from the intellectual dishonesty so beloved of its zionist detractors.

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

And the other is the Guardian hosted blog of Adam Shatz. This is a genuine critique of the article itself and a complaint of the way it has been received. Headed Dialogue of the Deaf and worth quoting at length.

However, Mearsheimer and Walt, in my view, bend the stick too far; they seem so in awe of the lobby's power that they have abandoned their realism for the fantasy that Washington is Israeli-occupied territory. It is true that the lobby has a lot of power - too much power, especially in suppressing debate terrifying and/or bribing members of Congress, shutting down artistic productions (see the cancellation of "My Name is Rachel Corrie"), and bullying public figures (witness the abject caving in of Sir Richard Rogers). It is also true that the lobby enjoys boasting of its power, when it is not minimizing it - throwing around one's power while at the same time maintaining the appearance of righteous victimhood is, after all, a delicate balancing act.

But I am not persuaded by the Mearsheimer/Walt argument that the lobby is so decisive a force in shaping American Middle East policy. Israel's record is an embarrassment to the United States, and an affront to its stated democratic ideals (but then so is American behavior in Iraq!), but the Jewish state also provides the United States with valuable services which it might be unable to obtain elsewhere, particularly Israel's intelligence services.

Israel's nuclear weapons have provoked an arms race in the region, leading Iran to develop comparable weapons, which is doubtless a concern to the Americans; but those same nuclear weapons (built with French support, it is often forgotten) create fear in the minds of Arabs and Muslims, something the United States government may well appreciate.

Israel has helped train paramilitaries to fight guerillas in Colombia and other Latin American countries; it provided arms to Somoza's Nicaragua when Jimmy Carter withdrew support from his crumbling regime; more recently, according to Seymour Hersh, it has worked closely with Kurdish groups plotting attacks on Iran's borders; and Israel has advised American troops in Iraq on counter-insurgency.

While the lobby helps to frame, or rather constrict discussion of Israel and its behaviour in America, and while it helps drum up support for Israel on Capitol Hill and to intensify the wave of hostility directed toward Israel's enemies, from Iran to Syria, I'm not convinced that it can be credited with determining American policy (the Iraq war was partly about creating a safe environment for Israel, but much more about control of oil); or that American policy today runs counter to American interests because of the lobby's influence.

There is more convergence than divergence between the interests of Israel and the United States, at least as they are presently constructed. Both Israel and the United States, for different reasons, prefer weak Arab and Muslim states. This is a dangerously short-sighted strategy, one that inevitably provokes hostility, and it is no accident that in such a climate radical paramilitary groups from Hizbollah to Al Qaeda have emerged. The lobby has much to answer for, and it would be a salutary development if groups like AIPAC, which do not represent the majority of American Jewish opinion, were obliged to register as lobbies of a foreign power.

But the vision of Mearsheimer and Walt of a lobby with the power to recast American foreign policy in its image strains credulity. Although the United States is certainly having a hard time of it in Iraq, it could face down the lobby if it decided that the lobby was undermining US interests to the breaking point.

Well done Mr Shatz. You have managed to critique the article without casting aspersions on the writers' integrity and without accusing them of antisemitism.

In Israel racism is becoming mainstream, shock!

According to Chris McGreal in the Guardian, academics in Israel are concerned that after decades of colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and the enforcement of racist laws to facilitate colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing, there is a danger that racism might become mainstream in Israel.

A poll of attitudes among Israel's Jews towards their country's Arab citizens has exposed widespread racism, with large numbers favouring segregation and policies to encourage Arabs to leave the country.

The poll found that more than two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab. Nearly half would not allow an Arab in their home and 41% want segregation of entertainment facilities.

The survey also found 40% of Israel's Jews believe "the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens", a policy advocated by some far-right parties in the run-up to next week's general election.

The poll was conducted by a respected Israeli organisation, Geocartographia, for the Centre for the Struggle Against Racism, founded by Arab-Israeli academics. "Racism is becoming mainstream," said the centre's director, Bachar Ouda. "When people talk about transfer [removal] or about Arabs as a demographic timebomb no one raises their voice against such statements.

"This is a worrisome phenomenon. The time has arrived for the Jewish population, who experienced what racism is on its flesh, to wake up and change its way."

Among the poll's other findings was that 63% of Jewish Israelis consider their country's Arab citizens a "security and demographic threat to the state". Some 18% said they felt hatred when they heard someone speaking Arabic, and 34% agreed with the statement that "Arab culture is inferior to Israeli culture".

An Arab-Israeli member of parliament, Taleb el-Sana, said he was not surprised by the findings.

"This shows we're not talking about a few people, but rather, a worrying phenomenon that places question marks over the Zionist movement," he said.

Mr Sana said polls that show anti-Semitism in other countries are greeted in Israel with a frenzy of denunciations.

"Yet when it happens at their home, they're quiet, and that's why this is a two-fold failure - they are racist, and they're also not attempting to address their own racism," he said.

Some Israelis have explained hostile attitudes toward Arabs not as racism but as stemming from years of conflict and religious differences. But Ahmed Tibi, another Arab member of parliament, said Israeli politics fuels racism.

"Overall, it pays to be racist in Israel because you don't pay a price for it and you can always explain it away by a security need and a self-defence mechanism," he said. "Racists have a long time ago moved from the street to government benches."

Far-right parties running in next week's general election in Israel have built significant support with anti-Arab platforms.

The Yisrael Beiteinu party advocates redrawing the border to place about 500,000 Arab-Israelis inside a Palestinian state. Yisrael Beiteinu is expected to win about 10 seats in the 120-seat parliament, meaning it could hold the balance of power. Another right-wing coalition is expected to take a similar number of seats.

Haaretz newspaper reported this week that the Kadima party, favoured to win the election, decided not to include an Arab in a viable position on its election list because it would cost the party several seats.

Oh dear. Where or when did it all go wrong?

Is Judaism defined by DNA?

Mark Lawson, in the Guardian, finds it sinister that someone would edit his Wikipedia entry to say that he is of Jewish descent and he's probably right. He also objects to being on the influential Catholic list of the Tablet.

Judaism is defined by DNA, Catholicism is conferred through practice. So it is provocative for the Tablet list to include the novelist David Lodge (an "agnostic Catholic"), Clare Short (a "cultural Catholic") and Bob Geldof (an atheist), all of whom would cause incense to come out of Papa Ratzinger's ears, while it cannot acknowledge Tony Blair, who is a Roman Catholic in everything except baptism.

But the magazine is right to be so catholic, as it were, in its definition of Catholicism. The novels of Lodge would not have the style or subjects that they do if he had been raised as a Methodist; nor would the screenplays of Jimmy McGovern (Cracker, Priest), another agnostic listed. The politics of Geldof and Short are also clearly shaped by the charitable and pacifist aspects of Catholic social teaching.

Ok, a bit garbled. It's wrong to suggest that being of Jewish descent might drive ones outlook because then you're making an issue of someone's DNA. But it's also wrong to call people Catholics if they don't practice Catholicism. Until Mark Lawson decides that it is ok.

But Jewish DNA? What DNA do I share with, say, Ethiopian Jews that I don't share with British gentiles? Also, ignoring the fact that Judaism is a religion and is defined by belief and practice, contrary to what Mark Lawson says, Jews are clearly a descent group more than a religious group. But is it simply the being born Jewish that makes one be Jewish or are there social, cultural, even political considerations? All this and much much more, I just don't know the answer to.

Oh Israel, when did you go wrong?

This is a good article in the Guardian. Written by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, it argues that Israel didn't simply go wrong.

There has, indeed, been a dramatic turn in opinion. It's very hard to recall the esteem and goodwill in which Israel once basked, not least on the broad liberal left, where there is now a received view that Israel has deserved this change in affections: that Israel and Zionism are vicious now, having been virtuous once. The view may be almost universal - but is it true?You can hear echoes of the shift in these pages. It might be a columnist recalling the early 1960s, when progressive young friends (mine too) would go from London to spend the summer on a kibbutz in that heroic land. Or it might be Sir Gerald Kaufman bitterly denouncing the present Israeli government by comparison with "the beautiful democratic Israel" that he first knew in the 1950s.

In the age of Jenin, and now Jericho, of "targeted killings" and F-16s blasting refugee camps, that turn in Israel's reputation might seem natural enough. And yet there is a contrary case to be made, that Israel has in some ways been criticised too harshly over the past 20 years, having been judged too leniently in its first 20.

It is really very hard to explain to anyone under the age of 50 just how popular Israel once was, notably among European social democrats and our own Labour party. In the 50s, newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian and the Observer (for all the trauma of Suez) accepted axiomatically that Zionism was a force for good, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, would be profiled in the New Statesman in what were frankly rhapsodic terms.

There were several reasons for this, from traditional liberal philosemitism to horror and shame at the fate of the European Jews. Besides that, in the nearly three decades after 1948, when Israel was run by Labour, it was widely, if myopically, seen as a model social democracy. The change began with the 1967 war, when Israel's former admirers began to condemn the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and was accelerated when Likud took over as the dominant party.

And yet those admirers missed some salient truths. That beautiful democratic Israel of 50 years ago was founded on ethnic cleansing. The later expansion of Israel was actually less brutal: after 1967 a number of Palestinians were uprooted, but there was nothing to compare with the wholesale expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948 - an event to which the right-thinking liberal west closed its eyes at the time.

Even the settlements in the occupied territories, which Israel almost light-heartedly (and in the end hubristically) began in the 1970s, were often set up on empty land, a contrast indeed to the settling of Palestine in earlier generations. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages," Moshe Dayan briskly admitted about the creation of his country: "There is not one single place that did not have a former Arab population."

It began wrong.

Outlawing anti-zionism?

From Ynet. A report in France suggests that anti-zionism should be punishable in the same way that anti-semitism is.

Its author, award-winning writer, doctor and president of a humanitarian aid association, Jean-Christophe Rufin, suggested a raft of measures to combat racism and singles out anti-Semitism as a problem to be combated separately.

But one recommendation, that "unfounded" anti-Israel stances be criminalised to the same extent as anti-Jewish acts, has stirred debate in France, where media and political commentary is often critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Anti-Israel positions among radical anti-racist campaigners risked "a contamination which could put the lives of our Jewish citizens in danger," Mr Rufin argued.

He suggested a law "to punish those who might level unfounded racism allegations against groups, institutions or states, and use against them unjustified comparisons with apartheid or Nazism."

Other recommendations in Mr Rufin's report included: video surveillance of Jewish cemeteries, clearer statistical databases permitting international comparisons, better national coordination, and heightened vigilance of Internet sites.

The study challenged stereotypes that perpetrators of hate-crimes often came from disadvantaged French suburbs predominantly populated by immigrant families from Muslim north African countries such as Algeria and Morocco.

"The new anti-Semitism appears more heterogeneous," it said.

Anti-racist organisations, while welcoming many of the measures envisioned in the report, turned on the controversial suggestion about assimilating criticism or acts against Israel with anti-Semitism.

Mr Rufin was "acting like an arsonist fireman," the head of France's League of Human Rights, Michel Tuniana, said.

'Personal take on problem facing France'

He said the focus on anti-Semitism created an "imbalance" in the approach to fighting all racism, and added that, if the recommendation became law, the umbrella groups the International Federation for Human Rights would be punished because it viewed Israel's treatment of Israeli Arabs as "discriminatory".

Jewish groups in France, however, supported the recommendation.

Mr. Rufin "denounces, very sharply, the anti-Semites who hide behind a sort of anti-Zionism," the head of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, Haim Musicant, said.

Whilst many anti-zionists stop short of likening Israel to nazi Germany, many, including Jews, could fall foul of a law against calling Israel an apartheid state.

"International reverberations"

Here's an article from yesterday's Ha'aretz by Meron Benvenisti. It's an interesting article in its own right but it carries with it a flat contradiction of a major aspect of the recent Israel Lobby article in the LRB in that it shows how America can and does pressure Israel to yield certain results. In this instance America intervened to stop Israel from making their policy of starving the Palestinians too obvious.

The trusteeship alternative
By Meron Benvenisti

The opening and closure of the Karni crossing could have been the subject of a comedy sketch, had it not been part of a humanitarian crisis for more than one million Gaza Strip residents whose basic products are running out. In the morning the crossing is reported closed due to a "serious warning," and a few hours later the crossing opens and a few trucks pass through, until it's closed once again.

The American ambassador invited Israeli representatives to his home in Herzliya, and that was all it took for Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to instruct the security establishment to open the crossing "in a limited manner." His spokespeople confirmed that it's not the humanitarian crises itself that's bothering Olmert, but the "international reverberations" the closure has caused.

It has also become clear that the "international reverberations" - rather than general elections - are the sole factor liable to change Israel's policy, and an American edict undermines any "sovereign and proud" Israeli position. Fear of an international reaction is the most effective roadblock for hasty steps, and the absence of such a fear serves as authorization to take belligerent actions that lead to impassioned public reactions - as though the issue at hand were courageous acts rather than underhanded opportunism.

The absence of a handful of international monitors was enough to jump at the opportunity to carry out the showy operation in Jericho, without worrying about the wrath of the United States. Israel will not be criticized for the humiliation suffered by the Palestinian Authority and its chairman, Mahmoud Abbas (and the entire Palestinian nation), since the PA and its chairman exist solely as a default; and everyone knows they survive thanks to an alliance of conflicting interests that support the existence of a violent and unstable status quo, only because of the fear that its collapse will bring about a worse situation.

That is the context in which the issue of the continued existence of the fiction known as the Palestinian Authority must be examined. Much has already been said about how the cynical use of terms such as "government" and "parliament" to describe Palestinian institutions is meant to disguise a reality of total chaos and continue the charity system known as international aid.

Those calling for the PA to be dismantled think the very existence of the fiction helps Israel continue a deluxe occupation, without being required to fulfill its commitments as an occupying power, and also continue to impose the heavy financial responsibility on the donor states. Those who support the continued existence of the PA say that even in its wretched condition, its very existence symbolizes the demand of self-determination, and that its activity in civil matters, no matter how limited, is important to the process of building the Palestinian nation. The Palestinian people, they say, need national institutions.

It appears that on balance, the continued existence of the PA serves Israel's interests more than those of the Palestinians. Israel is interested in the PA as a symbol of a terror organization (especially since Hamas came into power). Israel is also interested in maintaining the status quo - which is disguised in the election as "unilateral steps of convergence" - but in effect reinforces the regime of cantons, whose independence is, so to speak, verified every day at the Karni crossing.

Dismantling the PA would shake up this status quo, but will not cause chaos, as many fear. The international community would be forced to intervene, because otherwise, a humanitarian catastrophe would take place that no one would be able to shake off. The status quo that Israel wants to perpetuate generates boredom and revulsion that push the international community away from intervention, but dismantling the PA would force a de facto trusteeship, if only to monitor the continued financial support of the Palestinian people.

Israel - which is vigorously opposed to the internationalization of the conflict, out of an aspiration to utilize its complete power advantage without external intervention - will be faced with a tough dilemma. If it opposes such a move, it will be compelled to establish a ruling government in the territories on its own, and funding it. If it doesn't oppose the move, an effective roadblock against its exclusive control will be established for the first time.

A de facto trusteeship will undoubtedly establish a new Palestinian Authority that is not based on the Oslo Accords, of which the only sections left are those that are comfortable for Israel. Under the cover of this temporary trusteeship, the PA will be able to conduct negotiations without worrying about a dictate or boycott. After all, it has already been proven that even the ghost of a threat of international sanctions is enough to moderate boastful Israeli steps.

The opening of the Karni crossing due to American pressure should serve as an example of more daring steps. Whoever does not want to speak with the Palestinian Authority or pay a billion dollars a year to rule over the occupied territories should not complain when faced with the alternative.

I think Meron Benvenisti was a Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem once upon a time but became conscience stricken over the treatment of the Palestinians.

Israeli elections: whoever wins Arabs will lose

Here's an article in Australia's the Age newspaper. Written by Ed O'Loughlin and headlined Israel's shunned Arabs watch poll with unease, the article emphasises the fatc that whilst it's a proud boast of zionists that Arabs can vote and even hold seats in the Israeli parliament, they can only lose when the electoral spoils are divvied up if not before:

WHEN the seats are shared out after next week's Israeli election, the balance of power could be held by an immigrant leader who wants to rid the state of large numbers of its native citizens.

This curious state of affairs has not prevented several mainstream parties from courting the support of Moldovan-born Avigdor Lieberman, whose anti-Arab policies have not disqualified him from twice serving as a minister.

Polls show that Mr Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu ("Israel is our home") party could win 11 seats in the 120-seat Knesset in the March 28 election, thanks to growing support from Israel's 1 million recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

So when centre-left Labour became the first party to rule out a pact with 48-year-old Mr Lieberman last week, its principled stand was applauded by the liberal daily Haaretz, which noted that "until now, everyone has appeared willing to join everyone else, with the sole test being an arithmetic one".

Not quite true: there has long been another bloc in the Israeli parliament capable on paper of commanding more seats than Mr Lieberman and which — arithmetically — could have come to the rescue of more than one Jewish prime minister trying to shore up his slender majority.

But unlike Mr Lieberman and his fellow advocate of the "transfer" of ethnically inappropriate fellow citizens, the late tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi, Israel's Arab parties are considered untouchable by mainstream politicians, able to sit and vote in parliament but fenced off from power calculations.

"Arab parliamentarians are never seen as a legitimate partner in a coalition," says Dr Amal Jamal, an Arab political scientist at the University of Tel Aviv. "When Arab parties vote for the government or support the government in any policy issue, immediately the right-wing parties accuse the government of being illegitimate because it relies on Arab votes."

Growing frustration at 60 years of failure to gain a toehold in government is fuelling calls for an Arab boycott of this month's poll. Combined with internal divisions and changes to the election laws, this could all but wipe out the Arab-Israeli parties in the next Knesset. Although comprising a fifth of Israel's 6 million inhabitants, Christian, Muslim and Druze Arab citizens hold only a 10th of the seats in the present Knesset. Only eight of these MPs represent Arab parties or the mixed but mainly Arab communist party Hadash.

Well it is a Jewish state.

Honest reporting?

This is from the blog of a zionist group called, don't laugh, Honest Reporting.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but even op-eds have to be no less factually accurate than regular news reports. So we have to wonder about the Madison Capital-Times, which gave op-ed space to Jennifer Lowenstein (pictured) for a nasty screed about Israel. Unfortunately, her facts are all wrong.

Among other things, Lowenstein claims Hamas supports a two-state solution while Israel opposes this, then describes as “bizarre” the notion that Hamas should be forced accept a two-state solution. The road map, which Israel and the Palestinian Authority accepted, is premised on a two-state solution.

And here's what Jennifer Lowenstein actually wrote:

For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It has been doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state from emerging and will continue to do so as long as it can count on the complicity of its powerful friends and on abundant popular indifference.

Under such circumstances, it is incumbent upon ourselves to ask why Hamas has therefore been ordered - by Israel and its same powerful friends - to accept "the two-state solution," especially when, unlike Israel, it has stated clearly and repeatedly that it would accept a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Indeed, all of its key spokespeople have said this.

Now Hamas has clearly said that it will ceasefire for a generation if Israel withdraws from what non-zionists call the occupied territories. It isn't the same as accepting a two state solution and Jennifwer Lowenstein doesn't say that they do. The question is why is a group called Honest Reporting misrepresenting what she actually wrote? It's almost like zionists don't want people knowing the truth. The HR article also implies that Israel does supoort a two state solution and yet such a solution has been within Israel's gift for decades now. So why hasn't it been implemented?

Where the f*** are we?

I'm just posting this so that we all know where we are with America.

Israel's infanticide incentive scheme

Israeli soldiers haven't been killing enough children lately so what to do? Start an incentive scheme.

A Givati Brigade officer will receive NIS 80,000 in compensation from the state after he was cleared of all charges in relating to the death of 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman Al Hamas, in the much-publicized "confirmed kill" affair.

Captain "R" will receive NIS 80,000 in compensation from the state in addition to reimbursement for NIS 2,000 of legal expenses, as part of an arrangement reached between his lawyers and the military prosecution.

The agreement was made official Wednesday in the Israel Defense Forces's Southern Command court.

The going rate for killing a 13 year-old school student is NIS 80,000. The details haven't been published yet but it's believed to be a higher rate for killing girls because they are the ones who have babies and Israel's war on the Palestinians is nothing if not "demographic". The more women the Israeli army kills the less Palestinians will be born. This is great news for humanitarians everywhere. Those who despair at the Israeli army's propensity for killing Palestinian civilians can take comfort from the fact that the same army won't have to do that if it targets so many girls that Palestinians will stop being born.

Claimants of the award can remain anonymous like Captain "R" so that their comrades at arms don't get jealous at their jolly good luck. Not only do they get the pleasure of killing and then "confirming the kill" of Palestinian children, they get money out of it as well.

From Ha'aretz.

Beware idle chat

From the Guardian: A man has successfully sued a woman for defaming him in an online chatroom. Apparently courts can force ISPs to hand over personal details of users who libel others or otherwise break the law. This case only applies in the UK but there may well be similar laws in other countries.

A landmark legal ruling ordering a woman to pay £10,000 in damages for defamatory comments posted on an internet chatroom site could trigger a rush of similar lawsuits, a leading libel lawyer warned today.

Michael Smith, a Ukip activist who stood for the Portsmouth North seat last year, became the first person to win damages yesterday after being accused of being a "sex offender" and "racist blogger" on a Yahoo! discussion site.

Mr Smith, 53, from Fareham in Hampshire, sued Tracy Williams, of Oldham, for comments posted after she joined a rightwing online forum in 2002.

Judge Alistair MacDuff said in the high court that Ms Williams was "particularly abusive" and "her statements demonstrated that ... she had no intention of stopping her libellous and defamatory behaviour".

The judge ordered Ms Williams never again to repeat the "unfounded" defamatory remarks, which included calling Mr Smith a "nonce" and accusing him of sexual harassment.

Although ISPs have paid out for hosting defamatory comments, this case is thought to be the first time an individual has been found to have committed libel on a internet chat site.

"The obvious and immediate potential ramification is that there will be more cases like this," said Richard Shillito, a partner at the law firm Farrer & Co. "One sees on these sites particularly unrestrained comments that people make in the heat of the moment without thinking of the legal consequences.

"A lot of people post anonymously but it is possible to find out people's identity. I think people should read this judgment as a warning to be more careful about their comments."

I wonder how this will work out.

Bulldozing Rachel off the New York stage

Not bulldozing, bullshitting. Here's a filmed discussion on Democracy Now on the cancellation of My Name is Rachel Corrie from the New York Theatre Workshop.

"My Name is Rachel Corrie" - a play based on the words of the American peace activist crushed to death three years ago by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza - is causing controversy after the New York City theater that was scheduled to run it postponed production. We host a discussion with Katharine Viner, the editor of the play in London and James Nicola and Lynn Moffat, the two top directors of the New York Theatre Workshop.

It's really bizarre listening to James Nicola, the theatre's artistic director who told the Guardian newspaper

"In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation." Nicola went on to say, "We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn't want to take."

Now listen to Tony Nicola and Lynn Moffat "explain" their decision. Woops, I mean, explain "their" decision.

There is a potentially happy ending here. According to Katherine Viner, the Royal Court Theatre has been inundated with requests from American (including New York) theatres wanting to stage the play.

Guardian corrects and clarifies

The Guardian has added a correction to a review of Linda Grant's latest book by Karma Nabulsi:

In her review of Linda Grant's book The People in the Street, page 9, Review, March 18, our reviewer said that the author visited the village of a Palestinian writer's parents, which they left in 1948, and the reviewer suggested that the book records the Palestinian writer's feelings about the visit. That is not the case. The Palestinian writer told the author that he would be writing his own account, at a future date.

They have also run a clarification of the Punk Purim article I posted on Monday.

Just in case it needs any clarification, the cabaret artist Deborah Fink, referred to in Jewish hipsters and sacred cows, page 2, G2, March 20, as performing "satirical songs about whining Palestinians" while dressed as the columnist Melanie Phillips, was not making fun of the Palestinians as such. This was perhaps clearer in the writer's original piece. Ms Fink emphasises that the one relevant song, with words by Deborah Maccoby, was essentially a criticism of celebrities who go to Israel and ignore the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

So, a good day for Jews in the Guardian.

Engage relaxes its censorship

Engage seems to have relaxed its censorship today. I don't know when they started moderating comments but they clearly use "moderation" to prevent debate. I posted their stated rules here but their policy clearly doesn't tally with their rules. Sadly I have to use it too because I get more than my fair share of time wasting trolls. But I don't use it to prevent debate. I already mentioned that I only tried to comment on Engage twice: once to ask what George Galloway had said that was actually antisemitic and once to say that it didn't really matter if there are one or two states in Israel/Palestine but that it is the state structure that counts. Clearly Engage is trying to protect its lack of integrity here.

Anyway one of their disingenuous posts about the LRB Israel Lobby article has a comment from Debbie Fink. I can't link directly to the comment but here it is:

To those who are in denial about the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, maybe they can explain why the play 'My Name is Rachel Corrie' has been indefinitely postponed in New York and why the cantata for Rachel Corrie was cancelled there? (Funny how the JC has not reported the former...another example of censorship?).

As for Lord Rogers.........From what I know about him, I do not believe that he supports that wall, and the rest.....

And what of the pro-Israel lobby over here? Don't you find it strange that the West London synagogue cancelled EJJP's booking for the meeting ' The unheard voices of Israel'? How's this for censorship? It seems that we are only allowed to hear from Israelis (and Jews) acceptable to the Israeli government. People who claim to be pro-Israel in this way, are only selectively pro-Israel. It would be more accurate to say, pro-Israeli government.

The more I see their coverage of that particular article the more I feel they are not simply a bunch of liars for Israel but that they are becoming increasingly loopy and hate-filled. They're looking like a cross between Harry's Place and Little Green Footballs. Go look at the front page of their Forum. It contains the kind of imagery that gets MPACUK accused of antisemitism.

Their policy seems to have been relaxed since Deborah Fink complained about it to the Just Peace list whilst debating with Linda Grant.

Disgrace?

It must be the time of year. Or maybe it's the time of man. Oh never mind. Here's The Shondes, who can speak for themselves.

The Shondes are a much-needed wake-up call to New York independent music. This vibrant new band will send shockwaves tearing through audiences that have grown accustomed to a sleepy, ironic music sensibility. A Shondes performance will make you laugh, but their humor isn’t mockery; rather, it is a life-sustaining force in a world full of struggle. At a time when “queerness” is often de-politicized, focusing more on throwing a good party for people with lots of privilege than on calling that privilege out, and connecting struggles; a time when young, white hipster culture with loud Zionist overtones has come to define New York Jewish community and identity, The Shondes stand with their communities to challenge a comfort with this through a commitment to social justice and passionate music.

Here's a mid-pesach gig they have line up:

Pesach Rock!
A Radical Jewish Music Showcase, featuring:
Pharoah's Daughter: Hasidic chants, Mizrachi and Sephardi folk rock, and
Spiritual Stylings
The Shondes: queercore-to-the-kishkes rock quartet
Trictrotic: The Music of Nomy Lamm, Marcus
Rogers, and Erin Daly (Chicago)
Jason Trachtenburg's (The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players) Proverbial
Fourth Wall.

Saturday, April 15, 9:00 pm
@ Southpaw, Brooklyn, NY

For more info: www.shondes.com or www.spsounds.com

David Hirsh and the spectre of the Ku Klux Klan

More on the LRB's Israel Lobby article at the Engage site. This time David Hirsh has run the headline: Where the London Review of Books Meets the Ku Klux Klan. They even have a picture of Klansmen in front of a burning cross. Apparently David Duke likes the article so this makes it anti-semitic. Imagine, if Dr Hirsh had read the New York Sun (yes he links to the New York Sun as a serious comment on antisemitism) sooner, he wouldn't have had to misrepresent the article. He could have simply said, or said simply, that David Duke likes it. He's tried this brand of illogic before on Nick Cohen's site.

the American racist David Duke uses the same terminology to describe Zionism as does Joseph Massad, the anti-Zionist academic at Columbia - “Jewish Supremacism”.

Here's my reply

Comparing David Duke to Joseph Massad is disgusting even by your appalling standards. David Duke links every event in world history to the Jews whilst Joseph Massad has very clearly stated that Palestinians have been victims of European anti-semitism as surely, if not (so far) as intensely, as Jews have. I’m surprised at a great academic like you not knowing that. Except of course you do know that and you are just smearing a better person than yourself.

In fairness, he backed down:

I didn’t compare Massad to Duke. I simply pointed out that Duke uses the same central phrase, “Jewish supremacism” to analyse Jewish and Zionist power throughout the world. And Massad does think that Zionism is a global phenomenon.

My point was not that Massad and Duke were the same but that contemporary antisemitism is nearly always anti-Zionist.

But now it seems that zionists across their narrow racist spectrum are ditching any pretence of reasonableness and he is back to the comparison he couldn't sustain when he couldn't control the comments. As it happens, I think he's flipped.

Still, just in case I get likened to David Duke by David Hirsh, I'd better point out that I just hate blueberry pie.

Bush will attack Iran for Israel

According to Ha'aretz, Bush has said that America will use military might for Israel against Iran. He must be hard-up for excuses because if you say that America attacked Iraq for Israel you get accused of anti-semitism.

U.S. President George W. Bush said Monday he would use military force to protect Israel from Iranian threats, but also restated his desire to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program diplomatically.

Bush, in a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, cited comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year calling for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Iran's "stated objective" to destroy Israel is a "serious threat," Bush said as he marked three years since the start of the war in Iraq.

"I made it clear - and I'll make it clear again - that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel," he said.

So now what do we say? Ah, I know. Stop the war!

Punk Purim in the Guardian

Congrats to Joseph and Adam for bringing their yiddisher dissent to the attention of the Guardian. There's a fair write-up on the Jewdas meets Heeb festivities in the G2 today.

"We are trying to create a new, more radical form of Jewish identity," says Joseph Finlay, of Jewdas. "The main obsessions of British Jews are defending the state of Israel and making Jewish babies. We aim to knock these idols down and reopen the debate on who owns Judaism, who has the right to speak for the Jewish community and who is a Jew - surely anyone committed to justice? "We're also trying to bring in a new sense of fun," he continues, "playing with tradition rather than sanctifying it. Once Judaism is sacred, it is already dead."

See Jewdas's own write-up on the Punk Purim event here.

Who are you calling a liar?

There's a bit of a ding-dong going on over at Just Peace with Linda Grant insisting that Karma Nabulsi has invented a chunk of her book that just isn't there.

I am currently dealing with the Guardian's corrections and clarifications. Karma Nabulsi has invented for the purposes of her review a conversation between Samir el Youssef and myself on his experience of visitng his parents village which neither appears in the book, nor took place in real life. The Guardian has had complaints from others who know Samir, about this fictitious exchange and about the overall tone of the review. A correction has been prepared and the Guardian is currently waiting for Karma Nabulsi to explain how this fallacious exchange appeared in her review. Readers can judge for themselves how reliable the rest of it is on this basis. The correction will be inserted onto the review on the website.

I think Karma Nabulsi made an honest mistake based on other things she has heard or read of Linda Grant. In fact I thought I recognised the episode about the return to the parents village but on re-examination I saw that it wasn't as I thought I had remembered it. I still loved the review though, just ignore the last paragraph.

Leader of the free world?

I never really took much notice of Gary Younge until David Aaronovitch misrepresented him in an article a week or so ago. But here's quite a good one in the Guardian today.

Six years into his presidency it is difficult to think of a single, substantial foreign policy initiative that US president George Bush has pursued that did not involve war, or the threat of it. There is good reason for this. It is the one area in which America reigns supreme, accounting alone for 40% of the global military expenditure and spending almost seven times the amount of its nearest rival, China......

Last week the country that aspires to lead the free world stood alongside only Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands and against 170 countries in rejecting the creation of a new UN council to protect human rights. Only the US and Somalia (which has no recognised government) have failed to ratify the UN convention on the rights of the child....

Meanwhile, elections keep on producing the wrong results. Hamas is in power in Palestine; René Préval, the protege of Jean-Bertrand Aristide whom the US helped remove in a coup two years ago, won the presidency in Haiti; Ahmed Chalabi, the protege of the neocons whom the US wanted to impose on the Iraqi people at the outset of the war, could not win a single seat. Elsewhere, voters in Latin America have opted for leaders who campaigned against the neoliberal economic strictures imposed by Washington.

The issue is not whether the developing world is ready for democracy - as the administration keeps arguing - but if the US is ready for the democratic choices made by the developing world.

Quite.

Who or what is the Board of Deputies for?

What makes this question interesting is who is asking it. It's Geoffrey Alderman in the Jewish Chronicle.

Joint statement that’s not so joint

16 March 2006

By Geoffrey Alderman

On February 22, a most bizarre “joint statement” was issued by the Department for Education and Skills and nine individuals who were said to represent the leading religious communities in the United Kingdom.

At the top of this list — presumably because “Catholic” comes before “Church of England” — was Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, head of the Ro-man Catholic Church in England. Then came the Bishop of Portsmouth on behalf of the Anglican Church. Further down the list were representatives of the Buddhists, the Free Churches, the UK Hindu Council, the Methodists, and the Network of Sikh Organisations. Also on the list was the name of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, of the Muslim Council of Britain, to which I shall return in due course.

But the name that really caught my eye was that of Mr Jon Benjamin, representing the Board of Depu-ties of British Jews.

In October 2004, the DfES published the first-ever National Framework for Religious Education. That framework is non-statutory. Nonetheless, behind the scenes the government has been working hard to get the leaders of the major faith groups in the UK to sign up to one of its central themes, namely that, in all taxpayer-funded faith schools, pupils should learn about other religions. And so, after months of negotiation, the joint statement was launched, binding its signatories to the view that “schools with a religious designation should teach not only their own faith but also an awareness of the tenets of other faiths.”

On the face of it, no one could possibly object to these carefully crafted words. It is surely right for pupils in publicly assisted faith schools (I am thinking primarily of the 30 state-maintained Jewish schools) to be made aware of the fact that Britain is not a Jewish state and that the majority of British people, if they profess any religion at all, profess religions other than Judaism in its various branches.

Many, if not most, of you reading this column might also agree that pupils should know something — in superficial outline that falls deliberately short of anything remotely resembling systematic theology — about these other religions.

But there are several deeply troubling aspects to this otherwise innocuous initiative. To begin with, the Board of Deputies is not a religious body. Nor does it represent the totality of British Jewry. Its writ does not run in Gateshead, or in parts of Jewish Bar-net, Jewish Hackney, and Jewish Manchester. And even where its writ does run, it is obliged to seek the guidance of its ecclesiastical authorities, the spiritual head of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy) and the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi Professor Sir Jonathan Sacks. It is also obliged to consult the religious heads of congregations not recognising the authority of either of these two gentlemen.

Well, for starters, I can tell you that Dr Levy was never asked for his views on the matter of the joint statement. Nor was the religious head of my congregation (the Federation of Synagogues), Dayan YY Lichtenstein, ever consulted about it.

This is a pity, not least because Dayan Lichten-stein has some interesting views, strictly grounded, as you might expect, in halachah, on the extent to which Jewish children can be taught about other religions. He believes, for instance, that they can be taught something about the beliefs of Islam, but not about Christianity, which in his view falls within avodah zorah — idol worship.

And I have to ask what Mr Benjamin’s signature was doing on the joint statement. Why didn’t the statement contain the name of Sir Jonathan Sacks (assuming he agreed with its contents)? What about the religious heads of the Reform movement, the Liberals and the Masorti? Were they consulted? And, if so, why didn’t their names appear?

I turn now to a name that did appear, that of Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. Just like the Board of Deputies, the MCB is not a religious organisation. Cardinal Cormac Mur-phy O’Connor may be able, in an ecclesiastical sense, to speak for and on behalf of all the Roman Catholics in the UK. Sir Iqbal cannot speak, in an ecclesiastical sense, for British Muslims, let alone bind them to any particular religious imperative.

Had the joint statement included the authorised signatories of, say, the Lancashire or Bradford Council of Mosques, or the Islamic Sharia Council of the UK, I might have been inclined to take it seriously. As it is, it is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Perhaps the community's ready for Jews against zionism now.

Try the murderers!

Wow! here's a headline and a half in today's Ha'aretz.

State prosecutor: Israel has right to try Ze'evi killers

And now look at the article in Israel's most liberal daily:

Israel has the authority to try the murderers of former minister Rehavam Ze'evi, State Prosecutor Eran Shendar concluded yesterday after consulting with other senior legal officials.

Why try them when Ha'aretz has already found them guilty? And that's without getting into whether or not the killing of Ze'evi was a legitimate targeted assassination of a man who was openly planning ethnic cleansing.

Engage on that LRB article

I've just been reading some opinions on the Engage website about the article on America's Israel Lobby that appeared in the latest London Review of Books. They have three Engage opinions, a link to another one and 6 comments.

Here's a little chunk of the Engage intro to the article.

They discuss all the possible reasons why Israel gets favourably singled out by America, and discard them one by one. The only explanation left is that there must be some sort of secret, a shadowy influence being exercised somewhere.

And here's what the article actually says:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

Here's Jeff Weintraub:

"Yes, I saw that article yesterday, and I found it appalling... but also significant. This is a far more respectable and academically credible version of the Buchananite line - or, to put it another way, an academically heavyweight restatement of the "realist" critique of the US-Israeli alliance and the "Jewish lobby" that used to be associated mostly with people like George Ball, State Department Arabists, and big-business Republicans (with the additional wrinkle of blaming the Iraq war on the Jews)."

Here's what the article actually says:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical.

Is that "blaming the Iraq war on the Jews?"

Here's a bit of Shalom Lappin's offering:

the seductive skillfulness of the article consists largely in its packaging a traditional Zionist conspiracy view of American foreign policy, long a cornerstone of the far left and the far right, in a relaxed foreign policy analyist's idiom that detaches it from anti-Jewish diatribes. This is the source of its appeal and its danger.

He seems to be complaining that the article isn't anti-semitic which I would have to agree with since it's not but he also uses the c-word - conspiracy that is, to which we return to what the article actually said:

the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

He also says that the "Zionist conspiracy view of American foreign policy," has long been a "cornerstone of the far left." No it hasn't. The far left position tends to be that Israel is a useful tool in America's imperialist armoury. But what's also curious here is that for an academic site Engage offers no explanation of why America does support Israel. America supports almost every Israeli move including the occupation which Engage claims to oppose. So why don't they tolerate criticism of American support for Israel. Anyway, the one article that does seek to explain why America supports Israel is linked to on the Engage site but not posted there. The writer is Martin Kramer:

But let's enter Walt's World, and accept its presumptions, for argument's sake—and for the sake of an argument about Israel. Let's set aside the claim that Israel and the U.S. share democratic values, rooted in a common tradition. Let's set aside the fact that the American public has a genuine regard for Israel, shown in poll after poll, which prevents it from ever seeing Israel as one more Norway. (Walt: if Israel tries to impose an "unjust solution" on the Palestinians, the United States should reduce its support for Israel to "the same way that we support a Norwegian state.") Let's just ask his simple question: is Israel a strategic asset or a strategic liability for the United States?

To recap: Walt thinks that by any objective measure, U.S. support for Israel is a liability. It causes Arabs and Muslims to hate America. Since he thinks the United States should disengage from the Middle East, and follow a policy of "offshore balancing," he believes America needs to cultivate a sense of shared purpose with Arabs and Muslims, many of whom detest Israel or its policies or both. The less the United States is identified as a supporter and friend of Israel's five million Jews, the easier it will be for the United States to find local proxies and clients to keep order among the billion or so Muslims. And the only thing that has prevented the United States from seeing this clearly is the pro-Israel lobby, operating through fronts as diverse as AIPAC, The Washington Institute, and—yes—even the Brookings Institution. Have I simplified Walt's argument? Probably not as much as you might think.

To answer Walt's simple argument, I'll respond with a simple question. If you need an ally somewhere, don't you want it to be the smartest, most powerful, and most resourceful guy on the block, who also happens to admire you? And what is the point of having an ally who's backward, weak, irresolute, and thinks in his heart of hearts that you're his enemy? That's the choice the United States faces in the Middle East.

Leaving aside the offensive language, this isn't a million miles from the left perspective. It still begs the question: if Israel acts in America's interests why does the lobby spend so much money on American politicians?

Not the Jewish and Israel Blog Awards

I didn't get a JIBA (Jewish and Israel Blog Award) and I was really disappointed after all the hours (ok, minutes) I put into researching and writing my blog. But it's not all doom and gloom. I got an N-JIBA from the Jewish Socialist. This article sets out some of the Jewish interest websites that won't even be considered for a JIBA because they don't support Israel. Or as Clifford Singer puts it, they are Online but off-message.

Some radical bloggers prefer to skip the spiritual angst and head straight to the action of Israel-Palestine (IP) blogging. Three sites that won't be receiving Jewish and Israel Blog Awards anytime soon are the intelligent and unashamedly anti-Zionist Jews Sans Frontieres, Antony Loewenstein and Anti-Zionist Notes.

See that? "intelligent". Jewish Socialist is the magazine of the Jewish Socialist Group and is a shnip, I mean a snip, at £1.50 a go.

Another review of Linda Grant's book

I linked to the review of Linda Grant's latest book in a post to the Just Peace list and a John Strawson (I think he's with the Engage crew but I'm not sure) has responded thus:

Can I suggest that everyone who is interested in Linda
Grant's book "The people of the Street," read it? It
would be quite wrong to assume that Karma Nabulsi's
narrative of the book is the only one. Grant sets out
not to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or even
to investigate its origins. She is rather attempting
to offer some narratives about the current Israeli
reality. I think we need more not less of this
approach - and certainly need more including of course
Palestinian narratives. It breaks away from imposing
an all embracing national discourse that established a
fixed camp from which the world can see so simple and
instead offers a series of changing frames each
challenging, thought-provoking and thoughtful. My
reading of the book is not as Nabulsi's it is far from
comfortable and cosy but rather disturbing using in
turns humor and sadness to disrupt the noise of
ideological discourses. I my view this is an important
book and a really fine piece of writing.

I hadn't noticed any other reviews of this book but I just found this one, again in the Guardian:

Linda Grant's The People on the Street should be obligatory reading on both sides of the Israel-Palestine divide,

That was the sub-title. You know, the big print just below the headline. I held something back though. The reviewer's name: Ian Black. Another resident zionist at the Guardian.

Palestinian gays and more Dershowitz lies

For some time now zionists have been bragging that whilst Israel exists on the basis of colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid laws, it is at least a safe haven for persecuted Palestinian gays. Alan Dershowitz has got in the act, telling an audience that not only did he draft UN Resolution 242 but that he supports Israel because he supports gay rights. Look:

And in Israel? Misinformation abounds. In a 2004 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, Alan Dershowitz said: "I support Israel because I support gay rights. Recently, a progressive congressman, Barney Frank from Massachusetts, worked with me and Israel to grant asylum for 40 Palestinian gays."

Alas, not a word of this is true.

When gay Palestinian men run for their lives into Israel, they do not seek — and they cannot get — "asylum," which is a special status under international law available to those who can establish a "well founded fear of persecution" in the country of their nationality or "place of habitual residence." Israel has never granted asylum to Palestinians, gay or not, says Anat Ben-Dor of the Refugee Rights Clinic at the Tel Aviv University Law Faculty — even those who can credibly claim they will be killed if they are sent back to the West Bank or Gaza. This is because Israel interprets international asylum law — the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which Israel has signed — as inapplicable to Palestinian nationals.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Jerusalem advises any Palestinian seeking asylum in Israel that he or she is ineligible to apply. Nevertheless, in years past, West Bank Palestinians were sometimes allowed official or unofficial residence in Israel on any one of a number of humanitarian grounds. These included family reunification, medical treatment, fear of persecution or because they were blessed with high-profile friends. But not any more.

Full article here.

Sharon up and about in Israal

No, not Israel's answer to Leonid Brezhnev. Sharon Stone silly.

"I would kiss just about anybody for peace in the Middle East." It's not that you can't believe the above statement, although it does remain an inadequate excuse for Sliver. It's just well, you somehow sense this one isn't going to be solved by air-kissing. Although she did make good on the remark by puckering up to Peres, a guy she could totally have caught wrinkles from.

Yes, this latest member of the zionist peace camp was with Shimon Peres when she made her generous offer. Full article here.

Linda Grant's bubble-wrapped war criminals

Here's a Guardian review of Linda Grant's latest offering for Israel. Written by Karma Nabulsi, it's not scathing all the way through but it is pretty damning:

Like the colonial narrative tradition from which one can trace its genealogy, sentence after sentence, page after page, it relentlessly stitches a sentimental noose of absolute dominance: the violence has been done elsewhere, the reader becomes a ghost. The dissociation is wordless, for the words are all Linda Grant's, and she has used them well.

And the words she doesn't use?

Millions remain invisible and dispossessed in order to make this charming story possible - this endearing and fey world of a few streets in Tel Aviv. Here, all the Israelis are quirky, amusing, intelligent, terribly winsome, politically aware (or if not, then possessed, like the landlady, the café owner, the shop-keeper, by a sort of madcap ingenuity). There is a mythic quality to this fairytale book, set in an ersatz metaphysical Mitteleuropa on the shores of the Arab Mediterranean. Of course the people on these streets need to be pretty marvellous, as the price for their cosy, closed world is being extracted daily in the refugee camps not too far away.

But there is a glimpse of the price paid for this curious place where racist war criminals dress like ballerinas.

"What was happening in Gaza or Nablus - the curfews, the checkpoints, the terrifying incursions of troops, the targeted assassinations, the collapse of the social infrastructure, the malnutrition, the cages in which Palestinians were fenced off, like zoo animals - could be happening in Bosnia, instead of a 25-minute drive away," she writes. As for Israel: it is "a society floating on boiling anger, fear, anxiety, posttraumatic shock, aversion, brutality. You saw it in the road rage, in the domestic violence, in the rape, the desire to build walls against not just suicide bombers but your own neighbours ... Suspicion, fear, exploding psychodramas detonating whole families. I would be woken in the night by terrible screams, the raised voices of husbands and wives, the sound of objects smashing against walls, the police sirens. Or on the street, screeching tyres, sickening metal collisions, tirades of fury between drivers."

The moment passes, and she returns to the bubble, yet something profound has shifted. There is a new "normalcy", which accepts and incorporates this fracture, and the violence that she has looked in the face. This narrative of internal rupture has been repeated among many Israeli intellectuals over the past five years, the tectonic plates shifting as the Israeli left lurched towards the right: "And so we may have to face the nightmare that the war between the two peoples cannot be concluded; there is no deal that can ever be signed that will not give way, almost at once, to the resumption of the struggle," she writes.

At the end of this story, back in Britain, Grant discovers a Palestinian chum, a writer living in London, who comes from a refugee camp in south Lebanon. They end up going back to his mother's village near Acre (which has become a moshav called Betzel) after attending a literary festival. Unlike Ghassan Kanafani's classic A'id ila Hayfa (Return to Haifa, published in 1967), which captures that electric moment between dispossessed and dispossessors with a savage and subtle beauty, this is a dull affair. He is mostly silent; she, on the other hand, compares it to her own experience of the eastern European village her parents came from. She felt she didn't belong there ("I came, I saw, I left"); she felt nothing. She checks with him - he too feels nothing, no attachment to the ruins of his mother's destroyed village, no desire to return. That's all right then. Let's order another slice of cake at the Café Mapu.

Look out for Linda Grant's letter to the Guardian soon complaining that she's been misrepresented.

Israel kills another child

Ok not exactly news. I just found this paragraph tacked onto the end of an Independent article about Palestinians possibly suing the UK for its recent collusion with the Israeli invasion of Jericho.

* Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 10-year-old Palestinian girl yesterday during an arrest raid in a West Bank village.

Whose baby is AIPAC or who is AIPAC's baby?

Here's an article in the London Review of Books outlining just what support Israel gets from America and AIPAC's role as a conduit for that support.

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

It's also got some useful historical notes:

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.

Now the article drifts into a controversial area. It argues, correctly in my opinion, that there is no moral case for supporting Israel. Ok, so far so obvious. But it also says that there is no strategic case for supporting Israel. I don't think it makes that case convincingly but let's run with it to where AIPAC comes on the scene.

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

Now here's the rub. Marxists argue that the state is guided by materialist considerations. As far as I can tell, the philosophical conservative position wouldn't be significantly different but since for some reason the field of genuine enquiry about Israel has been left to the left I'll focus on that. Israel is clearly a loss leader for imperialism as it costs America money. So the materialist view of why America supports Israel is that it safeguards the assets on which America, or its corporations, do make money. Is that a fair, but brief analysis? Ok let's run with that then. So why does the lobby spend so much money on politicians? It's like the tobacco industry saying that advertising cigarettes doesn't increase smoking. Then why advertise? So this is perplexing. That's without getting into a materialist analysis of why Jews who support Israel do so. I'll leave that for another time. Is it possible that the American state has sound imperialist reasons for supporting Israel and that the lobby is being duped into funding a political system (or at least most of its elected officials) that perpetuates support for a regime whose structure and conduct, if they were publicised, should be repugnant to most Americans? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

Starving the Palestinians continues

From the Financial Times:

Palestinian business groups have called off a showcase government-backed conference for overseas investors after Israeli authorities made a last-minute decision not to allow Arab participants to attend, Mazen Sinakrot, Palestinian Authority economy minister said yesterday.

Cancellation of the meeting, widely promoted in the Arab world and scheduled to take place in the West Bank town of Bethlehem next month, was seen as exacerbating Palestinian economic isolation in the wake of elections that brought Hamas to power.

You won't believe this but while Israel is having the Palestinian comprehensively boycotted there are those, even in the labour movement, who say Israel shouldn't be boycotted. Incredible!

Two new blogs, one topic

There are two recently established blogs hosted by the Guardian. One is that of George Galloway and the other is that of Professor Stephen Rose. Galloway's started with the Israeli invasion of Jericho.

Al-Jazeera is broadcasting footage of a brutal Israeli raid on a prison in the Palestinian town of Jericho.

In what looks like a pre-election stunt, the Israeli government is trying to seize Ahmed Sadaat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and five of his comrades.

One Palestinian guard is already reported dead and there have been further casualties, according to al-Jazeera.

And did Professor Rose's:

Back in 1956, when Israel, France and Britain invaded Egypt, Anthony Eden's government tried to maintain the barefaced fiction that there was no collusion. Now this government has done the same, withdrawing UK monitors from Jericho prison to allow the Israelis (within 15 minutes) to storm the jail and capture for interrogation the prisoners held within. This morning the Foreign Office email site has been unavailable, preventing the wave of protest in this country from reaching Jack Straw's ears. Condoning or colluding in Israeli state terror is of course nothing new. Only a few weeks ago, Straw actually apologised to the Israeli government about the warrant issued for the citizens' arrest of an Israeli general charged with war crimes. The international court of justice finds Israel's apartheid wall illegal, but the UK government offers barely a whimper of protest; the double standards that pardon Israel any excess whilst threatening the Palestinians with sanctions because they have the audacity to elect - democratically - an inappropriate government are breathtaking. Of course, it isn't just the government. When the Church of England synod votes to disinvest from Caterpillar because its armoured militarised bulldozers are being used to demolish Palestinian houses illegally ­ and, incidentally, killing protesters like Rachel Corrie - the former Archbishop of Canterbury issues a grovelling apology and the chief rabbi claims that the divestment will increase the danger of anti-semitism. (Anti-semitism is the cheapest rallying cry of Israel's Zionist apologists and one that I, as one of Jewish ethnicity, find particularly nauseating.) And then, of course, there is the Richard Rogers affair, where the architect was forced to crawl to Jewish interests in New York to save his contracts because his office hosted a meeting of architects and planners, which called on their colleagues not to participate in building and related contracts associated with illegal Israeli activities in the occupied territories.

Both have commenting facilities, unlike some pro-Gulf war zionists I could mention, if I haven't already.

More on British duplicity

Here's a letter from Roland Rance in today's Guardian about collusion between Britain and Israel in the recent Israeli invasion of Jericho.

PFLP leader Ahmed Saadat was held without charge by the Palestine Authority under Israeli instructions. The PA has consistently refused to honour a ruling from the Palestinian supreme court four years ago, ordering Saadat's immediate release. So much for the rule of law. Israel insists Saadat was responsible for the murder of the right-wing cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi - an attack for which four other Palestinians were convicted in a Palestinian court. Meanwhile, nobody has been arrested or charged over the earlier murder by the Israeli army of Saadat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustafa. The collusion of the British government in this display of double standards is another shameful act in the long history of British duplicity in the Middle East.
Roland Rance
London

Perfidious Albion?

Here's a Counterpunch article by Jonathan Cook about Britain's duplicity with regard to the Israeli raid on the Jericho jail.

In the looking-glass world of Middle East politics, it is easy to forget that Ahmad Saadat, the imprisoned Palestinian leader Israel summarily arrested in Jericho late on Tuesday, is wanted for masterminding the killing of the Jewish state's most notorious racist politician-general.

Rehavam Zeevi, head of the Central Command in the late 1960s and early 1970s, personally developed and managed Israel's brutal regime in the newly occupied West Bank. After retiring from the battlefield, he waged a relentless war against "the Arabs" on the political front. His Moledet party, founded in the 1980s, advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Greater Israel--in other words, from Israel and the occupied territories.

His thinking became so acceptable after the outbreak of the intifada that he was appointed tourism minister in Ariel Sharon's first cabinet. Maybe Sharon thought that, with Zeevi for company, he really might start to look like a man of peace.

Zeevi's killing by gunmen in a Jerusalem hotel in 2001 was about as close as the Palestinians have managed to get to emulating an Israeli-style targeted assassination--with the difference that, in the Palestinian operation, no bystanders were killed.

There you go; a little bit of context but now for the Britain's duplicity bit:

Britain reneged on its understandings with the Palestinians and quit Jericho, but not before telling Israel it was going. As if waiting for its cue, Israeli armour rolled into Jericho at once to capture Saadat and a handful of other wanted men.

To Palestinians, the British broken promise, as well as the hasty exit from Jericho and apparent collusion with Israel, all smacked a little too painfully of other episodes of British foreign policy in the Middle East. There were echoes of 1956 and London's pact during the Suez Crisis with Israel on the invasion of Egypt. And there were echoes too of 1948, when Britain hurriedly abandoned Palestine, though not before it had effectively fulfilled the Balfour Declaration's promise of creating a Jewish homeland by allowing hundreds of thousands of Jews to immigrate.

That in large part explains the outpouring of rage from Gaza to Ramallah on Tuesday, as well as the kidnapping of foreigners. Britain's duplicity was a reminder--if it was needed--that nothing has changed in a century of Western "diplomacy".

And of course the Palestinian backlash against British duplicity has made British "security concerns" a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anti-war resources in context

My attention has just been drawn to this site. It's called the War in Context and on its home page has many intros and links to many good articles. Try this one by Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom.

Attacking the IDF siege of the Jericho prison as a campaign ploy by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, leftist activist and ex-MK Uri Avneri Tuesday termed the 2001 assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi a targeted killing, and said that slain Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin "was certainly of a higher rank" than Ze'evi.

"This was an almost-uncamouflaged campaign ploy by Olmert, prepared in a cabal with the British and the Americans," Avneri said of the IDF operation, in which a nine-hour siege ended with the surrender of Ze'evi's killers.

It also has intros and links to some really appalling articles. Try this. But context being all these are very useful resources.

Jonathan Freedland and the "too negative" review

Did you see the negative review of Jonathan Freedland's book in the Guardian? No. That's because he spiked it. He, Jonathan Freedland, spiked it. Not his editor, him. Here, according to Private Eye magazine (not much of it appears on line - you'll have to get the hard copy), is how and why.

Last month we reported the Grauniad's spiking of a review from eminent crime writer Michael Dibdin begause it was "too negative" about a new thriller, The Righteous Men, by Sam Bourne. The problem? Sam Bourne is the pseudonym of Grauniad bigwig Jonathan Freedland, making a desperate (and doomed) effort to break into the Dan Brown market.

Lord Gnome has now learned more about how the piece came to be suppressed, which sheds fascinating light on the Grauniad's editorial processes. When the Dibdin review arrived, hilariously trashing Freedland's thriller, literary editor Claire Armitstead went to editor Alan Rusbridger and asked what to do about it. Amazingly, Rusbridger then referred the piece to Sam Bourne himself, aka Jonathan Freedland, asking if he wanted it to run.

Surprise, surprise, Freedland said no. And so it came to pass.

Not that this spared the wretched Freedland. Angry at the Grauniad's censorship, Dibdin took his article to the Times, which was delighted to print it. A month after publication, it remains the only review of any kind for The Righteous Men.
Still fuming, Freedland has now advised Armitstead that she should never ask Dibdin to write for the Grauniad again.

Here's the Times Review:

READING THIS BOOK IS like dating someone who seems attractive if rather conventional at first, then maybe a little eccentric in a colourful way, but gradually gets weirder and weirder until finally, around four in the morning, you realise that you’ve invited a raving lunatic into your life.

But let’s go back to the beginning, when you were just getting to know each other. The background information looked reassuring: Jonathan Freedland, the respected Guardian columnist, has written a thriller, a traditional mid-life career move for male journalists, dating back to Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth. But thrillers are now essentially movie treatments, and any agent will be looking for an attention-grabbing concept on which to base the big pitch that gets the big numbers.

Well, how about this? A cabal of extremely rich and powerful New York Jews is conspiring to bring about the end of the world by murdering a seemingly random bunch of lowlife do-gooders, only to be foiled by a newspaper reporter in league with members of a community of ultra-orthodox Christians who have kidnapped his wife but help him defeat the evil Jews in the shootout climax.

No, but there’s something there. How about flipping the whole thing 180? Make the Jews the good guys — Hassidic instead of Amish reclusives — and have the killers be a bunch of reborn Ivy League Wasps. It’s The Da Vinci Code meets The Brotherhood and begets Rosemary’s Baby. Let’s get rich! Maybe they will. The hero of The Righteous Men is Will Monroe, a British journalist working for The New York Times — promising some interesting bicultural insights that never emerge — and the style is very much that of the most boring newspaper in the world since Pravda reinvented itself: a mixture of plonking facts and breathless platitudes.

That’s how thrillers are meant to sound, and the content is at first equally typical, with the cub reporter on the beat winning accolades from management and resentment from colleagues for filing on two apparently unconnected and motiveless murders. The only flaw is that Will takes a lot longer than the reader to notice that both victims are described by someone who knew them as “righteous”, as opposed to “good” or “kind”.

The looming concept finally steps out of the shadows when Will’s wife disappears and he starts getting mysterious text messages on his mobile and e-mails on his BlackBerry, for this is cutting-edge wi-fi paranoia. He enlists the help of a former lover and a computer geek and soon we are knee-deep in cryptography, acrostics and numerology. At this stage it’s all basically good clean fun, and the scenes of Will's incursion into a Hassidic community in Brooklyn are the best in the book, with real tension and drama. This could have resulted in a study of hard moral ambiguities in the John le Carré manner, but instead the the novel’s spinal column dissolves in a puddle of chicken fat.

The key to the killings is hidden in Jewish mysticism about which we are informed in reverentially hushed tones and that are taken at face value. For The Righteous Men to work in the rational world, which we have by now left far behind, the reader must accept that an Oxford-educated British hack could be so bowled over by the sheer wisdom, learning and, well, righteousness of the Hassidim that he comes to believe that You-Know-Who has a preordained plan for mankind encoded in scripture and that their rabbi possessed accurate real-world information about it.

Oh, and that Will’s unborn son may be the Messiah if the big guy upstairs decides he needs one any time soon, but (this is a helpful parenting tip) that Will shouldn’t make a big deal about it.

Still, you read on, if only out of morbid curiosity about which bit of kabbalistic hokum you’re expected to swallow next, and since Dan Brown — a name curiously similar to this pseudonym — has done all right, there must be a market for this sort of stuff.

At least really bad writing can be relied upon to throw up those great lines that you don't find anywhere else — like this reflection on the healing issues of a man who has blown his dad’s head apart with a pistol: “Whatever Freud said about Oedipal fantasies, killing one’s own father shook the psyche to its foundations.” How true.

I wonder if Freedland got the chance to vet this Observer review:

In truth, despite the welter of Jewish arcana, mysterious bumpings-off and the introduction of a brilliantly sinister newspaper editor called Townsend McDougal, it isn't much of a book, either. But neither is it the worst example of a genre whose day probably has some time to run, and Sam Bourne, unless Jonathan Freedland is hiding his light under a bushel in the manner of the pseudonymous activist collective Luther Blissett, should not feel shy to call it his own.

He may have even written it for

Matilda Lisle is the nom de plume for an Observer staff writer

I'd better set myself a task for 1st April like "don't be so gullible".

Jericho invasion, Guardian "might" know the answer

What happened in Jericho? and how? and why? Well the Guardian editorial this morning thinks it might know....maybe.

The sequence of events that led to the confrontation at the jail in Jericho yesterday, and to protests, arson and kidnapping elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, is not entirely clear.

So let's speculate a little shall we?

But it seems likely that Hamas, still in the process of forming a government after its victory in the Palestinian elections, sensed that it could win a small victory over the Israelis by releasing the militants held in Jericho.

Ok we won't just speculate, we'll ignore the fact that Hamas's election victory was itself a massive victory over Israel. But let's continue speculating all the same:

Hamas may have calculated that in the new situation following the January elections and with a de facto ceasefire more or less holding, Israel might not carry out the assassination threat, so that it was now safe to release them. Jack Straw may have calculated that the British could not be party to that so it was better to withdraw.

Ok the editorial does go on to apportion some blame on the invasion of Jericho to Israel but its starting point, indeed its main thrust, is to ignore the tradition of incumbent Israeli governments committing acts of massive violence as an election gimmick. We have been here before with Shimon Peres killing lots of refugees in a UN compound in Qana.

Israeli forces storm Jericho jail

It's all over the news now. Israeli troops have stormed the jail in Jericho and captured those it believes to be responsible for the killing of Rahavam Ze'evi, the minister most notable for advocating the expulsion of all Arabs from former mandate Palestine.

Some 80 Palestinian prisoners, including a man Israel says was responsible for the murder of an Israeli government minister, have surrendered to Israeli soldiers, ending an Israeli siege of the prison near Jericho on the West Bank.

The prisoners, who at first refused to surrender, filed out with their arms raised. Among them was Ahmed Saadat, who Israel says ordered the 2001 murder of tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi. Saadat had earlier told Al-Jazeera television he would rather die than surrender to Israeli soldiers.

Israeli officials say the siege began after the Palestinian Authority said it was prepared to release Saadat and other jailed militants.

Britain and the United States had removed their monitors ahead of the siege, but they say they had no advance notice that Israel would storm the prison.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign organised a demo at Downing Street this evening.

Lots of Jews, no synagogue

According to last Friday's Jewish Chronicle (subscription only), a shul has barred a meeting of European Jews for Justice for Palestinians from its premises. Here's the article in full.

Shul bars Jews who back Palestinians

09 March 2006

By Daniella Peled

A pro-Palestinian Jewish group has been barred from holding a meeting at the West London Synagogue for fear that congregants would be offended by its views.

The UK branch of European Jews for a Just Peace — supporting a targeted boycott of Israel — had booked the synagogue for a March 16 meeting on “The Unheard Voices of Israel.”

Cancelling the agreement, the West London management offered assistance to EJJP in finding an alternative venue.

“In hiring out [our premises], we wouldn’t knowingly engage with a group or individual who we believe might be contradictory to the beliefs and views of a substantial majority of our members,” West London executive director Alan Shapiro told the JC.

EJJP spokesman Dan Judelson commented that it was ironic that the unheard voices of Israel would continued to be silenced at the West London.

The JC actually got the date wrong. Here are the details of the meeting though it's tonight at 7.30 so unfortunately I won't be going:

THE UNHEARD VOICES OF ISRAEL

YEHUDIT KESHET AND ART NESLEN

will introduce their recently published books on the Israelis we rarely hear from

Chair: Michael Kustow

YEHUDIT KESHET is the author of Checkpoint Watch: Testimonies from Occupied Palestine, published by Zed Books. She is a veteran activist, co-founder of Machsom Watch, and writes about the Israeli women involved, day-in-day-out over the last five years, in monitoring Israeli checkpoints.

ARTHUR NESLEN is the author of Occupied Minds: A Journey through the Israeli Psyche, published by Pluto Press. He is a journalist who has worked for the BBC and AlJazeera as well as writing for the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, Red Pepper, the New Statesman and Private Eye. In his new book he explores the dynamics, distortions and incredible diversity of Israeli society from the mouths of more than fifty Israelis: soldiers, settlers, sex workers and the victims of suicide attacks.

TUESDAY MARCH 14TH AT 7.30PM
THE MONTCALM HOTEL, 34-40 GREAT CUMBERLAND PLACE, LONDON W1 (NEAR MARBLE ARCH)

EJJP brings together Jews opposed to the Israeli occupation; its UK affiliates are
the Jewish Socialists' Group, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Joint Action for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and Just Peace UK

The day after Paddy's Day

It's Paddy's Day on Friday 17 March. The next day is an anti-war demo assembling at 12.00 at Parliament Square in Westminster. And that night there is Punk Purim, laid on by the Jewdas people.

What: jewdas and New York’s Heeb Magazine present Punkpurim
Date: Saturday, March 18
Time: 9pm

Place: rampART, 15-17 Rampart Street , Whitechapel , E1 2LA

Cover: FREE

dresscode(optional): hassidic

Extras: DJs, bands, art, projections, food, drinking… you know
Radical Jewish culture returns to the East End as The New Rabbis of Liberty head down to rampART, a squatted social centre in the heart of Whitechapel. Bringing on the spirit of Yiddish subversion with klezmer hip hop/drum n bass bands Ghettoplotz and Emunah; Radical Torah will be taught by a motley crew of Jewish renegades; films and art showcasing the best of revolutionary Diaspora culture; and djs spinning the speeches of Ariel Sharon.

Punkpurim is Jewish hipsterism meets Israeli hardcore metal meets UK anarchist collectives meets anti-nomian Chassidism. It reclaims the carnival heart of the Jewish festival of Purim. Think of it as the meeting of Walter Benjamin, Noam Chomsky and Barbara Streisand in a Brick Lane Bagel Bar. Think of it as the revenge of subversive diasporists everywhere.

Punkpurim is brought to you by:

jewdas.org the focus point of radical Judaism in the UK and beyond.  Promoting heimische culture on acid, jewdas whips up Talmud, satire, heresy and cream cheese into a chicken soup of underground Diaspora culture. Jewdas fully supports the Anglo Jewish establishment and would never criticise the state of Israel.

Heeb is a New York based Jewish Culture Magazine. It is the roiling product of so many drunken postmillennial nights on the mean streets of the Lower East Side . It is an ambitious antitrust investigation into the monopoly on God. It is a sweaty prizefight between hip hop and sushi in this corner and klezmer and kugel in the other. It is the bastard love child of Emma Goldman and Lenny Bruce. It is a plague on modern-day pharaohs replete with miraculous jailbreaks and a nice little riot or two. It is a Carnival cruise to the Garden of Eden with all-you-can-eat cheesecake and Parliament as the house band. Hallelujah.

For more info, contact us at info@heebmagazine.com

Currently confirmed:
live music from Ghettoplotz and Emunah
poetry from angry sam, adam cohen
radical torah from Jeremy schonfield, simon eder
film curated by Charlie Phillips
VJ Miki Grahame (ghettoplotz)
slides curated by Sarah maxwell (heeb magazine)
Deconstructive megilla from florian

Zionist "left" as racist as the right

Just in case further proof were needed that the zionist left is as racist as the right here's an article in Ha'aretz on the left zionist parties' embrace of yet another transfer monger in the Israeli political mainstream.

The 2006 elections will go down in Israeli history as the first elections that legitimized ripping the heart out of the Declaration of Independence - the undertaking to "uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex." True, Yisrael Beiteinu is not the first party to call for denying Israeli citizens the right to live in the state on the grounds of religion and race. Rehavam Ze'evi's Moledet was in the Knesset and was even a coalition partner in one of the right-wing governments. But Ze'evi was never invited to eat pickled herring at Yossi Beilin's table, and was never showered with a smidgen of the praise bestowed by the Meretz chairman upon Avigdor Lieberman.

In a nutshell, the principal difference in the plans of the two transfer-mongers with regard to the Arab citizens of Israel is that Lieberman is proposing border adjustments that would place them and their homes (that would instantly plumment in value) outside their state, while Ze'evi proposed deporting them from their state (and paying them suitable compensation for their homes).

With the architect of Oslo and Geneva giving Lieberman friendly pats on the back, it's no wonder serious political analysts are mentioning him, in the same breath as Meretz and Labor, as a natural partner in a Kadima-led government. And it's no surprise either that a resident of Ra'anana, who identifies himself as a veteran left-winger, had no shame in writing to Lieberman that he is the only one "who is guiding us to a situation in which the Jewish people, too, will indeed finally have a Jewish state of its own." The man, who participated in an on-line readers' forum with Lieberman on the Haaretz Web site, asked Lieberman to elaborate on how he proposes removing Wadi Ara and the Triangle region from the boundaries of Israel and turning them into a part of Palestine.

I wonder what supporters of Geneva will have to say about this.

Jack Straw to disarm Israel

Oh dear! The Jerusalem Post reports that Jack Straw has said that the UK will address the issue of Israel's nuclear weapons after it has dealt with Iran's. But cop this:

Straw gave a lengthy television interview in Britain Thursday, following the decision to send Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. When asked about a "double standard" regarding Iran, Straw replied: "I want a nuclear-free Middle East. It's the policy of her majesty's government. We've been working to achieve that. We have ensured over the last few years that two of the four countries [in the Middle East] which posed a nuclear threat, Libya and Iraq, have had their nuclear weapons removed," he said.

"Libya and Iraq, have had their nuclear weapons removed?" Did no one think to ask him what nuclear weapons?

Settling the dispute?

It's been doing the rounds for a while but since I was just looking at the Anthony Lowenstein site I thought I'd do a quick post on it. Apparently Israel knew that it was breaking the "explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention" when it began the settlement of territory it conquered in 1967. All a bit silly really given that they couldn't possibly not have known that but, as everyone knows, Israel's opponents have to work to a far higher standard of proof than Israel and its allies do (WMD anyone?). So here's Gershom Gorenberg in the New York Times describing the relinquishing of the settlements as Israel's Tragedy Foretold.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front-runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Mr. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements. Those promises reflect a change not only in Mr. Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire. Sobriety and sadness replace euphoria. Arguments that once turned dissidents into pariahs now seem obvious: in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state. Not only settlers but national leaders have eroded the rule of law in pursuit of what they considered a patriotic goal.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: the warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. Leaders deceived not only the country's citizens, but themselves. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War. An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,' " he wrote.

So much for the expansionism but Israel's official racism gets some coverage here too:

Mr. Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory, because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal, he wrote: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

There is a subtext here. In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: if the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity — in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

Eshkol and other Israeli leaders knew that granting citizenship to the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would quickly turn Israel into a binational state. In effect, the Meron memo told Eshkol: you cannot have it both ways. If the West Bank was "occupied" for the Arab population, then neither international law nor Israel's democratic norms permitted settling Jews there.

The memo did note, however, that settlement was permissible if done "by military bodies rather than civilian ones" in bases that were clearly temporary. A week after receiving the memo, Eshkol informed the cabinet that Kfar Etzion would be re-established — through a branch of the army called Nahal, which created paramilitary outposts. By the end of September, settlers arrived at Kfar Etzion. Publicly they were described as "Nahal soldiers." In fact, they were civilians. The ruse acknowledged Mr. Meron's opinion. It also showed a sadly mistaken confidence that the legal, ethical and diplomatic difficulties of settlement could somehow be avoided.

There, you see? Israel cannot annex the West Bank without watering down its Jewish majority to near or actual non-existence or without more "transfers" of Arabs. The idea of a state that isn't specifically a state for Jews negates the zionist project which is about Jewish exclusivity or supremacy. So what now? Transfer or withdrawal? The way the piecemeal withdrawal is being played out with land grabbing and economic dislocation, both by the wall. It seems a combination of the two is on the cards.

The wrong sort of courage

Here's Robert Fisk on the cancellation of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie in New York. It first appeared in the Independent yesterday but I've nabbed it from the Information Clearing House. It's not that long so here's the whole thing. It's nice that he gives Anthony Loewenstein a bit of a mention. Ok, here goes:

The erosion of free speech

It was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the freedom of the wrong people

By Robert Fisk

You've got to fight. It's the only conclusion I can draw as I see the renewed erosion of our freedom to discuss the Middle East. The most recent example - and the most shameful - is the cowardly decision of the New York Theatre Workshop to cancel the Royal Court's splendid production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

It's the story - in her own words and emails - of the brave young American woman who travelled to Gaza to protect innocent Palestinians and who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer in an attempt to prevent the driver from destroying a Palestinian home. The bulldozer drove over her and then reversed and crushed her a second time. "My back is broken," she said before she died.

An American heroine, Rachel earned no brownie points from the Bush administration which bangs on about courage and freedom from oppression every few minutes. Rachel's was the wrong sort of courage and she was defending the freedom of the wrong people. But when I read that James Nicola, the New York Theatre Workshop's "artistic director" - his title really should be in quotation marks - had decided to "postpone" the play "indefinitely" because (reader, hold your breath) "in our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities (sic) in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas. ... we had a very edgy situation", I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

So let's confront this tomfoolery. Down in Australia, my old mate Antony Loewenstein, a journalist and academic, is having an equally vile time. He has completed a critical book on the Israel/Palestine conflict for Melbourne University Publishing and Jewish communities in Australia are trying to have it censored out of existence before it appears in August. Last year, Federal Labour MP Michael Danby, who like Loewenstein is Jewish, wrote a letter to the Australian Jewish News demanding that Loewenstein's publishers should "drop this whole disgusting project". The book, he said, would be "an attack on the mainstream Australian Jewish community".

Now the powerful New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies has weighed in against Loewenstein and efforts are under way to deprive him of his place on the board of Macquarie University's Centre for Middle East and North African Studies.

A one-off bit of skulduggery on Israel's behalf? Alas, no. A letter arrived for me last week from Israeli-American Barbara Goldscheider whose novel "Naqba: The Catastrophe: The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" has just been published. She has been attacked, she told me, "merely because I chose an Arabic title to my novel on the conflict... My brother-in-law has broken his relationship with me before he even read the book ... From members of my 'Orthodox' Jewish congregation in Bangor (Maine), I received a phone call from an irate 'friend' sputtering ... out: 'Don't you know the Arabs want to destroy Israel?'"

A talk on her new novel scheduled to take place last month at a conservative synagogue was cancelled "due to the uproar about my novel". A Boston professor has mercifully written to Goldscheider with what I regard as bloody good advice. "There's a vicious campaign out there," he said. "Don't cave in."

But what do you do when a publisher - or an "artistic director" - caves in? I found out for myself not long ago when the Military History Society of Ireland asked permission to reprint a paper I had published some years ago on a battle between the Irish Army's UN battalion in southern Lebanon and Israel's proxy - and brutal - Lebanese militia, the so-called "South Lebanon Army", whose psychotic commander was a cashiered Lebanese army major called Saad Haddad.

In the paper, I mentioned how an Israeli major called Haim extorted money from the inhabitants of the south Lebanese village of Haris and gave the code name of an Israeli agent - "Abu Shawki" - who was present at the murder of two Irish soldiers.
I had published these details many times, both in my own newspaper and in my previous book on the Lebanon war, Pity the Nation. Major Haddad died of cancer more than 10 years ago. I actually met Haim in the early 1980s as he emerged from a meeting with the mayor of Haris from whom he demanded money to pay Israel's cruel militiamen - the UN was also present and recorded his threats - while "Abu Shawki", whom the Irish police would like to interview, later tried to arrest me in Tyre - and immediately freed me - when I told him I knew that he was a witness to the murder of the two Irish soldiers.

So what was I supposed to do when I received the following letter from ex-Brigadier General Patrick Purcell of the Irish Army? "Unfortunately we have been forced to withdraw (your) article in view of a letter from our publisher Irish Academic Press. It is clear from our contract that (our) Society would be responsible in the event of a libel action." The enclosed letter from publisher Frank Cass advised that his lawyer had "cautioned" him because I had described Haddad as "psychotic", named the blackmailing Israeli major and named the Israeli agent present at the two murders.

It's interesting that Mr Cass's lawyer believes it is possible to libel a man (Haddad) who has been dead for more than a decade, even more so that he should think that publishing a military code name would prompt this rascal to expose his real identity in a court of law. As for Major Haim, he remains on UN files as the man who tried - and apparently succeeded - in forcing the people of southern Lebanon to cough up the cash to pay for their own oppressors.

And the moral of all this? Well obviously, don't contribute articles to the Military History Society of Ireland. But more to the point, I better remember what I wrote in this newspaper just over six years ago, that "the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone ... who dares to criticise Israel ... is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions. The attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is ... international". And growing, I should now add.

You still blog against the illegitimate state but don't expect to make a career out of it.

Brave potshots at the powerless

I just found this Gary Younge article in a rather convoluted way. I was looking at the Aaronovitch Watch blog which led me to a David Aaronovitch article attacking Gary Younge for criticising the fact that Aaronovitch received an award for bravery for supporting the war on Iraq.

So, here's a bit of the Younge article:

But the days when courage referred to those who take on the mighty against all odds and face the consequences are, apparently, over. For, when it comes to attacking the weak and backing the strong, "bravery" has somehow become the mot du jour. A couple of years ago a British journalist won a major award for columns supporting the Iraq war on the grounds that to do so was "brave". Whether the award was deserved is irrelevant; the judges' adjective is the issue.

What, after all, is "brave" about supporting the policies of both your government and the sole global superpower against a country that posed no threat? Likewise, when David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, published his blueprint for racial exclusion two years ago ("To put it bluntly," he wrote, "most of us prefer our own kind"), he was praised for being "bold". As though maligning diversity constituted an act of courage in a country where black people are overwhelmingly more likely to be stopped, searched, jailed, murdered in jail, unemployed and marginalised. It is not the validity of these arguments that is at issue here but the characterisation of those who make them as audacious that is problematic.

The next paragraph is what gives Aaronovitch his window to launch a mindless ad hominem attack on Younge:

Note, however, his operating assumption:

"To align yourself with the powerful and then take aim at the powerless takes not one ounce of valour. To prop up prevailing hierarchies and orthodoxies rather than challenge them demands not a scintilla of bravery. True, like Summers (of Harvard), you may run into trouble. But just look who's covering your back. With the prevailing winds of war, prejudice or the state on your side, the odds are with you."

In other words, he is the brave one. It is in challenging "prevailing hierarchies and orthodoxies" that true bravery lies. Propping them up takes no courage. This line is full of unwitting irony, as any person who has attended a Guardian editorial mass meeting would know. But look, a writer needs his image. Later on I'll try and show what I think courage looks like.

There is nothing in that paragraph to suggest that Younge is describing himself as brave. He is merely pointing out that if you align yourself with the powers that be you will attract all manner of inappropriate compliments.

Like me, Aaronovitch moderates his comments. Here's an extract from a comment that was allowed through:

Younge you are the worst kind of coward.

Worse you have attacked a colleague, not because of an issue relating to a misguided awarding of a gong for bravery, but rather as a result of the fact that his work is so far superior to yours.

David's work is not only a cut above yours with regard to his ability to put things down in words but also his focus on issues that require debate.

In future Mr Younge take your spiteful jealousy and put it where it belongs - children's comics.

Now Aaronovitch himself claims to have discouraged the use of the term brave to describe his work when he collected his award. So what's so terrible about others criticising it? And Younge didn't even name Aaronovitch.

Another brick in the wall II

I posted earlier on Roger Waters's refusal (so far) to call off a gig in Tel Aviv. Here's a video report on the Beeb's website on the same subject.

War criminal dies

No not that one. This one.

The power of protest or the power of zionism?

The leader comment in yesterday's Jewish Chronicle was a celebration of three recent zionist victories. The first, how a deliberate falsehood by the Chief Rabbi in the JC itself led to the Church of England pledging to continue to invest in Israeli war crimes. That is, they are continuing to invest in Caterpillar, the manufacturer of militarised bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes. The Chief Rabbi had accused the C of E of being asked by the Synod to "heed a call to divest from companies associated with Israel." It was actually one company associated with one of the more heinous aspects of the occupation. And the victory, based as it was on sheer dishonesty and very public too, is no cause for celebration by people of integrity. The C of E has a long standing policy of non-investment in military equipment so its continued investment in Caterpillar is in breach of its own policy, not on zionism or war criminality, but on militarism. Great victory Chief!

The second victory was to have Lord Rogers prostrate himself before the zionists of New York so that he could retain the commission to redesign a building named after a leading zionist. To watch this dog jump through hoops to appease the zionists has been as unedifying a spectacle as you could imagine. He has gone from facilitating the inauguration of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine to denouncing their main aim of opposing the wall built (or being built) through occupied territory. And now Rogers can keep his buck (ouch!).

The third victory, though even the JC is smart enough to realised that this is a tainted one, is the suspension of Ken Livingstone from office. Far too much was made of a throwaway drunken insult by the Mayor for London in the first place. By the time Livingstone was suspended even Eric Moonman was balking at what the zionists had done. A commentor here said that there were 25 complaints to the Standards Board on this and that one had come from the Commission for Racial Equality. I asked for more info on this but none came. I am not sure that Oliver Finegold, Ken's victim actually complained and I haven't met one Jew who said they were offended by what Ken said even though most Jews I know don't particualrly like him. It does seem that it was Ken's long-running spats with zionism and zionists that did for him, insofaras it has done for him in this instance. After all, many commentators think that he will be returned to power the next time the electorate gets a chance.

So what does it all mean? The Chief Rabbi demonstrably lied about the C of E and won his "case". The Archbishop of Canterbury could have exposed him but opted not to. Now the C of E is breaching its own rules for the sake of zionism. And the zionists at the JC are proud of this.

Rogers keeps the big buck by shredding his integrity in public under pressure from zionists in New York and a big hurrah echoes from the JC. Whilst crying "uncle!" he managed to blurt out that Israel is a democracy and the Palestinian Authority is a trrorist state which doesn't quite tally with the fact that Israel and its friends are refusing to accept the result of democratic elections to the PA. He also praised the wall as having thwarted terrorist attacks on Israel whilst ignoring the role of the Israeli army and ignoring Hamas's ceasefire. So Rogers joins the long list of high profile liars for Israel. And the JC calls it a victory for protest.

And Ken, who expressed regret for any offence caused to the Jewish community and/or holocaust survivors is suspended on the say so of a Jewish communtiy organisation for refusing to apologise to an individual.

Here's the whole editorial:

The British Jewish community has traditionally favoured the don’t-make-waves approach when faced with a stern challenge, preferring a word in the ear of someone in authority to a full-scale demonstration on the streets of London. Three recent incidents have proved, however, the efficacy of a more determined stance. In this newspaper last month, the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, fiercely condemned the Church of England’s general synod’s resolution to re-open the issue of whether the Church should withdraw its investment in the Caterpillar company. Rabbi Sacks, in unusually strong language, warned of the resolution’s “most adverse repercussions” on Jewish-Christian relations. This week’s welcome decision by the Church of England’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG) not to recommend divesting from Caterpillar shows that the Chief Rabbi was right to confront the issue head-on rather than rely on polite conversation over tea at Lambeth Palace. In announcing its decision, the EIAG recognised the contentiousness of the topic, something the synod had studiously ignored. The original vote was itself part of a disturbing trend to boycott either Israel directly, or firms that do business with it. While the Church’s clerics were discussing divestment, a group of British architects, under the Architects and Planners for Justice in Pal-estine banner, called for sanctions against architects and construction companies working in the territories. This group’s inaugural meeting was hosted by the eminent architect Lord Rogers, who has since learned that sanctions can be a double-edged sword. Lord Rogers is bidding for a prestigious New York project to redesign a convention centre in memory of Jacob Jav-its, a firm supporter of Israel and, for many years, the only Jewish Senator in Washington. Jewish groups in America are questioning Lord Rogers’s suitability to head the project. Lord Rogers has now felt the need to dissociate himself from the Ar-chitects and Planners for Justice in Palestine and issue a statement in support of Israel’s security fence. Again, a direct protest has achieved a positive result. The third example — that concerning the mayor of London — is less clear-cut, in view of the punishment handed out to him. Nevertheless, the initial offence was not allowed to pass and the Board of Deputies, in reporting the mayor to the Standards Board, showed that British Jews’ feelings cannot be ridden over roughshod.

So help war criminals where you can and don't insult journalists who happen to be Jewish, lest you offend a whole community and wind up feeling the "power of protest."

Free speech in the Jewish Chronicle?

Well not quite but here's a letter from Ian MacDonald titled Free Speech?

The only thing I agree with Melanie Phillips about is that it was right to jail David Irving. He purposefully and deliberately broke an Austrian law concerning Holocaust denial by refuting the known, racist and ethnic slaughter of millions.

However, Ken Livingstone would have been right to call a black reporter an Uncle Tom, and repeat it without apology, if that reporter worked for a BNP newspaper.

The whole point is that the Daily Mail (same owners as the Standard) supported Hitler in the 1930s when the Nazis were smashing Jewish shops, and sending Jews to concentration camps and ghettos.

I do not believe they have ever apologised unequivocally for their stance at that time. This is what motivated Ken.

In any case, the Standard has harassed him for 25 years over supporting gays, small “irrelevant” groups (which may well have included small, Jewish anti-fascist groups), reducing fares, introducing the congestion charge, and reducing the motorist’s “freedom to park and pollute wherever I want.”

Readers of the Mail and Standard — and their writers, including Melanie Phillips — appear to ignore the paper’s appalling, racist history.

The Danish cartoons were guaranteed to cause offence to the Muslim world. If the cartoons had been intended to show that all religions have their atrocity perpetrators (not easy in a single cartoon) then the response from Islamic communities would almost certainly have been more muted, and bearable, because — importantly — theirs would not be the only religion to have been depicted in this way as cruel.

Not bad, but Ken was being a tad hypocritical condemning the Mail group when he has worked for them and for the Sun.

How Britain brought Israel into the nuclear family

I first saw this on Osama Saeed's blog and then, via that, the BBC website and then there was a report on it on Newsnight last night. So what is it? It's the revelation of the fact that Britain supplied plutonium and heavyu water to Israel for use in its nuclear weapons programme.

In Harold Macmillan's time the UK supplied uranium 235 and the heavy water which allowed Israel to start up its nuclear weapons production plant at Dimona - heavy water which British intelligence estimated would allow Israel to make "six nuclear weapons a year".

Nukes R us it seems and for a society that exists on the destruction of another.

Another brick in the wall?

From yesterday's Guardian, Roger Waters is refusing (at the time of writing) to call off a planned concert in Tel Aviv. He is being asked to cancel it by several Palestinian artists:

Groups such as the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art and the League of Palestinian Artists have written to Waters expressing concern at his plans. Their letter said: "Palestinian as well as several international artists asked in shock: how can the artist whose name around the world was for many years associated with breaking walls of injustice be in any way complicit with the monstrosity of Israel's wall, declared illegal by the international court of justice?"

His response:

Yesterday, he said: "I have a lot of fans in Israel, many of whom are refuseniks. I would not rule out going to Israel because I disapprove of the foreign policy any more than I would refuse to play in the UK because I disapprove of Tony Blair's foreign policy."

A. This is isn't just about foreign policy. B. Who asked him to call off UK gigs?

Rogers keeps his contract by contrasting terrorism with democracy

Cop this. Lord Rogers has crawled his way back into favour with the zionists who were trying to get New York to disinvest from him. The way he did it was quite remarkable. He said that a state that routinely kills children is a democracy and a local authority that has killed nobody in the last year is terrorist. Look, it's here in Ha'aretz:

Asked to describe his current views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said he viewed the matter as a choice between a democratic Israel and a Palestinian government controlled by the militant group Hamas, which has sent suicide bombers into Israel.

"We have a country that is a terrorist state and a country that's a democratic state," Rogers said. "I'm all for the democratic state. I have strong feelings about democracy."

Still, three out of four's not bad

A Guardian editorial urges Israel to talk to the Hamas led Palestinian Authority today, arguing that the focus on Hamas's rejectionism amounts to a fetish on the following grounds:

The fact is that Israel has F16s, nuclear weapons, UN membership and international legitimacy. None of that will be taken away whether or not Hamas stops calling for the destruction of the Jewish state or amends its founding charter. The best hope is for a gradual, organic process of pragmatic acceptance that Israel is there to stay. It is unlikely to be enthusiastic but it will surely come, just as it eventually did when the PLO was in charge.

International legitmacy? Still, three out of four's not bad.

War criminal lawyer?

This report appeared in yesterday's Guardian. Apparently the UK's Foreign Office has appointed an adviser to the Israeli government to head a legal team at the FO that advises on such issues as Guantanamo Bay and the legitimacy of wars and walls.

The British Foreign Office has appointed a controversial Israeli government adviser to one of its most sensitive posts as head of the legal department.

Advice from Daniel Bethlehem QC in 2002 to the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led Israel to block a UN inquiry into the battle of Jenin. The Israeli refusal to cooperate was widely condemned at the time by various human rights organisations.

Mr Bethlehem, who was Israel's external legal adviser, also took the lead for the Israeli government at the International court of justice in The Hague in 2004 to defend the barrier being built along the West Bank. Israel lost the case.

It gets worse. See this:

He will have to advise Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, on a host of issues ranging from Guantánamo Bay to the legality of any pre-emptive strike against Iran.

And this:

A pointer to Mr Bethlehem's view on attacking Iran can be found in his evidence last year to the Commons foreign affairs committee. Although an Israeli pre-emptive strike on an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 was judged to be illegal, a good case could have been made for it both then and now, he said.

Thanks to AJP in the comments.

Lord Rogers crawling back to nowhere

The architect Lord Rogers has got a lot of crawling to do if he is to retain the commission to redesign a convention centre in memory of Senator Jacob Javitz. who was "a firm supporter of the Jewish state". Lord Rogers appears to have been in on the start of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine and some zionists in New York have taken umbrage because of Javitz's support for Israel and Rogers's once-upon-a-time opposition to it. From the Guardian:

Local politicians and some Jewish organisations have demanded Lord Rogers be sacked from the project because of the group, which opposes the separation barrier that has sliced up the West Bank and the building of settlements in Palestinian territories. The group has also criticised Israeli building companies for their support of settlement building, and has called for an economic boycott of those firms.

Such positions would ordinarily be controversial in New York, but they become even more combustible given Lord Rogers' project in the city: a redesign of a convention centre built in the memory of Jacob Javitz, a firm supporter of the Jewish state who spent more than 20 years in the US Senate - many of them as the sole Jewish senator. Boycotts of Israel are also illegal under US law.

Lord Rogers insists his involvement in the group is limited to lending his offices in London for its inaugural meeting last month. "There is a lot of discussion going on. There is no final decision on anyone's part yet," said Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Lord Rogers.

In the last week, Lord Rogers has severed his links with the organisation and stated explicitly that he does not support a boycott of Israel. He is also adamant that he spent only 10 minutes at the meeting.

"Hamas must renounce terrorism," he told the New York Post yesterday, attempting to shore up support. "Hamas must recognise Israel's right to exist. Just making a statement is not enough. They have to back it up."

What a sad sight! And But it doesn't seem to be working.

The effort appeared to have little effect. "His position on Hamas is not relevant," said Malcolm Hoenlein, of the Conference of Major Jewish Organisations. "The relevant issue is a group that is convened for the purpose of activities detrimental to a democratic state ...

It's true that making demands of Hamas to abandon some of their election promises is an affront to democracy, but then the PA isn't really a state and it never will be a state, at least not as we know it. Maybe Malcolm Hoenlein meant something else.

I didn't, I mean wouldn't, say I support David Clark

I've had a letter in today's Guardian, I've had a few in there before but this one was a bit mangled. Here's what I wrote in response to a comment piece by a former Labour government adviser, David Clark:

Dear Sir

I am mostly in agreement with David Clark's charge that accusations of anti-semitism are a form of intellectual dishonesty and intimidation. As a Jewish anti-zionist I am often accused of being a self-hater or even a kapo. However I do think he is being a little naive in suggesting that early leftist support for zionism and Israel was based on support for the underdog. Leaving aside that there was much leftist disquiet over what was and still is, manifestly, a colonial settler project, leftist support for zionism seems to have been based on a eurocentric disregard for the natives of Palestine. The 1944 UK Labour Party conference voted for the wholesale "transfer" of the Arabs from Palestine. How could any leftist (or anyone else) perceive the victims of this proposal, upon which Israel's existence depends, to be the top dogs in that situation?

Yours faithfully


Mark Elf

I know it's a biy clunky but I think it read better than what they actually published:

As a Jewish anti-zionist I am often accused of being a self-hater. But while I support David Clark, he is naive in suggesting that early leftist support for Israel was based on support for the underdog; it seems to have been based on a eurocentric disregard for the Palestinians. The 1944 Labour party conference voted for the "transfer" of the Arabs from Palestine.
Mark Elf
Dagenham, Essex

Still look what they did to Roland Rance back in December.

Israel to annex large parts of West Bank.. shock!

Hardly shock news now, is it? According to the Scotsman (and most other English language media) Israel is now using the election of Hamas to annex the largest of its settlement blocks in the West Bank which is what it was doing before Hamas was elected anyway.

The leadership of both sides now openly rejects negotiations and the road map's goal of a viable Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel. With the settlement blocs, Israel would protrude about 20km into the West Bank at several points and slice up the Palestinian area.

Israel's "primary goal" after the 28 March legislative elections will be to persuade the United States to agree to such an annexation in exchange for Israel unilaterally withdrawing from outlying settlements, Haaretz newspaper reported.

Israel would be able to argue that, with Hamas in power, the road map, to which it raised sweeping objections from the start, is now a dead duck. Hamas advocates Israel's replacement with an Islamic state, has carried out dozens of suicide bombings, and, unlike Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, rejects the road map's plan for a two-state compromise.

So what is new here? Hamas's election is fairly new I suppose but there's nothing new about Israel's annexationist designs on the West Bank. Blaming the Palestinians for Israel's land theft is hardly new. So it must simply be that Israel is going to ask America to abandon the pretence that the so-called roadmap was a way forward. That's it. Israel practically re-wrote the roadmap as soon as America produced it. But still it didn't like it. So now both Israel and America can abandon it and say it was the Palestinians fault. Blame the victims. Brilliant! But new?...

Anti-semitic chic?

Here's an article in today's Guardian titled Accusations of anti-semitic chic are poisonous intellectual thuggery. Not exactly a snappy headline but nor are mine lately. Also the article panders, it seems, to some of zionism's self imagery but here's the whole thing as it's not that long:

If the past few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is the frequency with which allegations of anti-semitism surface in modern political debate. Ken Livingstone, the Church of England and the Guardian (over articles comparing Israel and apartheid) are the most recent to find themselves in the firing line. This is the backdrop against which an unofficial parliamentary inquiry on anti-semitism under former Foreign Office minister Denis McShane concludes its hearings in Westminster today.

A sober reflection on the nature of the problem is badly needed to take the sting out of the issue and establish groundrules that everyone can respect. But there is a suspicion that others have a different objective. In announcing the inquiry, John Mann, the MP who chairs the Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism, said: "Anti-semitism is back in fashion and can be found on the streets of Islington, Aldershot and Bethnal Green." This is no random list: Bethnal Green is included because of its large Muslim population, Aldershot because it is where a Jewish cemetery was desecrated last year, and Islington because it is widely regarded as the spiritual home of Britain's leftwing intelligentsia. It is this last group that has become the target of particular vilification.

Variants of this theme have become common since the breakdown of the Middle East peace process, and especially since 9/11. The left is said to be in the grip of what the rightwing American columnist George Will has called an "anti-semitic chic". Instead of declaring its hatred of Jews openly, this new antisemitism is expressed indirectly through criticism of Israel or even opposition to Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. A particularly meretricious version suggests that opposition to American foreign policy, or even criticism of neoconservatives, is really a coded form of anti-semitism.

This accusation isn't confined to the rough and tumble of the post-9/11 transatlantic debate, either. The normally measured Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has cited "a leftwing anti-American cognitive elite with strong representation in the European media" as one of the main sources of anti-semitism. He doesn't spell it out, but we all know who he means. The argument is not just that there are individuals who harbour anti-semitic views, but that something in the political culture or ideology of the left predisposes it to anti-semitism. This is said to be the real reason why it criticises Israel.

There is no shortage of examples, from Karl Marx to George Orwell, of prominent leftwing figures making offensive remarks about Jews. Instances of anti-capitalism spilling into "rich Jew" bigotry are also well documented. More recently, Tam Dalyell blamed government support for Israel on "a cabal of Jewish advisers" - comments that were deservedly condemned.

But these personal expressions of prejudice stand out precisely because they conflict so sharply with the left's universalism and its opposition to ethnic discrimination. A more sweeping charge is that this universalism is itself a source of anti-semitism since, in its maximalist interpretation, it denies Israel's right to be a Jewish state. But the few still calling for a single "secular, democratic state" in the whole of historic Palestine are making a statement about the inadmissibility of defining statehood according to religious or ethnic criteria that they apply as a universal norm. Impractical and idealistic this may be, but it is not anti-semitic, and it is plainly dishonest to suggest it is.

In any case, this is a minority view on the left, and has been for a long time. Decolonisation forced the mainstream left to incorporate expressions of national and ethnic identity into its worldview. The reaction of the democratic left to Israel's creation was largely positive as a result. It helped that Israel was governed from the left, but the example of a persecuted people creating a successful, independent state inspired a profound admiration for Zionism.

So what changed? The answer is 1967 and Israel's subsequent emergence as a power determined to annex territory beyond its legally recognised borders. The unbearable truth is that the left that identifies with the Palestinians today is largely the same left that identified with Israel in the 50s and the 60s. Moreover, it does so for largely the same reason: instinctive sympathy for the underdog. For some, the idea that anyone could see the conflict in these terms is literally unthinkable, so they are forced to impute to Israel's critics the motive of Jew-hatred. At best, this betrays a lack of empathy - at worst, something less forgivable. From Golda Meir's denial that the Palestinians existed to Ehud Barak's dismissal of them as congenital liars, there is a long tradition of prejudice that regards the Palestinians as lesser beings deserving of lesser rights.

A more subtle argument accepts that Israel is open to criticism, but complains that it is singled out to an extent that reveals an underlying anti-Jewish prejudice. Or to put it another way: "Others get away with it, so why can't Israel." Despite its cynicism, this argument deserves an answer, and it is provided, as it happens, by Israel's staunchest supporters. Israel, we are rightly reminded, is a democracy. Is it not legitimate, therefore, to expect it to uphold the democratic values we share in common? Far from being held to a higher standard, as its supporters often protest, Israel seems to operate with a greater impunity, and to do so with western acquiescence. This is the real reason why the issue is felt so deeply on the left and why unofficial boycotts are emerging to fill the moral void left by our feeble leaders.

A final objection takes issue with the left's supposed "demonisation" of Israel. Although often overdone, one suspects that comparisons with apartheid provoke anger because they contain an uncomfortable element of truth. More clear-cut are analogies with Nazi Germany. These should be deplored on grounds of both historical truth and taste. But are they anti-semitic as opposed to just plain obnoxious? Those who resort to them know they are bogus, but they understand their shock value and hope to shame and anger Israel and its supporters into modifying their behaviour. Indeed, as a debating tactic, it is indistinguishable from the one deployed by those levelling charges of anti-semitism against the left. They do it not because they believe it, but because they know the left takes its anti-racism seriously and is susceptible to this kind of blackmail. There has been enough of this intellectual thuggery on both sides, and it's time someone called a stop to it.

This is one way in which the report of the parliamentary inquiry could contribute something positive. Real anti-semitism is a serious and growing problem, and there is a need for political consensus about how to tackle it. But debate is poisoned and consensus becomes difficult when allegations of anti-semitism are bandied about for reasons that have nothing to do with fighting racism. An inquiry that wants to confront anti-semitism should also confront those who cheapen the term through reckless misuse.

· David Clark: former Labour government adviser
Dkclark@aol.com

Jonathan Freedland on the Ken Livingstone affair

Here's a Jonathan Freedland article that appeared in the London Evening Standard last week. It's about the Ken Livingstone/Board of Deputies business that saw a mobilisation of zionists worldwide to condemn the Mayor for London. A friend of mine likes Jonathan Freedland's writing but complains that he has a blind spot where Israel and zionism are concerned. I find his stance on zionism so disingenuous sometimes that I mostly can't be bothered to read his stuff. I actually found this article on that bastion of integrity, the Engage website.

In the article Freedland points out that Ken has been undemocracitically treated three times now by the forces of darkness. First there was the abolition of the GLC, then there was his expulsion fron the Labour party and now there's his removal (stayed for the time being) from office. Freedland is quite sympathetic to Ken's "plight" whilst pointing out that it these little scrapes make Ken strong and win him support as this latest episode will do.

Now it's hard to defend such an opportunist as Ken Livingstone but Freedland then starts to attack Ken on an issue that doesn't quite stand up. See this:

In his long statement this week, Ken was right about something else, too. He made the coherent case that the accusation of anti-semitism is bandied around too freely, hurled especially at those who are critical of Israel. He quoted one Jewish analyst who has said that the equation of criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism "drains the word anti-semitism of any useful meaning."

All of that is true, but it doesn't quite exonerate the mayor. For the encounter with Oliver Finegold of the Standard had nothing to with Israel: the word was not even mentioned. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has insisted from the beginning that its objection was simply to Livingstone's treatment of a Jewish reporter. Ken says he has "never believed a word of it"; as far he is concerned, the whole episode is merely an excuse for attacking a high-profile critic of Israel.

On this the mayor is badly - even dangerously - wrong. For one thing, plenty of people in the Jewish community who are neither great admirers of Israel nor friends of the Board of Deputies saw the hurtfulness of the mayor's remarks to Finegold. What I hear mentioned most is the mayor's failure to apologise or change tack, even once Finegold had told him he was Jewish and found it offensive to be compared to a German war criminal. Plenty of Jews cannot believe that if the mayor were confronted by, say, a black or Muslim or gay reporter who said they were similarly hurt, he would not have made amends immediately. This is a man who prides himself on his sensitivity to London's minorities - and yet, on that night outside City Hall, he trampled on a very raw Jewish nerve, for which he has never straightforwardly apologised. To repeat: one does not have to be pro-Israel or a creature of the Board of Deputies to be troubled by this.

Now it's true his encounter with Finegold had nothing to do with Israel. But what followed that encounter surely did. The Board of Deputies were in there immediately mobilising mayors as far away as the USA about this. The Israeli ambassador jumped aboard. The BBC even had a chap on Radio 4 comparing Ken unfavourably to Goebells thus:

The story I always remember is that under pressure from the Americans and others, Hitler had to remove posters saying "Jews Not Wanted" and Goebbels issued a decree that people should not make any anti-Semitic remarks in pubs and otherwise to foreign people.

“If the German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels could apologise by saying ‘we don’t want you to make those remarks’, who is this man that he can make those remarks. Why can’t he apologise?

But it was the Jewish Chronicle that really blew the gaff on what this Ken-hunt was all about:

Ken Livingstone has clashed with the Jewish community [read Zionist movement] many times since the 1980s, when he was the leader of the Greater London Council.

In 1981, as co-editor of the Labour Herald newspaper, he ran a cartoon entitled "The Final Solution", depicting the then Israeli Premier, Menachem Begin, as a Nazi [as did Albert Einstein and Hannah Arrendt in 1948]. He is seen in SS uniform, giving the Nazi salute and standing on a pile of dead bodies, saying "Shalom? Who needs shalom with Reagan behind you?".

During a 1984 interview with Israeli newspaper Davar Hashavuah, he claimed the Board of Deputies had come under the control of "reactionaries and neo-Fascists." [in a word: Zionists]

In October 2002, he denounced Ariel Sharon as "a very unstable leader with a record of war crimes and mass murder."[ not a miilion miles from findings by the Israeli Supreme Court]

Last year he welcomed to London Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has endorsed Palestinian suicide bombings and is accused [in common with Orthodox Judaism] of backing the killing of gays and the beating of women. When a cross-communal [which communities?] coalition, including the Board of Deputies, asked to meet him to discuss their concerns he refused. He argued their claims were lies peddled by a "Zionist front organisation." [MEMRI: a Zionist front organisation]

At a GLA meeting last month, he was amused at the prospect of a stormy meeting with the Board of Deputies over his condemnation of Israel, joking: "They should have sold tickets for that one."

Now go back and see what Freedland had to say about where he agreed with Ken:

Ken was right about something else, too. He made the coherent case that the accusation of anti-semitism is bandied around too freely, hurled especially at those who are critical of Israel.

This is perfectly true and in this instance it has made it, at best, difficult to know whether the various players who jumped on Ken's case were sincerely concerned about the Jewish people or were just finding an excuse to nail a critic of Israel. Regarding offence to Jews or holocaust survivors, the supreme irony here is that Ken Livingstone did express regret over that. I'm sure that for most Jews, and I have asked most the Jews I know, were satisfied with that.

Hold on, there is still another irony here. Not only are most Jews unperturbed by what Ken said and subsequently didn't say, but even leading zionists have now criticised the Board of Deputies over its heavy handed treatment of this affair.

Hamas refuses to bow to Russian pressure to recognise Israel's "right" to exist

According to Ha'aretz, Russia has been rebuffed in its quest to have Hamas recognise Israel's "right" to exist.

Palestinian election winner Hamas will not recognize Israel despite pressure from Russia to do so during talks in Moscow, a senior leader of the Islamic militant group said on Saturday.

Moussa Abu Marzouk, Hamas's deputy political leader, told Reuters in an interview that recognizing Israel would negate all Palestinian rights.

"It means a negation of the Palestinian people and their rights and their property, of Jerusalem and the holy sites, as well as negation of their right of return. Therefore the recognition of Israel is not on the agenda," Abu Marzouk said.

Hypocrite? Moi?

I just got the following comment accusing me of hypocrisy:

You're such a hypocrite to enforce moderation of comments after the stink you kicked up about Nick Cohen's site. Don't think people don't recognise this.

Bob

Here's my reply:

I had to start moderating the comments because I was getting a ridiculous amount of nonsense here that was clearly aimed at closing down debate and was therefore itself a form of censorship. Many people who disagree with me quite strenuously, and even insultingly, I allow to comment here but the main thing I won't put up with is time wasting stupidness. I got the moderating idea from the Engage website when I posted a simple question under a post they had linking to a direct allegation that George Galloway had made demonstrably anti-semitic statements. The question was "what has George Galloway actually said that was anti-semitic?" They wouldn't allow the question in spite of the fact that two Engage people - David Hirsh and Alexandra Simonon - have quite happily (and hypocritically) posted comments here.

Regarding Nick Cohen's site, he doesn't allow comments at all. He posted a comment here accusing me of all manner of horridness and signed off as Baruch Spinoza. I caught him out and wrote to him about it and posted about it. He denied it and said that he had closed down the comments because of anti-semitism and potential libel. Complete tosh of course. I posted about it here and here. None of it amounts kicking up a stink.

Anyway, Nick Cohen has now deleted all of the comments that he got to his stupid "antisemitism" article. Luckily I captured most of them here. I didn't get all of them and I wrote to Nick Cohen to see if he still had them and he hasn't written back. I think he dug such a hole for himself posing as being of the same ilk as Baruch Spinoza to accuse me of self-loathing and sophistry and then lying as to why he had closed down his comments that he thought it best to remain shtum and he's probably right. Go check the comments. See in particular the contributions from Linda Grant and David Hirsh.

It seems to me that Nick Cohen closed down his comments because I had posted a link to my posts exposing him as a liar. Certainly his own excuses are entirely lacking in credibility. I'm not sure why he deleted the existing comments apart from the link to my site here unless it was because David Hirsh and Linda Grant made such asses of themselves and he felt that he owed them a favour as they were so supportive of him over his stupid artcle, but try asking him since you feel so strongly about open commenting.

Regarding what people recognise or not, something I notice about Israel's defenders is their complete lack of shame. Even in your case, you have come here simply to indulge in a bit of name-calling. You don't make a case for Israel because there isn't one but what started this whole thing with Nick Cohen was his posing under a false name to make unsubstantiated allegations about me and to accuse Respect of closing down debate. When I exposed him he then went and removed any possiblity of debate with him. If people see hypocrisy in my action then what might they see in his? Have you called him any names lately? You could write to him or you could post here if it's a serious or witty comment. You can't post anything there of course because the great debater just won't allow it.

I might have mentioned to the guy that anyone is welcome to post here if they want to contribute seriously to the debate. He can even post here again even though it's very painful for me to go through all that Nick Cohen stuff again - chortle!

Arsenal faces protests over its collaboration with Israel

The Guardian has now reported on the sponsorship deal between Arsenal and the Israeli tourism ministry.

Pro-Palestinian and British Muslim groups yesterday vowed to stage protests against Arsenal after the Premiership football club signed a deal with the Israeli tourism ministry, which will see the images of players used to promote the country as an ideal place to holiday.....

Betty Hunter, general secretary of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, said: "We are appalled. What's involved is an attempt to normalise Israel in the eyes of the British public, when Palestinian footballers can't even get to World Cup qualifying matches. Five were refused permission by the Israelis to go to a qualifying match."

Ihtisham Hibatullah, of the Muslim Association of Britain, said: "British Muslims will be angry and saddened by this deal. We show solidarity with Palestinian people who are oppressed and under occupation, and one of our football clubs should not be supporting an apartheid regime."

I think this is going to turn out to be bad mistake by both Arsenal and Israel but we'll see.

Jews against the Board of Deputies

I must say that this establishment Jewish dissent against the Board of Deputies of British Jews surprises me. It's even on the front page of the Jewish Chronicle today. Well, yesterday now. It's a pay for annual subscription. Here's a piece or two:

The Board of Deputies has rebutted communal criticism of its decision to report Ken Livingstone to the Standards Board for likening a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard, which led to the Adjudication Panel for England imposing a four-week suspension on the London mayor.

As Mr Livingstone obtained a last-minute High Court decision to freeze the suspension — which had been due to take effect on Wednesday — Zionist Federation president Eric Moonman told the JC that the Board’s decision to report Mr Livingstone over his remark to the Evening Standard’s Oliver Finegold could bring an “extremely serious” backlash against the community. The Board has received dozens of antisemitic emails since the panel’s verdict last Friday.

Recent events such as the imprisonment of revisionist historian David Irving for Holocaust denial in Austria had created the impression that Jews demanded special treatment, Mr Moonman argued.

"If I was an official of the Board, I would probably have felt enormous pressure to do something," he acknowledged. "But it would have been much more skillful to get a number of people to campaign on our behalf.

Chilling huh? He would have got others to campaign on our behalf. What's all that about? I don't know but it looks to me that anti-semitism card is losing its ability to trump Israel's and zionism's critics and opponents.

Anyway, I've posted the whole article here.

Independent letter

I had a letter in the Independent today and I didn't know til now because I always get the Jewish Chronicle on a Friday. Anyway here it is:

Starvation of Palestine

Sir: Like Leonard Doyle (report, 2 March) I am sure that the British government will support Israel in trying to starve the Palestinians. I'm not so sure the end result will be a "Jewish democracy". What kind of state is it that plunders the land and water resources of millions of people under its rule and then cuts the same people adrift in a cluster of non-contiguous reservations? The ethno-religious identity of the perpetrators of such colonial oppression might make it appropriate to call such a state "Jewish". But a democracy? No.

MARK ELF

DAGENHAM, ESSEX

The article I was responding to is here.

Action alert on Arsenal's Israel promo

Just Peace carries an action alert to protest at the Israeli tourism industry's sponsorhip of Israel.

ACTION ALERT: Arsenal Football Club supporting Israeli Apartheid
March 2006

Arsenal Football Club has just signed a sponsorship deal to promote Israel as a tourist destination from next season. The £350,000 agreement makes Israel Arsenal's "official and exclusive travel destination."

Below are just some of the benefits Israel will receive from this deal:

Israel will be featured on digital perimeter boards and 450 high-definition LCD screens at the stadium on game days;

- Israel will feature on the team's website, Arsenal.com; and in its magazine.

- The televised ads will reach audiences in an estimated 198 countries.

- The Israeli Tourism Ministry will receive intellectual property rights, the use of the team logo and the right to use photos of the team and its players in ads.

The Israeli Tourism Minister will be allowed use the stadium banqueting hall twice a year and organize an exhibition at the end of the playing season

The stadium will hold permanent sale tables for Israel t-shirts

The financial advisers Ernst & Young were employed to draft this proposal with the aim of bringing an extra 2 million tourists to Israel annually.

Arsenal FC and individual players have been in the forefront of the 'Kick Racism Out of Football Campaign'. For Arsenal to sign a deal to promote Israel which denies Palestinians human rights and is illegally occupying Palestinian territory is to go against the very principles of anti-racism.

This campaign is supported by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Palestinian Return Centre, Innovative Minds, the British Muslim Initiative, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Palestinian Forum in Britain, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Scottish-Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Suggested Action

All campaigners are urged to:

a) Contact Arsenal Football Club reminding them that Israel is a racist apartheid state which is consistently in breach of international law in its human rights abuses; and that such a deal endangers Arsenal's anti-racist reputation:

Commercial and Marketing Department
Arsenal Football Club
Arsenal Stadium
Avenell Road
Highbury
London N5 1BU

Email: marketing@arsenal.co.uk
Tel. 020 7704 4170
Fax. 020 7704 4171

b) Write to the players at the same address. Many of them have actively
supported Kick Racism Out of Football.

c) Contact the Football Association's Kick Racism out of Football Campaign
reminding them that Israel is a racist apartheid state which is
consistently in breach of international law in its human rights abuses; and
that such a deal endangers the FAs anti-racist reputation and the Kick it
Out campaign itself. Ask the FA to use its influence to prevent the deal
going ahead:

Kick It Out
PO Box 29544
London
EC2A 4WR

T: 020 7684 4884
F: 020 7684 4885
Email: info@kickitout.org

More info on www.palestinecampaign.org

With Christian friends like these....

Jerry Falwell has denied ever saying that Jews can get into heaven even if we don't embrace Jesus as god or the messiah or both.

"While I am a strong supporter of the state of Israel and dearly love the Jewish people and believe them to be the chosen people of God, I continue to stand on the foundational biblical principle that all people — Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Jews, Muslims, etc. — must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to enter heaven.

Looking on the bright side, we can get into most golf clubs these days.

UPDATE: Much more on this at Bartholomew's notes on religion.

Judeo-fascism?

Here's an article from Forward about how Jews and nazis get along (or not) in the white supremacist American Renaissance.

For the small, hardy band of right-wing Jews who attended this past weekend's American Renaissance Conference, the biennial gathering of white nationalists ended on a sour note.

The events Saturday, February 25, passed without major incident. But then, late Sunday morning, none other than former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke approached the microphone on the floor during the question-and-answer session for French writer Guillaume Faye. After congratulating Faye for stirring remarks that "touched my genes," Duke asked if there weren't an even more insidious threat to the West than Islam.

"There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit," Duke said.

"Tell us, tell us," came a call from the back of the room.

"I'm not going to say it," Duke said to rising laughter.

But Michael Hart, a squat, balding Jewish astrophysicist from Maryland, was not amused. He rose from his seat, strode toward Duke (who loomed over him like an Aryan giant), spit out a curse — "You f...ing Nazi, you've disgraced this meeting" — and exited.

"The speakers aren't Nazis," Hart assured him. "Jared isn't a Nazi."

Jared is Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance magazine. He founded the publication 1990, and since 1994 he had sponsored the biennial conference that bears its name. A former liberal, Taylor is glib, gracious and genial, capable of putting his white nationalism in the most benign and commonsense terms.

"We mean well to all people," he said in his address at this year's conference, "but our own people come first."

The conference has attracted ever larger crowds, with this year's event drawing about 300 people — all white (no more than 5% Jewish) and most of them male. The attendees are united by a common belief in black intellectual inferiority, opposition to non-white immigration and ardor for maintaining America's white majority. By the end of this seventh biennial conference, however, the delicate state of his coalition seemed apparent.

Hart, who spoke at the 1996 conference about his plan for a racial partition of the United States, said that Taylor now had to face the fact that he must purge the Nazis or lose the Jews. "He can't expect Jews to come if there are Nazis here,'' Hart said.

That rather depends how we define nazis.

South Africa moves to restore its anti-racist credentials

According to Ha'aretz, South Africa has confirmed that it has invited Hamas over for talks. I remember my own dismay when the new South Africa signed a trade deal with the last of the colonial settler states.

Khatami tells Ahmadinejad, holocaust is a misused reality

In what has been described as a "stinging attack" on the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his predessessor, Mohammad Khatami, has said:

We should speak out if even a single Jew is killed. Don’t forget that one of the crimes of Hitler, Nazism and German national socialism was the massacre of innocent people, among them many Jews,” the cleric said in comments carried in the Iranian press on Wednesday.

The Holocaust, he asserted, should be recognised “even if this historical reality has been misused and there is enormous pressure on the Palestinian people.”.....

“The persecution of Jews, just like Nazism, is a Western phenomenon. In the east, we have always lived side by side with them. And we follow a religion that states that the death of an innocent person is the death of all of humanity,” Khatami said.

He also argued that it was of little importance “whether the number killed (during the Holocaust) was high or not” -- but at the same time went on to accuse Israel’s leaders as being “victims of fascism and practising fascist policies today”.

Ahmadinejad also came under attack from the prominent and centrist Shargh newspaper, which complained that “the Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic of our foreign policy”.

“The Jewish question was never a problem for Iran or Islam, and is a Christian-European problem,” the paper argued.

Read the full article in the Khaleej Times.

Who does the Board of Deputies deputise for?

Here's a letter in today's Guardian, questioning the Board of Deputies of British Jews' democratic credentials over the Ken Livingstone affair:

The complaint against Ken Livingstone by the London-based Board of Deputies of British Jews raises important questions regarding the democratic process. This organisation professes to be the official voice of British Jewry, which numbers a figure in the region of 300,000, and of which I am one. However, it is not, in fact, representative of Jewry, but only of a number of individual synagogues and their respective members. Jon Benjamin, who made the complaint, is an unelected, paid official of that organisation. There are many thousands of Jews in the UK who (vehemently) disagree with the policies of the Board, and their methods and uncritical support of the Israeli government.

It is entirely possible that the decision of the Adjudication Panel for England would have been different had the above facts been clear and transparent, and this should properly be taken into account and the decision reviewed.
Michael Halpern
Westbourne, Dorset

Starving the Palestinians contd.

Independent report headed Israeli 'ruler-in-waiting' plans to starve Hamas. It's almost hagiographic about Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, who today is coming to London to persuade the British government to help Israel starve the Palestinians.

Israel's policy - described by a spokesman as putting "the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger" - has left London feeling squeamish. Tony Blair and Jack Straw will today undoubtedly show solidarity with Israel, saying Britain is not in the business of funding terrorists. But in private there is anguish that the policy will bring malnutrition to innocent Palestinians and punish them for taking part in a democratic election. The Palestinians are completely dependent on foreign aid for their survival and Israel's campaign to put 3.6 million people on starvation rations is foreboding.

Who's setting Jew against Jew?

That's what Daphna Baram is asking in today's Jerusalem Post. Here's the whole article since it's only short:

The debate over Zionism going on in Jewish communities is as old as Zionism itself. It did not end after the Holocaust, and it did not end conclusively with the founding of the State of Israel.

The champions of Zionism among Jews seem to have become a majority only after the 1967 war, but even then there was a significant minority of non-Zionists in any Jewish society.

However, it seems that the more powerful the Zionism trend has become among Jews, the more hysterical its supporters have turned. They engage in constant stable-cleaning, sniffing for dissidents behind every curtain, finding non-Zionists under each cupboard.

And when one or two are found - gevalt! All hell breaks loose. Hitler, Chmelnitzki and Petlura are back, and the shtetl is on fire. The renegades have to be found and hanged; the camp must be purified at once.

Reading the responses of Emanuele Ottolenghi ("Jews against Israel," February 22) and Melanie Phillips (in her infamous blog) to the recent debate over Zionism held in Cambridge in which Brian Klug, Richard Kuper and myself argued for alternatives to Zionism, one would think that Israel was not a nuclear regional superpower possessing the fourth most powerful army in the world, but a shaky sanctuary where Jews are annihilated by the thousands every day.

BUT ARE WE really not strong enough to have such a debate? Abraham Leon's book arguing against Zionism was smuggled out of Auschwitz; Algerian dissident Abraham Sarfati held on to his non-Zionist criticism even after years of imprisonment in Algiers for his opposition to the local regime.

Zionism is not an obvious response to suffering or to persecution. If those people, true Jewish heroes, kept on debating the subject while exposed to the most horrible perils, so, surely, can we.

Ottolenghi argued that the organizers of the Cambridge debate were "setting Jews against Jews" in a gladiators-arena scenario. The fact is that the debate was civilized and good-natured, and the participants went back to London on the train cracking Jewish jokes all the way to Kings Cross.

The only people in this story who are setting Jews against Jews are renegade-hunters like Ottolenghi. A brief read through the Internet responses provoked by his article should suffice to prove this point beyond doubt. "Fatwa anybody?" "Scumbags" and "kapos" are but mere examples.

One can only wonder what really poses a danger to fellow Jews - Brian Klug's suggestion that Jewish existence not center around Israel (he never said "There's no place in this world for nationalism")? Richard Kuper's revulsion over Israel's behavior in the West Bank? My own claim that Israel should belong to all its citizens? Or maybe, as one dead prime minister might tell us, were he able, it is those who wildly incite against anybody who dares divert from the party line.

I wouldn't have seen this if not for the Just Peace list.

Livingstone suspends suspension

Well the High Court did anyway. Ken Livingstone as had his suspension from office delayed "amid claims of a vendetta" (The Guardian). Further reports in The Telegraph and The Scotsman.

The Guardian also has an article by the man himself here.

However, there has been an unstated allegation in this case: the implicit suggestion that my comment was anti-semitic. It is not explicitly stated because it cannot be substantiated. But the innuendo is used to give weight to charges otherwise too trivial to merit this gigantic fuss.

The truth is that I have appointed black, Asian and Jewish people to the highest levels of my administration and waged an unrelenting war on every manifestation of racism, anti-semitism and every other kind of discrimination. Since I have been mayor, racial and religiously motivated incidents in the capital have declined by more than a third. Of course, there is still a problem. A Jewish person is three times more likely to suffer a racist attack than a "white European". A person of African, Caribbean or south Asian descent is 10 times more likely to suffer a racist attack. And an Arab person is 11 times more likely to suffer a racist attack in London today. But significant progress has been made against the trend that is taking place elsewhere in Europe.

Associated Newspapers has always led the charge against the policies that confront racism and anti-semitism. It praised the Blackshirts in the 1930s, and admits that as recently as the retirement party of the last editor of the Daily Mail, two of its staff dressed in Nazi uniforms and were not asked to leave.

The Board of Deputies, which referred me to the Standards Board, has at all times protested that this issue is just about how I treated one reporter who happens to be Jewish. I have never believed a word of it. Some time before this incident was blown up out of all proportion, the Board of Deputies asked to meet me to urge me to tone down my views on the Israeli government.