You couldn't make it up!

But I did just make it up* from google cache and a little steer from "Just Intruding" in my comments section. Below is a replica of the Engage page on Richard Littlejohn, Engage's latest ally in the fight against "antisemitism."

Who remembers Richard Littlejohn?

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Added by David Hirsh on July 06, 2007 11:18:23 AM.

Richard Littlejohn was one of the faces of the Thatcher era; him and Gary Bushell. They articulated the Thatcher message for the aspirational working class, the "loadsamoney" generation. And it was Andrew Neil, complete with barrow-boy-working-in-the-city (and driving a Peugot 205 1.9i) red braces, who brought the Murdoch message to the posh people who read the Sunday Times.

And we, watching Ben Elton rip them apart on a Saturday night, wearing our Coal Not Dole stickers, listening to our Specials records, doing Viv and Rick impressions - how we hated these nasty little apologies for everything Thatcherite - tinged as they were around the edges with an anti-immigrant xenophobia and a baying hatred of the "politically correct".

I'm just about to publicize Littlejohn's TV documentary about antisemitism and link to an interview with him and I'm wondering how to do it. Maybe this is the end of my credibility, as someone on the left, as a sociologist, as a human being? Maybe this one act signifies my final defeat?

But maybe not. I haven't seen the documentary but I've just read the interview. It's not hugely sharp, politically, but he's basically right - that antisemitism is a significant contemporary threat in the UK.

Perhaps the fact that Richard Littlejohn is campaigning against antisemitism tells us more about how much of the left has moved than about how I, David Hirsh, have moved.

Antisemitism is a form of racism. Who would have thought, back in the good old days, that Richard Littlejohn would be the anti-racist and Alexei Sayle would be sharing a platform with a party whose political foundation is the protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Who would have thought that the Socialist Workers Party would be hosting Gilad Atzmon and his hateful rhetoric at Marxism 07?

Who would have thought that the big trade unions would be organising a boycott of Israeli goods?

Who would have thought in a world where very much criticism of Israel is made by Jihadi Islamist antisemites, where the President of Iran denies the Holocaust in the name of criticism of Israel, that the union that represents university lecturers would be able to insist on the following: "Congress believes that... criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic".

Who would have thought that Ken Livingstone, the hero of the antiracist left, would be giving offensive back-chat to Jewish reporters or telling foreigners that if they don't like it they can "go back to...".

So before people start denouncing me for linking to a Richard Littlejohn interview, they should, perhaps, stop and wonder why it is that Littlejohn is the antiracist here and they themselves are the ones minimizing and excusing racism. What would Ben Elton have said about that?

So here's the link to the interview.

And the Littlejohn documentary is "The War on Britain’s Jews?" on Channel 4 on Monday 9th July at 8pm.

Phew! I'll be in big trouble when they hear about this at the anarchy society!

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* "You couldn't make it up is a Richard LittleJohn catchphrase along with "Palestinians are the pikeys (gypsies) of the Middle East!"

Now go see David Hirsh explaining his choice of post to some anxious Engageniks.

Me on Aaronovitch

Silly me! I must confess to being a little hurt by David Aaronovitch's personal abuse directed at me in the Jewish Chronicle. Aaronovitch in his JC article, describes me as "a heroic correspondent to the letters page of this and many other journals" and he claims that "Mr Elf or his ubiquitous comrade, Mr Tony Greenstein, constantly and at every opportunity to stress their Jewish origins." Before I started blogging I used to be quite an avid writer to the press but I could only ever remember getting published in the JC once and that was to criticise Aaronovitch for using two conflicting arguments to condemn Jews who criticise or condemn Israel. Well whilst googling his name and mine today (sometimes that's the easiest way to find your way around your own blog!) I found some letters by me to the Observer. I found three, two of which predate my blog, which I started in March 2004. Now cop this. Here's the first:

David Aaronovitch wonders why Iraqis have not risen against their rulers (Comment, last week). Could it be that people across the Middle East have seen how first Britain then America sponsored the Zionist movement in the colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine and decided that neither Britain nor America are worthy liberators?
Mark Elf
Dagenham
Essex

It's dated April 6, 2003.

Here's the second:

David Aaronovitch (Comment, last week) accuses John Pilger of dishonesty in attributing hundreds of deaths per year to Saddam Hussein, rather than the millions that war-party journalists like to quote. But 'hundreds' relates to people killed in internal repression whereas 'millions' relates to wars and crushed uprisings.

Internal repression was Saddam's responsibility. Responsibility for wars and defeated uprisings has to be shared between Saddam Hussein and whoever supported him. Dishonesty comes when journalists suggest that the thousands killed in the recent war and the hundreds of thousands killed through sanctions, have been, to paraphrase Madeleine Albright, 'a price worth paying'.
Mark Elf
Dagenham, Essex

That one was dated May 4, 2003.

And here's the third:

Not Gandhi
The juxtaposition of the names Gandhi and Mandela to denounce political violence is absurd (Comment, last week). Mandela was an active member of the military wing of the African National Congress and served as long as he did in prison, specifically, because he refused to renounce the armed struggle against apartheid. For this reason Amnesty International refused to take up his case.

Also, given Aaronovitch's support for the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, who on earth is he to invoke Gandhi?
Mark Elf
Dagenham, Essex

I really had forgotten about these but see how they differ in their approach from Aaronovitch's. I'm sure I remember him writing about his parents. I don't recall ever writing about mine. And yet he can say that I am in some kind of struggle with them. I think he said his parents were communists. Clearly Aaronovitch is no communist so we are looking at a case of projection here when he suggests I don't like my parents. And I'm sure he has stressed that he is not Jewish and yet he lectures those of us who insist that we are as to how and when we can identify as such. And see how I skilfully manage to avoid any mention of my being Jewish in spite of Aaronovitch's insistence that I mention it at every turn.

I don't know, and I don't like to presume on, why Aaronovitch decided to direct such personal abuse at me but it appears that I have had four letters published that are about what he has written. I have not mentioned his religious or ethnic background, I haven't said anything about how he feels about his parents. I have simply engaged with what he has had to say. Why can't he do the same? Is he a zionist? Surely not. He says he is a "non-zionist". Who am I to argue?

Disengaging from Littlejohn

More weirdness on, or off, the Engage site. Last night a post appeared promoting a programme scheduled for Monday night on Channel 4 to be presented by Richard Littlejohn titled "The war on Britain's Jews." Richard Littlejohn has several pet hates, most of which form the stock-in-trade of fascist parties. He rails from his tabloid column in the Daily Mail against gypsies, asylum seekers and gays. But he is a good friend of Israel - surprise surprise. Now Engage has waded into controversy before with its dalliances but this one really put the cat among the pigeons and had David Hirsh at his defensive best painstakingly explaining what he actually said to everyone who questioned what appeared to be his latest choice of friend. I first knew of the post when I got a comment here this morning. Thankfully the commentor copied and pasted the whole of one comment to the Littlejohn post:

interesting comment on Engage, which Hirsh posted but didnt reply to:

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/b...cle.php? id=1226
David Hirsh asks,

"back in the good old days,......

"....Who would have thought that the big trade unions would be organising a boycott of Israeli goods? "

is it surprising that big trade unions are now organizing a boycott of israeli goods when it willy-nilly steals its neighbor's land, on which it will set up Israeli-run "industrial estates" for walled-in palestinian villagers on the lands that will used to be their farms until stolen by the israeli state:http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? ItemID=5735

Is it surprising that trade unions are now organizing a boycott of Israeli goods, when, according to Ha'aretz :"Palestinian workers employed in West Bank settlements and factories earn less than half the minimum wage stipulated by law, a Knesset study revealed Tuesday." naturally, the workers dont receive health benefits or anything like that: http://www.kibush.co.il/show_fil...e.asp? num=20941

Is it surprising that trade unions are now organizing a boycott of Israel when the World Bank, the UN, and Amnesty all say Israel is destroying the west bank's economy, making it impossible for farmers to get their own goods to market, while Israel floods they palestinian market with their own goods? http://www.stopthewall.org/downl...df/ FoodFull.pdf

Is it surprising that trade unions are now organizing a boycott of israel, when Israel's closure of Gaza now has 75% of Gazan industry shut down? http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Sat...icle% 2FShowFull

Ok, did you check out the link to Engage? I did and I very helpfully pointed out how you can get the url to link to the comments here. Follow the link and.....no comments. But now if you follow the link to the post you find....no post. Now when I did see the post I noticed that there were 30 comments so what has happened here?

Unfortunately Engage was so quick to remove the offending piece you can't (well I can't) find it on google's cache but Tony Greenstein copied me a comment that he tried to post earlier today to the same thread. In his email he very usefully copied some of the existing comments on the Littlejohn thread. He didn't catch the name on this comment but I think it's Joshua:

I just came across this at Workers' Liberty:

'When genocide was raging in Rwanda in 1994, Littlejohn wrote: "Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them." '

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8818

If Littlejohn really did write this then in my opinion you should take down this post. I don't care how much good he may do the Jewish people. There have to be limits. If that's what he wrote (and I really don't care if he subsequently retracted it) then he is a monster. Utterly beyond the pale. He should no more be talking about anti-Semitism on television than David Irving or Erich Priebke.

Here's an Anon possibly responding to the comment above:

Sorry to say this Joshua but from your last post you appear to be principled but naive.

First people on this site didn't want Dershowitz, now they don't want Littlejohn. If you want to 'vet' everyone who is against anti-Semitism however repulsive their views on the use of torture or genocide in Africa just remember that the people who are baying for Jewish blood today (and not always metaphorically) are not so queasy. Why else are we witnessing an unholy alliance between radical Muslims & the SWP?

What do you want, for Engage to be a minority site dismissed as some obscure ramblings of an extreme-left fringe?

P.S.
If this comment is censored then I know where the moderator stands and you won't be hearing from me again

Here's a chap called Mike Chivers:

I don't think we need any help at all from this racist. In addition to the Rwanda comments, he is also reported to have called Palestinians "the Pikeys of the Middle East" ("pikeys" being an offensive term for Gypsies, one of Littlejohn's chief hatreds). It might do for "Little Green Footballs", but not Engage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Littlejohn

Some good comment from Johann Hari: http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=631

And here's a chap called Roger responding to the Joshua above:

Before Josh played the Irving card I was going to restrict myself to quoting Orwell: 'just because something is printed in the Daily Telegraph does not automatically mean it is untrue' (or something to that effect).

Irving and Priebke are not fair analogies.

Obnoxious as he is as far as I am aware nobody has ever accused Littlejohn of being an anti-Semite (in fact Jews must be one of the few minorities he is keen on) and he may even be capable of producing an informative and intelligent programme on anti-Semitism in Britain.

Presumably other left-wingers have appeared on the various TV shows he's fronted over the years - as watching him sagely agree with other bigots would hardly have made for good television (not that they were good television).

So personally I wouldn't touch him other than with the pointed end of a very long pole but given the pressing need to publicise that anti-Semitism is a problem and that this programme might well reach a wider audience than the few thousand political obsessives we normally address ourselves to, I am not sure David had that luxury.

And now a comment from a critic of Engage rather than a supporter:

Jews, Gypsies and Homosexuals are united by a deadly history of persecution by the Nazis.

A question for David Hirsh. If you were a Gypsy and you were told that someone was making a programme about anti-Gypsy racism, the only trouble was that they often say and write nasty things about Jews and Gays. How would you feel about this? Would you welcome it.

Similarly, if you were gay (I don't know your sexuality) and you knew someone was going to do a documentary about homophobia, only they are often racist about Jews and Gypsies, would you give them the time of day?

Why should any thinking Jew with a sense of history do anything to promote any piece of work by Littlejohn, who has excelled in anti-gypsy, anti-gay statements, not to mention his well known comments on Rwanda's peoples and about Palestinians which other contributors have referred to, and his appalling statements over the years on asyluym -seekers?

Is every anti-human statement forgiven the moment he utters something positive about Jews?

The only thing that may be unfair to Littlejohn is to call him Nick Griffin's favourite columnist. I thought that honour belonged to Melanie Philips, but maybe I'm wrong. ne thing I'm certian of though: the day the Jews think they need help from, or have an ally in, the likes of LittleJohn is the day things really are desparate.

Well up pops Hirsh immediately, almost:

I linked to an interview and I gave the time of a TV programme. Perfectly reasonable - people can watch the TV programme and make their own judgment. As I said I haven't seen it. I didn't embrace Richard Littlejohn as a lovely guy. In fact, if you read what I wrote, I said:

"how we hated these nasty little apologies for everything Thatcherite - tinged as they were around the edges with an anti-immigrant xenophobia and a baying hatred of the "politically correct"

I didn't know the Rwanda quote which is disgusting - but I well remember that he was xenophobic, homophobic, unpleasant - as I wrote in the piece. I don't think he was ever fascistic - he was a Thatcherite.

But diasporist, my point was, how come this right wing sleaze is now suddenly more of an anti-racist than you are? At least than Livingstone is, than the SWP is, than Alexei Sayle is, than UCU is than UNISON is, than T&G? How come?

What has happened to antiracist politics when even Richard Littlejohn is to the left of all those that I mention? I never said he was good, I said he was a clearer opponent of anti-Jewish racism than a whole layer of "antiracists".

You can pretend that I've suddenly become a fan of Littlejohn if you like - but people can read. And that pretence won't prevent anybody noticing that you have dodged the whole point of my piece.

Before people get all excited, I didn't say Littlejohn was suddenly a great antiracist, I didn't say he was an ally against antisemitism, I didn't say that we should all join in a popular front against antisemitism with him, I didn't say that he was my best mate, I didn't say that he was right to hate gay people - what I said was, perhaps you might be interested to watch his television programme on Monday.

And that's it. Those are just some of the quotes that saw the light of day but never will again, not on the Engage site anyway. Here's one last one that probably never saw the light of day on the Engage site in the first place. It's from Tony Greenstein:

What a sorry pass things have come to when David Hirsh goes into the last ditch in defence of Richard Littlejohn, the chauvinist and racist ex-Sun and Daily Mail columnist.

Let us ignore, no let’s not ignore, the record of the Daily Mail. This is what it said about Jewish refugees in the last century as they escaped the pogroms in Russia and Nazi persecution:

"The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage: the number of aliens entering the country through back door - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed"

Daily Mail, 20 August 1938.

"They fought, they jostled to the foremost places at the gangways. When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined in broken English asked for money for their train fare." February 3^rd, 1900

And of course one could quote the ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ headline or of course the personal meeting between Viscount Rothermere and Adolph himself.

So what has changed that their columnists, Richard Littlejohn and Mad Mel Phillips are so concerned about anti-Semitism? Actually nothing. It’s the Jews who changed in such a way as to become acceptable to right-wing bigots and chauvinists. They moved out of the East End and into London’s middle-class suburbia. Their place was taken by Bengalis, the new object of the Daily Hate Mail.

Whereas Jews in 1945 voted to put one of only 2 communists, Phil Piratin, into Parliament today they vote Tory or New Labour or even further rightwards (according to Geoffrey Alderman’s Jewish Community in British Politics substantial numbers in Hackney voted National Front in the 1974 General Election. In short, whereas Jews in the 1930’s identified with the Spanish Republicans and anti-fascist worldwide, today they identify with the Israeli State and the apartheid treatment meted out to the Palestinians. Because that is what Zionism has done – it has dragged many Jews to the right in support of imperialism and its domestic allies.

And of course the attitude of the Mail, including of course Littlejohn and Mad Mel, to asylum seekers is entirely consistent with that paper’s policies towards asylum seekers today. So how come they are concerned about anti-Semitism?

It is not, therefore surprising, that even posters to the Engage blog which David Hirsh runs, have taken exception to what Littlejohn wrote about the Rwandan genocide in 1994 ‘"Does anyone really give a monkey's about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them." (which is actually a take on the sayings of another racist and friend of David Irving, the late Alan Clarke MP. And Littlejohn’s racist reference to Palestinians as ‘pikey’s’, a term normally used about Gypsies, another Littlejohn hate is entirely consistent with his opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’..

And likewise some people have taken exception to the support of Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Professor who believes that judges should be able to issue ‘torture warrants’, for the anti-boycott campaign. After all Zionism and the Israeli state rely on the support of the far-right in the United States and their Christian Zionist allies, who when not supporting Armageddon in Palestine are dancing in joy at Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ. Why object to the support of Littlejohn and Dershowitz?

It makes no sense.

But what is Hirsh’s take on all of this?

‘I didn't know the Rwanda quote which is disgusting - but I well remember that he was xenophobic, homophobic, unpleasant - as I wrote in the piece. I don't think he was ever fascistic - he was a Thatcherite.

But diasporist, my point was, how come this right wing sleaze is now suddenly more of an anti-racist than you are? At least than Livingstone is, than the SWP is, than Alexei Sayle is, than UCU is than UNISON is, than T&G? How come?

What has happened to antiracist politics when even Richard Littlejohn is to the left of all those that I mention? I never said he was good, I said he was a clearer opponent of anti-Jewish racism than a whole layer of "antiracists".

You can pretend that I've suddenly become a fan of Littlejohn if you like - but people can read. And that pretence won't prevent anybody noticing that you have dodged the whole point of my piece.’

Yes that’s right. How come Littlejohn is an anti-racist in comparison with Ken Livingstone or UNISON asks Hirsh. Well the obvious answer is that he’s not, but since Littlejohn opposes the academic boycott and accuses it of anti-Semitism he too has to be welcomed into the fold. And why not ? If it is racist to support a boycott against a state that still, today, demolishes the houses even of Israeli Palestinians because their villages are ‘unrecognised’ why not support the Littlejohns of this world?

Of course reality is slightly different. UNISON’s conference overwhelmingly supported the resolution calling for boycott and the right of return of Palestinian refugees because people saw, quite rightly, that you cannot oppose racism when it is directed against Jews but support it when it is carried out in the name of Jewish people. So simple really that it’s a wonder Hirsh doesn’t get it.

Now I know that, like my previous post, this will probably be ‘moderated’ i.e. censored. But maybe that’s a good thing because then I can e-mail the post directly to his academic colleagues rather than taking the chance that a few of them might chance upon his web site.

Tony Greenstein

I must say that I'm disappointed Tony didn't catch some of Linda Grant's contributions. I'm sure I saw her equating a man who insults gypsies, asylum seekers and gays every week from a multi-million circulation tabloid with the Socialist Workers Party's "antisemitism," epitomised in the slogan "We are all Hizbollah!"

Ok, one last thing. Engage monitors the Just Peace list and the comments of this blog. They have used their findings to harass Deborah Fink out of the leadership (or something) of Jews for Justice for Palestinians. I remember Deborah joking on the JP list that we'll have to be careful what we say on that list in case Engage or the Jewish Chronicle are watching. I think Hirsh even made an issue out of that. Now look at what happened in the Engage comments when I posted the thing about the F in academic freedom.

JSF have picked up on Jon's 'F' word: he really should be careful.

Which led to this:

I think that JSF need to be reminded of the historical antecedents (and precedents) here. The (ig?)noble F word was used at the time of the trial of "Lady Chatterly's Lover" for obscenity way back in the early 1960s (surely I'm not the only person on this site who can remember that far back, although I was very young then - and of course I still am). The Guardian - still The Manchester Guardian (shows how long ago it was: not even Linda Grant can remember that far back. Shows how much younger than me she is) - printed _that_ word. You have to realise that back then, The Guardian was still a liberal (capital _and_ lower case l) newspaper then. It even went on to support Israel in the 6 Day War. And I remember that as well.

So JSF should climb off their high horse (before they fall off). Jon merely remembered that impressionable young people, such as members of IJV, JfJfP or JBIG, might read the Engage entries, and they might be offended or otherwise upset. Unlike the mature people of the world on the UCU activist email list.

The F word was removed from the site after Brian Robinson complained about its use to David Hirsh. David Hirsh wrote back to Brian saying that it was perfectly appropriate for Jon Pike to use that language in the context of someone threatening to sue him. He then quietly, he thought, removed it without any explanation, apology or "hat-tip" to Brian. So how did this last commentor know what motivated Jon Pike to remove the offending word from the passage? I hope I never get defenders like that.

Ok, so another little slip by our (sorry non-Jewish reader, I'm addressing my very own here) defenders against antisemitism at the Engage site. They may have actually understood that allying with racists isn't a good way to fight antisemitism. Who knows perhaps they'll one day realise that you can't fight antisemitism with anti-Arab racism either. But then they'd have to delete the whole site.

Aaronovitch analyses....me

David Aaronovitch has one of his famously analytical pieces in today's Jewish Chronicle and on his own blog. It's a freebie on line so here's the whole thing. It's appalling even by Aaronovitch's standards. I'll comment in brackets:

Anti-Zionists should grow up
06/07/2007
By David Aaronovitch
It has long been one of the perverse talents of British middle-class activists to be able to devise campaigns which, instead of drawing attention to real grievances, divert attention away from them. I spent a lot of my early adulthood in observation of this phenomenon and recognise the inevitable moment when the movement stops being about the thing it says it was about and becomes about itself.

So it is with the boycott. Today the question in Britain is no longer what should be done about the Middle East, but how to spread or defeat the boycott. For almost everyone involved, the debate is — if the truth is admitted — hugely enjoyable. This isn’t really surprising, because it is all a fabulous diversion from the extraordinarily painful business of making or soliciting peace.[Now this could be seen as an even-handed criticism of both sides in the boycott debate but anyone familiar with Aaronovitch's articles will recognise immediately that he has opened by serving notice that he is not going to engage with an argument here but rather engage in ad hominem attacks on those he doesn't like but can't argue against.]

This is only one way in which the boycott movement is entirely counter-productive. It has emphasised the gulf between activists and memberships in all the unions where it has been debated (does anyone seriously believe that most Unison members want to boycott Israel?). And as Jonathan Freedland has pointed out, it has also forced an unhelpful solidarity upon those who are normally enemies, making it more, not less difficult for a hegemonic Israeli peace faction to arise.[who are these "normally enemies?" We can't know because Aaronovitch doesn't say. If he did say we might be able to point out that the enmity of one side was possibly a sham. I mean is he saying that there are zionists who are opposed to the occupation, the wall, the war on Lebanon who are going to support these things because this or that trade unionist won't eat a Jaffa orange?]

All this should be bleeding obvious, yet somehow it is not. That’s why I believe there is something deeply irrational about the boycott movement. This “something”, I think, rests not in a genuine sense of injustice concerning the Palestinians, but in a negative ideology that calls itself anti-Zionism.[ok, let's take stock. The boycott leads to zionist (sorry, pro-occupation) unity and is counter-productive because people who oppose the occupation support it because of the boycott, yes? So the boycott is irrational because its supporters claim to be anti-occupation and yet they strengthen the occupation. But then that means that all the money that zionists are pouring into the anti-boycott campaign is wasted. Not, as Jonathan Freedland says, because it is for PR for a bad product, but because the boycott actually works, according to Aaronovitch's reasoning, for the occupation. Also, anti-zionists do not care about the Palestinians. They subscribe to a free-standing ideology called anti-zionism.]

With there being no strong right-wing movement any more for the annexation of “Judea and Samaria” or the construction of Eretz Israel, anti-Zionism seems to me to be about as historically relevant as being anti-Common Market. [I don't know if Aaronovitch knows that Judea and Samaria are names for the West Bank but the Likud is quite a strong movement in Israel still and Olmert isn't exactly retreating from those areas. That's without getting into his not so subtle redefinition of zionism as the ideology of the settlers beyond the pre 1967 boundary and not the idea that Jews from anywhere have more right to and in Israel than the native non-Jews who are there or who come from there.]Personally I am a non-Zionist, just as I am a non-Catalan-nationalist, and I would no more think of being “anti” than I would of campaigning against the desire of Australian aboriginals to reclaim their ancestors’ skulls from the British Museum. I am, however, anti-Likud.[I've seen John Strawson try this one by saying that he is a zionist in the same way that he supports Bulgaria's right to exist. But does he support the right of one community from around the world to ethnically cleanse most natives from Bulgaria and establish a state that values, by force of its laws, a community from around the world in preference to the natives? He never said but Aaronovitch avoids such relative straightforwardness by getting into a comparative treatment of Catalan nationalism. Now check Catalan nationalism out on Wikipedia. It's a movement for greater autonomy for Catalonia. Catalonia is a place. Now there are various zionist orientations but when most people speak of zionism they do not mean autonomy or statehood for the place now known as Israel. They mean statehood for the Jews. That is one Israeli and non-Israeli community over other communities in or from the same place. That is what sets zionism apart from other movements for statehood or self-determination. So he is not comparing like with like. I'm not saying that he can't be non-zionist. I'm just saying he has invoked a bogus comparison. Obviously with only a vague definition of zionism it's impossible to know if he is truly a non-zionist. He'd have to say precisely what he understands by zionism. As it is he has only hinted at a confusion between Jewish supremacy in Israel on the one hand and the occupation on the other.]

So it is interesting to me to see that many of those involved in the boycott campaign use “Zionist” as a term of abuse, not analysis. For example, Mr Mark Elf, a heroic correspondent to the letters page of this and many other journals, describes Tony Blair as a Zionist almost entirely because he doesn’t like the PM.[ah now he gets personal against little old me and deliberately dishonest. He doesn't want people to see how dishonest he is being so he doesn't link to the article he is referring to but I am guessing it is this one on Blair being appointed envoy for the Middle East quartet. I headlined it "Quartet to appoint zionist as Middle East envoy." I explain in the article that I say this because Blair is an honorary patron of a zionist organisation called the Jewish National Fund]

He tells another critical correspondent on his Jews Sans Frontieres blog “not to lie or evade, I know that as a Zionist you find thus difficult to impossible…”. Used in this way, Zionist is just another word for bad, like the apartheid regime in South Africa was bad, or fascists are bad. It is a word to be applied to people whether they believe themselves to be Zionists or not.[The quote is lifted from a lengthy comment by me against Paul Bogdanor, a contributor to Campus Watch and Front Page Mag. The quote is from April 2006. That is how deep Aaronovitch had to dig to find a quote that would have me using "Zionist" as "a word to be applied to people whether they believe themselves to be Zionists or not." And that against an extreme zionist by the standards of other zionists or is Aaronovitch saying that Paul Bogdanor does not believe himself to be a zionist? But what this is, is Aaronovitch saying "you just can't argue with these people, they use such hateful terms as er "zionist"." But we define our terms and the reason zionists cannot argue with us is because there is no case for Israel.]

As deployed by some agency entirely external to the Jewish communities — an Egyptian newspaper, say, or an Iranian TV channel — such a demonology is to be regretted but can at least be understood as an attitude towards the “other”.[pass the sick bag Alice]

But when it is used in this way by people who go to such lengths as Mr Elf or his ubiquitous comrade, Mr Tony Greenstein, constantly and at every opportunity to stress their Jewish origins, something else would seem to be going on.[We don't stress our Jewish origins at every opportunity but unlike the many specifically zionist organisations that simply call themselves Jewish this or Jewish that, we do state what our agenda is honestly and openly.]

Ah yes, say some readers, we are way ahead of you. Mr Elf and Mr Greenstein are archetypal “self-haters”. They are typical Jews who hate Jews (an organisation, come to think of it, which would complete the long, self-indulgent list of Jews For or Against This or That). They wish somehow to lose their unwanted Jewishness by currying favour with the goyische welt. They like the Nobel prizes and the comedy, but they don’t want to be associated with the big noses and loud behaviour in Waitrose.[These anti-zionist Jewish groups that state their agenda in their name are at least being more honest than those that simply say that they are Jewish as if they are Jewish community groups. And it's a long time since I've heard those stereotypes about loudness and big noses and all and why would I not want my Jewishness? Accidentally Aaronovitch has hit on to something with this "big noses" thing. Of course we object to racist stereotypes but we are perfectly comfortable with our Jewish identity. We believe we should be able to live as Jews wherever we find ourselves. What we are rejecting about zionism is colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing, racist laws and relentless aggression. But see how Aaronovitch resorts to antisemitic stereotypes.]

There are Jews who hate Jewishness. In his excellent book about being brought up in a fascist household, Trevor Grundy describes his late discovery that his fiercely antisemitic mother was herself originally Jewish. Bad experiences at the hands of her step-father might have accounted for her pathological rejection of her own people.[He's come a long way from my condemnation of a state that favours Jews from anywhere over non-Jewish natives to an antisemitic Jewish fascist. Will JC readers notice the lack of linkage. I'm sure they will, but how many will point it out]

But the very extremeness of her example indicates why I distrust the “self-hating” diagnosis as much as I distrust the Elfian definition of Zionism. Both are impertinences. “I don’t hate myself,” Mr Elf might say with justice, “I just hate you.” [But he hasn't mentioned my definition of zionism. As far as I know he doesn't know what it is even though he has delved into my blog so deeply he went back to the comments in the first half of last year to muster ammunition and then he had to lift it out of context.]

Trevor Grundy’s mother hid her Jewishness. Jews Against Zionism (or whatever) luxuriate in their superior version of theirs. Indeed, their profession of Jewishness is as excessive as anybody’s on their hate-list, though it seems to exist for the sole purpose of negative deployment. I knew Tony Greenstein many years ago, when he reminded me of John McEnroe in a kefiyeh.[And yet Jews against zionism don't go around suggesting that their identity is somehow more authentic than that of zionist Jews. They are simply refusing to be (mis)represented by zionists.]

The boycotters, and especially the Jews for Boycotts, are not self-hating Jews — they’re adolescents. It isn’t themselves they hate, but Daddy and Mummy. In fact, they’re so vain they probably think this piece is about them.[Ah now this is the old David Aaronovitch. The dissident, the communist. Standing up to the establishment. They ludicrously call us self-haters but Aaronovitch has superior insight. He's got our number. We hate our parents.]

How's all that for a grown up argument.

I ought to point out here that Aaronovitch implies that I have had several letters published in the Jewish Chronicle. Actually I have only had one. It was this one:

Dear Sir

David Aaronovitch wonders why he wasn't invited to sign the Independent Jewish Voices declaration even though he wouldn't have signed it. There could be two reasons. One is the fact that late last year, in The Times, David Aaronovitch sneered at Jews for Justice for Palestinians and, in particular, an invitation to sign their statement. He actually said that he wouldn't sign anything "as a Jew" and that he couldn't understand why anyone would ask him to sign anything simply because he has a Jewish name.

The second reason might be that the David Aaronovitch, who writes for The Times and who couldn't understand why he would be asked to sign anything "as a Jew" was a different David Aaronovitch altogether from the one who would like to have been asked to sign the IJV declaration and that these IJV people asked the Times chap but not the JC chap.

Perhaps it's time for one of these David Aaronovitches to read the other one's articles.

Yours faithfully

Mark Elf

That was published back in February 2007. Did Aaronovitch wait for the dish to go cold? I wish I could say that this JC article is more evidence of the panic zionists are in over the boycott business but this time I think it really was personal.

Did you see....?

I've just been sent this video clip from Ynet of an al Aqsa TV cameraman being shot on the ground by Israeli soldiers until both of his legs needed amputating. Al Aqsa TV is Hamas's television station so they must have carried on shooting him on the ground because he was armed with a charter. He certainly can't have been armed with much else because you can see his camera in his hands quite clearly in the clip. The Ynet article is here.

Engage puts the "F" in academic freedom.....

....and takes it back out again.

See if you can spot the difference between this passage that appeared in a Jon Pike post to the Engage website:

You can accept that it is disproportionate and unjust to punish this group of people, but you can argue that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. The proposals that you make are unjust and discriminatory in effect, but that is justified in terms of the deeper and wider goal of making solidarity with the Palestinian people. If you want to argue this - which is the most promising line of argument - could you shut the f*ck up about being unconditionally opposed to unjust discrimination, please?

and this passage in the same post showing the same posting time:

You can accept that it is disproportionate and unjust to punish this group of people, but you can argue that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. The proposals that you make are unjust and discriminatory in effect, but that is justified in terms of the deeper and wider goal of making solidarity with the Palestinian people. If you want to argue this - which is the most promising line of argument - could you stop saying that you are unconditionally opposed to unjust discrimination, please? This is because you aren’t.

Clearly a change has been made here but why? The last time I remember this happening was when Dr Hirsh saw fit to use a ludicrous anecdote about his daughter for some political point-scoring but that was in response to complaints in the comments. See the comments to the post above, including this particularly er academic one from "Chaim"

Beautiful.

The future of the zionist project is in their hands. Beautiful!

Tony Greenstein (not) on Engage on Massad

I couldn't squeeze John Strawson into the headline because he definitely is on Engage on Massad. I did a post earlier about their post on Massad but at that time they only had three comments. They have had more now and would have at least one more than they are showing but they wouldn't allow Tony Greenstein's comment through. Check out the comments they have allowed through here. Note in particular John Strawson's comment:

This is an extraordinary article which entirely reverses the truth of the Gaza coup. Since the elections Hamas has tried to play at being both government and opposition in Gaza; in June it opted for opposition. Massad pitches his argument as a democrat but necessarily has to lie about Mahmoud Abbas, comparing him to Pinochet, when in actual fact he is the elected President. And of course Massad attacks the elected government of Lebanon at the same time. However, that this article is a tissue of lies and distortions is not perhaps the main issue. It is the incitement against intellectuals and others in Palestine that is most disturbing. In New York calling others "collaborators" might be a rough palour game, in Palestine it can be a death sentence.

Ok, and now I have to make a little detour because Strawson has been on the beleaguered Massad's case for some time now. His comment to Engage wasn't a million miles from a comment he posted to the Just Peace list about a year ago in response to another article by Massad in al Ahram.

This piece by Massad is an open invitation to murder. He calls those who fought for, and to establish the Oslo peace process and the institutions it created, collobators. It is simply not true to suggest that the PLO or rather Fateh should be characterized as corrupt organization. This piece of cod-Marxism is crude analysis and dangeruous politic chap words in New York but cheap lives in Palestine.


john

What does he want of Massad's life? Never mind. Here's Tony Greenstein:

It’s not Joseph Massad’s article which is extraordinary but the knee-jerk response from Engage and its rabid Jewish chauvinists, to quote my good friend Steve Cohen, in his article ‘For the Third Camp – Yes to Palestinian Liberation! No To Anti-Semitism!).

The article by Massad locates what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza in the context of US imperialism and its bloody record in the Middle East. Anyone who has any pretensions to be on the left, let alone a socialist, would have no difficulty in understanding and comprehending this analysis. The track record of the United States, be it in South America, Asia or the Middle East is a matter of record when it comes to coups, destabilisation and the murder of socialists, communists and trade unionists.

Of course Engage and its rabid Jewish chauvinists have some difficulties with this since this very same United States also supports the ‘Jewish’ State of Israel. It is in squaring the circle of pretending to be on the left and supporting the US and its client Israeli state that leads the Strawsons and Pikes of this world to perform verbal gymnastics.

It is quite laughable that Engage is now lining itself up as a supporter of Abbas. Leave aside that his doctoral thesis was a full-blooded defence of Holocaust denial. It is a matter of record that the US has funnelled arms, equipment and money to him in order to take out Hamas. And of course Israel has been happy to oblige. Abbas and his Fatah supporters are, in the eyes of most Palestinians, collaborators and Engage’s crocodile tears for Dahlan and his Fatah militias, whose corruption and brutality is second to none should be a lesson for anyone who believes that there is such a creature as the Zionist left.

It also seems to have escaped the attention of the Engageniks that Hamas won a resounding electoral victory in January, despite interference from Israeli forces. The reaction to this victory by the US and Israel was, of course, to punish the electorate! Abbas’s election as President was only achieved by the fact that his main competitor, Marwan Barghouti was in an Israeli prison and independent candidates were subject to severe harassment and worse by Israeli forces. Clearly he doesn’t retain majority support today.

Massad has been in the forefront of opposing any manifestation of anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement which is probably why Engage has singled out his article for attack. The fact is that al-Ahram regularly carries articles which don’t accord with the views of the Mubarak regime. It seems Engage has a problem with this but the explanation is quite simple. Al-Ahram’s reputation is such that it can afford to carry such articles but it would seem that Engageniks would rather than Mubarak’s secret police closed it down, much as George Bush sought to close down and then bomb the offices of Al-Jazeera.

Interesting also to note the concentration on whether Massad is an assistant Professor, with the references to Norman Finkelstein. Presumably the defenders of academic freedom (i.e. Israeli Jewish academic freedom) would be more than happy to oust Massad from Columbia. Unfortunately this has already been tried by the Jonathan Institute. This is what the reference to ‘considerable controversy’ in 2005 is about. Another attempt at witchunting by the Zionist lobby, which this time failed.

Fortunately they got their timing wrong, despite paying students to spy on him and other dissident lecturers. Columbia had more bottle and an inquiry exonerated Massad and others of the McCarthyite allegations and he is therefore tenured!

I note however that references to doing the same to Ilan Pappe at Exeter don’t arouse any comments. Now what would be the reaction of Engage if we were to begin a campaign against the Strawsons, Pikes and Hirshes? Anti-Semitism? I think we should be told.

As for Massad’s comments about ‘Zionism's anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora’ is a matter of fact. Which is why David Hirsh responded so aggressively to Charles Pottins use of Yiddish once. Zionism detested Yiddish and the Galut and that is a matter of record.

So all in all, Engage once again demonstrates that when the chips are down, it aligns itself with the right-wing of the Zionist movement without a seconds thought.

Now why wouldn't Engage publish a comment like that? They like to stress that they are academics and that comments should be genuine contributions to debate but a mere random glance shows that that isn't true. In the comments I read I think three made great play of the fact that Massad has used the expression "Jewish supremacy" and that Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir and David Duke have done the same thing. But Duke and Shamir are referring to America or the world whereas Massad is referring only to Israel. Why can't these academics tell the difference?

Beeb man free!

Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter kidnapped in Gaza, has been freed. It's all over the web and every media now but I got the news from Reuters. He was another of those captives who zionists in the media half-accused of colluding with his kidnappers. This approach to the victims of kidnappings began when one kidnapped American thanked his captors for treating him so well and blamed his government for his plight. Now zionist and Iraq war enthusiasts hedge their bets on the victims by half-accusing them of collusion. They can't make a whole accusation because, as happened in the case of Ken Bigley, sometimes the victims get killed.

No such thing as left zionism, no such thing as an Israeli left?

Hmm. Obviously it's trite to speak of a left zionism given the obviously racist nature of the zionist project. But what of Israel? It's a state now, a place now, a nation now. Surely it can have a left. Well see what Oren Ben-Dor has to say here:

It is unethical to blame Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem for events in Gaza. At the heart of the factional violence in Gaza and the political crisis in the Palestinian leadership lies the constant marginalization of a voice which poses an ethical challenge to an uncritically accepted presumption. Sadly, but hardly surprisingly, initial reactions to the situation have used it to further marginalize this voice.

The presumption challenged is that it is morally acceptable to have a state whose legal structures assign preferential stake to all those who pass some test of Jewishness. It is not surprising that the Israeli right wing rejects this challenge. But why is the message also rejected by those Israelis, and their Western supporters, who claim to be concerned about human rights?

It is true that some Israeli left wingers refer to the post-1967 occupation as an apartheid regime. There are good reasons for such comparison with the old South African system. In the Occupied Territories, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary military regulations, while Israeli settlers are governed by Israeli law. It is no accident that the barrier being built by Israel in the West Bank is called by Israelis the "gader hafrada". Like the Afrikaans word "apartheid", the Hebrew word "hafrada" means "separation". The Israeli barrier separates Jewish settlements from Palestinian villages, usually also separating those villages from their farmland.

But the apartheid label should not be restricted to the post-1967 occupation. There is a more fundamental form of apartheid, of which the occupation is but a manifestation.

Apartheid in historic Palestine originated, and has persisted, in the ideology of creating a state in which Jews would be separated from non-Jews in terms of their stake in the political community. It was an apartheid mentality that nourished the desire of establishing and maintaining a state with a Jewish demographic majority and character. The well-planned ethnic cleansing, in 1948, of 750000 indigenous people was apartheid practice par excellence. It is apartheid which prevents the expelled and their descendants from returning: this apartheid denies residence to expellees from my former home district, the Galilee, but grants it, not just to Israeli-born Jews like me, but to Jews all over the world. It is apartheid law that creates a wall of discrimination between Jewish and Arab citizens of the Israeli state. It is an Apartheid mentality that prompts some Israeli Jews to view their Arab fellow-citizens as a "demographic threat".

When "Israel's right to exist" is used as a litmus test for moderation and pragmatism, the subtext is that it is reasonable for apartheid practices which are at the core of the state as currently constituted to be allowed to continue. Thus, those who mouth this mantra, and those who try to limit the apartheid label to "the occupation", are complicit with the apartheid inside pre-1967 Israel.

Tough questions need asking. Does not moral condemnation directed against the post-1967 occupation and its apartheid practices both conceal, and thus entrench, the apartheid mentality that lies at the core of the Israeli state? Is the argument merely about the boundaries of the area in which apartheid can have free play, or should criticism be directed at such practices wherever they exist?

If Israel demolished the concrete wall and withdrew to its exact pre-1967 limits, would the self-described Israeli left-wingers agitate against the continuance of apartheid inside those borders? If not, what makes apartheid inside the pre-1967 borders acceptable? If the notion of Jewish statehood necessitates apartheid, why is this not subject to the same challenge as South African apartheid? These are questions that ought to be canvassed among the Israeli "left".

The truth is that there has virtually never been any real "left" in Israel. So-called left-wing Israelis share their right-wing compatriots' support for the state ideology.

Any moral condemnation which restricts its ambit to the post-1967 occupation is at best simplistic, at worst misleading. By focusing on "the occupation", it serves to entrench the apartheid ideology which is central to the essence of the Israeli state.

The economic and diplomatic boycott imposed on the elected Hamas government, which has resulted in the recent violence in Gaza, was intended to force it to accept Israeli apartheid. Only when the world is ready to call by its true name the premise upon which Israeli statehood is based, will it not take violence to advance a morally coherent and credible criticism of Israel.

The denial of this core apartheid, of which the Gaza violence is a symptom, must stop. We should say it loud and clear. The apartheid system which lies at the core of Israeli statehood should be dismantled. It is unethical to rationalize the apartheid notion of a Jewish state. It is not consistent to be a friend of Israel, thereby endorsing its apartheid-based statehood, while criticising its apartheid practices in the Occupied Territories. Apartheid should have no sanctuary in any future vision for historic Palestine.

Only when this realization sinks in will it be possible to create a stable political solution, one in which redress can be made for past injustices and equal citizenship provided for all, Arabs and Jews.

The last time I blogged an article by this chap I ended the post with "in other words, expect a lot more of this" referring to Israel's destruction of so much of Lebanon. He has a stark style the man, depressing even. But the truth has to be told.

Engage on Massad on the Fatah coup

I'm indebted to the "non"-zionists at Engage for drawing attention to this Joseph Massad article in al-Ahram. He's pointing out that American support for the Fatah takeover of the West Bank is the latest in a long line of American overthrows of elected governments in the Middle East.

As the enemies of the Palestinian people have been attacking them on every front -- Israel with its inquisition against Azmi Bishara and with him Palestinian resistance to the racist basis of the Jewish state inside the green line, or Hariri Inc. and its 14 March allies intent on proving the might of the Lebanese army at the expense of Palestinian civilian lives in Nahr Al-Bared, and the continued siege by the Israeli military occupation and its US sponsor of the occupied territories -- the latest attack came from Palestinian collaborators with the enemy: the Fatah leadership abetted by the United States. Indeed the subversion of Middle East democracy has been the mainstay of US policy in the region since the CIA supported the 1949 Hosni Al-Zaim coup that overthrew democracy in Syria. The list after that is long, US support for the shah of Iran's coup in 1953 against the Mossadegh government, destroying the Jordanian liberal parliamentary experience by organising a Palace coup in 1957, supporting the Baathist coup in Iraq in 1963 against the popular Abdul-Karim Qassim, and so forth. American policy has not been limited to the overthrow of liberal and democratic governments in the region but of actively supporting if not planning and abetting dictatorial rule in its place and training and supplying those rulers who have instituted regimes of extreme repression and tyranny. Its current role in subverting Palestinian democracy and imposing a corrupt collaborator class on the Palestinian people is therefore anything but novel.

And if you were aghast at Palestinian collaboration with those seeking to eliminate the Palestinians, that's nothing new either:

In the midst of all this, Orientalist fantasies of the so- called exceptionalism of the Palestinian situation are being offered by Western pundits and their Palestinian and Arab "secular", read pro-American, counterparts. These experts seem to have forgotten the history of collaboration among the oppressed amidst tragedy and oppression, from the Judenrats and the Kapos, to Vietnam's Thieu, Angola's UNITA, South Africa's Buthelezi, Mozambique's RENAMO, Nicaragua's Contras, and Lebanon's South Lebanese Army under Saad Haddad and Antoine Lahd. The Palestinian situation is indeed the rule and not the exception. The only exception that the Middle East offers to world politics is the disproportionate imperial interest that its oil has attracted, and the unprecedented international support given to its Jewish settler colony, the two being intrinsically connected. It is not the Arab world that is exceptional but American strategy in the region and the anachronistic nature of its Jewish settler-colony. The resistance of Western pundits and their Arab servants to learn this is their resistance to any analysis that aims at resisting imperial rule.

He also gets into the political developments among Palestinians since 1948 and his whole article is worth a read but the Engage take on it is truly bizarre. I'm posting the whole thing here:

While Massad's invective against the 'forces of darkness' represented by the 'racist Jewish state' is not exactly unusual in Al-Ahram - well-known for its anti-Semitic cartoons and articles - the degree of unconditional support his article offers Hamas and the vehemence with which it denounces the 'Fatah putschists', their 'American and Israeli and Arab sponsors' and their 'Oslo secular intellectual' apologists is remarkable in a newspaper whose editorial line is said to be closely supervised by the Egyptian Ministry of Information.

The fact that it has just been reproduced on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign website may also be significant in that it means the PSC is now publishing pieces denouncing Fatah and the Abbas government as 'collaborators with the enemy'.

Massad also of course also generated considerable controversy in 2005 when he and other professors in Columbia's Middle East Studies programme were accused of bullying and intimidation by pro-Israeli students (The usual diametrically opposed accounts of this dispute and the Columbia investigation into the accusations are given here and here).

The Massad piece is in Al-Ahram, here.

This is disgusting. It's a declaration by Engage that zionists don't like Massad. The article needs a look at. He is saying that America has a tradition of overthrowing democratic systems in the Middle East. He is saying that Abbas follows a long line of collaborators including the Jewish councils under nazi rule in Europe. Do the academics at Engage get into that stuff? Not a bit of it! They say that al Ahram has run antisemitic cartoons and articles. What has that to do with Massad's article? They say, wrongly that he offers unconditional support to Hamas and Hizbollah without a quote. They also see significance in Palestine Solidarity running the article. But these academics don't do what academics do: critically appraise what it is they are talking "about." And Massad says this in the article that Engage "critiques." Let's see it again:

The resistance of Western pundits and their Arab servants to learn this is their resistance to any analysis that aims at resisting imperial rule.

He could have addressed that line to Engage. This is more proof that the zionists (sorry, non-zionists) are in panic mode. They can't make a case for Israel and they can't make a case against Israel's detractors so they simply declare "we don't like Massad" and why wouldn't they? Wasn't Massad among the first to criticise Mearsheimer and Walt? But surely Engage were against M & W? Well yes they were but Massad criticised them for the wrong reason. He simply said they got it wrong in that they tried to blame the Israel lobby for America's own foreign policy choices. Engage should have been pleased but they weren't. They don't want people criticising Israel or America's policy on Israel and that's that. So here we have a statement by Engage, "we don't like Massad." We can't say what he has said but we can tell you that his stuff has been published where antisemitism has been published and that he didn't say anything critical about Hamas and Hizbollah in an article where such criticism wouldn't have been relevant. And they even link to where the article appears so that their supporters will know precisely what it is they are not analysing or criticising. Already one of their commentors has read the edition even to the letters page and found a letter supporting Abbas. The irony that Engage followers are supposed to condemn any article that appears in al Ahram lost on the Engage reader and editor for long enough for the comment to slip through the net.

Vanunu back in Israeli jail

Just got this report from the Canadian Globe and Mail.

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was ordered by an Israeli court on Monday to return to jail for six months for violating an order restricting his contact with foreigners.

Mr. Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's nuclear plant near the southern town of Dimona, spent 18 years in prison for giving details of the country's atomic program to a British newspaper in 1986.

Upon his release in 2004, Mr. Vanunu was prohibed from leaving the country and from talking to foreigners without approval, because Israeli authorities said he could still divulge classified information.

A Jerusalem regional court found in April that Mr. Vanunu had violated 14 counts of those restrictions by holding unauthorized contacts with foreigners through the Internet and by entering the West Bank. On Monday, the court sentenced him to six months in jail and a further six months suspended sentence.

Following the conviction, Mr. Vanunu said the ruling proved “that Israel is not a democracy.”

He pleaded to be allowed to leave the country and “be free.”

Mr. Vanunu has 45 days to appeal the ruling, the court said.

The details divulged by Mr. Vanunu in 1986 and published in London's Sunday Times led experts to conclude that Israel has the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, including hundreds of warheads.

Israel neither acknowledges nor denies having a nuclear weapons program.

Well that's alright then.

The mini-quartet , the disappearing occupation and the coming of the Messiah?

This is a Counterpunch article by Uri Avnery, arguably zionism's most credible peace campaigner. He describes the significance, or insignificance of the latest Arab-Israeli summit involving Jordan, Egypt, Israel and some other country that doesn't have a name plate at these gatherings:

All four--Hosni Mubarak, King Abdallah of Jordan, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas--bore a severe countenance. Throughout the official part of the conference, not a single smile could be seen.

One after the other, the four delivered their monologues. An exercise in shallow hypocrisy, in empty deceit. Not one of the four raised himself above the murky puddle of sanctimonious phrases.

A short monologue from Mubarak. A short monologue from Abdallah. A medium-length monologue from Abbas. An interminably long monologue from Olmert--a typical Israeli speech, overbearing, educating the whole world, sermonizing and dripping with morality. Held, of course, in Hebrew, with the obvious aim of appealing to the home public.

The speech included all the required phrases--Our soul longs for peace, The vision of two states, We do not want to rule over another people, For the good of coming generations, bla-bla-bla. All in standard colonial style: Olmert even talked about "Judea and Samaria", using the official terminology of the occupation.

But in order to "strengthen" Abbas, Olmert addressed him as "President" and not as "Chairman", which has been the de rigueur title used by all Israeli representatives since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. (The wise men of Oslo circumvented this difficulty by referring -in all three languages--to the head of the Authority by the Arab title of Ra'is, which can mean both president and chairman.

And the word that did not appear throughout this long monologue? "Occupation".

Hm, so what happened to that then? It hasn't ended, that's for sure. But where is the Palestinian President, Abbas, in all this?

With the air of a Sultan throwing coins to the paupers in the street, Olmert announced his intention of releasing some Fatah prisoners. 250 coins, 250 prisoners. That was the "generous gift" that was to make the Palestinians jump for joy, "strengthen" Abbas and awaken to new life the dry bones of his organization.

If Olmert had not been sitting so far away from Abbas, he could just as well have spat in his face.

First at all, the number is ridiculous. There are now about 10,000 (ten thousand) Palestinian "security" prisoners in Israeli prisons. Every night, about a dozen more are being taken from their homes. Since there is no more room in the prison facilities, the wardens will be pleased to get rid of some inmates. In previous gestures of this nature, the Israeli government has set free prisoners whose term was nearing the end anyhow, and car thieves.

Having his face spat in.

Olmert's announcement of his readiness to release Fatah--and only Fatah--prisoners is designed to sabotage this unity. It could stigmatize the Fatah people as collaborators, and Abbas as a leader who is concerned only with the members of his own organization, not giving a damn for the others.

And this to "strengthen" Abbas?

And was Abbas strengthened?

The sole winner was Olmert. The conference has proved that Mubarak's and Abdallah's influence on Israel is nil, and that Abbas' position is even worse.

And the occupation?

To eliminate any doubt about this, Olmert sent the army at once into the kasbah of Nablus, the heart of Abbas' virtual kingdom, in order to "arrest" the leaders of the military arm of Fatah. They put up determined resistance, wounding several soldiers. A lieutenant lost a hand and a leg. In another incursion, this time into Gaza, 13 Palestinians were killed, including a boy of 9. According to the official version, the aim was to throw the militants off balance so that they would feel hunted.

If this is not occupation, what is it? But God forbid that anyone mention this word in diplomatic discourse--the ten letters that have turned into an obscenity. A ten-letter word that has become taboo in polite society.

It's disappeared from discussion. But again, where is Abbas in this?

All the talk about "strengthening" is conducted in this context: Abbas and his people are supposed to function as an administration under occupation. According to Olmert's and Bush's perception, their job is to fulfil the orders of the occupation, in return for their own money and perhaps some small arms. Incidentally, that is very similar to the "autonomy" promised by Menachem Begin to the "Arab inhabitants of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District". Olmert is quite ready to talk about the "Two-State Solution"--much talk, with a lot of bloated words and pathos--while doing everything possible in practice to prevent this "vision" from being realized before the coming of the Messiah.

The Messiah?

Into this reality Tony Blair is now stepping.....

Blair will come, meet, make declarations, ooze charm from every pore, generate headlines, fly, come back, make more announcements, meet again with kings, presidents and prime ministers. A long tail of news-thirsty journalists will follow him everywhere, generate media noise, write, tape and take pictures, as if he were a male Paris Hilton.

Meanwhile Palestinians and Israelis will keep dying, the wall will be finished, more land will be expropriated, settlements will be enlarged, targeted "terrorists" will be killed, the blockade on Gaza will be tightened, and all the hundred and one daily activities of the occupation will go on, the occupation that dares not speak its name.

The declared task of Blair, too, is to "strengthen Abbas". Woe to the task. Woe to Blair. Woe in particular to Abbas.

As bombs are being found from London to Glasgow, Avnery might extend some this woe to us here in the UK. Bombs here and our support for the racist war criminals of the State of Israel might not be related of course, but it wouldn't hurt to accept the possibility that they are.

VOICES: PALESTINIAN WOMEN NARRATE DISPLACEMENT

I just got the news about this site from the Just Peace list:

In this digital book you can hear the voices of around 70 Palestinian women, as well as a few men, currently living in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel. They were recorded between 1998 and 2000 telling about their different experiences of displacement. You can see many of their faces as well as their surroundings. There are accompanying texts and bibliographies intended for interested lay-readers as well as students and scholars.

The site is still a work in progress but well worth a look at.

Letters on the boycott

Tony Greenstein has a letter in this weekend's Jewish Chronicle. The JC is pay for sub but has a freebie section which, this week, includes the letters page:

Not one of the opponents of the Unison motion even tried to defend Israel’s actions in the occupied territories. Their argument that it was better to maintain dialogue was reminiscent of the arguments that were used against the boycott of South Africa and merely reinforced the image of arrogance and intolerance. What does it matter if Israel is the site for the production of Intel chips? Did the fact that Hitler built the autobahns make his regime any the less murderous? The suggestion that Israel is being “singled out” omits the fact that Israel has laid claim to being the Middle East’s only democracy.

I was overwhelmed by the reaction of delegates, especially black members, to my contribution at the Unison conference, because it is black people above all who see the similarities between the treatment of the Palestinians and what happened in South Africa. How can anyone justify Jewish roads in the West Bank or different laws for Jews and Arabs?

In recent months, Israeli opinion polls have shown that 61 per cent of Israelis consider a Jew marrying a Palestinian as “treason”. Two-thirds of Jewish respondents have said they don’t want to live with an Arab and that they want to see the transfer of Palestinians out of Israel. This is what is mobilising support for a boycott, not antisemitism.

Richard Kuper, of Jews for Justice for Palestinians also has a letter in the same section.

May I, as a member of the UCU opposed to the boycott, take issue with the Chief Rabbi (JC, June 15). UCU is a democratic union. The resolution merely commits it to a discussion of the issues in every branch. There will be no boycott until a majority of members vote for one. The Chief Rabbi’s knee-jerk, hysterical misrepresentation of what is the opening-up of a debate is unlikely to garner support for voices of reason. His comparison of UCU with Hizb ut-Tahrir is scurrilous, and a textbook example of the demonisation he so strongly opposes.

Richard's letter in the JC print edition refers to the Chief Rabbi's article in the June 15 edition but the Chief Rabbi's own site refers to a JC article on June 22. Anyway, here's that article and the chunk that has the "Chief," in Richard Kuper's view, misrepresenting what the UCU has actually voted on:

There was a curious incident at the UCU Congress the day its members voted to call for a boycott against Israel. That day, the union voted unanimously to oppose government plans urging them to fight extremism on campus. They had been asked by the government to monitor potential terrorists. They refused, saying that it amounted to a "witch hunt".

They then proceeded, seemingly unaware of the contradiction, to start a witch hunt of their own against Israeli academics who, they deemed, were guilty of "complicity" in the policies of their government. Why, I wondered, is this witch different from all other witches? Why is "demonisation" the language of the earlier resolution, permitted in one case (Israel) and forbidden in another? It is a question that haunts me, as it should haunt everyone who knows the history of witch hunts and where they lead, in this case straight to an assault on academic freedom.

Quite honestly, I'm enjoying this boycott stuff so much I don't even check the details of the various resolutions but the logic alone here is atrocious. How can he compare a request for academics to spy and report on their colleagues and students to a boycott? Oh never mind. Anyway, here's another case of the same kind of misrepresentation of what the UCU is actually proposing for the time being. It's on the Engage site where Sue Blackwell has been falsely accused of seeking to exclude Israeli academics from UK campuses. Sue has threatened to er sue so Engage is now jumping through hoops to demonstrate that whilst academics of any nationality could be affected by a boycott of Israeli institutions, they were right to say what they were wrong to say. Something like that, go check. This latest spat between Engage and Sue Blackwell began with a post by Jon Pike. Now the thing I find interesting about Jon Pike is that he came very close to calling the Engage campaign a bit "over the top." It was a throwaway line in the Engage comments but it had David Hirsh nervous enough to don the "Alf Green" mantle to take issue with my reference to it. What John Pike actually said was:

Probably a fair few think that ENGAGE is a bit over the top.

It now looks like Jon Pike may be guilty of the over the top-ness that "probably a fair few think that Engage is".

"Opinion formers" don't see boycott as antisemitic

The Jewish Chronicle has an interesting article on a poll by Populus commissioned by the Britain Israel Communications and Resource Centre. It carries a breakdown of a poll of "business, cultural and political" leaders. The "surprise result" for the JC is that a clear majority of 62% said that they did not see the boycott as antisemitic. Now this is curious. Members, leaders and founders of the boycott movement have insisted that the boycott isn't antisemitic. Many people have said, whether they support the boycott or not, that it isn't antisemitic. And yet the JC is surprised at that particular result. It's not surprised at the fact that 86% of those polled are against the boycott. I mean when so many people support a boycott why not be surprised at that result? I think the secret here is in the words "opinion formers" and "business, cultural and political leaders." Who are these people? We know they mostly oppose the boycott. Were they handpicked?

Revisiting Tommy Lapid

A zionist just wrote to the Just Peace list something about boycotting Israel having no effect on Israel. For some reason it reminded me of a bit of a here-today-gone-tomorrow Israeli politician called Tommy Lapid. He was a spontaneous sort of a chap who once or twice compared Israel to the nazis in spite of being an Israeli cabinet minister at the time. He also, and this is the thing I remembered, voiced his concern that the apartheid wall would bring a boycott down on Israel. I mean he was worried and he said so. See this on the BBC website:

Mr Lapid reportedly told a cabinet meeting that Israel should "have another look" at the route of the barrier, which at times cuts deep into the Palestinian territory and would affect hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

He warned that the upcoming hearings by the International Court of Justice at The Hague over the legality of the barrier could be the first step in Israel being treated like apartheid-era South Africa.

"There is a danger that we will be exposed to an international boycott as was the case before the fall of the regime in South Africa," Mr Lapid told the cabinet, according to his spokesman.

Mr Lapid, who is the leader of the secular Shinui Party, said Israel had brought this on itself for not sticking to the original route of the barrier along the Green Line.

Ok, still a nasty chap but I think his fear speaks volumes as to the worth of a boycott, any boycott, academia, goods, anything.

You can't trust Israel

So there! I was just going to blog an old article about Tommy Lapid and then I thought I'd better google "Israel" first just in case there's a hot news item I'd be missing. I got this little nugget from Ynet, Yediot Aharanot on line. It's headed Israel's hollow declarations and it gives a blow by blow account of how Israel is making the prospect of a Palestinian state impossible. It also goes into the absurd spin placed on every zionist statement:

Olmert's problem, and in fact the problem faced by all of us, is that in reality one cannot fool all the people all the time. Certainly not the Palestinians, who continue to see on a daily basis how more land is being taken away and paved under the wheels of the settlement and annexation machine, which does not rest even for a day.

At one location land is being seized for building the fence, with "only" 80 percent of it being built east of the Green Line, that is, in West Bank territory. Elsewhere land is being seized in favor of expanding one or another "consensus settlement."

Simultaneously, at the heart of the West Bank, settlers who are fans of organic agriculture, plant vineyards on land that up until recently was worked by Palestinian farmers, while yet another bypass road is being paved on land confiscated with the High Court's approval for "public benefit."

After all, in the West Bank everything is always done for public benefit – the Israeli public that is (which accounts for only 10 percent of the West Bank's population).

In order to calibrate the national expectation gauge of the Sharm el-Sheik summit and the festive declarations that followed it, it would be worthwhile for us Israelis to one day clarify to ourselves, among the other terms we use routinely in order to describe our realities, the term "consensus."

The Even-Shoshan dictionary defines the term as follows: "general agreement," "unanimity," or "homogenous position." Where then does consensus have to prevail when it comes to the issue of settlements? Are we talking about a consensus between the Labor and Kadima parties? Or perhaps a consensus between the settler Right and all those who have yet to pledge their allegiance to the notion of the Greater Land of Israel?

Olmert's problem is that he can't fool the Palestinians? But he's not even trying to fool the Palestinians. He's got the Quartet on his side.

Satire dead rumours?

It's been said so many times before but this guy gives a very good blow by blow explanation, in the Independent, as to why satire died only just recently:

Sir: Satire is dead. Under Blair's leadership, Britain has colluded in the invasion, occupation and utter devastation of Iraq, blocked UN action to end Israel's invasion and bombardment of Lebanon, conspired with the EU, US and Israel to impose a crippling economic blockade on the Palestinian people, and refused to implement the earlier wishes of the European Parliament to suspend Israel's preferred trading status with the EU. And now this war-mongering, hypocritical, war criminal's apprentice is to be appointed a peace envoy to the Middle East of all places.

CHRIS WEBSTER

ABERGAVENNY

Of course the same or similar has been said about Kissinger and Begin getting Nobel peace prizes and satire hung in there long enough for this latest assault so who knows?

Reuters agrees with me

See my post below. I say that the appointment of Blair to represent the so-called Quartet had Israel celebrating in customary style by killing a child. Now see this Reuters headline:

Blair named Mideast envoy, Israel kills 12 in Gaza

27 Jun 2007 17:10:54 GMT

Source: Reuters

See that? "Blair named Mideast envoy" - CAUSE. "Israel kills 12 in Gaza" - EFFECT. Ok, they ran their piece before I ran mine so it's not a me exclusive, but chilling stuff, huh?

Israel celebrates Blair's appointment by killing another child

Israel today celebrated the appointment of its man to be the Quartet's Middle East envoy by killing eleven Palestinians including a ten year old child. Well why should Israel stop killing children now? Here's Ha'aretz with Olmert's take on Blair:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called outgoing Blair "a true friend of the State of Israel," on Tuesday evening.

Blair having a laugh