uh hello?

Here's a song by Leon Rosselson called Conversation on a mobile:



Leon's appearing at the Cellar Upstairs soon:

Date:

Sat 21/05/2011

Times:

from 20:00

Place

Cellar Upstairs,  Exmouth Arms,
Starcross St.,
London NW1 2HR

Contact person:

Shela Miller 

Burchill wrong shock!

Here's a letter in today's Independent protesting Julie Burchill's "absurd analogy" between a boycott of Israel and the nazis anti-Jewish boycott:

Julie Burchill (5 May) makes an offensive, unfounded and absurd analogy when she accuses human-rights campaigners picketing Ahava of "carrying on Hitler's work".

The "little Ahava shop" in Covent Garden promises "beauty secrets from the Dead Sea". The real secrets it keeps are an ugly truth – its products come from stolen Palestinian natural resources in occupied Palestinian territory, and are produced in the settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. Israeli settlements on Palestinian land were declared illegal in a 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice.

Ahava seeks to profit from violations of international law and receives Israeli government subsidies for its role in whitewashing Israeli oppression. That two years of pickets and direct action have forced a landlord to refuse to renew Ahava's lease and to end their relationship with this criminal enterprise should be celebrated and be seen as part of the broader movement for Palestinian rights.

Israel systematically denies Palestinians their basic rights and the international community has failed to hold it accountable. In response, Palestinian civil society calls for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law. Heeding this call, electronica band Faithless, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and scores of other artists have vowed not to play in Israel. Tower Hamlets council recently passed a policy excluding Veolia, a company that runs infrastructure projects for Israel's illegal settlements, from bidding on future service provision contracts in the borough.

Boycotts helped to end apartheid in South Africa and have an important role to play if we are to bring an end to Israeli apartheid.

Bruce Levy BDS London;

Deborah Fink Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods;

Sarah Colborne, Tim Hicks

Palestine Solidarity Campaign;

Pete Jones International Solidarity Movement London; Michael Kalmanovitz

International Jewish anti-Zionist Network,

London n7

There's another letter criticising Burchill for helping the case for the growth of Tesco, but that's another story.

The case of Tony Kushner

I first saw something about this Tony Kushner business in an email to the Just Peace UK group from Roland Rance.

Academic freedom and open debate should apply to everyone on campus, not just defenders of Israel's government. CUNY's [City University of New York] Board of Trustees recently violated these values when they made the unprecedented decision to block an honorary degree for Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner, solely because of his criticism of Israel. They did so based on the last minute objections of Board of Trustees member Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who has a history of opposing open debate. He opposed the first Arabic dual language public school in the country, opposed the rights of Muslims to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan, and tried to block Kristofer Petersen-Overton’s appointment as an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College because of his political opinions about Palestine and Israel. But he said that Glenn Beck should not be criticized for anti-Semitism. 

If you are outraged by this hypocrisy like me, please join me in signing this petition athttp://bit.ly/tonyatcuny to overturn this unjust decision and support a free and open debate at this public university.

Now Magnes Zionist has two posts on the same issue here and here.

Barak: fear of a BDS planet

The following is a partial translation, with some added comments in [brackets]. Hebrew original: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1227196.html  

"...[Israeli defense minister Ehud] Barak believes that a UN declaration of Palestinian statehood without a prior Israeli political initiative will paint Israel into a corner previously occupied by South Africa during the apartheid era. His admonition is pungent and scathing: 'There are elements in the world, quite powerful, in various countries, including friendly ones, in trade unions, [among] academics, consumers, green political parties', he warns, 'and this impetus has culminated in a broad movement called BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) which is what was done with South Africa. This will not happen overnight. The day after September, people will say: 'so now October has come, the sky hasn't fallen, nothing has happened'. This is not true."

Will this happen in December or January?

"It will start coming at us like a glacier, from all corners. There are people in the European Council that deal with export and import, and they are capable, without any government decision, of inflicting significant damage on the Israeli economy. We will see this taking place in academia, we will see this taking place in dockworker unions, consumer groups, and this will seep into governments. This is unwise [apparently referring to Israeli policies which will bring about this outcome]. To me, this uncontrollable process looks more dangerous than what the [Israeli] public perceives at the moment. We have been ruling over another nation for 43 years, this is unprecedented. Perhaps China can allow itself to control some small nations in various corners of its empire, and perhaps Russia can [failing to discern that Tibetans and Chechens have citizenship]. We cannot, there is no chance that the world will accept this. The far right is exposing Israel to dangerous and unwarranted isolation."

(Translated by Ofer Neiman)

Winner of the Emperor Obama vacuity contest

Books have been published collecting and even analyzing George Bush the Younger's malapropisms and idiocies. I doubt anyone will do it for Emperor Obama. Not because he is any better. But because, as George Bush said, "fool me once, shame on , shame on,..." you, who were fooled. On the occasion of the not-even-judicial execution of the Master Signifier of terror,

“Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” Obama said in a speech Sunday certain to stand as one of his most historical. (Stanford Herald)

So something in America is finally working. Not us. Even if, like every other project managed by the Pentagon, it took decades more than planned, cost billions more that expected, and resulted in "collateral" death in the millions.

This confirms that the best prism of reading that assassination is through Lacan's theory of discourse. It's just pitch perfect. What is the Master? The one who doesn't know what he wants because others know it for him. This is what is being celebrated here. Total, absolute ignorance, not only of the Muslim world but of oneself, and not only as fact, but as vision. For of course we know how false this is, how little is possible right now, when the limits of the possible are subordinate to keeping the bonuses of Wall-Street growing year after year. How there is no money for satisfying the most basic human needs of most people. But at the bargain price of cheering the death of one loathsome man, we can get rid of the knowledge of that gap between desire and reality. If only we accept that killing Bin Laden was our highest aspiration, that having had that there is nothing more that we could possibly want, then we reach blessed ignorance and achieve Nirvana. "We can do anything" means "we don't need to do anything any more." Everybody will either work for us or die. And every American will get the chance to say that to herself on the way to the soup kitchen.

American "Tahrir" Square

Only weeks after the Arab world began shaking off the rotten crop of imperial stooges that oppressed them for two generations, the frathouse American shabab responded with throwing off the last inhibitions that connected them to the rest of humanity. What a difference!

while celebrations of the not-even-judicial execution of Bin Laden were not limited to campuses, it is clear from the media reports that campuses played an unusual, and fairly unexpected, key role. Indeed, the media sometimes even noted with surprise that celebrations were not led by "the usual suspects" but by college students, for example, noting that "In a Military Town, a Muted Celebration About Bin Laden". It is worth reflecting not only about the existence of this abhorrent spectacle, a point noted quite a lot, but also on its unexpected university setting. The following is just a preliminary thought. I am sure that there will be a lot more that will be said on it.

American universities became prominent together with the rise of the White Collar, the new class of managers, accountants, lawyers, professionals, etc. a class that grew in power from the end of the 19th century as capitalism moved from family owned to shareholders owned and professionally managed. For half a century or more, this was a relatively progressive class. It successfully hegemonized working class discontent in the interest of a reform agenda that increased its power. It was also able to impose concessions on the capitalist class that stood above it. Limits on speculation and accumulation, funding of public services, the extension of civil rights to minorities, and even a cultural ethos based on so-called merit and workoholism, an ethos that forces even the scions of the wealthiest families to masquerade their rent extraction in the form of "compensation" for work.

As Dumenil and Levy show, a key aspect of neoliberalism was the switching of sides of this class, from a partial alliance with the working class in order to win concessions from capitalists, to a fully owned, and lavishly paid, sidekick of the rentier class. Comparing the nationalistic riots over Osama bin Laden's extrajudicial execution to the riots against the Vietnam war is dispiriting. It may be that what we are seeing on US campuses is the ideological completion of that process. These students are expressing in different forms the slogan of Louis XIV, "the state is I." There is complete identification with The Man.

Although superficially similar, and although both linked to imperialism and neoliberalism, there is a significant difference between the US nativism of the subaltern classes that has been so common in recent years and this. The former, even when it identifies with militarism and adopts racism against the other of the empire, particularly Muslims, always has an oppositional edge. It is directed against the professional class, often described as "the liberals," who are perceived as ruling the country without being patriotic enough. The structure of "heartland" nativism is always that of a lack. "The state isn't us," and that is what is damn wrong with the country. In contrast, in the recent celebration of Osama Bin Laden's execution there is no such contestation. It is the pure joy of the master. That is why one can refer to it as the "plus-de-jouissance," surplus joy, that the empire extracts from the knowledge of its (oversees) subjects. ( of course, there is a certain boundary breaking associated with frat-houses, which is a ritual, not a contestation.)

It remains to be seen how the neoliberal proletarization of the university, which is obviously not universal, as the scions still need a degree, will play out in this context. It is also a question of class identification and hegemony at a more comlicated level, as clearly not all these celebrating frat boys will become CEOs of Boeing. There are different modes of identification here, including the logic of the video game. (One is reminded of the music and splashing colors and forms that play on the screen when a level has been completed successfully.) But there is also a more extensive definition of the Master. Just as the CEO now "works" 18 hours a day, the overworked professional can feel part of the ruling class, as long as the gulf from below is growing deeper every day.

100 years of non-violent Palestinian resistance

I picked up a freebie issue of Time magazine yesterday and I was surprised to see a letter on non-violent Palestinian resistance.

I'm copying it out as it appears on page 10 of the 2 May 2011 edition because the letters aren't available on line:

Nonviolence among Palestinians is not new.

The recently released book Popular Resistance

in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh, documents

over 100 years of everyday acts of resis-

tance, with suicide bombings and rocket

attacks as the exception.  The world needs

to hear more about these courageous acts.

Peggy Vander Meulen,

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH, US. 

The book is available from Pluto Press.

The death of a master signifier

"Osama Bin Laden," the master signifier of the US war on terror, is dead. The frail proper body that used to be attached to that signifier was assassinated in an imperial US military operation in a foreign country, Pakistan. That body is not important. The Master Signifer Osama bin Laden had only a passing and insignificant, literally, relation to that body. Rather, It represented the Middle Eastern subject, the rebellious native, the child who rejected the authority of the father, to America the Beautiful.

The operation was carried out among a people who despises the US for decades of misery that the US inflicted of them. It was the very kind of operation that convinced a much young Osama Bin Laden that killing lots of Americans is the only way to go. He was wrong. There are better ways. And his idea of liberty was kooky. But that is as much as one can say against him. The number of people he killed is pathetically small by the standards of US presidents. If Bin Laden merited a bullet, then Emperor Obama deserves to be quartered and drowned. As for Bush and Blair, if we set to punish them honestly we would need the sadistic creativity of the Olympian Gods. There is no human punishment that would be horrible enough to match their culpability.

Nevertheless, the death of a Master Signifier is a cause of celebration. It is appropriate that it happened in such close proximity to the Wedding of the Century, an opulent spectacle of violence in the name of the Holy right to violence, matching an opulent spectacle of looted wealth celebrating its God given right to loot. Death and Marriage, as Freud might have hummed one spring afternoon, go together like horse and carriage. The death of the master signifier puts into play the knowledge of God's love for his people. It is not, of course, "America" that knows. America knows nothing at all. Except that it knows that the Middle East knows it for it. On the occasion of his visit to Bin Laden's territory, Bernard Henri Levy already explained how the knowledge of race and the knowledge of God's election exchange fluids.

“The Taliban weren’t just defeated, they were defeated without a fight. …the image of these defeated fighters, lionized by the Arab street from Baghdad to Damascus, the image of these salahudins who were supposed to !bring America to its knees, and who, at the first shot, fled like chickens, could only astound those who identified with them.”

Out of the labor carried out by this Arab knowledge of America emerges what Jacques Lacan calls a "surplus-of-joy". The people of the US are jubilant. So I hear. I am not sure if that covers also the people whose houses were foreclosed in the last three years. But it is possible that they too are jubilant today. It is Purim in America today. The evil Haman is dead. Millions of his kins have been murdered in advance.

Only a doubting Thomas would fail to see here the ultimate proof that God loves America, England, and, of course, the Queen.

Arab spring and Palestine

I always think of this chap, Azzam Tamimi, as Hamas's man in London. He's certainly very close to them but I have heard him speak and he admitted to being "embarrassed", for example, by Hamas's charter. He also claims a fondness for democracy that you don't hear from many Hamas advocates. So, here's Dr Tamimi in The Guardian, print and on line today:

When, at the start of this year, Palestinians around the world marked the anniversary of the 2008-09 Israeli war on Gaza, few could see any hope. The Gaza Strip was still under siege, Palestinian reconciliation seemed out of reach, the Arabs were useless and the US unable, or unwilling, to broker a resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine National Authority (PNA).

Then came the Arab popular revolutions, and the mood among Palestinians switched from desperation to euphoria. Soon after the fall ofHosni Mubarak I visited my old friend, the Hamas leader Khalid Mish'al, in Damascus. He told me he was sure the change in Egypt, which he expected would be followed by similar changes in other Arab countries, meant that it would not be too long before Palestine was free.

My friends in Gaza would tell me the same thing, and so would my relatives in Hebron and the diaspora. They all believed that the Mubarak regime was an impediment to the Palestinian struggle for freedom; once the Egyptian people were free, a genuine democracy in Egypt would support the Palestinians.

At the very least, in the short term, Palestinians believed that post-Mubarak Egypt would not take part in the siege of Gaza, which would all but collapse if Egypt were to open the Rafah crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, last Friday Egyptian foreign minister Nabil al-Arabi told al-Jazeera that, within seven to 10 days, steps will be taken to alleviate the "blockade and suffering of the Palestinian nation".

Palestinians monitored the Israeli reaction to the collapse of the Mubarak regime. It did not surprise them to see Israel immensely worried. Mubarak was an ally who contributed to Israel's security in a very hostile Middle East. The neutralisation of Egypt, and the minimisation of its role in the Palestinian cause since President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, constituted Zionism's greatest success since Israel was created 30 years earlier. Rather than spearhead the struggle to liberate Palestine, Mubarak's Egypt led the so-called Arab moderate camp, an alliance of pro-Israel and pro-US Arab states that included Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, the PNA and the United Arab Emirates.

Palestinians began to imagine what would happen if a popular revolution in Jordan were to bring about a similar change; then one in Saudi Arabia; and perhaps Morocco. Israel would have lost its most important allies in the region and the PNA would be isolated, having been fatally wounded by revelations in al-Jazeera and the Guardian about the concessions its negotiating teams offered in secret to the Israelis.

But although the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions did inspire Arabs to demand political reform or regime change, it was not Jordan, Morocco or Saudi Arabia that saw this the most. There were a few demonstrations, but demands were generally for political reform rather than a change of regime. Instead it was Yemen, Libya and Syria that witnessed the more dramatic protests, which soon escalated into armed struggle in Libya and calls for regime change in Yemen and Syria.

When I saw Khalid Mish'al in February, he did not expect a popular uprising in Syria. He believed the regime was less vulnerable because of its support for resistance in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as its anti-imperialist stance. But solidarity with the Palestinian or Lebanese resistance was not enough to protect any autocratic regime. This worried some Palestinians, and they rushed to express support for Bashar al-Assad's regime; but Hamas remained silent, to the regime's displeasure.

While the euphoria created by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions has been dampened by the Libyan experience, seen by many in the Arab region as a revolution gone drastically wrong as a result of armament and western intervention, most Palestinians still believe a new era is coming. The more Arab dictatorships that are replaced by genuine democracies, the closer Palestine will be to liberation. Democracies representing the will of the Arab peoples can only be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.

One immediate fruit of Mubarak's removal and the uprising in Syria has been the revival of Palestinian reconciliation efforts. Responding to grassroots pressure, both Hamas and Fatah met in Cairo and decided to work for the formation of a unity government and the resolution of disputes over security and elections. Fatah is anxious that it may lose favour with Egypt, while Hamas is anxious it may soon lose Syria as a safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Israel threatened to take action against the PNA if Fatah went through with the deal with Hamas.

For many years Israel claimed to be the only democracy in the region. And yet Israeli politicians appealed to the US to intervene in Egypt to prevent Mubarak's fall, and campaigned for him to remain in power. Israel clearly believes it can count on Arab dictators who are more interested in power and personal wealth than in serving their nations, let alone serving the Palestinian cause.

Despite its claims of superiority, Israel appears to suffer from the same symptoms that plague Arab dictators; the failure to learn that they need to change before it is too late. It's been too late for Mubarak, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh. Israel has oppressed the Palestinians for so long, and has incurred the wrath of the Arab masses whose revolutions are bringing hope to Palestinians.

Whichever way one looks at it, the Arab revolutions are the best news the Palestinians have had for decades.

Comments are still open.

"The anti-zionism of fools"

The Arabs and the Holocaust from Danny Bermant on Vimeo.

A fascinating discussion of the Arab reaction to the holocaust between Gilbert Achcar and Tom Segev, hosted at the Jewish Book Week. Achcar is at his best. Tom Segev however disappoints. He is an extremely generous writer, but every time I hear him talk I am disappointed. The Zionist defensiveness that he holds back when he writes returns in his on stage persona. You can hear him looking for imaginary opportunities to challenge Achcar for being "soft" on antisemitism. Worse is his recycling of Zionist historical disinformation, like the disturbing claim that Nasser wasn't ready to make peace with Israel. It is unimaginable that he doesn't know the truth. Achcar was very considerate in holding back on the history of the alliance between Zionism and the most pro-Nazi and reactionary Arab figures. I prefer more confrontation.

One point that Achcar makes that was never mentioned in the video is that the emblematic status of War World II as the supreme "good war" and the holocaust as the ultimate evil is a uniquely Northern perspective. It is not widely shared in the South and for goods reasons, as so many other atrocities compete on the imagination. That is something Jews need to hear from scholars like Achcar. Because by acknowledging Christian Europeans for their acknowledgment of the holocaust, Jews pay for their social mobility with a subtle form of holocaust denial themselves, the denial that the holocaust was not an isolated event, but the culmination of a history of European racism that is still far from over, even when Jews are no longer its victims.

Contagious flatulence

A.B. Yehoshua, the (racist, judeophobic, blood thirsty ) leading Israeli author, had a brain fart. One admits--by the standards he himself had set, it wasn't even a particularly odorous one. (for these standards, do click on these links, please, because there are few better ways to get a measure of a society than by the bottomless pits scaled by its luminaries).

Yehoshua starts by putting forward a phony question, "Why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict refuses to be resolved"? As if conflicts have mind and agency and can be blamed for not resolving themselves. (Mind you, if only that poor conflict could be subjected to two or three sleepless weeks in a Shabak dungeon, I am sure it would have cried uncle already. But the famous efficiency of Israel's security services only works on flesh and blood subjects.)

With the question thus framed, all matters of (criminal, ideological, historical) responsibility can be summarily executed, and their place filled with metaphysical cant and Hasbara. First comes the Hasbara. "There is no precedent for a nation that lost its sovereignty 2,000 years ago, was scattered among the nations, and later decided for internal and external reasons to return to its ancient homeland and re-establish sovereignty there." Indeed, there is no precedent because it never happened. No nation lost its sovereignty 2,000 years ago because the concept of a sovereign nation didn't exist then. Second, it didn't happen because it can't happen. A nation is a metaphysical concept, not an entity capable of making decision. Herzl, Rupin, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, etc., were not the elected representatives of a trans-historical Jewish polity stretching back in time 2,000 years. They were a tiny organized minority of European Jews who developed a Jewish nationalist ideology drawn on contemporary Eastern European models, based on a reading of the Bible adapted from German Protestantism, and using a concept of the relation of European Jews and the Ancient Hebrews that was first articulated by a the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. Not that there is anything inherently bad about borrowing ideas from Herder, but he did not live 2,000 years ago.

In addition, the whole argument is a non-sequitur. The story of Zionism is indeed "unprecedented", in the sense that all historical narratives are unique. No country except Australia was forged on the basis of a former penal colony, and no country except Haiti was the first ever state established by liberated African slaves. The unique way each country came to be is of course of great importance, but nothing follows from that uniqueness itself. It is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, the trivial sense in which every history is unique, and, on the other hand, the Zionist claim to uniqueness, which is a preemptive strike against the comparative method of historical inquiry, and therefore completely bogus.

Let's continue with the Hasbara.

"The Jewish people...did not want to expel the Palestinians, and certainly not to destroy them." Surprisingly, that is almost true. "The Jewish people", having neither agency nor will, did not indeed "want to expel the Palestinians". For that very reason, "the Jewish people" did not in fact expel the Palestinians (contrary to what Yehoshua's sly negative construction implies). It was the militaristic Zionist cadres, the Histadrut, the JNF, the Hagana, the Palmach, etc., that indeed wanted, planned and executed the expulsion. It is very chivalrous of the High Priest of the Third Temple Yehoshua to assume responsibility for the Nakba on behalf of "the Jewish people." It's a priestly tradition.

"Moreover, there was no attempt here to impose a colonial regime, since the Jews had no mother country that had sent them on colonial conquests, as in the case of Britain or France." The idea that Zionism isn't colonial would have shocked Herzl, Rupin, Nordau, Jabotinsky, and practically all the Zionists who lived before the area of decolonization, when "colonialism" become a dirty word. The sophistry is breathtaking, not unlike that of the Israeli lawyers who argue with a straight face that the Geneva conventions do not apply to the OPT. For information, here is a classic definition of settler colonies from "key concepts in post-colonial studies":

In settler colonies “the invading Europeans (or their descendants) annihilated, displaced and/or marginalized the indigenes to become a majority non-indigenous population”.

Nowhere is it part of the definition of colonialism that the settlers must be agents of their own metropolitan nation state. The formulation "sent them for colonial conquests" is a trap for the unwary. To take just one example, Britain didn't send the Puritans to "colonial conquests" in North America. It persecuted them. This is typical. Settlers in all settler colonial formations were drawn from the marginal elements of their metropoleis. They were persecuted religious and ethnic minorities, destitute economic refugees, criminals and demi-monde, etc. The case of Zionism is unexceptional. The beauty of the argument that subtracts Israel from colonialism is that, not only it is willfully blind to the self-understanding of early Zionists, who clearly thought of themselves as colonizers, but it also reinvents what colonialism means to suit itself. What makes Zionism colonialist is the relation between European settlers, supported by Western powers, and Southern indigenous people. That Jews didn't come to Palestine from a country called Judonia is irrelevant.

Thus far, I scooped the hors d'œuvre (and left enough hanging Hasbara fruits for others to pick). It is time to get to the pièce de resistance.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a question of territory, as in the case of many historical conflicts between nations, but a battle over the national identity of the entire homeland.

Now, the homeland in question, isn't that presumably that land between the river and the sea? Namely, a territory? And isn't the battle about the future of that land? About the right of people to live there and to determine that future? Yehoshua argues that a battle over the future of a territory, over the rights to be in that territory, is not "about territory." Odd, but let's try to decipher.

There are conflicts that are "about territory" but do not implicate the "national identity of the entire homeland". Examples would be Alsace, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, etc. Of course, from the perspective of the people who live there, it is hard to argue that their identity and future is not deeply at stake. But who cares about people anyway? Yehoshua's distinction only makes sense from a nationalist perspective that treats land as possession of the abstract nation, not as the lived world of flesh and blood people. Thus the fate of Gibraltar would be purely a "territorial" matter, a property dispute between "Spain" and the "UK" in which the national identity (of the diplomats, not of the residents) is not at stake. Yehoshua cannot apply that framework to Palestine. Perhaps because he really lives there. And as obtuse as he is, he cannot fail to see that the future of that place and the people who live there cannot be reduced to his beloved abstractions.

But he tries nevertheless, tying himself in knots. First, he blames the uniqueness of Jewish history. But surely, the struggle in South Africa, In Northern Ireland, in Algeria, were just as much "not a question of territory" according to this distinction, at least not from the perspective of those in the thick of it. There must be something else.

For both sides, and mainly for the Palestinians, the size of the nation confronting them is not clear - whether it consists only of Israeli Jews or the entire Jewish diaspora. And the Israelis don't know whether they are confronting only the Palestinian people or the entire Arab nation. In other words, the demographic boundaries of the two sides are not clear either. This is therefore a fundamental conflict that constantly creates primal and profound mistrust between the two peoples, preventing a possible solution.

One could point out that there is hardly any party to a conflict that knows exactly the size of what confronts it. What confronts the democratic revolt in Bahrain? The royal family of Bahrain? Sunnis? Saudi Arabia? The GCC? Arab reactionary governments? The US? The world? But lets stay on topic. That Palestinian nationalism has a relationship with Arab nationalism (and also with other identities, for example Islam), and that Israeli national identity is bound with Jewish identity (as well as other identities, for example, Europe), these are trivial observations about both Jews and Palestinians. Identity is fuzzy and relational, with multiple, fluid, opposing components operating at different levels, changing over time and in response to circumstances. First year psychology students get that. What Yehoshua makes of these elementary facts which he imagines world shattering discoveries makes little sense. First, if Israeli Jews are part of the Jewish nation and Palestinians part of an Arab nation, then, according to Yehoshua's own logic of nationalistic abstractions, this should have made the future of Palestine a mere "territorial conflict", with Arabs and Jews fighting over Palestine the way Argentinians and Brits fought overs Las Malvinas. It should have simplified things, not complicated them. Isn't it a staple of Zionist cant that Arabs have already 22 (or 23, or 24) states to choose from? It doesn't work like that because the basic logic is nonsense.

Then there is the issue of "mistrust." This term belongs to the language of the "peace process," of which Yehoshua is a doyen. It lurks there together with "dialogue," "confidence building measures," "mutual understanding" and other such cant designed to create the illusion that the conflict is not a matter of power and dispossession, but a giant misunderstanding. According to Yehoshua, then, the conflict persists because Palestinians and Israelis do not trust each other. They do not trust each other because they cannot be sure of each other identity. And they cannot be sure of each other identity because they are not clear about the boundaries of their own identity.

Let's note that the premise is pure cant. Palestinians have about one thousand reasons to mistrust Israelis apart from the fact that Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews have bonded over Zionism in recent decades. The history of violence, dispossession, deception and bad faith, for example? The elementary political truth that "trust me" is not a solution to powerlessness? On the Israeli side, the main reason Israeli Jews mistrust Palestinians is that they have lived three generations on a diet of an orientalist discourse that portrays Arabs as inherently untrustworthy and violent. I trust that Yehoshua knows that, as he himself made some contributions to that discourse.

But facts aside, one has to grasp the real thrust of this exposition. The next sentence of the essay discloses the goal post:

Is it still possible to resolve the conflict without ending up in the trap of a binational state?

The solution to the conflict, according to Yehoshua, is in the clear demarcation of identities. What does that mean, for Yehoshua, the supporter of withdrawal from the OPT, Jewish secularism, the apartheid wall, and the unrestrained use of military hardware against Palestinians? This is what I understand. If only Palestinians were clear about who they were, if they gave up their complex identities, memories, family ties, and saw themselves as members of an abstract Palestinian nation confined in a clear territory, say, the West Bank and Gaza, minus Ma'ale Edumim. If only Israeli Jews figured out that they alone were the true Jews, that being Jewish is not a question of tradition or religion but merely about holding sovereign power over a well defined Jewish territory, (like a "normal" nation) and therefore cut their umbilical cord to the various diasporas, stopped listening to Arab music, and stopped taking American Jewish political advice... Then everything would be simple. Then both Jews and Palestinians would become "normal" nations. A wall built roughly over the 1967 border, Palestinians over there, Jews over here. Done! Then Israel could be the dream of white European separatist racism that has always inspired Yehoshua, the dream of secular Zionism. And Palestine? Palestine would be that same dream, only upside down.

---

A coda, and a return to the title. I probably wouldn't have noticed Yehoshua's fart if it weren't for Gilad Atzmon noticing it, and I wouldn't have noticed the latter if it weren't quoted by Philip Weiss on Mondoweiss.

Atzmon is moved by the "interesting insight" such as that "It is also far from being clear where the Israeli ends and the Jew starts." Describing something that has been discussed ad nauseam for the last 60 years in every Jewish Israeli high school, summer camp and youth movement gathering as an "insight" is special. Atzmon, who, tragically enough, cannot let go of his IDF uniform, compliments Yehoshua for being "a proud Israeli Jew," one assumes as opposed to those spineless diaspora "progressive Jews" who offend Atzmon so much. It is as shocking as drought in the Mojave Desert that two who share the same secular Zionist assumptions, the same dislike of the radical left, the same belief in the trans-historical agency of abstractions, and the same colonial/racial/sexual anxieties about the impure and the unformed diaspora Judaism, would find each other insightful. Possibly the only thing to say about sentences like "In the contemporary Jewish world there are no clear dichotomies. We are dealing with a spineless elastic metamorphic identity that shapes itself to fit every possible circumstances," (aside from the sheer falseness), is that by the standards set by these two authors it isn't particularly odorous.

As to why Philip Weiss finds that deep, one should ask him. Weiss confesses that he "generally avoids" Atzmon. But why does he avoid Atzmon? Is there some political consciousness there that is struggling to take shape. Or is it just fear of what those over-sensitive "progressive Jews" might say? I am not sure Weiss himself can tell, but time will tell.

Unity until.....?

Guardian editorial on the reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas:

The Arab spring has finally had an impact on the core issue of the region, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It came in the form of a draft agreement between Fatah and Hamas which took everyone by surprise. There are three chief reasons why, after four years of bitter and violent conflict between the rivals, Fatah acceded to all of Hamas's political conditions to form a national unity government.

The first was the publication of the Palestine papers, the secret record of the last fruitless round of talks with Israel. The extent to which Palestinian negotiators were prepared to bend over backwards to accommodate Israel surprised even hardened cynics. The Palestinian Authority found itself haemorrhaging what little authority it had left. The second was the loss to the Palestinian president, Abu Mazen, of his closest allies in Hosni Mubarak and his henchman Omar Suleiman. While they were still around, Gaza's back door was locked. But the third reason had little to do with either of the above: Abu Mazen's faith in Barack Obama finally snapped. For a man who dedicated his career to the creation of a Palestinian state through negotiation, the turning point came when the US vetoed a UN resolution condemning Israel's settlement-building. In doing so, the US vetoed its own policy. To make the point, the resolution was drafted out of the actual words Hillary Clinton used to condemn construction. Fatah's frustration with all this has now taken political form.

Israel's politicians reacted darkly to the news of reconciliation. From right to left, they shared an assumption which is out of date. It is that they retain the ability – and the right – to dictate what sort of state Palestinians will build on their borders. Having spent years fashioning the environment, the penny has yet to drop that a future environment composed of free Egyptians, Jordanians and even possibly Syrians could well fashion Israel's borders. Even after Mubarak fell, the consensus was that Cairo was so preoccupied with internal problems that it lacked the energy to make foreign policy.

Not so. Yesterday foreign minister Nabil al-Arabi announced that Egypt would shortly be lifting the siege of Gaza. These events pose a direct challenge to the status quo that Israel, the US and the EU have fashioned. Do they now subvert the will of the Egyptians they claim to champion? Does the US do what it did the last time Fatah and Hamas reconciled at Mecca, and pull the plug on the unity government? Do the Quartet threaten to withdraw the PA's funds, because, as is very likely, Salam Fayyad will no longer be there to disburse them? The US could twist Fatah's arm, but Fatah might just sign on the dotted line all the same.

Comments are still open. I wouldn't say they're free, but they are still open.

Palestine Film Festival

Karma Nabulsi in The Guardian on the Palestine Film Festival:

The perilous art of choosing a film on Palestine for an international audience may appear fraught with elephant traps. Weighted down by more than 40 years of military occupation and 60 years of dispossession, and comprising the largest refugee population in the world, Palestine is a touchstone for passion and political engagement across the world. Is a film about it inherently too political, too ideologically rigid to enlighten, or indeed entertain? Do the unhappy politics of the place trump any chance of critical engagement on a film's artistic merit, or allow room for happy accident and serendipity in choosing a film?

The long-running London Palestine film festival, established at London University more than 20 years ago and held annually at the Barbican since 2005, arrived at a highly unexpected and bold solution to this challenge. It somehow manages to transcend this traditional dilemma by holding fast to a few simple but radical aims: to constantly push boundaries, disrupt our conventional understandings, make us see it all anew, and open it up for us once more. With each screening, discussion, roundtable, photography exhibit, director's conversation and artist's event, the world of Palestine is seen yet again, as if for the first time.

Under this mandate, a serious but ebullient festival has emerged. In order to keep shaking things up, a key premise was to universalise Palestine. Although we are in the midst of a wave of Palestinian film talent, they forgo the confines of a traditional "national cinema" series for an unmistakably internationalist one. This year's festival showcases 30 works by artists working in 12 different countries, and across genres from video art to biopic, puts up work for UK premieres (16 this year), and shows cutting-edge documentaries such as Mahmoud al Massad's mesmerising This Is My Picture When I Was Dead.

It also regularly celebrates archive gems, this year showing the recently restored Far from Vietnam (1967), on which Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais and Joris Ivens all worked. The result is a carnival of cinematic styles and concerns that transcend and unite the historical, the aesthetic, and the political in film, and that is why it works so well. Each film and event challenges – either obliquely or directly – our thinking around Palestine today.

The festival also plays a major role as the platform for introducing Palestinian films and film-makers to UK audiences. Since its inception in 1998, more than 320 works have been shown, nearly half by Palestinians. The festival's focus on Palestinian work unites established and emerging artists. This year's festival opens with Zindeeq (pictured), a remarkable work of sublime beauty. Bold, dangerous and difficult, it is the latest work of pioneering Palestinian auteur Michel Khleifi. But it also contains a body of work from a new generation of film-makers such as May Odeh, Rima Essa and Abdallah al Ghoul.

This year the programme highlights pressing contemporary issues, as well. Vibeke Løkkeberg's astonishing Tears of Gaza offers a searing account of the human impact of the 2008-09 war in Gaza, while a triple-bill on 7 May focuses on the tunnels that furnish Gaza's precarious lifeline. And this year includes the rare chance to see Heiny Srour's 1984 feminist masterwork, Leila and the Wolves (co-presented with Birds Eye View film festival), as well as the UK premiere of Dahna Abourahme's groundbreaking documentary on the women of Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp in south Lebanon, The Kingdom of Women. Breathtaking, uplifting, heartbreaking, inspiring: welcome to Palestine.

The London Palestine film festival runs from 29 April to 11 May. Details:palestinefilm.org

Comments are open, even at this late hour.

Martin Buber, the kibbutz movement and "socialism" in Israel

I was in a chat on a message board recently and I mentioned, in passing, that I doubted the sincerity of Martin Buber's so-called bi-nationalist zionism. I couldn't quite remember why I doubted it but it had to do with a story I heard about how Martin Buber came to occupy the former house of Edward Said's family.  I just googled "Martin Buber" "Edward Said" and I eventually found this little gem, in Peace News, by Uri Davis:

Like Buber, one of my father's relatives (Leon Roth), was a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem at the time. He also witnessed the atrocities committed against the Palestinian Arabs in the name of the "Jewish State". Unlike his colleague Buber, however, he resigned his post and returned to Britain. 

Buber, on the other hand, sold out. In 1963 he had this to say: "I have accepted as mine the state of Israel, the form of the new Jewish community that has arisen from the war. I have nothing in common with those Jews who imagine that they may contest the factual shape which Jewish independence has taken." (Martin Buber, "Israel and the Command of the Spirit", Israel and the World, p257.) According to Edward Said, prior to 1948 the Buber family were tenants of the Saids in Jerusalem. They paid their rent for their house in the wealthy mixed Arab-Jewish Talbiyya Quarter to Edward Said's father. Sometime towards 1948, a tenant-landlord dispute erupted between Mr Said and Professor Buber, and the case was taken for adjudication before the British Mandate court. Buber lost the case and had to leave the premises. 

At the door, after returning the keys to Edward Said's father, Buber turned round and said: "Mr Said, you just wait. I will be back." 

Buber: comeback kid

The war that began with the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948 ended in 1949 with the expulsion of approximately 75 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian Arab populations from some 400 Arab localities that came under the control of the Israeli army. 

In the armistice agreements between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Jerusalem was partitioned and Talbiyya was ceded to Israel. In consequence, the Said family were classified under Israeli law as "absentees", their rights to their properties in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel were nullified and vested with the Israeli Custodian for Absentees' Property. 

Immediately after the war Buber was as good as his word. He returned to take residence in the Saids' house in Talbiyya, now as tenant of the Custodian. He lived there for the rest of his life. (Uri Davis, op cit, p54.) 

Against the backdrop of the continuing Israeli denial of the rights of the 1948 Palestine refugees to return, and the occupation since 1967 of the West Bank and teh Gaza Strip, Martin Buber's "Epilogue" in Paths in Utopia makes for an almost surreal reading. 

Read on for an article exposing the sheer hypocrisy of Martin Buber and the whole of the kibbutz movement for which he was something of an ideologue.

I should point out for those who go a-googling some more, that as with the Joan Peters hoax there are many zionists outlets trying to make out that the Buber/Said saga never happened. On that matter, here is Edward Said.

Nice!

Actually, It isn't nice is the name of the song, written by Malvina Reynolds, and performed as the soundtrack to this video by Barbara Dane.

Israel studies at SOAS

I thought I already blogged this. Apparently SOAS has created two posts for a new Israel studies course. A resident zionist at SOAS, Colin Schindler, is a happy bunny. According to The Guardian:

Colin Shindler, professor of Israeli studies at Soas and future chair of the association, says the decision to expand Israel studies is a response to growing demand from students to know more about the political, cultural, social and economic background to events in the Middle East and is an attempt to offer an academic alternative to what he terms "the megaphone war".

Antony Lerman is a little perplexed:

The same emphasis on this development as being purely motivated by a desire to provide information, knowledge and understanding was evident from remarks made by the Director of the Pears Foundation, Charles Keidan:

[He] stresses that the aim is to meet demand for better scholarship in the area rather than to promote a cause.

‘We have been very conscious not to be involved in this as any form of Israel advocacy,’ he says. ‘This is advocacy for Israel studies, not for Israel.’

......despite the gloss put on this development by Shindler and Keidan, all is not what it seems. While interest in the subject among students has no doubt increased and Shindler will strongly, and with some justification, claim that he teaches and researches the subject from as academically objective a position as possible, it’s quite obvious that this move is meant to counter, at least partly, the proliferation of Middle East studies funded by Arab sources at various universities up and down the country. The notion that work done at these institutions is politically biased against Israel is common in some Jewish circles in which I am sure that members of the Pears family mix.

Keidan may well be entirely sincere in saying that the foundation is not involved in this initiative ‘as any form of Israel advocacy’, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Pears itself funds Israel advocacy both directly and indirectly. It’s true that Pears’s involvement in advocacy is rather more enlightened than the path followed by those who more or less base what they do on the belief that Israel can do no wrong. The foundation supports the New Israel Fund, for example, which provides grants to Israeli and Israeli-Arab human rights organizations. And it also began a major initiative to raise awareness in the UK Jewish community of the severely disadvantaged position of Israel’s Arab – or Palestinian, as most now call themselves–citizens. However, a book it produced celebrating Israel’s scientific achievements - Israel in the World - was a classic hasbara (propaganda) exercise, based on the view that the problem facing Israel is simply that the country’s good news stories are not being disseminated sufficiently widely and intensively and that negative developments are exaggerated out of all proportion. (A devastating critique of this approach by the IsraeliHaaretz journalist Gideon Levy was published on 10 April.) Just how much money it devotes to Israel advocacy is impossible to know because, contrary to many other grant making foundations that are registered charities, Pears does not itemise all its individual grants in its annual accounts.

And a letter to The Guardian Education section raises concerns about impartiality:

Harriet Swain's article "Lessons on Israel" (12 April) carries the lead-in: "A new association aims to fulfil growing demand from students for knowledge about the Middle East". If that is the case, why does it promote Israel studies rather than Middle East studies? And if it is neutral with regard to Israel/Palestine, then why is the European Association of Israel Studies not called the European Association of Israel/Palestine since 1948 studies? The backer of the new Soas Israel studies posts, the Pears Foundation, is said to be rooted in Jewish (not Middle Eastern or Palestinian) values; the foundation's attitude towards Zionism is not mentioned. One can only speculate.

Sophie Richmond,

London N8

I don't think we can only speculate.

Mordechai Vanunu

Letter in today's Guardian:

Today marks seven years since Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower, was released from Ashkelon prison to face the assembled world's media, having served his full sentence of 18 years (11.5 years in solitary confinement) for revealing the truth of Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons programme. Since his release he has faced no further charges regarding any "secrets" he is still supposed to have, yet it is for this reason he is not allowed to leave Israel and suffers daily restrictions on his freedom of movement, speech and association. It is time the British government called for these cruel restrictions to be withdrawn so he can leave Israel immediately, as he wishes.

Ben Birnberg Trustee, Free Vanunu, Jim Boumelha President, International Federation of Journalists, Jeremy Corbyn MPParliamentary human rights group, Jeremy Dear General secretary, National Union of Journalists, Kate Hudson General secretary CND, Bruce Kent Trustee, Free Vanunu, Jon Sen  Film-maker

Transcript of the Itamar Investigation

According to Ynet:

Shin Bet, IDF and police have arrested two Palestinians, both residents of the village of Awarta, in connection to the Fogel family massacre in Itamar in March. The first suspect is Hakim Mazen Awad, 18, a high school student whose father was active in the Popular Front terror organization. Awad has a prison record. His uncle, who was killed in clashes with IDF forces in 2003, was involved in a June 2002 terror attack in Itamar, which left five dead. The second suspect, Amjad Mahmad Awad, 19, also a student, is affiliated with the Popular Front. (YNET)

Now, YNET doesn't mention the method of investigation. But, luckily, I have the partial transcript:

Shin Bet Investigator 1 (David): So, Hakim, I was told that the last week you spent in our four stars hotel convinced you to cooperate with the investigation?

Hakim: (trying to move his broke arm) yes.

Shin Bet Investigator 2 (Shlomo): Good! Good! Yalla David, let's finish this. Let's finish it and call it a day.

David: (taking a file from a pile on his desk, opening it). So, Hakim, do you confess that you were in the room with Hitler when he gave the order to exterminate all the Jews of Europe?

Hakim: I do. I do.

David: please describe what happened.

Hakim: I was sitting in the room. Hitler came in with a briefcase. He had that funny mustache.

Shlomo: David, David! You took the wrong file out. What's the matter with you? This is the f**ing wrong file!

Hakim: He open the briefcase and said, "now we're going to kill all the Jews." He then.

Shlomo: Shut up! Shut up! David, please start again.

David: (picking up a different file), So, Hakim, do you confess that you infiltrated Itamar and committed a vile murder of a family and their children?

Hakim: I do. I do. I went to Itamar together with Hitler. He ordered me to slaughter the baby. I then went and cut the throat of the baby. Hitler was very happy and gave me a bar of chocolate.

Shlomo: (shaking Hakim up) I am going to break every bone in your body if you mention Hitler one more time! Do you understand?

Hakim: I am sorry. I thought that's what you wanted. I apologize. I will try to do better.

David: Ok. Hakim. take it easy. How did you get inside Itamar?

Hakim: we dug a tunnel and crawled into Itamar in the night.

Shlomo: you mean you climbed over the fence.

Hakim: Yes! Sorry. That is what I mean. We dug a tunnel and then we took the tunnel with us and we climbed over the fence.