Zionism and apartheid: a strategic and ideological alliance?

This is part 2 of Chris McGreal's compare and contrast essay on Israeli apartheid. There are also letters mostly critical of yesterday's offering.

Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.

Israeli apartheid

From Chris McGreal in the Guardian:

Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid.

Int'l Atomic Energy Agency "surprises and displeases" Israel

Ha'aretz reports on Israel's "surprise and displeasure" at a half attempt at balance by the IAEA. On past form it seemed that the IAEA was formed to bring predominantly Arab and Muslim states to their knees but in their recent report they dared to hint that they might, just might, be criticising a state that is neither Arab nor Muslim.

At the last moment, and to the surprise and displeasure of the Israeli delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Article 13 was added to the resolution on Iran. It states that "...

...a solution to the Iranian issue would contribute to global nonproliferation efforts and to realizing the objective of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, including their means of delivery."....In any event, even the softer version provoked complaints from the Israeli delegation. Israel is a member of the IAEA, but not the board of governors, although its representatives have observer status on that body.

Toward the end of the discussion, Israel's delegate, Israel Michaeli, said he opposed the article because the issue of Iran should not be connected to other regional issues. In any event, he said, everyone supports regions that are free of weapons of mass destruction, but it would be unacceptable and irresponsible to accept such a resolution at this stage.

Michaeli asked that his statements at the meeting, which was held in camera, not be made public because of Israel's wish to maintain a low profile at the IAEA.

I wonder why.

Blaming the victims

This article from the Houston Chronicle argues that Israel and the US should work with a Hamas dominated PA, not against it. Nothing new there except this appears in an American paper:

Israel's refusal to deal with the Palestinians' chosen representatives and attempts to isolate the Palestinian national movement are not new. Israel has worked for decades to drum into our consciousness the notion that "there is no partner for peace."

This places the blame for its military occupation on the shoulders of the very people it occupies. The strategy was evident in the 1980s when Israel refused to negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. During the last five years of so-called peace negotiations, the onus has been on the Palestinians to "reform." A hallmark of President Bush's policy toward the Palestinians has been the demand for the development of transparent, democratic institutions. Democracy is a worthy goal, and one that Palestinians have long struggled for themselves. Yet, the idea that democracy is somehow a litmus test for Palestinian independence obfuscates the real issue at hand — the continued military occupation, denial of equal rights and dispossession of a people.

Elsewhere in the same paper an article condemns Hamas's words and ignores Israel's deeds.

Cameron joins the ethnic cleansers

According to the Jewish Chronicle, David Cameron, the recently elected Tony Blair lookalike, soundalike and isjustlike, has become an honorary patron of one of zionism's foremost ethnic cleansing organisations; just like, er, Tony Blair.

Here's the JC article:

JNF UK, which is currently embroiled in a bitter row with its former Israeli associate Keren Kayemeth LeIisrael over the use in Britain of the name Jewish National Fund, received a double boost this week.

The charity announced that the Duke of Edinburgh is to host a lunch for it at St James’s Palace on March 8 and that Conservative leader David Cameron has become an honorary patron.

The lunch will raise funds for the Israel Youth Awards. The Israeli award scheme, a partner of JNF UK, is affiliated to the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme in Britain. The lunch is expected to raise £150,000 for its work with Jews, Muslims and Christians.

JNF UK president Gail Seal said the charity was honoured the Duke was to host the lunch. “His support for JNF is much valued and his work in Israel, through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, is vital in promoting good relations and supporting Israel.”

Mr Cameron, meanwhile, was welcomed as an honorary patron by Mrs Seal. He joins his predecessor Michael Howard, Prime Minister Tony Blair and some half-dozen other communal and political figures.

“We’re delighted he is to further his friendship with Israel through the UK’
s foremost Israel-dedicated charity,” declared Mrs Seal.

How does Tony Blair feature as a communal figure? Perhaps they meant political.

Genocide, ethnocide or politicide?

Here's an review in the London Review of Books on two books (three if you count each volume of one of them) on the subject of genocide. Frankly I don't understand the whole article but in its discussion of the UN Convention on Genocide, I was drawn to this passage:

Feeling that nothing like the Holocaust should ever be allowed to happen again, the UN Convention on Genocide tried to define exactly what it was that had happened. The omission of political, occupational and other social groups from the terms of the UN Convention, which thereby excluded the mass killings of Stalin and Pol Pot, has been criticised by many. Michael Mann chooses to call such massacres ‘classicide’ or ‘politicide’, and reserves ‘genocide’ for the destruction of ethnic or religious groups. Mark Levene, on the other hand, includes all of these within his definition of genocide as ‘the state-organised total or partial extermination of perceived or actual communal groups’.

However, the Convention also inadvertently included within its definition many other things that none of the signatories regretted very much, like the colonial depopulation of Australia and the Americas. Mann prefers the term ‘ethnocide’ for the unintended annihilation of racial groups, but for both victims and perpetrators the consequences are much the same. Without the benefit of such ethnocides many readers of the LRB would not be living where they are now. Few think of themselves as being in favour of genocide, and many would like to see Israelis dismantle their settlements on the West Bank, but no one is going to demolish their own house and give the land back to the indigenous people. Zionists remember this, and so did Hitler.

See what you make of the whole thing here or here.

Danny Rubinstein: Even Zionism has its boundaries

A few people have sent me this interview between Keshev - the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel - and veteran Israeli journalist, Danny Rubinstein. I've been trying to resist posting on it because it contains a certain bombshell that looks like a far flung conspiracy theory but it comes from one of Israel's best known and well respected journalists. Rubinstein is also from strongly zionist stock. He didn't just wash up on the shore. So what is this bombshell?

In my personal estimation, based on several findings and testimonies, we poisoned Arafat. Writing that today seems like an exercise in futility: 'those Arabs, with their imagination, and their conspiracy theories, etc.'. It is so opposed to our narrative and so identified with theirs, that I can't put that in. I think that's true for today's media in general: it's careful not to target sacred cows. In the end, all the systems adopt an approach held by part or most of the establishment.

What difference does it make anyway? Arafat was incarcerated in a bombed out basement for (I think it was) three years. He was old anyway. Why poison him? Principle perhaps? They couldn't allow him the dignity (dignity? huh!) of dying of natural causes. And of course Rubinstein could be wrong but he certainly doesn't go in for sensationalism. He drops other bombshells too.

I grew up in what was known as Working Israel, in a very Zionistic environment. And now the post-Zionist era is upon us, and you say, something has to be changed. The state of Israel exists, and needs to be a normal state. We have to start rethinking the Law of Return, the Citizenship Law… these are things that are hard for me to grasp. But they are beginning to trickle into me, from a journalistic standpoint as well. Maybe this is not just the beginning, these things have already become quite established. Even Zionism has its boundaries. The Law of Return needs to be restructured, because the Arabs have rights in this land too.

"Arabs have rights in this land too." Arabs from this land, or just in this land? The Law of Return must go. But what of the right to return? Arafat's death was a big deal for sure but the abolition of the Law of Return coupled with the right to return would change everything.

Sue Blackwell on holocaust denial

Here's an article by Sue Blackwell in al-Ahram castigating those who promote the Protocols and deny the holocaust.

like most English people of my generation I have a father who fought against Nazi Germany and who brought me up to understand why. But increasingly these days I find myself having acrimonious exchanges, usually by email, with people whose messages start by expressing their support for my stand on Palestine and then continue with "I think you ought to read this."

"This" often consists of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which for a document over a hundred years old has weathered remarkably well. It crops up everywhere on the internet, including the weblogs of people who claim to be campaigners for Palestinian rights. I had a graduate student in my office not long ago, a highly intelligent young man who is a member of a socialist party in the UK. He told me in all seriousness that I really ought to read this incredible exposé of a world Jewish conspiracy, which was apparently new to him.

The Times of London discredited this document as a forgery as long ago as August 1921, yet it continues to enjoy a wide circulation. I'm told that its Arabic translation is particularly popular, and I recall that it featured prominently in "Horseman without a Horse" screened on Egyptian television in 2002.

She makes many points that I wholeheartedly agree with:

you do not have to deny the Holocaust in order to condemn Israel. First, there is the fact that Zionist emigration to Palestine began in the late 19th century, long before the Third Reich. Second, there is the simple moral argument that two wrongs do not make a right: whatever suffering the Jewish people have endured does not make it okay to take the land of another people who never did them any harm. And there is a third argument, which for me is the definitive one.

Some of the faces that stared down at me from the walls of the Auschwitz exhibitions were not Jewish. If Israel is the answer to anti-Semitism then what is the answer for the other five million victims of the Nazis? Where is the homeland for gay men? The very idea sounds ridiculous. Yet homophobia is very much alive all over the world today, and gay men and lesbians have every right to seek to escape the violence it often leads to.

Where is the homeland for people with physical and mental disabilities? For Catholic priests and Jehovah's Witnesses? What about the Romani and Sinti gypsies, some one million of whom perished at the hands of the Third Reich? We know that they came originally from north-west India some time in the 11th century, so surely the solution is obvious: they should go back there. There are 12-15 million Roma dispersed around the world today and they suffer horrendous racism and persecution in every part of it, particularly Europe. So, let them return to the Panjab, a land without a people for a people without a land; too bad for the Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Christians currently living there. Outrageous? Of course. And so is what Zionism has done to the Palestinians.

She also makes a point that I am not so comfortable with:

Last week many countries, including the UK, marked Holocaust Memorial Day. The Muslim Council of Britain boycotted this event, as they did last year. I do not agree with them, despite my enthusiasm for boycotts.

Of course I agree with her enthusiasm for boycotts.

UK to grant free pass to Israeli war criminals

The Guardian reports that the UK is to curb the ability of private citizens or groups to bring prosecutions against war crimes suspects. This appears to follow Israeli pressure over the attempted prosecution of Israeli General Almog. General Almog escaped war crimes charges when he was advised to stay on his plane and return quickly to Israel when he came to the UK last year.

Under international law, Britain has a duty to arrest and prosecute alleged war crimes suspects if they arrive on its territory, even though the alleged offences occurred overseas.

Gen Almog is alleged to have ordered the destruction of 59 Palestinian civilian homes in revenge for the death of Israeli soldiers, in breach of the Geneva conventions.

Since last September, Israeli officials have met twice with Home Office officials and Foreign Office representatives regarding the attempted arrest. The government has denied claims that US officials want the British law changed, fearing their officials could be arrested for alleged human rights abuses.

Gen Almog said he was tipped off by the Israeli military attache in London, who boarded his plane at Heathrow. Police rejected demands to investigate who tipped off the general, saying in a letter seen by the Guardian from Peter Clarke, the national anti-terrorism coordinator, that they lacked the resources to do so.

There are many disturbing aspects to this case. The short term one is why there is no investigation into who tipped off the Israeli embassy about the warrant. The long term on is the fact the the UK government is allowing Israel to undermine our own legal structure and our commitments under international law.

Tamimi repudiates the Protocols

Dr Azzam Tamimi participated in a talk tonight at the School of Oriental and African Studies titled The Palestinian Elections and Their Consequences. He was the most enthusiastically received speaker on a panel of four including the chairman. The most interesting thing for me was when a zionist in the audience put it to Dr Tamimi that Hamas's Charter promotes the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion thus:

For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. ...They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

Tamimi listened and nodded respectfully and I was anxious as to what he might say. The zionist had asked the question that I wanted answered. Tamimi said that it's true that Hamas has a covenant that states all that stuff. He said that he has tried to persuade them to ditch such religious-sounding and nonsensical conspiracy theories but that the covenant was adopted when many of the more educated among the membership were in prison or in exile. Not a great excuse but it was a clear repudiation. He said that the leadership were misguided to think that if they let the covenant quietly drop from their own statements, maybe the world wouldn't notice. But of course the world that counts is the west and whilst the west is happy to fund and cover for Israel's racist atrocities, Hamas's every word is scrutinised.

Collective punishment of the Palestinians

And this time its the EU and US doing the punishing according to head of Hamas's political bureau, Khalid Mish'al in today's Guardian:

The day Hamas won the Palestinian democratic elections the world's leading democracies failed the test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of Hamas as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, seize the opportunity created by the result to support the development of good governance in Palestine and search for a means of ending the bloodshed, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their right to choose their parliamentary representatives.

Meanwhile, highlighting the EU and the US's hypocrisy on this issue Israel killed a 9 year old girl in "free" Gaza two days ago. She was the second child to be killed by Israel in a week. See here.

And here's a letter in today's Guardian pointing up the cleft stick that our own government is in now, through it's uncritical support of Israel, it has driven the majority of Palestinians under occupation to support Hamas:

Under the terrorism bill will it now be an offence to support a democratically elected government?
Nigel Hunt
Harrogate

Good question.

Jennifer Lowenstein in conversation

This is a guest post from Esther Sassaman:

What follows is a write-up I wrote for Jews sans frontieres about the Jennifer Loewenstein presentation on Wednesday evening.

Included is an audio link to her lecture, a Windows Media file about an
hour in length.
---
Jennifer Loewenstein is one of the most prominent and outspoken American Jewish activists and scholars on the issue of Palestine. On Wednesday she travelled to Dundee and gave two presentations about the current situation of Palestine under occupation and after the election victory of Hamas.

Loewenstein worked at the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City for 5 months in 2002. In February 2003 she founded the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and visited Rafah in January 2004 for its first delegation to the city. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin but is currently a visiting fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University.

She spent a good part of the years 2000-2002 in Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon. Loewenstein is a member of the Palestine/Israel Peace & Justice Alliance (PIPAJA) and a founder of the Rafah-Madison Sister City Project, and a contributing author of The New Intifada (2001).

On Wednesday, Loewenstein talked a lot about the Hamas elections victory, the history of Hamas and its original Israeli backing, and raised an interesting point that the occupation in Palestine has been a force that counteracts the ongoing trend towards social and political modernization there - the occupation, by utterly disrupting freedom of movement, increases the control and influence traditional village elders
have on communities and essentially forces Palestine back in time.

According to Loewenstein, Hamas has capitalized on this trend and is encouraging and intensifying it culturally.

She placed the election results in the context of the brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel by sharing many moving personal anecdotes from her time in Gaza.

She also talked about what solidarity activists should do, a bit - talking about the difference between support of Palestine and endorsement of Hamas. But further questions need to be raised on this issue. When working with Palestinians directly or talking about Palestine in the West, what approach should solidarity activists take as regards issues such as womens' rights and the killing of civilians?

Madison Rafah Sister City Project
Mezan Centre for Human Rights
Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University

A word from the Wise

Here's a letter from Palestine News editor, Hilary Wise, in today's Guardian:

What an extraordinary spectacle. The media are dutifully lining up behind Israel to repeat the mantra "renounce violence!" to the newly elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Amid the hysterical outpourings, Israel's ongoing violence is never mentioned. For every Israeli who has died over the last five years, four Palestinians have been killed.

Suddenly, Fatah are the nice guys. But Israel refused to negotiate seriously with them, even when Mahmoud Abbas, its preferred candidate, was elected. As early as 1988 the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist within the 1967 borders. Israel's response was to keep pouring settlers into the occupied territories, as it does today. It was the realisation, after Oslo, that nothing was going to change, that led the Palestinian people to launch the intifada in 2000 and to turn to the only alternative political force in last week's elections.

Hamas could "renounce violence" tomorrow and formally recognise Israel's right to exist; but there is no evidence to suggest that Israel would renounce its policies of enlarging the settlements, building the settler-only roads across the West Bank and penning the Palestinians into shrinking ghettos.

There are others too including one this particularly hypocritical one from William Shawcross:

In your leader (January 27) you say that Hamas is "best known in Israel and abroad for the suicide attacks it used against its Israeli enemies". This is a description you have used before. You appear to have forgotten that under the laws of war, children and women and other civilians are not legitimately targeted as "enemies". Hamas has murdered many innocent people in brutal crimes against humanity. Why do you not say so?

Because Israel is so scrupulous about the rules of war.

The Qalqilya effect?

Here's an article by Ali Abunimah in Electronic Intifada explaining the significance, in so far as it can, of the recent Hamas victory.

The election result is not entirely surprising, however, and has been foreshadowed by recent events. Take for example the city of Qalqilya in the north of the West Bank. Hemmed in by Israeli settlements and now completely surrounded by a concrete wall, the city's fifty thousand residents are prisoners in a Israeli-controlled giant ghetto. For years Qalqilya's city council was controlled by Fatah but after the completion of the wall, voters in last years' municipal elections awarded every single city council seat to Hamas. The Qalqilya effect has now spread across the occcupied territories, with Hamas reportedly winning virtually all of the seats elected on a geographic basis. Thus Hamas' success is as much an expression of the determination of Palestinians to resist Israel's efforts to force their surrender as it is a rejection of Fatah. It reduces the conflict to its most fundamental elements: there is occupation, and there is resistance.

For Palestinians under occupation, it is not yet clear what Hamas' win will mean. It is now common to speak of a Palestinian "government" being formed out of the election results, as though Palestine were already a sovereign and independent state. But if the first duty of a government is to protect its people's lives, liberty and property, then the Palestinian Authority has never deserved to be called a government. Since its inception, it has not been able to protect Palestinians from lethal daily attacks by the Israeli army in the heart of their towns and refugee camps, or to prevent a single dunum of land being seized for settlements, nor to save a single sapling of the more than one million trees uprooted by Israel in the past ten years. Rather, in Israel's conception the Palestinian Authority was supposed to crush Palestinian resistance to make the occupied territories safe for continued Israeli colonization. Hamas will certainly not allow that to continue, but whether it will be able to tranform the Authority into an arm of the struggle against Israel is by no means certain. Hamas, which has observed a unilateral truce with Israel for a year, has signalled that it wants to continue this if Israel "reciprocates." The movement clearly believes it can make such an offer from a position of strength and it is to its tactical advantage to leave uncertainty about when and how it might resume full-scale armed resistance

It's interesting that this unilateral truce of Hamas has received so little coverage. It's now nearly a year old. google Hamas truce and it comes up as news. Google anything that's one year old, anything now, and see if it comes up on Google news.

Fisk on the PA elections

Here's Robert Fisk's comment on the elections to the Palestinian Authority. The article first appeared in the Independent but Fisk's articles are pay per view there so this is from the Information Clearing House.

Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn't we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn't they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!

True, the Afghans elected a round of representatives, albeit that they included some warlords and murderers. But then the Iraqis last year elected the Dawa party to power in Baghdad, which was responsible - let us not speak this in Washington - for most of the kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, the car bombing of the (late) Emir and the US and French embassies in Kuwait.

And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power. They were supposed to have given their support to the friendly, pro-Western, corrupt, absolutely pro-American Fatah, which had promised to "control" them, rather than to Hamas, which said they would represent them. And, bingo, they have chosen the wrong party again.

Result: 76 out of 132 seats. That just about does it. God damn that democracy. What are we to do with people who don't vote the way they should?

So now what? Jewish Voice for Peace has an interesting article on this here.

Herzl and "transfer"

No special reason for posting this now. I just remember a zionist commenting here once that the founder of "modern political" zionism, Theodor Herzl never intended the removal of the Palestinians from what would become the Jews' state. Here's the quote that most people are aware of to prove that Herzl intended that the natives would be removed from Palestine.

We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.

Now that looks pretty clear to me and to most people but one detractor did come here (again and again) to complain that what Herzl went on to say in this passage meant that he actually wanted coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. This of course begs the question of what would be so Jewish about the Jews' state if Jews had no special status there. But anyway, here's how the passage unfolds as related by the zionist rabbi, Dr Chaim Simons:

Herzl realised that secrecy and discretion were necessary to put these ideas into practice. His diary entry thus continues, “The property-owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”

Herzl described his methods of expropriation. “The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents. The Company would pay excessive prices.” Herzl was determined that once property had been acquired it would be retained in the hands of the Jews. “We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews,” he said. As a qualified lawyer, Herzl realised that he would not be able to declare sales to non-Jews invalid. He therefore took precautions to avoid resale to non-Jews, as he wrote, “If the owner wants to sell the property, we shall have the right to buy it back at our original sale price.”

Herzl realised that some property owners would, for sentimental reasons, be reluctant to part with their properties and in such cases these people “will be offered a complete transportation to any place they wish, like our own people. This offer will be made only when all others have been rejected.”

This guy Chaim Simons has a whole site devoted to pressing the case for the expulsion of the native population from Palestine. It makes for interesting reading because of his calm casual style. Incidentally this guy who thinks it only right and proper that he has more right to live in Palestine than the Arabs who come from there do, and even more right than those who live there now, is a Londoner. I found the link to his writingson the very useful resource site: Palestine Remembered.

Be moderate!

That's the title of a song by James Connolly. But it's also my new policy for would-be commentors. I've been getting a lot of hassle lately from zionists. I usually allow the usual lies we get from zionists from time to time (make that all the time) but some of the stuff lately has been about nothing at all. I think it's a ploy to put people off the idea of genuine debate so what happens now is you leave a comment and I check my "pending moderation" facility and if I think the comment is conducive to people's understanding then I will allow it. If it's stupid I won't. If you want to give vent to a load of disingenuous zionist tosh you might like to try the Engage on line site. Or if you want to cross the line into pro-zionist and pro-war hysteria then try Harry's Place or Little Green Footballs. I would recommend Nick Cohen on that latter score but he has now stopped comments on his blog. Did I mention that already? If you want to be just plain silly then there is a blog specially set up to denounce me but the guy ran out of things to denounce apparently so he does slag some other people too. He calls his blog "Banned by Elf" and he seems to adopt multiple IDs to maintain some kind of "dialogue" with himself.

Anyway the moderating lark's only an experiment for now as it might be too time consuming checking the posts. I'll let you know if I revert to unmoderated comments.

I got the idea for this from the Engage site when I tried to ask them to substantiate an allegation about George Galloway going on record with anti-semitic statements. If someone is asking me to substantiate something I have asserted I will usually respond with links...if I can.

Thank you

The end of zionism?

According to Forward, zionist activism is on the wane in America. the World Zionist Congress is trying to organise worldwide elections for any Jew over the age of 18. In America voter registration is down from 150,000 in 1998 to 70,000 for this latest contest.

The world's only global Jewish elections are approaching fast, but from the early tallies it appears that the word has not spread far.

Voter registration for the World Zionist Congress — open to any Jew over 18 — closes February 15 in America. Thus far, fewer than 70,000 Americans have registered, down from 120,000 registrants in the 2002 election and 150,000 registrants in 1998. American voters will choose 30% of the 700-odd delegates to the WZC, to be held in Jerusalem in June; the remaining delegates will be chosen by Israelis and by other Diaspora communities.

Communities? I suspect that means "community organisations".

This report follows on from reports that the Israeli Jewish population (the only Israeli population that counts in the zionist worldview) has just recently overtaken the American Jewish population in size. It reminds me of a heckler at the recent MPAC meeting who tried to defend Israel's race laws on the grounds that Jews worldwide are choosing assimilation and that therefore Israel is necessary to maintain the "ethnic purity" of the Jewish people.

Respect supports Holocaust Memorial Day

Here's a curious piece in the European Jewish Press. Apparently Respect was behind the Holocaust Memorial Day event at SOAS yesterday. The Muslim Council of Britain has been castigated by various zionists in the media for boycotting HMD. Well now Respect's support for the event has caused great disgruntlement to zionists. Check this:

Gavin Gross, president of the SOAS Jewish Society, said: “I believe that Respect may have organised this Holocaust Memorial Day event as a political ploy to inoculate themselves against future charges of anti-Semitism.”

“When they attack Israel or ‘the Zionists’ in future, they will point to their embrace of Holocaust Memorial Day to demonstrate that their criticism is purely about Israel and that they care very much about Jews,” he added.

So leaving aside the fact that this is an admission that the SOAS Jewish Society uses the charge of anti-semitism to undermine Israel's opponents, what does Respect have to do to appease this particular zionist group? Should it make like the MCB and boycott HMD? Personally, I'm not comfortable with HMD as Israel has clearly used the holocaust to justify its own actions but I suppose there are lessons that can be drawn from it in terms of why we should oppose all manifestations of racist rule.

Sharon's posthumous victory?

Here's Gerald Kaufman's take on the Hamas victory in today's Guardian.

Lying in a coma in Hadassah hospital, Jerusalem, Ariel Sharon has achieved his final triumph. The Hamas victory in Wednesday's Palestinian elections is not only the inevitable outcome of everything Sharon did as prime minister, but is precisely what he would have wished.

Last week I argued in the House of Commons that "If Hamas does well [in the elections] as it may well do, the responsibility for that will lie with the Israeli government for nourishing the roots of Hamas. The sad thing is that Hamas and Likud and Kadima need each other. Israelis can say, 'We've got to do what we're doing because Hamas and Islamic Jihad are so dangerous'; Hamas and Islamic Jihad can say, 'We've got no alternative because the Israelis are oppressing us'." The Hamas landslide is the direct outcome of the utter frustration felt by Palestinians at the failure of anybody to do anything about the abject poverty and oppression under which they spend every day of their lives.

There's a curious quote from Netanyahu here

Today Hamastan has been formed, a proxy of Iran in the image of the Taliban.

Does he not know the animosity between Iran and the Taliban? The Taliban killed several Iranian diplomats before the American invasion of Afghanistan, calling them "CIA stooges". Somthing like that anyway. Kaufman quotes this to demonstrate that Netanyahu is an extremist but it rather shows that he is out of touch with reality.

Kaufman also outlines some issues around whether America tries to take on Iran militarily before ending with the troubling observation that Armageddon, after all, is a place in Israel.