February 2, 2007

Check out the new blogs from Jewish Voice for Peace:

The Third Way --In-depth analysis on all aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Check out the latest, a three-part response to Alan Dershowitz's vicious attacks on Jimmy Carter

Muzzlewatch --Tracking efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy. Including new features on harassment of a Jewish activist and efforts by Israel to muzzle refusers.


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The views expressed here are those of the editors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jewish Voice for Peace.

A Freedom Ride (Gush Shalom) Uri Avnery on the apartheid analogy

Taken for a Ride by the Israeli Left (Electronic Intifada) A Response to Uri Avnery

Sunni Islamists' Changing Agenda (Le Monde) "What Hamas Really Wants"

Checkpoint Comradeship (Ha'aretz) Amira Hass on the face of Israel that Palestinians see: checkpoints

Museum of Intolerance? (LA Times) The new Wiesenthal Center Museum to be built atop Muslim tombs in Jerusalem

Let Our Children Live (Nurit Peled Elhanan) on the death of 11 year old Palestinian girl Abir Aramin

Is there a Kosher Way to Criticize the Israel Lobby? (The American Prospect) on the Israel lobby in American politics

More Important Articles Links to other important news articles for today

[JPN Commentary 1: In this article, long-time peace activist Uri Avnery discusses the merits and limitations of using the term 'apartheid' in reference to the Israel - Palestine conflict. While there are a number of descriptive similarities (and differences) between the situation in Palestine and that of South Africa, Avnery presents two significant reasons why we should not take the analogy too far. Avnery argues we must not think that the tactics successfully used to defeat South African apartheid can be applied to the situation in the Middle East; nor is the Israel - Palestine conflict likely to be resolved in the same way.

Given the raging debate over the title of Carter's book, Avnery's nuanced comparison between these two 'apartheids' is well worth bearing in mind. JN]

[JPN Commentary 2: I'd like to offer some criticism of two issues raised by Avneri. The first - regarding the assessment that the two state solution is the only solution we should bother thinking about, or working towards.

While it's true that a huge majority of Israeli Jews are vehemently opposed to a one state solution, I disagree that it's the same on the Palestinian side: It seems that what most Palestinians wish for is an end to the occupation and oppression and to the extent that they opt for a two state solution they do so because it used to seem the only viable option, *not because they wish so desperately to separate themselves from Israeli Jews.*

If we look more specifically at Palestinians who live in refugee camps and the diaspora, the level of support for a Two State solution goes down significantly (and I suspect will keep plummeting as the wall keep growing, and the number of settlements and settlers keep mushrooming).
There IS a strong desire among many Palestinians, especially among refugees, to return to their villages - something Avneri says nothing about. Also, what happens to Israeli Palestinians if separation of the two national groups is so vital??

More generally, In light of the severely problematic nature of partitions elsewhere - it seems to me that the burden of "proof" is on those who promote what amounts to a partition in this case. If this type of solution failed in India/Pakistan; Ireland; Iraq; etc. on what grounds exactly does Avneri imagine it could work in Israel/Palestine?

The second major area I find myself disagreeing with is regarding Avneri's pronouncement that "It is a serious error to think that international public opinion will put an end to the occupation.

This will come about when the Israeli public itself is convinced of the need to do so". He bases his view on the fact that changing international public opinion and mobilizing it to oppose Israeli policies seems like a hugely difficult task. While I agree that it's a monumentally difficult and complex job to take on, I'm not sure on what basis Avneri determines it to be an *impossible* one. And when he says that the Israeli Public will need to be convinced on its own to end the occupation - how exactly is he proposing to achieve it? Besides, if public opinion outside Israel doesn't count, why is he wasting precious time communicating with us in the first place?

For people who are interested in giving serious thought to the one state solution, including a closer look at the lessons offered by South Africa, I highly recommend Ali Abunimah's recently published book: "One Country: A Bold Proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse". I think it might prove a paradigm-shifting book for many! - RG]

20.1.07

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1169333948/

Mahatma Gandhi would have loved it. Nelson Mandela would have saluted. Martin Luther King would have been the most excited - it would have reminded him of the old days.

Yesterday, a decree of the Officer Commanding the Central Sector, General Yair Naveh, was about to come into force. It forbade Israeli drivers from giving a ride to Palestinian passengers in the occupied territories. The knitted-Kippah-wearing General, a friend of the settlers, justified this as a vital security necessity. In the past, inhabitants of the West Bank have sometimes reached Israeli territory in Israeli cars.

Israeli peace activists decided that this nauseating order must be protested. Several organizations planned a protest action for the very day it was due to come into force. They organized a "Freedom Ride" of Israeli car-owners who were to enter the West Bank (a criminal offence in itself) and give a ride to local Palestinians, who had volunteered for the action.

An impressive event in the making. Israeli drivers and Palestinian passengers breaking the law openly, facing arrest and trial in a military court.

At the last moment, the general "froze" the order. The demonstration was called off.

THE ORDER that was suspended (but not officially rescinded) emitted a strong odor of apartheid. It joins a large number of acts of the occupation authorities that are reminiscent of the racist regime of South Africa, such as the systematic building of roads in the West Bank for Israelis only and on which Palestinians are forbidden to travel. Or the "temporary" law that forbids Palestinians in the occupied territories, who have married Israeli citizens, to live with their spouses in Israel. And, most importantly, the Wall, which is officially called "the separation obstacle". In Afrikaans, "apartheid" means separation.

The "vision" of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert amounts to the establishment of a "Palestinian state" that would be nothing more than a string of Palestinian islands in an Israeli sea. It is easy to detect a similarity between the planned enclaves and the "Bantustans" that were set up by the White regime in South Africa - the so-called "homelands" where the Blacks were supposed to enjoy "self-rule" but which really amounted to racist concentration camps.

Because of this, we are right when we use the term "apartheid" in our daily struggle against the occupation. We speak about the "apartheid wall" and "apartheid methods". The order of General Naveh has practically given official sanction to the use of this term. Even institutions that are far from the radical peace camp did relate it to the Apartheid system.

Therefore, the title of former President Jimmy Carter's new book is fully justified - "Palestine - Peace not Apartheid". The title aroused the ire of the "friends of Israel" even more than the content of the book itself. How dare he? To compare Israel to the obnoxious racist regime? To allege that the government of Israel is motivated by racism, when all its actions are driven solely by the necessity to defend its citizens against Arab terrorists? (By the way, on the cover of the book there is a photo of a demonstration against the wall that was organized by Gush Shalom and Ta'ayush. Carter's nose points to a poster of ours that says: "The Wall - Jail for Palestinians, Ghetto for Israelis".)

It seems that Carter himself was not completely happy with the use of this term. He has hinted that it was added at the request of the publishers, who thought a provocative title would stimulate publicity. If so, the ploy was successful. The famous Jewish lobby was fully mobilized. Carter was pilloried as an anti-Semite and a liar. The storm around the title displaced any debate about the facts cited in the book, which have not been seriously questioned. The book has not yet appeared in Hebrew.

BUT WHEN we use the term "Apartheid" to describe the situation, we have to be aware of the fact that the similarity between the Israeli occupation and the White regime in South Africa concerns only the methods, not the substance. This must be made quite clear, so as to prevent grave errors in the analysis of the situation and the conclusions drawn from it.

It is always dangerous to draw analogies with other countries and other times. No two countries and no two situations are exactly the same. Every conflict has its own specific historical roots. Even when the symptoms are the same, the disease may be quite different.

These reservations all apply to comparisons between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the historical conflict between the Whites and the Blacks in South Africa. Suffice it to point out several basic differences:

In SA there was a conflict between Blacks and Whites, but both agreed that the state of South Africa must remain intact- the question was only who would rule it. Almost nobody proposed to partition the country between the Blacks and the Whites. Our conflict is between two different nations with different national identities, each of which places the highest value on a national state of its own.

In SA, the idea of "separateness" was an instrument of the White minority for the oppression of the Black majority, and the Black population rejected it unanimously. Here, the huge majority of the Palestinians want to be separated from Israel in order to establish a state of their own. The huge majority of Israelis, too, want to be separated from the Palestinians. Separation is the aspiration of the majority on both sides, and the real question is where the border between them should run. On the Israeli side, only the settlers and their allies demand to keep the whole historical area of the country united and object to separation, in order to rob the Palestinians of their land and enlarge the settlements. On the Palestinian side, the Islamic fundamentalists also believe that the whole country is a "waqf" (religious trust) and belongs to Allah, and therefore must not be partitioned.

In SA, a White minority (about 10 percent) ruled over a huge majority of Blacks (78 percent), people of mixed race (7 percent) and Asians (3 percent). Here, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are now 5.5 million Jewish-Israelis and an equal number of Palestinian-Arabs (including the 1.4 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel).

The SA economy was based on Black labor and could not possibly have existed without it. Here, the Israeli government has succeeded in excluding the non-Israeli Palestinians almost completely from the Israeli labor market and replacing them with foreign workers.

IT IS important to point out these fundamental differences in order to prevent grave mistakes in the strategy of the struggle for ending the occupation.

In Israel and abroad there are people who cite this analogy without paying due attention to the essential differences between the two conflicts. Their conclusion: the methods that were so successful against the South African regime can again be applied to the struggle against the occupation - namely, mobilization of world public opinion, an international boycott and isolation.

That is reminiscent of a classical fallacy, which used to be taught in logic classes: an Eskimo knows ice. Ice is transparent. Ice can be chewed. When given a glass of water, which is also transparent, he thinks he can chew it.

There is no doubt that it is essential to arouse international public opinion against the criminal treatment by the occupation authorities of the Palestinian people. We do this every day, just as Jimmy Carter is doing now. However, it must be clear that this is immeasurably more difficult than the campaign that led to the overthrow of the South African regime. One of the reasons: during World War II, the people who later became the rulers of South Africa tried to sabotage the anti-Nazi effort and were imprisoned, and therefore aroused world-wide loathing. Israel is accepted by the world as the "State of the Holocaust Survivors", and therefore arouses overwhelming sympathy.

It is a serious error to think that international public opinion will put an end to the occupation. This will come about when the Israeli public itself is convinced of the need to do so.

There is another important difference between the two conflicts, and this may be more dangerous than any other: in South Africa, no White would have dreamt of ethnic cleansing. Even the racists understood that the country could not exist without the Black population. But in Israel, this goal is under serious consideration, both openly and in secret. One of its main advocates, Avigdor Lieberman, is a member of the government and last week Condoleezza Rice met with him officially. Apartheid is not the worst danger hovering over the heads of the Palestinians. They are menaced by something infinitely worse: "Transfer", which means total expulsion.

SOME PEOPLE in Israel and around the world follow the Apartheid analogy to its logical conclusion: the solution here will be the same as the one in South Africa. There, the Whites surrendered and the Black majority assumed power. The country remained united. Thanks to wise leaders, headed by Nelson Mandela and Frederick Willem de Klerk, this happened without bloodshed.

In Israel, that is a beautiful dream for the end of days. Because of the people involved and their anxieties, it would inevitably turn into a nightmare. In this country there are two peoples with a very strong national consciousness. After 125 years of conflict, there is not the slightest chance that they would live together in one state, share the same government, serve in the same army and pay the same taxes. Economically, technologically and educationally, the gap between the two populations is immense. In such a situation, power relations similar to those in Apartheid South Africa would indeed arise.

In Israel, the demographic demon is lurking. There is an existential angst among the Jews that the demographic balance will change even within the Green Line. Every morning the babies are counted - how many Jewish babies were born during the night, and how many Arab. In a joint state, the discrimination would grow a hundredfold. The drive to dispossess and expel would know no bounds, rampant Jewish settlement activity would flourish, together with the effort to put the Arabs at a disadvantage by all possible means. In short: Hell.

IT MAY be hoped that this situation will change in 50 years. I have no doubt that in the end, a federation between the two states, perhaps including Jordan too, will come about. Yasser Arafat spoke with me about this several times. But neither the Palestinians not the Israelis can afford 50 more years of bloodshed, occupation and creeping ethnic cleansing.

The end of the occupation will come in the framework of peace between the two peoples, who will live in two free neighboring states - Israel and Palestine - with the border between them based on the Green Line. I hope that this will be an open border.

Then - inshallah - Palestinians will freely ride in Israeli cars, and Israelis will ride freely in Palestinian cars. When that time comes, nobody will remember General Yair Naveh, or even his boss, General Dan Halutz. Amen.

[JPN Commentary: Here is a response to the Uri Avnery article which does a good job at exposing what I see as the serious fallacies embedded in Avnery's analysis (and outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). Friedman and Tilley's article does so even as it acknowledges Avnery's many years of good work towards peace and reconciliation among Palestinians and Israelis.

I don't much like the title of the essay - "Taken for a Ride by the Israeli Left". First of all, the Israeli left isn't homogeneous: It's a bit ironic that Friedman and Tilley resort to a generalization in an article which decries generalizing on the part of Avnery... Additionally, it implies to me that the "Israeli Left" means to deceive.

I think disagreements are natural and should be expressed and explored, but there is no need to automatically resort to assigning bad intent to those we disagree with. - RG]

The Electronic Intifada
26 January 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6447.shtml

A Response to Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery is a human rights crusader of venerable standing. He has fought, written, published and campaigned for Palestinian rights for some sixty years. He has stood on the political barricades and faced down bulldozers to defend Palestinians from Israeli military abuse. His articles, books, and magazine denounced Israel's seizure of Palestinian land before most of the "new historians" learned to write. He even denounces legalized discrimination against Palestinian Israelis in uncompromising terms and has called for Israel to become "a state of all its citizens", although still retaining a large Jewish majority (e.g., see his recent "What Makes Sammy Run?"). As a founder of the peace group Gush Shalom, he remains the recognized godfather of liberal Zionism and no one doubts his sincerity in insisting on a two-state solution.

Given all this, it may seem odd that many people working hard for a stable peace in Israel-Palestine find Mr. Avnery so immensely irritating. The reason stems from his moral contradictions, all too common to liberal Zionism: that is, while taking an unflinching moral stand against racist abuses of Palestinians, he somehow drops the same principles in assuming that Israel itself has a right to preserve its "Jewish character" at the expense of Palestinian rights. For it is all too obvious that sustaining an "overwhelming" Jewish majority in Israel, essential to preserving its "Jewish character," requires that Israel sustain a whole cluster of racist practices, such as giant Walls to keep people from mixing and not allowing Palestinian exiles to return.

Liberal Zionists who cling to Mr. Avnery's analyses consistently trip over this moral fallacy. They want the occupation to end and find oppression of Palestinians morally abhorrent, and some even believe that discrimination against Palestinian Arabs must end. But they don't want Israel's status as a state run for only one ethnic group to end. They must therefore endorse whatever discrimination is deemed essential to preserving Israel's Jewish majority, particularly in keeping those Palestinians expelled from what is now Israel from ever coming back. In this view, Israel itself is morally okay -- a "miracle," as David Grossman recently put it -- or it would be okay if its leaders hadn't stupidly stumbled into military occupation after the 1967 war.

The result of this conundrum is moral chaos. While bald ravings about ethnic cleansing by racists like Avigdor Lieberman are considered repellent, the earlier ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel is considered acceptable -- a convulsion of war violence that has (it is never explained how) been morally transcended. The solution, in this view, is not to redress that founding sin but simply to stabilize Jewish statehood, which is understood mostly as relieving Jewish-Israeli fear of attack or annihilation. Recognizing that some modicum of justice is required to achieve this "peace", the liberal-Zionist goal is to create a Palestinian state next door (safely demilitarized, of course, and not necessarily within the 1948 green line).

It takes a special kind of denial to hold onto this worldview, especially in light of fresh histories like Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which demolish the soothing fantasy that Israel's history of ethnic cleansing was an accident of war. This isn't surprising in itself: nationalist myths everywhere dismantle slowly. But Mr. Avnery does not fall into the classic category. He exposed Zionist crimes before anyone else. Yet he has never lost his affection for Jewish statehood or his dedication to preserving Israel's Jewish majority in Israel. He knows that, in 1948, Zionist troops ruthlessly terrorized and expelled hundreds of thousands of defenceless Palestinians from their villages and threw them out of the country. But he believes that the agenda of preserving the Jewish-Israeli society that he treasures not only mandates but grants moral authority to not allowing them back.

It is from this muddle of contradictory tenets that Mr. Avnery approaches the "apartheid" charge, given new publicity by President Carter's recent book. In a recent Counterpunch essay, "Freedom Ride: Israel and Apartheid", he rejects any lessons the comparison suggests for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine.

Mr. Avnery's argument against the apartheid analogy is not that Israeli state policies toward the Palestinians are not racist. He agrees that the occupation is racist and that the settlements and the Wall are creating a Bantustan Palestinian state. He endorses the term "apartheid" to describe Israeli policy in the West Bank. He also argues what is incontestably true: that many people treat the comparison of Israel with South Africa too casually and commit errors of logic. (His "Eskimo" comparison, about chewing water, is an uncomfortably antiquarian reference to the Inuit but makes the point). This care we endorse: genuine differences distinguish South Africa and Israel that do require careful consideration.

But Mr. Avnery's own analysis includes glaring logical and factual errors, stemming partly from a fundamental misunderstanding of what apartheid was and how it worked. He seems to think apartheid was an extreme version of Jim Crow, in which blacks were subordinated while being incorporated into a white society. In fact, apartheid was a system of racial domination based, crucially, on the notion of physical separation. The doctrines, policies, and collective psychologies of the Israeli and South African systems were much more similar than he recognizes and it is vital to spell these out.

Mr. Avnery's main argument stems from his most profound misconception. He warns that a campaign for South African-style unification in Israel-Palestine would only trigger new ethnic cleansing, because brooding Jewish anxiety about the "demographic threat" (too many non-Jews) would inspire Israeli reactionaries to forcibly expel the entire Palestinian population. Yet he considers this risk special to Israel, on grounds that it didn't exist in South Africa: "no White would have dreamt of ethnic cleansing. Even the racists understood that the country could not exist without the Black population." Yet a key feature of apartheid was forcible population transfers. Celebrated books have been written about the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and lands in an attempt to create a "white South Africa" in which blacks would be allowed only as "guest workers". So widespread was the policy of "forced removals" in order to "whiten" South Africa that we will probably never know how many people were really moved; the campaigns were far more systematic attempts at "ethnic cleansing" than anything attempted in Eastern Europe. If Mr. Avnery thinks apartheid had nothing to do with population transfer, he does not even vaguely understand apartheid.

Mr. Avnery supports this flawed analysis by offering four reasons why the apartheid comparison should not guide a solution in Israel-Palestine. First, he says that consensus on a one-state solution was already in place in South Africa. Blacks and whites, he argued, "agreed that the state of South Africa must remain intact -- the question was only who would rule it. Almost nobody proposed to partition the country between the Blacks and the Whites".

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Territorial separation of blacks and whites was the central plank of official apartheid policy at least until 1985 -- that is, for almost four decades. Central to the policy was the claim that 87 percent of the country's land mass belonged only to whites and that blacks were allowed into it only under sufferance and without rights. In the late 1970s, for example, a senior Cabinet Minister told the South African Parliament that eventually "there will be no black South Africans". Part of this policy was the creation of phoney "black homelands" which were given sham "independence" to make the point that their "citizens" were no longer South African -- just as Israel's "two state" policies promise a "homeland" for Palestinians today. The acknowledgment that South Africa should remain intact was a consequence of apartheid's defeat, not a feature of the system.

Second, Mr. Avnery argues that, while racial separation in South Africa was a white agenda universally rejected by blacks, in Israel-Palestine both peoples want separate states. "Our conflict is between two different nations with different national identities, each of which places the highest value on a national state of its own." He affirms that only a radical micro-minority on both sides wants a single state. On the Jewish side, he says, these radicals are the religious zealot settlers who insist on retaining all of the West Bank. On the Palestinian side, the rejectionists are "the Islamic fundamentalists [who] also believe that the whole country is a "waqf" (religious
trust) and belongs to Allah, and therefore must not be partitioned."

These sweeping assessments of either case do not hold up. First, black South Africans were not so monolithic in their own views. The ANC supported unification and democracy but factions of South Africa's black population bought into the "homelands" concept. Best known for this was the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu, but other groups also embraced the homeland policy for the power and patronage it allowed them -- much as Fatah is embracing the truncated "state" offered by Israel today. Yes, the vast majority of black opinion rejected separate "homelands". But the small section of black society that felt it had something to gain from the "homelands" did not.

Palestinian views are not so monolithic, either. Polls conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre from 2000 through 2006 have shown Palestinian support for a two-state solution (understood as an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) running at only around 50 percent. Adherence to the vision of one Palestinian state in all of Palestine has waffled between 8 and 18 percent. But notably, support for a single "bi-national" state in all of Israel-Palestine has hovered stubbornly between 20 and 25 percent -- a strikingly high figure given that the one-state option is not under public debate among Palestinians. (The reason for this silence is not that unification is unpopular, but that its discussion would undermine the premise for the Palestinian Authority's "interim" existence and is therefore politically very sensitive.) If a quarter of Palestinians support a one-state solution even under these daunting conditions, it is not unreasonable to propose, as do veteran Palestinian activists like Ali Abunimah (author of the new book, One Country), that wider Palestinian support for unification would quickly manifest under more conducive ones.

It's also relevant that, in these same polls, Palestinian support for an Islamic state has run at about 3 percent. Clearly, 25-percent Palestinian support for a unified state can't be reduced, as Mr. Avnery suggests, to Islamic radicalism.

Third, Mr. Avnery points to the different demographics of the two conflicts. In South Africa, a 10-percent white minority ruled over a 78-percent black majority (as well as "coloreds" and Indians), while in Israel-Palestine the Jewish and Palestinian populations are roughly equal, at about 5 million each. But this point leaves the argument hanging -- so what? Any idea that it somehow makes the comparison inapplicable fails in two ways. First, it fails morally. Does oppression change qualitatively if the population distribution between the oppressor and oppressed vary? Would apartheid not have been apartheid if whites were half the population? Second, it fails in its political logic. Surely the black "threat" perceived by a 10-percent white minority in South Africa was far greater than the Palestinian Arab "threat" now feared by a Jewish-Israeli population standing at roughly 50 percent. Not surprisingly, the fear of being "swamped" by a large black majority was frequently cited by apartheid's supporters as a rationale for continuing to deny black rights. Yet Israeli Jews are far better positioned to retain political and economic power in Israel than were whites (especially Afrikaners) in South Africa.

Finally, Mr. Avnery holds that unification in South Africa was driven by racial economic interdependency. "The SA economy was based on Black labor and could not possibly have existed without it". In its initial phases, apartheid
did try to minimize any dependence on blacks, by trying to relegate blacks only to menial labour. Black Africans were not permitted to do work reserved for whites (or for Indians and "coloreds"). There was, for example, a strict ban on blacks working as artisans outside the segregated homelands. The system started unravelling in the late 1960s when the economy ran out of whites in some semi-skilled and skilled occupations and the government was forced to allow blacks in. That change gave black workers greater bargaining power and, with other factors, provided a base for more effective organised resistance. Whether the Israelis will be forced at some point to let Palestinians back into the labour market is hard to know. But even here the differences are not as stark as he claims.

In his conclusions, Mr. Avnery argues that the apartheid comparison also fails on the question of an international boycott. "It is a serious error," he insists, "to think that international public opinion will put an end to the occupation. This will come about when the Israeli public itself is convinced of the need to do so." This argument suggests that Mr. Avnery does not understand how apartheid fell, either. White South Africans did not change their minds about apartheid simply because the moral and political case was finally brought home to them by black street demonstrations and labour strikes. They did so when a strategic campaign of hard and bloody domestic struggle was supported by concerted international pressure, which included boycotts of South African products and the currency as well as artists and sports teams.

The economic effects of these sanctions against South Africa are still debated. But the psychological effect of international isolation on South African whites' willingness to change was immense and became one of the key levers which ended apartheid. As late as 1992, when whites were asked to endorse a negotiated settlement in a referendum, media interviews with voters showed that whites' desire to "rejoin the international community" persuaded many who might have voted against a settlement to endorse it.

To attribute the "lack of bloodshed" in that transition to "wise leaders" like de Klerk and Nelson Mandela is to misunderstand how those historic figures were able to play their vital role precisely because of this far larger and historical collective effort. Just as it was impossible to imagine a negotiated end to apartheid without international isolation of South Africa, so it is hard to imagine that a political solution to the Palestinian conflict will be achieved unless substantial pressure is exerted on Israel by the world.

But an even deeper mistake underlies Mr. Avnery's pessimism about a one-state solution on the South African model: he seems to confuse the South Africa that everyone saw at the 1990 negotiations with the South Africa that existed before then. This all-too-common error holds that the factors which led to a settlement were immutable parts of the South African reality. In fact, political consensus about the need for national unity crystallized only after a long and bitter struggle, whose successful outcome had seemed just as implausible to most commentators as a shared society in Israel now seems to Mr Avnery. Forgetting this history indeed erases from it those courageous campaigners who fought for decades for the principle of national unity, sometimes at the cost of their lives. In fact, South Africans were never united in the view that the country had to be shared -- many whites still reject the notion today. This is partly why, as late as the 1980s, much scholarship and "expert" commentary on South Africa continued to assume that the conflict was intractable and that a shared society was impossible, citing many of the same arguments that are repeatedly cited in the Palestinian case.

It clearly suits those who believe that partition is the only solution to act as though the world never changes. But it does -- and did under apartheid. It will change also in Palestine.

Steven Friedman is a South African political analyst based
in Johannesburg.

Virginia Tilley is a US citizen now working as a senior researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. Comments can reach them at her email address, tilley@hws.edu.

Paul Delmotte

http://mondediplo.com/2007/01/05hamas

Tension remains high in Gaza because of clashes between Fatah and Hamas militants, which increased when Mahmoud Abbas decided to hold new presidential and parliamentary elections. One of the main sticking points is Hamas's refusal to recognise Israel formally.

THE failure to form a Palestinian coalition government again raises the question of why Hamas persists, despite considerable pressure at home and abroad, in refusing to recognise Israel officially and explicitly. The first answer, which is rarely discussed, is that Hamas is convinced that recognition would be a pointless concession.

It has not forgotten that for decades the international community pressured the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Fatah, both secular bodies, to make the same concession: they were given nothing in return, neither a Palestinian state nor a capital in East Jerusalem. Worse, Israel did not accept any responsibility for the Palestinian exodus of 1947-49 nor did it recognise the right of return (or the entitlement to compensation) of some 5 million refugees.

In March 2006 the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, announced a unilateral programme of withdrawal from occupied territory, stipulating that Israel intended to keep 36.5% of the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem and the Jordan valley. This represented almost half of the 22% of the post-1949 Palestine on which Yasser Arafat had hoped to build a Palestinian state. Hamas consequently seems to have decided to stick to the position the PLO defended in the 1970s and 1980s, keeping recognition for Israel in reserve, while making a succession of minor statements reflecting de facto recognition of Israel.

Many commentators maintain that Hamas's radical stance is due entirely to its Islamist world view. As the researchers Bruno Guigue (1) and Khaled Hroub (2) have often pointed out, this analysis of Hamas policy is based only on its charter, published in August 1988.

Hroub has analysed in detail three key documents published by Hamas since the charter: its autumn 2005 election manifesto, Change and Reform; its March 2006 draft programme for a government of national unity; and the government programme presented by the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, to the new parliament on 27 March 2006. Hroub points out that Hamas is now a different organisation from the Hamas that took shape at the beginning of the first intifada in December 1987.

Democratic concerns

According to Hroub, Hamas now claims to be concerned about political freedom: freedom of expression, press and association; pluralism; the separation of powers; and due electoral process. It also wants to build a proper civil society and uphold minority rights. Between the first and third documents, the number of religious references decreases and the theme of armed struggle disappears almost completely (3) to make room for matters of governance and civil reform. There is also a noticeable change towards the "two states for two peoples" solution and in the attitude of Hamas towards international agreements on Palestine.

Western media and government bodies have not publicised any of these documents. Hroub notes that of the 13 items in the manifesto addressing legislative and judicial policy, only the first, which stipulates that Islamic law should be the principal source of legislation, has attracted any public attention; it prompted fears of an Islamic society. The 12 other items, which do not mention Islam, have gone unnoticed.

Guigue writes: "On an issue as essential as the Islamic status of Palestine it is striking that the election manifesto makes passing reference to Qur'anic tradition, without dwelling on the topic." He also finds it significant that the manifesto should refer to United Nations resolutions when condemning Israel's illegal occupation. He writes that this does not mean that Hamas is ready officially to recognise the state of Israel, a requirement that also features in several UN resolutions. But explicit appeals for compliance with international law "will sooner or later lead to accepting all the [attendant] consequences".

As for the programme for a national unity government, its preamble recalls the need to preserve non-negotiable national imperatives: an end to occupation; the right of return; the right to resistance in all forms; the construction of an independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital; and the rejection of partial solutions.

Setting aside the fact that these priorities are common to all Palestinian organisations, including those that the international community is prepared to endorse, many clauses in the programme reflect the efforts of Hamas to make allowance for international demands, even if they fall short of fulfilling all its requirements.

Hroub maintains that the programme as a whole hinges on a two-state solution, referring to territory occupied in 1967 without any mention of liberating the whole of Palestine or destroying Israel, as was the case in the charter. He notes that the government platform of 27 March shows no sign of backtracking on the ideas outlined in the programme of national unity. This is significant, for by this stage the other political organisations had rejected plans for a coalition. The platform consequently only concerned Hamas, which had no further need for concessions.

Stifling Palestine

The silence that has greeted the texts published by Hamas should prompt questions about the international community and the European Union. The obsession with Hamas's Islamist leanings was not the only the justification for the decision to impose economic sanctions on the Palestinians unless they unilaterally renounced their part in the violence and officially recognised Israel (without any gesture being demanded of Israel), but it made it easier to convince public opinion of the need for sanctions.

Commentators in the United States and Europe have been quick to condemn the shocking remarks about Israel and the Holocaust made by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (4), since October 2005. But their swift response has distracted attention from the positive reception that his words enjoyed in the Middle East, and farther afield. What Ahmadinejad made explicit with these remarks (at least as they were understood by some in his Arab and Muslim audience) was that recognition or denial of the reality of the Holocaust was less important than the idea that, 60 years after the Nazi genocide, the West still uses it, along with Zionism, to justify the fate of the Palestinian Arabs.

Several years ago the Israeli historian Dan Diner identified three orders of legitimacy for Israel, to which he allocated degrees of universality (5). He classified Zionist legitimacy as unilateral, because it was only valid for Jews, being based on a promise by God to the Jews (6). He acknowledged that Jewish legitimacy, rooted in the horror of the Holocaust, was only partly universal. He rated Israeli legitimacy as universal since, in his view, it was based on Israel's irrevocable right to exist because it already did exist.

We may acknowledge this Israeli legitimacy and conclude, as Maxime Rodinson did, that "the rights derived from making good use of land, from work done and from personal sacrifice are the only ones that may be validly invoked" (7). In which case, we may ask why Palestinians are not entitled to such rights.

Recogition is a two-way street

The legitimacy of Israel is only likely to be recognised, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world, if it is unbreakably linked with universal legitimacy for Palestine. In resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, on the partition of Palestine under the British mandate, the UN General Assembly jointly recognised the legitimacy of two independent states.

It might be helpful to recall the legitimacy granted by the UN to Israel. The international community seems to be suffering from amnesia in demanding that Hamas recognise Israel unconditionally. There is no longer any question at the UN of the 44% of the territory covered by the mandate, offered (8) to the Arab state of Palestine under resolution 181. Nor yet of resolution 194 covering the Palestinian refugees' right of return and entitlement to compensation.

By locking itself in this omission and making de jure recognition of Israel an obligation the EU is digging itself deeper into a hole. It will soon be unable to frame an overall strategy, backed by political proposals, to convince Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that the West has decided to end double standards.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass once joked that Hamas extremists think that Allah will give Palestine back to the Arab world and Islam in 50 years, whereas their more moderate brothers think it will take five centuries. As long ago as 1995 Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (9) offered Israel a long-term truce in exchange for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza. In 2004 he added that, if this was achieved, he would leave the rest of the occupied territories to history.

Senior Hamas leaders have repeated this offer since and allowance should be made for such statements. They seem to confirm Guigue's view that Hamas has come to "tacitly accept a share-out of Palestine on the basis of the borders as they stood before the 1967 war".

It took Fatah 20 years to make this acceptance official. Europe's lack of political courage since Hamas first made these concessions is partly to blame for the collapse of subsequent negotiations. Given Israel's persistently intransigent attitude and the worsening tension in the Middle East, it is urgent that the international community act and work towards a solution based on Hamas's de facto recognition of Israel.

"The international community," writes Guigue, "must finally show that its resolutions are serious, after 40 years of conniving with Israel".

-----

Translated by Harry Forster

*Paul Delmotte teaches international politics at the Brussels Institute of Social Communication Studies (IHECS) and lectures at Brussels Free University (ULB)

(1) http://www.oumma.com, 27 March 2006. Bruno Guigue is the author of Proche-Orient: la guerre des mots, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2003.

(2) "A new Hamas through its new documents", Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. XXXV, n° 4, Washington, DC, summer 2006. Khaled Hroub is a specialist on Hamas and author of Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington DC, 2000.

(3) In Change and Reform, only a few passages mention "armed struggle" and they lump it together with all the means Hamas considers legitimate to end the occupation. In the government platform of March 2006, Hroub points out that it is highly significant that the main reference to resistance underlines its importance in the past.

(4) On 11-12 December the Iranian authorities organised a conference in Tehran emphasising denials that the Holocaust happened. During it Ahmadinejad said that Israel "would soon disappear".

(5) See "Les trois légitimités d'Israël", Le Monde, 18 19 August 2002. Diner teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Jewish history and culture at Leipzig University.

(6) It is simplistic to consider a "divine promise" as the basis for the Zionist movement, which was secular at the outset.

(7) Maxime Rodinson, Peuple juif ou problème juif?, La Découverte, Paris, 1997.

(8) The Arabs of Palestine accounted for 66% of the total population. The UN allocated 56% of the land to the Jewish community which then numbered 650,000. In 1948-9 Israel seized half of the remaining 44%.

(9) Founder of Hamas in 1987. He was killed in a deliberate Israeli attack on 22 March 2004.

Haaretz
24 January 2007

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/817008.html

Anyone who wants to become acquainted with Israeli society should go to the checkpoints. Not for a quarter of an hour, under the guidance of commanders who will glory in the pavilion they built for the people waiting in line and will explain that the upgrading and the expansion of the checkpoint are intended to benefit the locals. Those who really want to know the checkpoints should rather dwell here for hours, during several days. When you observe the soldiers, you will discover many Israeli characteristics among them, characteristics in which we have always taken pride.

Comradeship, for example. The comradeship is so strong that there are those who feel they can even deviate from the norms that have been created at the checkpoint, which are perverted in any case. At the Taysir checkpoint, for example, in two cases documented during the past two weeks, a soldier urinated in public, and in the presence of women. Perhaps it was the same soldier both times, or perhaps two different soldiers. This was but an extreme manifestation of the scorn the soldiers at the checkpoint demonstrate for the people who are at their mercy and must pass through there - teachers, farmers, merchants, schoolchildren, workers at the settlements. But this is also an expression of the soldiers' self-confidence, of the knowledge that none of their comrades will prevent them from doing things they would not do in Binyamina or Bnei Brak.

The willingness to help is also an Israeli trait. The very same soldier helped a policeman ensconced in his jeep at this remote checkpoint, located at the end of the Jordan Valley. On Tuesday last week, this soldier collected the identity cards of a number of drivers, gave them to the policeman in the jeep and returned to the drivers with the ID cards and with traffic violation tickets and a payment of a fine of NIS 100 each, which they would have to pay for the benefit of the state treasury, for not wearing seat belts. And incidentally, they were wearing seat belts, although their cars had already been waiting for half an hour or more.

Inventiveness is another blessed Israeli trait. A military order prohibits all Palestinians from entering and sojourning in the Jordan Valley, except for those who live there and work for the most part at Jewish settlements. In recent weeks, the soldiers at the Taysir checkpoint have told inhabitants of the Jordan Valley who "dared" to spend the night outside the valley and return to it in the morning that "this is forbidden." A year and a half ago they decided that it was "forbidden" for farmers to bring their produce through this checkpoint - as a result, these farmers had to make a detour of about 30 kilometers and pass through a different checkpoint. When it was made clear to the soldiers that there was no such order, they found a method to keep drivers away from the checkpoint: They obligated those who transport vegetables into the West Bank to unload all crates before the checkpoint, supposedly for inspection, and to reload them.

Tenacity is also considered to be an admirable trait, especially in the army. Brigade commanders come and go, soldiers are replaced and yet, during the past two years, the reports about the distant Taysir checkpoint have remained the same: soldiers who invent harassments, waiting times way beyond what is justified, on various false excuses (one time it is construction work at the checkpoint, another time forged documents and yet another time a security warning), and reports of people who were made to pass through a different checkpoint.

It is easy to claim that Taysir is exceptional. It is a fact that the reported behavior of that particular soldier was seen by his commanders as very grave, and he was suspended from his position. The brigade also denied the veracity of reports by inhabitants that the specific soldier was present and "served" at the checkpoint even after he was suspended for about two hours on one day and three hours on another. Brigade officials stressed that the suspension of this soldier is still in force, with the same assertiveness as those people who said they had seen him again at the checkpoint. In any case, in the past, too, after this kind of information was brought to the attention of the commanders, the situation at the checkpoint improved for several days and the waiting time was shorter, and then everything returned to the status quo ante. Each of the many dozens of checkpoints has developed its own methods of harassment over the years. They derive from the implicit order behind the existence of every checkpoint: Prevent Palestinian freedom of movement for the sake of the welfare of the Jewish settlements; that is to say - Israel. One gets sick of reading about the checkpoints. One gets even sicker of writing about them. And the most sickening thing of all is to pass through them. But because the Palestinians have no alternative but to continue to pass through them, these checkpoints will continue to be the representatives of Israeli society.

[JPN Commentary: Daniela Yanai, a Jerusalem-based Israeli attorney, writes in this op-ed in the LA Times about plans of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build its new "Museum of Intolerance" atop an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem. According to Yanai, although building over the ancient Muslim tombs would be tantamount to a desecration, Simon Weisenthal Center officials continue to insist that the property is suitable for a museum dedicated to combatting intolerance.

Yanai uses this controversy to delve into the meaning of tolerance and the problem posed by the "ideology of exclusivity" that underlies efforts to define Jerusalem as either exclusively Jewish or exclusively Palestinian. She criticizes the Wiesenthal Center's claims that its efforts to push ahead with the construction are designed to oppose "those extreme elements whose sole objective is to reclaim the heart of Jerusalem." The narrow-mindedness of the Center's justification for going ahead with construction indicates that even the dead -- and those who try to honor them -- are subject to the sweeping national ideologies of those who believe that their rights supersede and even cancel out those of their neighbors.

Land expropriation has been going on for a long time in Jerusalem, of course, but rarely are the issues so starkly symbolic as they are in this case. Yanai understands very well what is at stake here for Palestinians who are routinely denied basic residency and human rights in Jerusalem. The organization for which she works as a staff attorney, Ir Amim, is an Israeli non-profit that defends the rights of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem while asserting that negotiation, and not the use of force, is the key to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. --LS]

January 23, 2007

www.latimes.com

LAST WEEK, Israel's High Court of Justice ordered Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center and the municipality of Jerusalem to explain why they should be allowed to construct a new Museum of Tolerance on the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery.

On the surface, it's a straightforward enough question. But it's really about more than the fate of one cemetery and whether it should be preserved. What is at stake is the nature of both people's claims, Palestinian and Israeli, to Jerusalem.

The site of the museum is in the heart of downtown Jerusalem, on a parking lot next to the city's Independence Park. Designed by architect Frank Gehry and kicked off in 2004 with a visit by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the museum (a sister, of sorts, to the one of the same name in Los Angeles) seems, at first glance, like a welcome initiative. In a region wracked by intolerance, what better way to improve the chances for peace than to teach people about different cultures?

But the museum itself became a test case for tolerance when bulldozers digging its foundation unearthed human remains last year, and the project has been mired in legal disputes ever since. Even though archeologists and historians knew that the site was on top of an ancient cemetery — parts of which are visible just adjacent to the site — spokespeople for the Jerusalem municipality claimed that the discovery of remains came as a surprise.

What happened? How could the city have risked the embarrassment of the project's sponsors and the withdrawal of donors from this multimillion-dollar endeavor, not to mention the far more dangerous risk of inciting the Muslim community worldwide? The answer lies in the ideology of "exclusivity" that characterizes the attitude of leaders on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially in Jerusalem.

The way the leaders see it, the very existence of one community constitutes a threat to the rights of the other. In other words, if Jerusalem is to be Jewish, in the eyes of Israeli leaders it cannot also be Palestinian — and vice versa in the eyes of the Palestinian leadership. Both sides try to bolster their exclusive claim to the city with proof of their historic, religious and archeological ties to it, and both sides minimize, and in some cases outright deny, the ties of the other.

The Mamon Allah, or Mamila Cemetery, is a Muslim cemetery dating to at least the 13th century. Muslim tradition holds that associates of the Prophet Muhammad are buried there. It is a historical and archeological treasure, as well as a holy site for Muslims.

The cemetery is located in what became West Jerusalem — the Israeli side of the city — after the 1948 war for independence, and Israel declared it "absentee property." In 1955, when the first changes in the status of the area were proposed, no public notice of the plan was issued in Arabic — contrary to Israeli law. Bit by bit, over the next 30 years, the municipality of Jerusalem expropriated the area and acquired ownership in the property. Objections were filed along the way but to no avail.

In defending the museum's proposed location, the Wiesenthal Center notes that in 1964, the president of the Muslim religious courts in Israel declared the cemetery "abandoned," thereby paving the way for its future development. Many Muslims today, however, reject this ruling on the grounds that the decision contradicts Muslim law and that the official who made it was corrupt. The Wiesenthal Center also argues that no one has been buried in the cemetery since the 19th century — although this claim is disputed as well.

"At no time did the government of Israel or the city of Jerusalem designate the site as a Muslim cemetery," notes the Wiesenthal Center. Rather, it had legal status as a "public open space." In other words, the actual existence of the graves is secondary to Israel's designation of the site.

But the center said something even more disturbing: Its aim is to stop "those extreme elements whose sole objective is to reclaim the heart of Jerusalem." This statement suggests that Palestinian protest at the desecration of the graves is nothing less than a disguised attempt to assert rights over Jerusalem itself, West as well as East.

This is the ideology of exclusivity. It makes any effort to preserve the graves a threat to the Israeliness of Jerusalem. By this logic, the mere presence of Palestinian cultural sites in West Jerusalem endangers Israel's claim to its capital.

Such a stance is the definition of intolerance, on either side. If allowed to prevail, the ideology of exclusivity thwarts the possibility of peace because, if one community's very existence constitutes a threat to the other, no accord is reachable. And it ignores the essential nature of Jerusalem, which must be taken into account for any solution to succeed — the living presence of two communities, Jewish and Palestinian.

Regardless of who is in charge, it is incumbent on both sides to preserve Jerusalem's unique heritage — for the maintenance of good relations between the parties, for each sides' own enrichment and dignity, and for posterity.

By insisting on construction of the museum at all costs, the Wiesenthal Center assists Israel in its efforts to erase the record of Jerusalem's Palestinian heritage. This not only belies the museum's name, it allows the ideology of exclusivity a victory over one of the world's most precious sites, the holy city of Jerusalem.

Let Our Children Live

http://www.legrandsoir.info/article.php3?id_article=4641
http://www.info-palestine.net/article.php3?id_article=621

Bassam Aramin spent 9 years in an Israeli jail for being a member of the Fatah in the Hebron area and trying to throw a grenade on an ISraeli army Jeep which was patrolling in Occupied Hebron. On Wednesday morning, an Israeli soldier shot his nine year old daughter, Abir, in the head. The soldier will not spend an hour in jail. In Israel, soldiers are not imprisoned for killing Arabs. Never. It does not matter whether the Arabs are young or old, real or potential terrorists, peaceful demonstrators or stone throwers. The army has not conducted an inquiry in Abir Aramin's death. Neither the police nor the courts have questioned anyone. There will be no investigation. As far as the Israeli Defense Forces are concerned, the shooting did not happen. The army's official account of her death is that she was hit by a stone that one of her classmates was throwing "at our forces."

We who live in Israel know that stones thrown by 10 year olds do not blow brains out. Just as we see every day the Israeli jeeps circling Palestinian children on their way to and from school and greet them with stun-bombs, "rubber" bullets and riot control gas.

A bullet penetrated Abir Aramin's skull, while she was walking to school with her sister [the hospital has since said that it was not live ammunition, but has not said what it was that killed Abir. Dorothy.] I saw her just afterwards at Hadassah Hospital, where she slept quietly in a huge hospital bed. Abir's face was white. Her huge eyes were closed. By then, she was already brain dead, and the doctors decided to allow the rest of her to die. I saw clearly that her head had been shot from behind. A young student who witnessed her shooting told journalists that the Israeli border police, part of the IDF, drove up to the girls as they came out of their school examinations. "The girls were afraid and started running away. The border police followed them in the direction in which they were retreating. Abir was afraid and stood against one of the shops at the side of the road. I was standing near her. The border policeman shot through a special hole in the window of his jeep that was standing very close to us. Abir fell to the ground… I saw that she was bleeding from the head."

Abir Aramin is dead. The doctors at Hadassah will not disclose the cause of her death to her parents or her friends. Her family has requested an autopsy. Her father, Bassam Aramin, is one of the founders of Combatants for Peace. My son, who served as an Israeli soldier in the occupied territories, is also a member. They are friends. Bassam told us that he cannot rest until his daughter's killer convinces him that nine year old Abir threatened his life or the life of the other soldiers in his jeep. I fear he will never have the chance to rest.

Abir Aramin has joined in the underground kingdom of dead children the thousands of other children killed in this country and the territories it occupies. She will be welcomed by my own little girl, Smadar. Smadar was killed in 1997 by a suicide bomber. If her killer had survived, I know he would have been sent to prison for his crime and his house would have been demolished on the rest of his family.

In the meantime, I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, "We are all victims of occupation." As I say it, I know that her hell is more terrible than mine. My daughter's murderer had the decency to kill himself when he murdered Smadar. The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night. Abir is in a grave.

Abir's father was a warrior, who fought the occupation - officially a "terrorist," although it is a strange logic that calls those who resist the occupation and dispossession of their people as terrorists. Bassam Aramin is still a fighter - but as a peace activist. He knows, as I know, that his little dead girl takes all the reasons for this war to her grave. Her small bones could not bear the burden of life, death, vengeance and oppression that every Arab child here grows up with.

Bassam, as a Muslim, believes he must pass a test - as a man of honour not to seek revenge, not to give up, not to neglect the struggle for dignity and peace on his own land When he asked me where we find strength to go on, I said the only thing I could think of: from the children who are left to us. His other children, my three living sons. From the other Palestinian and Israeli children who have a right to live without their elders forcing them into being occupiers or occupied. The so-called enlightened, western world does not get what is happening here. The whole enlightened world stands aside and does nothing to save little girls from murderous soldiers. The enlightened world blames Islam, as it once blamed Arab nationalism, for all the atrocities the non-Islamic world is inflicting upon Muslims. The enlightened west fears little girls with scarves on their heads. It is terrified of boys in keffiehs. And in Israel, children are educated to fear, most of all, the fruits of the Muslim womb. Therefore when they become solldiers they see nothing wrong in killing PAlestinian children "before they grow" . But Basam and Salwa and all of us -Jewish and Arab victims of the Israeli occupation - want to live together just as we die together. We see our children sacrificed on the altar of an occupation that has no basis in law or justice. And, outside, the enlightened world justifies it all and sends more money to the occupiers.

If the world does not come to its senses, there will be nothing more to say or write or listen to in this land except for the silent cry of mourning and the muted voices of dead children.

© Nurit Peled-Elhanan 2007

[JPN Commentary: This very sober and restrained essay by Matthew Yglesias in The American Prospect offers a clear-headed assessment of the actual role of the Israel lobby in American politics. Broaching this topic in a publication which includes a large proportion of liberal Jews among its readers is an important advance. This is a discussion that needs to take place in as calm and measured a way as possible, without intimidation from forces like the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League or hysterical accusations by those who see the lobby as all-powerful. JB]

Is There a Kosher Way to Criticize the Israel Lobby?

Matthew Yglesias, The American Prospect

Posted on January 26, 2007, Printed on February 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47148/

Retired General Wesley Clark is, like me, concerned that the Bush administration is going to launch a war with Iran. Arianna Huffington spoke to him in early January and asked why he was so worried the administration was headed in this direction. According to Huffington's January 4 recounting of Clark's thoughts, he said this: "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers."

This, of course, is true. I'm Jewish and I don't think the United States should bomb Iran, but Thursday night I was talking to a Jewish friend and she does think the United States should bomb Iran. The Jewish community, in short, is divided on the issue. It's also true that most major American Jewish organizations cater to the views of extremely wealthy major donors whose political views are well to the right of the bulk of American Jews, one of the most liberal ethnic groups in the country. Furthermore, it's true that major Jewish organizations are trying to push the country into war. And, last, it's true that if you read the Israeli press you'll see that right-wing Israeli politicians are anticipating a military confrontation with Iran. (For example, here's an article about the timing of the selection of a new top dog in the Israeli Defense Forces; Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted as saying that the new leader "will have to straighten the army out, rebuild Israel's deterrence and prepare the defenses against threats, first and foremost, against Iran.")

Everything Clark said, in short, is true. What's more, everybody knows it's true. The worst that can truthfully be said about Clark is that he expressed himself in a slightly odd way. This, it seems clear, he did because it's a sensitive issue and he worried that if he spoke plainly he'd be accused of trafficking in anti-Semitism. So he spoke unclearly and, for his trouble, got ... accused of trafficking in anti-Semitism.

James Taranto, who writes the hack "Best of the Web" column for the online version of The Wall Street Journal's hack editorial page, likened Clark's views on this to the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Scott Johnson of the influential and moronic right-wing Power Line blog argued that "Clark's comments are not simply 'anti-Israel,'" and asked "[i]s it a only a matter only of parochial concern to American Jews that they are now to be stigmatized without consequence in the traditional disgusting terms -- terms that used to result in eviction from the precincts of polite society -- by a major figure in the Democratic Party?"

Needless to say, Clark did not stigmatize American Jews. Indeed, he went out of his way to note that the American Jewish community is divided on the issue. Michael Barone's sneering attack on Clark also managed, almost incidentally, to reveal Barone's own understanding that Clark's remarks are substantially correct. Barone observed that it's "interesting to see a Democratic presidential hopeful denounce 'the New York money people,' people whom Clark spent some time with in 2003-04."

And, indeed, it is interesting, for demonstrating the bizarre rules of the road in discussing America's Israel policy. If you're offering commentary that's supportive of America's soi-disant "pro-Israel" forces, as Barone was, it's considered perfectly acceptable to note, albeit elliptically, that said forces are influential in the Democratic Party in part because they contribute large sums of money to Democratic politicians who are willing to toe the line. If, by contrast, one observes this fact by way of criticizing the influence of "pro-Israel" forces, you're denounced as an anti-Semite.

Needless to say, the increasingly ridiculous Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, was swiftly located in order to ply his trademark tactic of accusing people of anti-Semitism that he knows perfectly well aren't anti-Semites. As The Jewish Week reported, "The ADL leader told Clark that he had 'bought into conspiratorial bigotry' that increasingly sees Israel, Jews and American Jewish organizations as the driving force behind U.S. involvement in Iraq and Iran." What's more, "Foxman said Clark's comments are particularly worrisome because of the context, coming in the wake of," among other things, "a book by former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who accused Israel of pushing for war with Iran."

The context, I would say, is worrisome. "Israel" is not a unitary actor, but clearly some Israelis are pushing for war with Iran. More to the point, many American Jewish organizations are pushing for war with Iran. And before Foxman comes to lock me up, he might want to check out his own outfit's website, complete with a section on "The Iranian Threat." Meanwhile, over on AIPAC's site we can learn about the "escalating threat" from Iran. A group called The Israel Project has an Iran Press Kit page, linking only to alarmist takes on the Iranian nuclear issue and to a hawks-only set of expert sources. (Shockingly, none of these organizations are especially concerned that Israel won't join the Non-Proliferation Treaty Framework.)

For another example, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs gave Senator John McCain its "Scoop" Jackson Award in December; in his remarks accepting the award, McCain argued that "[t]he path to future success for Israel will not be an easy one, and there will be a number of difficult issues. Foremost on many minds, is, of course, Iran." He characterized "Tehran's continued pursuit of nuclear weapons" as "an unacceptable risk" -- language clearly designed to lay the groundwork for war.

With this last bit, we not only see the accuracy of Clark's remark, but, once again, the stunning hypocrisy of the anti-anti-Semitism brigades. It's clear that McCain, just like Clark, sees American Jewish organizations as key players in the Iran-hawk movement in the United States, and also that he sees concern for Israeli security as motivating those groups. Nobody, however, is going to label McCain a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist -- because, of course, McCain wants to help these groups push the United States into a military confrontation with Iran. Thus, McCain gets an award, and Clark gets called an anti-Semite.

Since Clark would like to have a future in the politics game, he ended up backing down from his remarks, explaining he didn't mean what he said. Mission accomplished for those who smeared him. But would I ever suggest that Democrats have been unduly timid on the Iran issue because they fear crossing powerful "pro-Israel" institutions? Never. Only anti-Semites think stuff like that.


Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.

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