I frequently criticize the Washington Post editorial page here for providing a night refuge (as Herzl said of Uganda) for the neoconservatives as they flee the progressive pogroms. Well yesterday the Post distinguished itself head-and-shoulders with a superb op-ed by Israeli filmmaker Ronit Avni blaming Americans for their support of the colonialist program in Palestine. Sorry, the settlements. Avni singles out the Hebron Fund and Irving Moskowitz (a backer of the American Enterprise Institute, neocon cave), also lays the usual blame at the feet of the usual suspect, the Christian Zionists, who I don’t think do all that much here.
And she also mentions Glenn Kessler’s wonderful reporting in the Post on the long/suppressed U.S. official opposition to the settlement program:
Thirty years ago, a U.S. State Department legal adviser issued an opinion that called the settlements “inconsistent” with the Fourth Geneva Convention.
These are important points that need to be teed up at the center of Obama’s effort here. Hail the Post!
A few things need to be added to Avni’s great piece. The Central Fund of Israel, which this site has reported on, needs to be mentioned too. Operates out of a fabric store on Sixth Avenue. Draws on big Jews. Milken et al, to fund the settler movement’s “urgent security needs.”
Avni is right to blame American Jews. But we know American Jews; and the Post should blame the Israel lobby, too. The actual funding of settlements is less significant than the nullification of U.S. policy in the West Bank; and that achievement belongs to the rightwing Jewish leadership that went after any politician who attacked the settlements, all thru the 90s.
Michael Walzer has lately written that we need to defeat the settler movement (to save Israel). John Mearsheimer, who also wants to save Israel, has long said the same thing. The Post Op-Ed page would do well to try to join Zionists like Walzer with realists like Mearsheimer on this point. If you really want to end settlements, you need a new political combination. You are up against strong forces. You need political imagination (just as Lincoln dreamed up new political combinations in the 1850s to end slavery). The Post would provide leadership by bringing together these forces on its influential pages. (Thanks to Andy Whitmore for tip.)
Related Posts
- ‘Washington Post’ lets two men who have seen conditions on the West Bank publish a letter criticizing Elliott Abrams
- ‘Harvard Crimson’ runs piece attacking Oren as apologist for war criminals
- Peace Now and J Street should join the battle against tax breaks for the West Bank colonists
- American press trivializes the injuries suffered by American peace volunteers in the West Bank
- While the world looks the other way, the colonization of the West Bank continues
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Its about law. The reason that the settlement project is wrong is the marriage of nationalist politics with land expropriation. BOTH Israel and Palestinian solidarity advocate for similar, but favoring different sides. A contrasting perspective is the advocacy of the rule of law, which requires equal due process before the law, distinctions between individual rights and national. The only land that is Israeli or Palestinian are those lands that are specifically titled to states, administrations, NGO's, etc. The land is just the land. Communities self-govern, NOT land. The selection of jurisdiction though describes the legal definition of sovereignty. It has NOTHING to do with title.
Its important to oppose and stop the expropriation, especially through the self-rationalization method by which it occurs. In a nutshell. 1. Establishment of military outposts in conformity of their responsibility as temporary occupier to maintain order 2. Establishment of barracks for military personnel 3. Invitation of families of long-posted military personnel to reside 4. Development of civilian support infrastructure to provide for the civilians needs (becoming a majority of people) 5. Designation as a settlement, rather than a temporary administration outpost 6. Transfer of title to Jewish National Fund offering leaseholds exclusively to Jews At each phase, the individuals (the tree level) are fulfilling their rights and responsibilities. A leaseholder rightly claims, "I paid for that right". But, the sequence as a whole, a process that was designed in fact during the likud period of the late 70's. Each administrator at the military level is fulfilling orders and policy. The people rotate out, so there is no possible institutional memory. The structure is the problem, should be publicized and contested legally. Individual former Palestinian owners or lease-holders don't have the means or access to contest each transfer. Its traceable nevertheless and needs to be conducted, documented, written up, filmed, and referenced against actual law, not false assertions that the ICJ rules on law, or that general assembly resolutions are law.
“the neoconservatives [fleeing] progressive pogroms.” Great line, if only it were true: ‘The New Neocons‘: “CNAS is behind the new counterinsurgency strategy championed by the neoconservatives before their exile from the corridors of power and advanced by their hero, Gen. David Petraeus, in the army’s new counterinsurgency manual…CNAS is the new American Enterprise Institute in that it is left-neocon central in the way that AEI and PNAC performed a similar function during the Bush years. A look at the CNAS board of directors – an institution where Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin, the Albright Group and Armitage International, the Center for American Progress and the Hoover Institution all have a place at the table – provides a few key clues as to its provenance and mission.” http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/05/12/the...
Good for the WP. But there is something going on that interest me more than what the major national papers publish. Ever since my own local paper front paged the dead Gaza children and blistered Israel and congress in their editoral I have been scanning local papers in my state every now and then to see how often the Israel and I-P issues is mentioned. I am seeing that the issue is showing up more and more on state and local level. Yesterday I saw two articles ,one in the Charolette Examiner and one in the High Point Enterprise. The one in the Charolette paper was in a new reporter blog like column entitled the 'Top Ten AIPAC politicans in congress.'..the one in the High Pont paper was entitled…'the US must end it's funding of Israel's settlements'. I said back when Gaza was going on that it was the beginning of the end for Israel with the US public in the real world outside of DC. The horror of Gaza really did shake up the American street. The NYT , the WP have zilch effect on the great unwashed masses, but everyone reads their local paper.
For once, I agree with Richard Witty, especially his second post above. There is a systemic, organic movement, the details of which he outlines, rooted in Likud Party (i.e., Neocon Movement) policies stemming from the 70s. These are based on deceitful efforts to change the facts on the ground, to abuse the power of occupation to colonize a conquered land, against international law, the deceit coming in through hiding the naked illegality through elaborate subterfuge, suppressing the victimhood of the Palestinians, displacing it by demonizing them as terrorists, contorting their objections and protests into an existential security threat, undercutting any criticism by freely and loudly hurling the Anti-Semetism epithet, redefined as opposition to the Neocon Movement, dressed up as Zionism, dressed up as Judaism generally, when what has been forever objectionable is the Likud Party/Neocon Movement policies, which are bankrupt, corrupt, and threaten to destroy Israel, and greatly diminish the United States in the process. It is good to see this op-ed piece in the Washington Post, but it will be better when the Post acknowledges its role in having empowered this awful, immoral, criminal enterprise, by abandoning its traditional journalistic role of holding Congress and its lobbyists accountable, whenever these Neocon interests should have been the target of no-holds-barred investigative reporting, but somehow have been given an almost perpetual free pass. It is past time for full accountability.
The Pals are not squatters; they've been literally living on the original Mandate land for a long time. WittyI defends the principles of classical serfdom. That was law too, and for a long time. Title is determined by politics, translated into law to be implemented.
Yes the structure is the problem–a historical example is revealed by Ukrainian history–plop down in 17th Century there, and keep going, right up to the 1930's. Or, you can look at the lack of rights of Mandate Arabs, most of whom never held any deed to the land they lived on for centuries. The Ottoman Empire allowed absentee Arab ownership, which the Jews took advantage of, buying up 6% of the land legally. That legal system didn't make itself right. Should we Americans just ignore our highest value, the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We should just keep funding Israel's activity, even post Nuremberg, that's how we honor our own dead?
Uri Anvery remembered one of the Palestinian Negotiators describing settlement movement: "We are spending endless time discussing how to share a pizza, while all the time the Israel is eating it."
Good catch. Seems the neocons never die, from Scoop Jackson to AEI/PNAC to CNAS–now that's what I call focus on their part, and lack of focus, or rather too many objectives by normal Americans, the latter being under the general umbrella of conflicting US domestic interests. If you only have one concern, even if it happens to be divergent with US interests re foreign policy, you win? Seems so. A good athlete is similarly focused, or somebody trying to win a body sculpture contest. Don't ask one to strive for good judgment on foreign policy regarding what is in the best interests of the USA and/or international humanism. Yet the USA government continually hires and is bankrolled by zionist mental athletes with moneybags… How is this good for the world? How is this good for the average US citizen? Most Americans don't even think of asking; they need to know how much Michael Jackson's glove will go for at auction. The Zionists count on this; they do it very well. No competition. BTW, anyone got a guess on how many years Madoff will be sentenced too? Or on if any of his collaborators will be revealed, and punished? LOL
You got a point. If only they would devote more attention to it than to Michael Jackson's glove.
Damn, will the WP do that? I guess they are sufficiently moved by the volcanic murmurs to toss out a feeler. Just to see if they should stand a bit more on this side or that side of the low hissing fissure.
Its a nationalist, rather than a legal, approach to residence. Its NOT one-person one-vote. Its one ancestor one vote. Its wrong to apply a nationalist approach to title no matter who does it, otherwise you end up supporting the demise of individual rights in favor of nationallist. (That's called fascism)
We should advocate for the rule of law. That is NOT what Palestinian solidarity here and elsewhere is proposing.
The tension is one of scale. The design occurs at the national scale. But the violation of rights and experience of threat is experienced at the individual. That is part of the Israeli design, but its also part of the Palestinian design. The important goal is to change the criteria of injustice from the national to the legal. The nationalist is perceived as liberatory, anti-colonial, constructing a federal entity in most cases (Algeria, Israel, India) , but as soon it achieves power, nationalism nearly always adopts suppressive features relative to minorities or those for whom the national identity isn't the primary. Tribalists, humanists, class activists are all counter-"revolutionary" to nationalist goals.
You gotta SOLVE the problem, not complain.
Precisely why Israel is a fascist country.
And so we should advocate for the rule of law as established in our founding documents and amendments thereto, and as interpreted by our highest court, especially when their is a division between federal appellate courts in their districts. I mean, come on, WittyI, even Nazi Germany had a judicial court system. You are just blowing smoke where your biased generalizations. I guess you will never learn that many regulars on this blog are actually at least as wise and smart as you. And many are more honest.
their=there where =with typed too fast. Please do keep posting Witty. How else would we really see the self-declared Zionist mentality operate? It shows what we are up against. It you believe it, it's the truth, eh? Every door2door salesman is inspired. Keep trying to close the deal at our doorsteps, Witty. It's enlightening. We all need a 2 thousand dollar rug cleaner for our 100 dollar rugs.
The Palestinian design is fundamentally reactive. Do you deny this, Witty? This is a crucial historical question. If we deconstruct what you just said, it does go back to which tribe started the fight. It sure was not the arabs now known as Palestinians. Any objective judge would see that. Criminals have a host of rationalizations, excuses for doing what they've done. It's one thing to mitigate penalty for stealing a loaf of bread for your starving family; it's quite another to ignore Jewish theft of Palestinian land and means of semi-decent survival–the bigger point is it's not American nor Just to not even allow the Palestinian claim in the halls of American media and government.
Translation: I will keep discussing it, urging more and more words, just so long as Israel keeps eating the pie. Witty is in total accord with Lieberman. Which Lieberman? Take your pick, they both represent Israel First. Keep it up folks, Witty might even give you a few crumbs.
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