March madness. Indiana University is promoting a prof’s statement that in Israel, US is funding "colonialism… rejected everywhere in the world." Amazing that this is on the Indiana University website. Note that Rafael Reuveny is former IDF and came here years ago (university bio – includes: Technion, Israel Institute of Technology B Aeronautical Engineering, six years in IDF). I wonder what Shaul Magid, the Brit Tzedek guy/Kabbalah scholar who is the usual IU expert, has to say about this? The release, in part:
IU Professor: U.S. must immediately stop funding Israeli colonial project
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 15, 2010
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. –
Vice President Joe Biden’s rebuke of Israel over proposed settlement expansion in Greater East Jerusalem is not only ineffective, it’s hypocritical, said Professor Rafael Reuveny, a researcher on Middle East violence and political economy at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington.
"The United States has been funding the Israeli colonial project for decades," Reuveny said.
While Israel annually receives billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars and weapons, money and easy loans are then passed on to Israeli settlers to build homes and businesses in Palestinian territory. "It is terribly difficult for Palestinians who have very few rights in their homeland," Reuveny said. "Not only has such colonialism come to be rejected everywhere else in the world, it defeats U.S. and Israeli interests and gravely risks their national security."
As the United States struggles with security problems resulting from Israel-induced anti-Americanism, Israel faces a demographic bomb. "Because Palestinians have one of the highest fertility rates in the world, they will become the majority within approximately 10-15 years," he said. "When that happens, Israeli colonial control will resemble South Africa or Rhodesia, essentially creating a system of apartheid. As a result, international pressure will mount for a bi-national state, which is a receipt for endless violence in the Middle East and around the world."
According to Reuveny, who first arrived in the U.S. from Israel in 1992, the only way to secure peace is for Israel to dismantle all settlements, evacuate all settlers, and return to the 1967 border. "Obama’s idea to freeze settlement expansion in order to bring about peace is not going to do a thing, similar to if we simply freeze the level of heroin consumption in order to bring about detoxification," he said. "By now, many Israeli citizens have come to agree with this, but religious Zionist settlers and the Israeli right wing do not, as in other efforts toward decolonization since 1945."
History has shown, he said, that a "cold-turkey," full-scale withdrawal is the only way to end wars of decolonization. "As Israel’s bankroller, it is time for the United States to stop enabling Israel and force an immediate West Bank decolonization by cutting financial and military support to Israel if it does not comply. In 1991, George H. Bush was not afraid to stand up to Israel. And it worked."
Pointing to President Obama’s speech in Cairo promising to bring peace to the region, Reuveny said the president has the opportunity to finally end this long-suffering conflict that plagues the world.
"He will then, undisputedly, deserve the Nobel Peace Prize," Reuveny said.
I agree with Reuveny. Nothing makes more common sense. A caveat: Bush Sr paid a price for his little stand-up against Israel, and that was duly noted and internalized by his son, who was a total Israeli puppet right up to near the end of his second term, when, on the way
out of the WH, he refused to green light Israel’s plea to let it bomb Iran.
Amazing that this is on the Indiana University website.
This is a bigger shift than will be noticed.
“Paging Rafael Reuveny! Paging Rafael Reuveny! You have a very urgent call at the courtesy desk from a Professor Dershowitz. Please hurry. He seems extremely agitated!”
P.S. I hope to hell Reuveny is tenured!
The dam has cracked.
oh yeah WOW Aipac must be in panick now, all these guys are labelled from now on educated anti-semi.
The guy is ex-IDF. That makes him the s-h j.
haha yes potsherd i remeber you that Goldstone earned both lol even if he is J. Einstein will call him a racist Jewish elite.
Why do I suspect nothing will happen? Obama also spoke about regulating the rating agencies like Moody’s. End the freedom of such legal bribery–who trusts the hired
salesman paid by his employer? Obama has done nothing to change this legal bribery,
responsible for giving gold stars to bundles of investments all totally worthless, subprime to the invisible core.
link to crooksandliars.com
So tot the I-P status quo will remain, fully enabled by our government. Seems that whether on the domestic front, or foreign policy front, our leaders are determined
to at most put a kid’s colorful band-aid on the huge open, gushing wound. The US
health insurance horror? How about the US national health itself?
Well, good news. If a million more Jewish Americans spoke out, there might be quicker progress, and perhaps more debates in colleges and universities. But it’s reassuring to see the growth of awareness of the Middle East throughout the past years.
Pat Buchanan has a piece on Biden – “The Poodle gets Kicked”
link to buchanan.org
oops, wrong one:
link to humanevents.com
Send this article, minus the comments, and this short piece at TPM, link to tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com
minus the comments, to your senator and congressman in DC. Not the local office.
Indiana is the northernmost of the southern states. This is going to reverberate through the churches. Add the military spouses in NC and Georgia, slowly internalizing who their military commanders have identified as a threat to their fighting husbands abroad, and the dam is breaking.
Pastor Joel Hunter, an evangelical minister with a church of 12,000 based in Florida (I think) and a huge global internet missionary presence beyond the 12M, just left the GOP because he objects to Hagee-style politicization of Christianity to foment and create more war, and he has made statements about the unfairness of Gaza. He told his parishioners that the GOP no longer represents Jesus’ values. He doesn’t think the Dems do either.
Ah, the ideas of March!
Hopefully, Hagee will meet a March 15th fate too, just delayed a bit.
I just sent key parts of Reuveny’s article with his contact info to the Obama WH, saying he is just the tip of the iceberg out here in the Heartland. I checked the box saying I’d like a return email response delivered to me. So, let’s see… According to Chris Matthews I won’t get any response as I didn’t use snail mail. I figure anyway, some staffer’s minion
will at least get to read it–maybe they’ve been told to be on the look out for citizen input to help give Hillary applicable marching orders at the AIPAC meeting…
The problem with Reuveni’s statements is that he believes that a withdrawal to the Green Line would be sufficient in solving the conflict, whereas a one state solution would result in eternal conflicts.
Certainly a withdrawal would be good for Israel as it will be able to somewhat maintain Jewish supremacy within the 1948 borders, but Reuven pretends as though recorded human history began in 1967.
Certainly the refugees from 1948, the destroyed villages and the surviving family members of the massacres would have to have those injustices addressed before Reuven can declare that the conflict is resolved for good.
It can’t be right to refer to Israeli apartheid as something that will exist in the future if the Palestinians become the majority in the area over which the Israeli government is the effective sovereign. If 40%, even 4%, of those subject to a sovereign power are disfranchised without good reason that is still apartheid in the plain sense of keeping many people apart from those who exercise the right to vote. (It’s also a form of oligarchy rather than democracy.) If the Israeli government is not practising apartheid now it must have good reason for disfranchising so many of those it controls and it would still have that reason when the Palestinian majority emerges from its cradles and creches. If it would have no good reason in those future circumstances it can have no good reason now, so is practising apartheid already and has been doing so for decades. To say that there will be, rather than there long has been, a problem is rather too comforting.
it has begun – speaking truth to power – if it builds momentum then the change will be at hand before long
I find it hard to believe that this man had a sudden enlightenment on the I/P conflict. The use of keywords describing this conflict (normally suppressed by the Israel lobby) such as apartheid and colonalism, are not used in recognition of the criminality and brutality of the Israeli regime, but as a wake up call to fellow Zionists and Jews, that Israel is now endangering its own positions due to its own self-serving actions. The fact that Reuveny brings up apartheid and colonialism is immediately relegated when he simultaneously discredits their true impact by denying that Israel is really guilty of the full extent of these acts, when the facts on the ground indicate that they have surpassed these labels into a more horrible monstrosity. Observe the use of the language here:
“”It is terribly difficult for Palestinians who have very few rights in their homeland,”
Notice Reuveny’s statement that [colonialism] is terribly difficult for Palestinians. How so? The existence of the settlers, in and of itself, does not present this so-called difficulty in the Palestinians lives. It is their immediate enabler and protector, who follow around while the settler’s commit violence and racism against the Palestinians, who are the source of the oppression of these people. And that unit is the same one this professor belonged to, and which he conspiciously absolves any guilt from.
I want to briefly highlight the latter part of the statement as well, that the “Palestinians have very few rights in their homeland.” I take objection to this statement not due to semantics but due to its implication, which against impunes Israel/IDF of having any part in manufacturing and subjecting this system of oppression onto the Palestinians. As far the concept of natural rights go, it is asserted that all human beings, inherently possess inalienable rights (which cannot be denied to them). So the statement, if it had any accuracy, would reflect that it is not that the Palestinians possess very few rights, but that they are denied their very fundamental rights, and only allowed as much freedoms as are required for basic survival. And who is the party which denies them the freedom? And which state does that unit serve? Who are the policy makers and enacters? Reuveny has no insight there, except for some very choice words demonstrating Palestinian misery, but not the policies or parties bringing that about.
Now my contention is that people like him who are readily using words bitterly condemned in Israeli circles, have started doing so because they have come to realize that the Israeli state has started to undermine itself, as very clearly stated in the so-called ‘demographic problem.’ That is the very reason that these Zionists have sprung into action, of suddenly declaring that Israel is a colonial project, or that it is ‘approaching’ apartheid (notably they still aren’t ready to admit the apartheid description). Not some genuine desire for peace, not for asserting the rights of Palestinians (for then they would realize that the problem is 1948), nor for bringing the regime responsible for atroticies to justice, but to keep their own homeland from destroying itself. In that the professor echoes the words of Henry Siegman who demonstrated the same shift of opinion, which is one of necassity for preserving the zionist project, not one for promoting the rights of the Palestinians.
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