The Washington Post is reporting that a plot has been uncovered to assassinate Americans. US embassy officials in Azerbaijan were allegedly alerted to the plot via a "tide of daily cable traffic" last November. The culprits? Why Iran, of course.

A probe ensued:

The plot had two strands, U.S. officials learned, one involving snipers with silencer-equipped rifles and the other a car bomb, apparently intended to kill embassy employees or members of their families.

The threat, many details of which were never made public, appeared to recede after Azerbaijani authorities rounded up nearly two dozen people in waves of arrests early this year. Precisely who ordered the hits, and why, was never conclusively determined. But U.S. and Middle Eastern officials now see the attempts as part of a broader campaign by Iran-linked operatives to kill foreign diplomats in at least seven countries over a span of 13 months. The targets have included two Saudi officials, a half-dozen Israelis and — in the Azerbaijan case — several Americans, the officials say.

In recent weeks, investigators working in four countries have amassed new evidence tying the disparate assassination attempts to one another and linking all of them to either Iran-backed Hezbollah militants or operatives based inside Iran, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern security officials.......Strikingly, the officials noted, the attempts halted abruptly in early spring, at a time when Iran began to shift its tone after weeks of bellicose anti-Western rhetoric and threats to shut down vital shipping lanes. In March, Iranian officials formally accepted a proposal to resume negotiations with six world powers on proposals to curb its nuclear program.

March? But Iran agreed to a U.N. inspector mission and to hold talks in Turkey with the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany on its nuclear program...two months earlier, on January 13th.

The first link in the blockquote above -- Azerbaijan's "waves of arrests" -- leads to WAPO's March 14th article Azerbaijan arrests alleged spies, sourced by the BBC:

The authorities in Azerbaijan have arrested 22 people on suspicion of spying for Iran, accusing them of links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The undated arrests were confirmed in a brief statement by the Azerbaijani national security ministry.

Azerbaijani TV reported last month that a plot to attack the Israeli embassy and a Jewish centre had been foiled.

At the time, Iran was also suspected of attacking Israeli targets in Thailand, India and Georgia..... according to Contact, a non-government Azerbaijani news website supported by the US National Endowment for Democracy, the arrests took place between late January and 20 February.

Contact said the detainees were being charged with treason and illegal possession of weapons.

........

Iran says Azerbaijanis have been helping Israeli assassinations in Iran.

Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was assassinated January 11th. If a news site supported by the US National Endowment for Democracy places the arrests between late January and 20 February, one might assume these current allegations are connected to that plot. However, I do not recall Iran accusing Azerbaijanis of assisting Israel in targeting Iranian scientists until today.

There's something eerily familiar in the playbook of thwarting Iranian plots to kill embassy officials. Let's not forget it was the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador ("it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script") that was used as the basis for arguing that Iran was willing to attack the US, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment:

"The 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States shows that some Iranian officials -- probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei -- have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime. We are also concerned about Iranian plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas. "

Which reminds me:

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who visited Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, this week. “Our relationship is very intense,” Mr. Lieberman said.

Car bomb attack in India Photo:Reuters

I'll bet it is. We have not forgotten about that airfield: Rumor has it that Israel and the Azeris struck a deal allowing Israel to use that country's air space and territory to stage an attack on Iranian nuclear installations.

Interestingly, the graphic used to accompany today's report by both the Washington Post and Israel National News is from a car bomb attack in India-- also blamed on Iran. Why? It's worth scrutinizing: Who was behind the Delhi bombing?

We've got the car bombings, the plots to assassinate the ambassadors and probably scores of other crimes allegedly thwarted. And all of this came to a halt after Azerbaijan arrested the Iranians allegedly tied to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which proves.........Azerbaijan is on the team?

For this [domestic Israeli] pro-peace majority to become politically empowered, Israel’s citizens must be able to trust that the Palestinians with whom they negotiate are able to enforce the agreements they reach. This is, literally, the only path to genuine Palestinian self-determination. No American president, much less Congress, will ever attempt to force Israel into a peace agreement against its will. Neither would the Europeans, who are actually irrelevant since they lack both the power and the means to do so. Terrorism aside, Palestinians have no credible military option vis-à-vis Israel. Their only hope can come by convincing Jewish Israelis that the risks and benefits of peace outweigh the risks and benefits of continued conflict.

...Barghouti’s conditions demand that Israelis voluntarily forfeit their commitment to their history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history.

Were Barghouti to ask American Jews to join him in pressuring Israel to come to its senses and negotiate a secure settlement based on the 1967 lines, with necessary adjustments on both sides and some sort symbolic (and perhaps financial) redress for Palestinians without the “right of return,” he might stand a chance of attracting significant support even among American Jews and within the Israeli peace camp. As his plan now stands, it is of a piece with the programs of Hamas and Hezbollah and with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent call for “the destruction of the Zionist regime” by peaceful means.

What I find most remarkable about Alterman's argument is how inherently conservative it is in the claim that the BDS strategy defies Israelis' "history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history." A liberal would not accept such rationalizations in any other situation in which we encountered such a gross imbalance of power. Imagine ceding to the white southerners of the 1960s "their understanding of southern history" as a reason to tolerate Jim Crow. Alterman is referring to fears of another Holocaust, but this dialogue is billed as a conversation among progressives; and I should think it is the progressive's duty to reimagine social relations and overcome traditional understandings. Also, notice how Alterman seems to honor the constellation of existing powers, American empire and the Israel lobby, which have served to preserve the occupation.

The piece is also surprising for Alterman's argument that the "democracy deficit" between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including Egypt, somehow justifies the status quo. I keep waiting for a sincere statement from Alterman about why he feels a need for a Jewish national homeland when we are doing so well here. That is the heart of his own understanding of Jewish history. 

In the same forum, Lizzy Ratner argues for BDS and offers a far more fluid understanding of Jewish history. She cites a Jewish tradition of supporting boycott when there is injustice, and disputes the claim by Bernard Avishai, who preceded Alterman, that boycott will only put Israelis on the defensive and curb the progressive force of international capital. Again there is the issue, of a progressive adopting a conservative program:

Avishai makes the perplexing claim that in cutting off the salutary spigot of corporate capital, BDS risks alienating the very Jewish Israelis who are most primed to be sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight—namely, its “most educated and cosmopolitan people.” This is an odd formulation for several reasons, the most notable being the most obvious: Since when was morality the privilege of elites? And at what point did corporations become the avant-garde of enlightened behavior?

But there is another problem, which is that the available evidence doesn’t seem to support the theory. During the years that capital has poured into Tel Aviv, nightlife may have boomed but anti-occupation protest has not. More to the point, one of the prime, historic examples of boycott and divestment—the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which inspired BDS—was enormously effective, as both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu have argued. (And they should know, to quote Omar Barghouti.)

Read Ratner's piece for the emphatic description of the facts on the ground today. That is the real argument for BDS, intolerable conditions. If not now, when?

I am a Jewish Israeli woman who was born in Tel Aviv and has been living in Ramallah and Nablus in the occupied Palestinian territories for the last 12 years. When Israelis, or people who have spent a lot of time with Israelis, hear where I live they often ask me "aren't you scared?" And I tell them the truth. Yes, I am sometimes scared of Israeli soldiers and even more of Israeli settlers. But other than that I feel more at home than I do anywhere else in the world.

But this was not always the case. When I first started visiting the occupied Palestinian Territories I was, like most Israelis, terrified of Arabs. It took me years to chip my way through this fear. Years in which again and again my heart would race, and I would think that the Arabs around me, want to kill me, only to discover time after time, that people had other things on their minds rather than me. And that if they did interact with me it was in a way that was more open and honoring than what I was used to.

It is for this reason that I was shocked, but not surprised, by the images of an angry Tel Aviv mob attacking African immigrants. The vehement racism was very familiar it was only it's target thats shifted. For example a slogan on a woman's t-shirt read: "Death to the Sudanese", an obvious rehash of the well worn "Death to the Arabs". Ilan Tsion chairman of the Israeli advocacy group "Fence For Life" said in a panel in Ramlah that, "The migration from Africa and the Palestinain Authority and Arab countries is about to sentence every single one of us to death". Tsion explained:

"I have figures here prepared by demographic experts showing that if the present situation continues then by the year 2030 there will be a drastic reduction in the percentage of Jews in the population of Israel ...we are a country surrounded by twenty enemy countries that want to annihilate us. They are just waiting for a moment that our army will grow weak. For the moment that foreigners take control of the army so they can overcome us and murder us."

You can watch the whole speech here:

"Fence for life," which has advocated for the creation of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank and for preventing family reunification of Palestinian families both In Israel and in the occupied territories, is now advocating for the expulsion of African immigrants from Israel. Their argument for all these issues are identical. They maintain that the existence of non-Jews in and around Israel is a mortal danger. This so called logic is something the vast majority of Israelis can relate to, at least on an emotional level. Most Israelis agree with Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak's statement they are living in "a villa in the jungle".

I often wondered where all this fear came from? In my case, while it was true that I was exposed to the Israeli media that only presents Arabs as terrorists, was fed similar propaganda at school, and thus saw the world through a Holocaust paradigm, all these things could not explain the scope and depth of my fears. Eventually, I realized that despite the fact that no one talked about the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 while I was growing up, my fear came from knowing that I was living on someone else's land. It came from knowing that the people who's houses and graves and trees and cactus plants I see everywhere around me are not allowed to be in this land but I am. I realized that this fear is not different than the fears that any colonialist or beneficiary of a racist system must develop towards the colonized or oppressed people in order to keep his peace of mind. The fact that this process happens unconsciously only makes it stronger.

My Israeli friend David lives with his family on a house surrounded by 5-6 dunams of land in Pardes Hanna near Haifa. David is exceptionally aware of his motivations. He told me that when he considers being engaged or opposed to what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, he asks himself, "Would I be willing to share what I have with a Palestinian refugee?" and since the answer is, "no", he does nothing. I think that it is essential to understand that it is greed, the desire to possess another's land and resources, and not fear that lies at the root of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The fear comes later, to justify having and not sharing what belongs to someone else.

But I no longer feel this way. I feel blessed that choices that I have made in my life have allowed me to remain in the country of my birth without feeling like I am stealing or taking the place of another people. This has allowed me to let go of the fear of the people around me and to enjoy and become a part of the Arab world in which I live.

A two-state solution that does not include the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is not only an unjust solution that would leave Palestinians with a non-viable, non-contiguous, so called state but it would leave Israelis trapped in their ethnocracy. As long as Israel wants to be a Jewish state, every non-Jewish ethnic minority is a threat to the "Jewishness" of the state, non Jewish Wombs are perceived as ticking bombs, babies as weapons in a never-ending demographic war.

firebombed kindergarden April 2010. (Photo: ActiveStills)

The Netanyahu government will impose fines on mayors who hire migrant workers, pushing a slight tactical difference between him and the mob-riling Knesset members responsible for the violent attacks earlier this week. Whereas rightist MK incited a riot, Netanyahu is looking to legislate non-Jewish immigrants out of the country. Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced the city officials would "personally" pay the penalties, an equivalent punishment for crimes such embezzlement.

"We will also start to enforce this so that they do not employ infiltrators. They will employ Israelis instead, the place of infiltrators is in the countries that they came from," said Yishai speaking to Israeli News Channel 2.

After the government's announcement the city of Tel Aviv fired back to Haaretz, using the same rightist patois to describe migrants.

'The municipality does not employ illegal infiltrators and has even approached contracting companies it works with to request they act according to the law, and not employ infiltrators.'

Separately, Netanyahu also distanced himself from the mob-like fiasco incensed by members of his political party, but re-affirmed their anti-migrant sentiment in an announcement yesterday. Speaking in Tel Aviv, the prime minister said "We will complete construction of the fence within two months, and soon we will begin sending infiltrators back to their countries of origin."
 

On one issue Feltman is remarkably consistent. When it comes to the Middle East, Feltman has been outspoken about the threats posed by Iran in the region. Whether in Beirut or Manama, he has publically denounced Iranian “interference” outside its own boundaries. At the same time, Feltman has generously offered US assistance to these same regimes. In other words, US interference is quite acceptable, but Iranian interference is utterly unacceptable. This might be adequate behavior for the diplomat of a country, but it is hardly the temperament for a senior UN official. It raises doubts about Feltman’s ability to be even-handed in his deliberations as a steward of the world’s political dilemmas.

Feltman’s intemperate logic was not of the distant past. It was on display in March 2012 at a Lebanese American Organization’s meeting at the Cannon Office Building in Washington, DC (as Franklin Lamb reported on this site this week). At this meeting, the former US Ambassador to Lebanon, instructed the Lebanese people as to what they must do in their next election, “The Lebanese people must join together to tell Hezbollah and its allies that the Lebanese state will no longer be hijacked for an Iranian-Syrian agenda.” The people must “use the 2013 parliamentary elections to defeat the remnants of the Syrian occupation, the pillar of which is Hezbollah.”....

A clear-eyed assessment comes from Karim Makdisi, who teaches at the American University of Beirut. Makdisi recalls Feltman’s role as Ambassador in the area, where he made himself an extremely divisive figure. Feltman pushed for UN Resolution 1559 from 2004, to disarm the Lebanese resistance, he supported the Israeli invasion in 2006, and he provided assistance to the March 14 political party against Hezbollah. In other words, Feltman actively took sides in a divided political landscape. Feltman’s appointment “would be a disaster and send exactly the wrong signal for the UN” to the region. Having recognized its weakness, the US knows that it will be the UN that takes the lead in Syria and elsewhere for the foreseeable future. Makdisi believes that in “anticipating a larger role for the UN,” the US wishes Feltman to be well-placed to “ensure that US interests are maintained as much as possible.” Whatever credibility remains with the UN will whittle in the region with this appointment.

Ethnic Cleansing / Land Theft & Destruction / Occupation & Apartheid / Exile & Restriction of Movement / Refugees

Report: Israel issued 13,000 demolition orders against Palestinian real estate
Haaretz newspaper said the Israeli civil administration issued 13,000 demolition warnings against Palestinians accused of unlicensed construction in Area C of the West Bank.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

Israeli military order expels Palestinian family from its land
The Israeli occupation forces expelled on Friday a Palestinian family from an area south of Al-Khalil, claiming that it is a closed military zone in which Palestinians are not allowed to live.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

Slater is outspoken on the role of the Israel lobby in forcing Obama to cave, and he is wicked, writing as a Christmas tree Jew, about Beinart's communitarian call for reenergizing religious segregationist impulses in Jewish life to fight assimilation. Hasn't Beinart noticed, Slater asks, that he is empowering the most intolerant political segment of the Jewish community when it comes to his chief cause, saving the two-state solution? 

The piece concludes with this plainspoken statement of Jewish identity and call for sanctions. Slater remains a liberal Zionist but one with fewer and fewer illusions:

As an anti-religious Jew, my own self-identification with our community has been principally a function of a defiance of an anti-Semitism that has now essentially disappeared but was hardly uncommon in my youth, combined with pride in the Jewish tradition of rationalism and morality--at least as that has been previously understood, and not only by Jews. The enlightenment tradition has been betrayed by Israel, and it gets worse practically day-by-day. Consequently, there is no good reason to revere or love Israel; such feelings should be reserved for the unflinchingly honest and brave Israeli dissidents.

The Israeli left can be helped only by truly serious outside pressures, including making U.S. and other Western economic, military, and political support of Israel conditional upon an end to the Israeli occupation and repression of the Palestinians. That is the sine qua non for a genuine legitimization of Israel, whether as a full democracy with equal rights for all its citizens, or as a Jewish state which privileges its majority in certain limited ways but which can be legitimately characterized as a democracy in most essentials.

The likelihood of such sanctions being imposed on Israel by the American Jewish community, the U.S. government, and the West, is close to nonexistent. Yet, somehow, even if we believe the struggle is hopeless, we must act as if it isn’t.

And another day in Gaza

Another day in Palestine

A day in prison

And we live on

Despite Israel’s very much identified flying objects

That we see more than our family and friends

And despite Israel’s death sentences

Like lead

Cast upon the head

As we sleep

Like acid rain

Gnawing at our life

Clinging to it like a flea to a kitten

And stuffed in our throats

The moment we say ‘Amen’

To the prayers of old women and men

Despite Israel’s birds of death

Hovering only two meters from our breath

From our dreams and prayers

Blocking their ways to God.

Despite that.

We dream and pray,

Clinging to life even harder

Every time a dear one’s life

Is forcibly rooted up.

We live.

We live.

We do.

On Friday, the head of the U.S. negotiation team, undersecretary of state for political affairs Wendy Sherman, arrived in Israel along with officials from the White House National Security Council working on the Iran nuclear issue – Gary Seymour and Puneet Talwar.

...

According to the U.S. official, the Israeli government was the first to be updated by them on what happened in Baghdad after the talks were over. "We updated the Israelis in detail before we updated our own government," the official said.

Palestinians in the occupied territories, the diaspora and in refugee camps protested earlier this month on the 64th anniversary of the Nakba, commemorating the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians by nascent Israeli forces. Palestinians were sending a message to the world that the right to return to their homes would not be forgotten, and that millions of refugees are awaiting a solution.

One senator from Illinois, though, wants to write off those millions and change who is classified as a Palestinian refugee. Mark Kirk, a hawkish Republican whose political career has been boosted by right-wing Israel advocates, is leading a drive to fundamentally redefine who a Palestinian refugee is in the eyes of the United States.

Critics see the move as just one step in a larger strategy to take the issue of refugee rights for Palestinians off the negotiating table, and to cut funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency that assists Palestinians. One senior Senate aide who helped craft the amendment told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “this will have major implications for future negotiations over final status issues with regard to refugees.”

In a statement, UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness said that “while UNRWA is following the debate in DC very closely, [the agency] does not comment in public about the internal workings of the legislatures of member states.”

Israel strongly opposes Palestinians’ right to return to their homes or their descendants’ homes, which they fled during the 1947-49 Arab-Israeli war and were never allowed to return to. Israel opposes the right to return because of their policy of maintaining a Jewish demographic majority. International law, though, strongly supports the rights of refugees to return to homes they were displaced from.

On Thursday May 24, a Senate committee passed an amendment by unanimous voice vote that would require the State Department to differentiate between Palestinian refugees who were displaced first-hand and those born after to families who were refugees.

The senator behind the amendment was Kirk, who is close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and has received over a million dollars from Israel oriented political action committees during his political career. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) expressed concern at the bill and modified the amendment, but it still contains the State Department reporting requirement that Kirk was pushing. Kirk celebrated the passing of the amendment in a May 25 press release: "With U.S. taxpayers providing more than $4 billion to UNRWA since 1950, the watershed reporting requirement will help taxpayers better understand whether UNRWA truly remains a refugee assistance organization or has become a welfare agency for low-income residents of the Levant."

An earlier version of the bill pushed by Kirk would have made it US policy to classify as a refugee only those Palestinians personally displaced by Israeli forces. In practice, this would mean erasing the refugee status of almost all registered Palestinian refugees, cutting down the number to about 30,000.

It’s unclear how far the amendment will go in the legislative process. The State Department has come out strongly against Kirk’s idea to redefine Palestinian refugees. Their position, as Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy reports, is that “final status issues can and must only be resolved between Israelis and Palestinians in direct negotiations. The Department of State cannot support legislation which would force the United States to make a public judgment on the number and status of Palestinian refugees.” Rogin also reports that the State Department puts the number of Palestinian refugees at 5 million--the amount registered with UNRWA--and that US policy is in line with UNRWA’s practice of granting refugee status to descendants.

A diplomatic source with knowledge of the Kirk amendment outlined the key problems with it in an interview. The US has no interest in attacking UNRWA because in allied countries like Jordan, UNRWA is a stabilizing force. Jordan hosts some 2 million Palestinian refugees who are registered with UNRWA, which provides refugees with crucial services in education and health. If US funds to UNRWA were cut, for example, as Kirk tried to do when he was in the House of Representatives, Jordan could be destabilized.

Furthermore, Kirk’s amendment rests on the wrong assumption that Palestinian refugee status is uniquely passed on through generations. In fact, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a separate agency that oversees refugee situations outside of Palestine, also gives refugee status to generations of family members who remain displaced. For example, the son of a Cambodian refugee registered with the UNHCR as a result of being displaced is also considered a refugee by the UNHCR. The amendment also does not address the fact that the 1967 war created 500,000 Palestinian refugees, with an additional 175,000 Palestinians registering with UNRWA as a result.

Lara Friedman, an expert on Congressional policy on Israel/Palestine, criticized the bill in a recent post at the Daily Beast blog Open Zion. Kirk wants to “use U.S. law” to redefine “most Palestinian refugees out of existence” outside of a negotiations context. “Of course, it won’t work, even if this somehow makes it into law. Palestinians who consider themselves refugees don’t do so simply because UNRWA, or anyone else, gives them permission to do so,” wrote Friedman.

The big issue here, as Friedman notes, is that Kirk is pushing for a fundamental shift in US policy towards who is a Palestinian refugee. In turn, this shift could help scuttle Palestinian refugee rights in negotiations over resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict. If this amendment were to become US policy, it would boost Israel's attempts to take the right of return off the table.

Backers of the bill have been explicit about their aims. Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the neoconservative think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, wrote that the aim of the bill is to “tackle” the “thorny” issue of the right of return. “By tackling one of the toughest challenges of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without the bedlam that typically accompanies bilateral negotiations, there would theoretically be one less sticking point when the stars align again for diplomacy,” wrote Schanzer. “Under the leadership of Knesset member Einat Wilf, this idea now has the backing of the prime minister's office, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

According to Americans for Peace Now, Schanzer is reportedly "deeply engaged in this latest anti-UNRWA initiative." The group also reports that AIPAC "was reportedly pleased with the amendment but has issued no public statement."

It’s all in line with the recent attacks on UNRWA by Likud Party member Danny Ayalon. Ayalon created a video in conjunction with the right-wing Israel lobby group Stand With Us which argued that UNRWA was prolonging the refugee conflict and the conflict with the Palestinians. But as Randa Farah, an expert on UNRWA and Palestinian refugees recently wrote, it is Israel’s “repressive apparatus” of control over Palestinians that perpetuates the conflict and “increases the dependence of refugees on UNRWA’s meager aid, while at the same time creating even more refugees and internally displaced persons.”

The right of return is not something Palestinians plan on giving up, as the recent Nakba Day protests show. But that won’t stop Kirk from trying to legislate their status as refugees out of existence. Kirk is holding water for the Israeli demand that Palestinian refugees should never be allowed to return to the homes they were forced out of over six decades ago.