Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 6 (since 2009-10-20 16:51:43)

howard lenow

Founding member of Amerian Jews For A Just Peace, www.ajjp.org

Website: http://www.howardlenow.com

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• You won't have Ethan Bronner to kick around anymore . . .
  • howard lenow February 18, 2012 at 1:23 pm with 7 replies

    Friends:
    I don't think being Jewish disqualifies a reporter from reporting on Israel/Palestine. I don't think having a son or daughter serving in the IDF does either. If that logic is extended, we wouldn't pay attention to Palestinians reporting from Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem, or we shouldn't pay attention to so many of the important blogs and other outlets where similar "conflicts" may exist.. It is a silly argument, in my view. It's the actual reporting that matters, so long as any "conflicts" such as they are, are disclosed.

    I don't want to be put in the position of defending the NYT or any other media outlet and that is not what I was saying. I do think Ethan Bronner was unfairly villified too often on this site and in our movement generally. I also know that he has been villified from the right as being too sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative. So, again, he is a reporteer, not an activist. I just think we should pick our battles where they make sense and not fall prey to the same shibboleths that characterize the shrill and unfair attacks from the right.

  • howard lenow February 17, 2012 at 5:16 pm with 4 replies

    I wish folks would give up on the gratuitous attacks on Ethan Bronner. Frankly, I think his reporting was often brilliant and ground breaking. Yes, he wasn't the public relations director for the BDS movement (which I support, by the way) but he covered on the ground stories in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem and he has a deep knowledge of the conflict and the history. I believe he did his level best to be fair, as he saw things, and he contributed to opening up the dialogue and the reporting in the New York Times on the issues that had never been covered by the Times with any sensitivity to a Palestinian narrative. I will miss his reporting as Bureau Chief.

• "As long as the Za'atar remains. . ."
  • howard lenow June 22, 2011 at 12:59 pm

    Once again, Jeff Klein takes us all on a trip inside '48 to tell the story of life for Palestinian citizens of Israel and teaches us how important it is to look back to 1948, not just 1967.

• Sorry, 'Mother Jones' but you're piping the Israeli narrative of Gaza 'war'
  • howard lenow December 26, 2010 at 6:06 pm with 9 replies

    The Great Amira Hass

    Amira Hass: What Hamas is really afraid of
    16 AUGUST 2010
    By Amira Hass, Haaretz – 16 Aug 2010
    http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/what-hamas-is-really-afraid-of-1.308264

    Amira Hass

    “I wish these pictures reached leftists abroad,” my friend said to herself Tuesday as she watched Hamas police use rifle butts and clubs to beat her friends – activists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although my friend has never been a fan of the Fatah government in the West Bank, she is outraged by the romanticization of Hamas rule by foreign activists.

    Photographs of Tuesday’s protest will be hard to come by, as the Hamas police prevented photojournalists from doing their job. At some point, shots were fired into the air to disperse the PFLP protesters in Gaza City, a demonstration Hamas called an illegal gathering. Many protesters were injured and needed medical attention; others were detained for some time.

    “We women weren’t physically attacked by the police,” my friend told me later on the phone. “They only swore at us.” The profanity, mostly variations on “whore,” was accompanied by words like “Marxist,” which the police see as an insult. They don’t need to know exactly what it means – it’s among dreadful words like atheism, communism and dialectic materialism. In other words, all the terms that don’t explain the world as Allah’s creation.

    Hamas and the PFLP have a lot in common: opposition to the Oslo Accords, glorification of the armed struggle and opposition to direct negotiations with Israel. Many of the PFLP’s supporters, especially the younger ones, are also religiously observant. But in terms of social vision and ideological temperament, the gaps seem as wide as they were in the 1980s, when the Muslim Brotherhood aimed most of its attacks at “heretics,” especially the Palestinian left, then many times stronger than today.

    Senior Hamas officials may watch their language when they talk with representatives of the depleted left, but the real attitude shines through in the conduct of younger activists and people lower in the hierarchy. They don’t stand so much on pretense and openly express the spirit of the times.

    But it wasn’t Marxism that brought some 500 PFLP activists to the western end of Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard in Gaza City, to Unknown Soldier Square in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council (or what was left of it after Operation Cast Lead ). The demonstrators came out to protest the electricity supply crisis in Gaza. Was this an odd choice for a rally by a veteran, proud political organization? Not in Gaza.

    Since the beginning of the year, the residents of the Strip have been suffering from scheduled power cuts that last more than eight hours each day. Between 2006 and 2009, the European Union funded the industrial fuel used at the local power station. In November 2009 it was decided, together with the Ramallah government, that the Palestinian Authority will start paying for the diesel, in addition to the electricity bill it pays to Israel.

    Since then, the quantity of fuel entering Gaza has fallen steadily. In the first week of August, for example, only 812,006 liters of diesel fuel – 23 percent of what is needed – entered the Strip. In Ramallah they claim that the company collecting electricity bills in Gaza is not doing its job properly and/or transfers some of the money to Hamas’ coffers. Hamas denies this. Ramallah also says Hamas is playing on the people’s suffering. The PFLP, through its protest, says it doesn’t believe either side, and that the supply of energy has fallen victim of a political rivalry.

    According to Palestinian law, demonstrations, public assemblies and political meetings do not need a license from the authorities. The authorities only need to be informed to be able to direct traffic accordingly. On August 5, the PFLP told the Gaza authorities of the protest.

    “They said to us there’s no need for the protest because the problem has been solved,” one activist told Haaretz. “We said this was wrong and that the crisis was still going on. We held discussions with Hamas and the Interior Ministry. They insisted we may not protest. We insisted we may.”

    “By ‘sheer coincidence,’ an hour and a half before our protest, Hamas women came out in large numbers to the same place to demonstrate in support of the government on the electricity issue, with loudspeakers. When we arrived, hundreds of police with clubs and rifles were waiting, while the driver of the truck that carried our loudspeakers left the place very quickly, following a request from the police,” the activist said.

    “He was only hired for that, and he was scared. After some friction with the police, our representative said a few brief sentences about our position. After that, we were dispersed very violently.” Some of the younger activists tried to defend themselves by pushing the police away with the plastic chairs left from the pro-Hamas demonstration.

    Hamas understood the subtext of the PFLP protest all too well. The PFLP is unwilling to see the Hamas regime as a mere victim, either of Israel or the PA. You took power? Take responsibility as well.

    But the shamelessly brutal suppression of the protest shows just how scared the Gaza government is. It has suppressed all activities by Fatah in the Strip, be it public or internal.

    Last week, it prevented a protest by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the al-Maghazi refugee camp, also based on the electricity crisis. It even banned a celebration by the Khan Yunis refugee committee for students who passed their matriculation exams.

    This is because any activity not controlled by Hamas or protesting the Israeli siege is defined as a threat to the movement’s rule. If Hamas felt it still had public support, it wouldn’t need to suppress any activity that it didn’t initiate or finds unflattering.

    Tagged as: Amira Hass, Gaza, Hamas

• Maybe the 'Times' reporter in Jerusalem shouldn't be best friends with Charles Bronfman?
  • howard lenow July 7, 2010 at 10:36 am

    Phil: My only comment is that I was a bit concerned with your using "I was told by somebody who spoke with her" in your story. To me, that is not a sufficient basis for reporting on someone's views or reputation. It isn't fair and it could be wildly inaccurate. It seems to me that in order for you to maintain the integrity of your important work, you should avoid this type of disparagement that comes from such a remote and inherently unreliable source. In fact, I think it deserves a retraction in order to uphold your standards. So many of us rely upon your blog for analysis and reporting and this was just out of keeping with your usually high standards.

• J Street and the battle for the Jewish soul, or wallet, or status
  • howard lenow October 29, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    It is silly to even try and make the argument that a Jewish democracy is possible while still adhering to basic human rights princples or providing for a civil structure than can guarantee equality. In a country where 93% of the land is controlled and held in perpetuity for the "Jewish" people, how can anyone even begin to make the argument? I think the right is more honest in Israel and I think J Street has no intention of holding out that it expects Israel to comply with International Law because to do so would mean the end of "the Jewish State." Israel can't adopt a constitution because to do so without a basic guarantee of equal rights for its entire population would expose Israel's govenment for what it is. The way things operate now, with a shifting and weak Supreme Court in a land governed by ministries whose web of intricate regulations mask the true inequality that is the very fabric of Israeli society, is a much better way to hide the apartheid structure that began in 1948 and never stopped expanding.

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