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I hereby nominate Isabel Kershner and her husband Hirsch Goodman
for the Judy Miller Award, which is of course named for the NYTimes reporter whose fake stories about Iraq's nonexistent nuclear weapons helped provide the public rationale for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. While many reporters helped to promote this propaganda claim, Miller's journalistic was so terrible that she became an embarrassment, and was later fired by the New York Times. For details, see Judy Miller's War on CounterPunch.
Kershner richly deserves the Judy Miller Award for her degraded journalism, pretending that Israel didn't shoot Muhammad Al-Dura, even though millions of people around the world have seen the footage. Kershner takes seriously Israel's claim that this is all "blood libel," a phrase that has been used before. When Begin and Sharon carried out their bloody massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, killing up to 3000 people by some accounts, there was a worldwide outcry. Official Israel took out gigantic newspaper advertisements, headlined "Blood Libel", going on to say that "any suggestion that Israel was involved, directly or indirectly, is blood libel, and is rejected with the contempt that it deserves." Nobody bought the Israeli story. European reaction was exemplified by Andreas Papandreou, then the Greek Prime Minister, who said "Israel is doing to the heroic Palestinian and Lebanese people what Hitler did to the Jews!"
So the take-home lesson is that when Israel officials cry "blood libel", it's a good sign that they're trying to deny their atrocities and are totally desperate.
Mandy Patinkin once recorded an album of songs in Yiddish. That is a niche market if there ever was one. Hardly anybody speaks Yiddish any more. I'm guessing that he was proud of his cultural heritage. He definitely didn't do it for the money.
Patinkin may well be concerned for the future of Israel, especially if Israel continues the right-wing extremist policies supported by the West Bank settlers.
The attack on Patinkin is just the Lobby attempting to whip American Jews into supporting everything Israel does, including things that nobody should support.
It the story gets coverage in the LA area and the SF Bay area, it's bad for Sen. Boxer.
The people in Bakersfield are too conservative to vote for her anyway.
A 2002 book about prominent La Vegans, The Money and the Power, by Roger Morris and Sally Denton, has a chapter about journalist Hank Greenspun. Working with his friend, Al Schwimmer, Hank Greenspun acquired much of the weaponry that allowed Israel to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in 1947-1948. The Las Vegas Sun, Hank Greenspun's newspaper, is still in business, under the leadership of Hank's son, Brian Greenspun. The Sun has suffered serious cutbacks in recent years, but Democrats hoping for favorable coverage or newspaper endorsements, or campaign contributions, always pay homage to Brian Greenspun.
On the Republican side, there's Sheldon Adelson, financial supporter of Israel.
Abe Foxman says
" These men were working for a propaganda outlet, not a legitimate news organization."
Foxman is head of the ADL, which is an Israeli propaganda outlet, not a legitimate civil rights organization. The ADL spends most of its time defaming anyone who dares to criticizes Israel. The ADL ought to change its name to the PDL: "Pro Defamation League".
Both Foxman (ADL) and David Harris (AJC) throw around the accusation of terrorism. ADL and AJC are strong supporters of Israel, and who is Israel's most honored senior stateman? Menachem Begin, notorious Israeli terrorist whose bloody career stretches from Deir Yassin (1948) to Sabra and Chatila (1982). For documentation on the Sabra/Chatila massacre, see Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle. The Sabra/Chatila massacre was condemned by the UN General Assembly (where the US has no veto), as "an act of genocide".
We should welcome the latest outburst from the Israeli Jewish working class and middle class, trying to defend their standard of living, in the face of attacks by the Israeli Jewish ruling class. Of course, it would be wonderful if they could work together with the Palestinians, as I'm sure all Mondoweiss readers agree.
However, I wonder if it's entirely realistic to demand that the J-14 speak out for Palestinians right now.
If organizers of the J-14 protests want to recruit about 20% of the Israeli population who are severely oppressed, they could reach out to Palestinians. That would requiring combating the racist attitudes of their own (Israeli Jewish) members. And they may not be ready for that yet.
For decades, leftists have dreamed of an alliance between Palestinians and Israel's Jewish workers. But getting there isn't easy.
It's the same in the US: leftists have long voiced the slogan, "black and white: unite and fight!" But it isn't easy here, either.
What is encouraging is the emergence of class conflict between the Jewish classes of Israel. Polarization along class lines, as well as longstanding racial lines.
There are plenty of obstacles. For example: if Israeli leftists reach out to Palestinians, who represents the Palestinians? Hamas, as an Islamic party, has trouble reaching out to Palestinian Christians or secular Palestinians. The Palestinian "Authority" is even more discredited among Palestinians than Hamas.
Let's hope that the new Israeli Jewish protest movement can establish relations with the Palestinians.
I hope Mondoweiss will run opinion pieces from Jewish Israelis involved with the new protest movement.
If the Church of Scotland doesn't feel comfortable calling for a boycott now, here's what they could do: investigate and publicize the plight of Palestinian Christians, both within Israel and on the West Bank. These Christians are facing systematic racial discrimination by Israel. Many of them were victims of the Nakba in 1948, yet their story has not reached a mass audience.
Somebody ought to demand that Dershowitz declare whether or not he "supports Israel's right to exist as an Orthodox Jewish State".
What's that? A state in which only the Orthodox Jews are first class citizens. What about Reform Jews or secular Jews? Tough! Legally they would be in the same category as Palestinians. They would have to put up with checkpoints, religious discrimination, etc. After all, Israel has a right to exist as an Orthodox Jewish State!
Why am saying this? Seriously: once you start to declare that citizenship depends on race or religion, you might as well go all the way. And Orthodox Jews undoubtedly are closer to the ancient Hebrews than secular Jews.
I'm just curious about how the harbarists like Dershowitz would respond to a proposal that would make him a second class citizen.
Numerically, non-Orthodox Jews are about 90% of US Jewry, Orthodox about 10%.
Thanks very much for the link to the Guardian story.
Last December, Israel was threatened by an Israeli academic who had signed a petition (back in 2008) supporting Israeli draft resisters, and they banned her from a science conference in Germany .
Now Israel is threatened by a British academic, Stephen Hawking, who is boycotting a conference in Israel.
Such a lot of existential threats!!
Phil, thanks for your thoughtful essay, dealing with the conflicts over Israel, conducted within American Jewry, who make up about 2.5% of the US population.
The next series of battles is likely to be conducted within the 96-97% of the US population that is not Jewish. In the past, criticism of Israel drew accusations of anti-Semitism. But recently, Mearsheimer/Walt, and Jimmy Carter wrote critical books, geared to the general public, and they successfully fought off the usual smears from the Israel Lobby. Their books became best sellers.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict will be echoed within non-Jews also, with evangelical Christians (Robertson, Hagee, Falwell) allied with the Israelis, and other Christians supporting the Palestinians.
Good article. Thanks, David Samel!
The title should be changed slightly, from
"The three whoppers from Alan Dershowitz"
to
"Three of the whoppers from Alan Dershowitz".
Because the man doesn't stop at just three.
For details about lots of other whoppers from A. D.,
see Beyond Chutzpah, by Norman Finkelstein.
Thanks, Terri Ginsberg. It would be helpful to have a few sentences about Abdeen Jabara.
A document from the 1960's has surfaced* recently in the papers of George Wallace, segregationist politician from Alabama. Governor Wallace, faced with demands for voting rights for African-Americans, declared that any deal would have to be approved in a referendum.
And of course only whites would get to vote in the referendum.
*Not really: this document does not exist. But Mondoweiss readers will understand the point.
Sheldon Adelson devotes significant amounts of his enormous fortune to slanting Israeli (and US) policy to the far right. Sheldon Adelson's wife Miriam is an Israeli, a dozen years younger than Sheldon, who turns 80 this coming fall. When he dies and she inherits his fortune, she may be as malevolent as he is. Certainly she will be as powerful as he is, judging by this 2012 profile in Fortune magazine.
Palestinians should propose land swaps, and - a crucial point - the Palestinians (not Israel) get to pick what land gets swapped for what other land. For example: Palestinians get all of Jerusalem and surroundings, and all of Tel Aviv and its suroundings, while in return Israel gets the Gaza Strip.
Do you think John Kerry would celebrate that proposal as a bold step towards peace?
One irritating habit of the mainstream media is referring to the ADL as a "civil rights" organization. When it was founded (ca. 1915), it really was a civil rights organization, but in recent decades it has been just another part of the Israel Lobby. The ADL is solely concerned with foreign policy, and the ADL supports everything Israel does uncritically.
I see people I respect on either side of this crucial debate:
Uri Avinery, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein (2SS), Ali Abunimah and Rashid Khalidi (1SS)
Either the 2SS or 1SS would have to be forced on Israel, whose govt has always opposed a Palestinian state, in practice (while sometimes claiming to support it verbally). Certainly in the US, racial integration had to be forced on Alabama, Mississippi and the other former Confederate states. If it were entirely up to the southern whites, Jim Crow would still prevail today.
Chomsky's argument is that there is some support in Europe for the 2SS but none for the 1SS.
He thinks the 1SS is more morally just, but then if you ask, "how do we get from here to there?" his argument is that it's even harder to win the 1SS than the 2SS.
Khalidi (and MANY others) think the 2SS is dead, because Israel worked very hard for decades to make it impossible, and they succeeded.
David Doppler:
You wrote...
“Israel, he said, could not continue ‘to rule over a million people without giving them democratic rights’ without becoming internationally isolated.”
This has already happened.
For decades, Israel has ruled over a million Palestinians in Gaza, on the West Bank, and within the 1967 Green Line. The Palestinian in the OPT cannot vote in Israeli elections (of course Jewish settlers in illegal West Bank settlements can vote in Israeli elections). Palestinians are the victims of systematic racial discrimination.
And, Israel has become internationally isolated: as shown by the vote to admit the state of Palestine to the U. N., and as shown by international opinion polls. Of course, it can become even more isolated.
Rashid Khalidi remarks somewhere: the whole world supports the Palestinians, except for the US and Israel. But the US and Israel are so powerful that they can to pretty much whatever they want.
In fact, Hoffman's Wikipedia page provides the following information.
In a 2006 interview, [Hoffman] said that all of his children from his second marriage had bar or bat mitzvahs and that he is a more observant Jew now than when he was younger; he has also lamented that he is not fluent in Hebrew. [link]
"Hoffman is someone whose Jewishness seems to have played very little role in
his life other than as a trigger to anti-Semitic bullies..."
Speaking of bullies..
What motivated the Boston bombers? Gary Leupp, prof of history at Tufts University, makes a reasonable case for his view that it's not Chechan separatism, it's the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I want to add: Khalidi is clear that the Israeli drive to annex more Palestinian land on the West Bank has continued under both Labor and Likud governments. You used to read, in publications like The Nation, that Israel used to be wonderful (under Labor), until Menachem Begin and those awful Likudniks ruined everything. The Nation rarely says that today.
You still occasionally hear stuff like that from the J-streeters.
Many thanks, Phil, for running this interview.
Once in a while, Khalidi gets interviewed on the TV. Not too often: the mainstream media are too busy booking Tom Friedman, to give Khalidi much exposure.
It is a fact that Friedman has been totally wrong from the beginning of the Iraq war, while Rashid Khalidi has been right. But Friedman get every opportunity to push his mainstream view forcefully. while Khalidi is all but shut out.
This tells us all we really need to know about the mainstream media.
Any solution that results in a Palestinian state will be resisted by Israel, because a Palestinian state will be hauling Israel into courtrooms all over the world, and advocating for the Palestinians. (Unless it's a tiny rump statelet, a Bantustan, with no power at all.) So either 2SS or 1SS would have to be forced onto Israel.
Think about the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960's. African-Americans won the right to vote, after "only" a couple of centuries. If it were up to the white Southerners, it wouldn't have happened, ever.
David Grossman is a leftist whose 1988 book, The Yellow Wind, treated West Bank Palestinians as real people. At the time, that was a novelty for most Israeli Jews. (It still is.)
When Israel invaded Lebanon 2006, David Grossman and two other literary figures (Amoz Oz, and A. B. Yehoshua) held a press conference to announce their support for the war. But Hezbollah was well prepared, and gave Israel a much tougher fight than expected. As Israeli casualties mounted, public support quickly declined. So the three literary figures held another press conference to announce their newfound opposition to the war (!!). Their previous posture was "we're doves, and even we support the war!" Their new posture was to say that starting the war was justifiable, but now they were against it. Two days after the press conference, Grossman's son Uri was killed in Lebanon. For the rest of his life, Grossman will have something in common with tens of thousands of Palestinians, loss of a family members.
It would be too simple to say that Grossman is merely an opportunist. Sad to say, Grossman really is a peace activist by the standards of Israeli Jews. He was actually beaten up by Israeli police during a protest against colonization of the West Bank.
Grossman was a fair-weather friend of the peace movement, switching sides rapidly enough to make your head spin. When people try to tell you that Israel has a powerful peace movement, tell them about David Grossman and how he was swept up in the pro-war hysteria in 2006.
Phil Weiss might have mentioned this little unfortunate little detail about Grossman's past.
I had to read the letter to discover who these Eminent Europeans are: mostly former foreign ministers or former prime ministers.
Of course, the letter is right, that statements by EU politicians are totally disregarded by Israel. What is badly needed is action: sanctions, diverstment, and boycott.
That would definitely get Israel's attention.
Unfortunately, the EU is a very weak reed for anybody to lean on. Too divided. Too easily pressured by the US and Israel.
Will the EU defy the US? They never have.
The cold war has been over for decades, but when it raged, the US found it very handy to cite the "Soviet Threat". But how do you justify these vast military spending when there isn't any Soviet Union any more? "Terrorism" fills the bill, so the "war on terror" replaces the "Soviet threat" as the way to justify this stupendous military spending, at a time when increasingly Americans are broke and hungry (and US military spending exceeds the military spending of the rest of the world, combined!!).
If the US really did get into a war with Russia, the Saudis or the UAE wouldn't be of much help. The worldwide spawning of little military machines loyal to Washington is, of course, justified by "defense", but really it tilts the internal balance of power within Saudi Arabia or the UAE, bringing to power their own military. For example, the military runs Egypt. Egyptian Leaders from Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak came from the Egyptian Air Force.
One final note on the battle that is fought incessantly at MondoWeiss: is US foreign policy supportive of Israel because the US finds Israel to be a strategic asset? Or is the Israel Lobby forcing the US to support Israel, against the US national interest?
If it were entirely up to AIPAC, Saudi Arabia or the UAE wouldn't get these warplanes. But if AIPAC took that position ("arm Israel, not Saudi Arabia!") they would lose. The weapons companies want profits, US military spending boosts the US economy, the Saudis and the UAE want the weapons, and AIPAC wants Israel to get even more weapons, too. This latest arms deal is an example of US/Israeli convergence of interests.
There certainly are examples that cannot be explained by the theory that US and Israeli interests are the same. Sometimes they conflict. Here's a partial list: Jonathan Pollard...USS Liberty...Stewart Nozette...Larry Franklin. But for the most part, and in the long run, US imperial interests are parallel to Israeli interests, in trying to keep the Arab world divided, backward, and weak. Propping up the oil dictatorships is part of longstanding US imperial policy.
I told my wife that the Israelis and their supporters will be planting stories that the Boston marathon bombers were helped by Iran. She thought I was being paranoid.
Of course it makes no sense at all: Chechnya is a Sunni Moslem region, while Iranians are nearly all Shia Moslems. And Sunnis and Shia branches of Islam are like Protestants and Catholics within Christianity: they don't agree, on fundamentals. To Catholics, the Pope is God's representative on Earth. To Protestants, the Pope is nobody special. Some Protestants think the Pope is the Anti-Christ.
An analogy: would the KKK and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) cooperate?
Both have used terrorism. But the KKK is anti-Catholic (also anti-black and anti-Jewish), while the IRA is Irish Catholic.
Correction: Elaine Wynn is Jewish. Don't know whether or not she converted when she married Steve.
Two comments:
Sheldon Adelson is a Las Vegas casino king, and a right-winger. He's so right wing that he has less power than you might otherwise expect. His candidates usually lose at the ballot box.
For example Adelson once (years ago) tried to take over the Clark County Commission (Las Vegas is in Clark County). Adelson financed the "Committee for Fairness" and ran his own candidates against the incumbents in about 4 races. The Committee for Fairness consisted of one Adelson employee with a FAX machine, and an advertising budget. Adelson himself became a target, as the incumbents ran a advertisement with Godzilla stomping on a city skyline. The ad proclaimed "Don't let Sheldon Adelson do this to Las Vegas!" Adelson's candidates lost every race.
Adelson is so right wing that his contributed more to the ZOA than to the AIPAC. Adelson's current wife is an Israeli.
Adelson's rival Las Vegas casino king is Steve Wynn, also Jewish. As far as I know, Wynn has not been a big supporter of Israel. Neither Wynn's first wife, Elaine, nor his current wife, Andrea, is Jewish. (Elaine became a billionaire in their divorce settlement).
So the two state solution is dead. What next? The one state solution?
Rashid Khalidi says, "the one state solution is what we have now!"
So maybe the Palestinians should issue a public renounciation of their hope for a separate Palestinian state, and instead demand equal rights for all within a single nonracist state.
Israeli Jews are strongly opposed to equal rights. In fact they are even more opposed to racial equality than they are to a separate Palestinian state. The opposition comes not just from a handful of leaders, but from nearly all Israeli Jews, even including Uri Avnery, prominent antiwar campaigner.
A suspect is in custody for sending ricin to Obama and a US Senator. Much to the disappointment of Chris Matthews, the suspect is not an Arab.
I think it's ridiculous to label people like Max Ajl as "traitors". That's just a propaganda term, used to suppress dissent within the Jewish community. As an insult, it has little force beyond the Jewish community.
It's better to rephrase it, as follows:
When Israel was established, the already-existing Palestinian society was destroyed, and the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, turned into a nation of refugees. About 1/3 of the Palestinians remained, and were subject to Israel's system of racial discrimination.
Most Israeli Jews accept and support this racism, using one rationalization or another. Many American Jews, if they have an opinion on the matter, support it also. Accusations of "treason" are one weapon in Israel's arsenal, designed to suppress dissent.
In recent decades, the near-monolithic support for Israel among American Jews has declined.
There has always been a small minority of Jews, in the US and in Israel, who oppose Israel's racist oppression of the Palestinians. Some of the sharpest and most articulate opponents of Israeli policies are Jewish: Chomsky, Finkelstein, some Israelis. However, this is a small minority. In recent decades, the number of American Jews who actively oppose Israeli policy remains small, with some growth (in my opinion). The biggest change is the "distancing" of many American Jews from Israel: for a growing number, Israel is just not an important issue.
I hope the small minority will grow, and MondoWeiss is an important avenue of communication.
A second important trend is that the Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinians have grown in numbers recently. The are still outnumbered by the supporters of Israel, by a huge factor. The Electronic Intifada is an important factor for these activists.
A third important trend is that several Establishment figures - Jimmy Carter, Walt&Mearsheimer - have criticized the lopsided US support for Israel, and their books became best-sellers.
The Israelis, and the network that they control, are worried, and it's not surprising, because the trends are running against them.
The Israelis and their supporters still have enormous power in the US media and among the politicians. The Palestinians, by comparison, have nothing.
In conclusion, Max Ajl is an example of the younger generation of Jewish activists, who has been able to free his mind from Israeli propaganda. Accusations of treason are predictable.
Citizen, I don't know you can be so sure of Phil Weiss' motivations and thought processes.
I've never met Phil Weiss, and can't get inside his head.
Judging by his writings on this blog, Weiss is a supporter of freedom, equality and justice, and an opponent of racism and oppression. (Not controversial so far...) But he thinks Palestinians are people, who are entitled to human rights (a controversial position!), which brings him into conflict with Israeli policy.
Phil Weiss is one of a small but growing number of American Jews are willing to face up to the realities of Israeli policy without flinching, evasion, or hypocrisy. I hope that the number will continue to grow. The Mondoweiss website provides a valuable service. Phil and his comrades deserve our support.
Walzer and Chomsky are enemies from way back.
In 1984, the New York Review of Books ran a review of Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle: Israel, and US, and the Palestinians. The book covers Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and Israel's massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese at Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. The massacre of up to 3500 people was condemned by the UN General Assembly as "an act of genocide".
Chomsky's book was reviewed in the NYR by Avishai Margalit, a dovish Israeli professor. Margalit's article is behind a pay wall at NYR.
The review prompted a long letter by Chomsky, rebutting Margalit's review. Chomsky's letter can be found here
The paragraph in Chomsky's letter about Walzer reads as follows:
Margalit’s preference for personal impressions over the public record serves him poorly when he turns to my discussion of those he calls “fellow travelers,” in particular, Irving Howe, Michael Walzer, and Martin Peretz. He writes: “I do not at all like what he has to say about the first two,” and expresses his wish that they had much more influence than they do. I had little to say about them beyond quoting their words, and I am not surprised that Margalit does not like these words. I find it hard to believe that he wishes that their views had more influence: for example, Walzer’s explicit support for the Lebanon war (“I certainly welcome the political defeat of the PLO, and I believe that the limited military operation [sic] required to inflict that defeat can be defended under the theory of just war”; September 8, 1982) and his advocacy of transfer of Israeli Arab citizens (the problems of those who are “marginal to the nation” can be “smoothed” by “helping people to leave who have to leave,” in a 1972 book edited by Irving Howe and Carl Gershman; the idea that the indigenous population should be transferred has deep roots in the Zionist left, as I document). Note that Walzer goes beyond the position of right-wing extremists such as Hanan Porat, who restricts this proposal to West Bank Palestinians (“Israel can help by buying their land or giving them economic assistance to leave”).
That's right, folks: Michael Walzer in the past has endorsed Israel's "transfer option" (completion of the ethnic cleansing of 1948). Naturally Walzer is embarrassed when Chomsky quotes Walzer's own words back at him. It speaks volumes about the atmosphere surrounding any criticism of Israel back in 1984, even mild criticism. Walzer is widely praised as a humanist etc etc., and colleges and university class routinely assign Walzer's book on Just and Unjust Wars. Yet Walzer endorsed Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and defended it as a Just War.
Just for the sake of completeness, I note that Walzer also endorsed Israel's 2008-9 bombardment of Gaza refugee camps. [See Finkelstein's This Time We Went Too Far].
It's been almost 30 years since the NYR donnybrook (which also included a letter from Edward Said and another from Walzer). Chomsky was very isolated back then. He has a lot more support now, in my opinion, in part because of the books by Walt/Mearsheimer and by Jimmy Carter, as well as Palestinian activism. While in 1984 the NYR ran Chomsky's long letter, they did not (and still do not) run any articles authored by Chomsky. The NYR has run articles critical of Israel (by Tony Judt, for example), but Chomsky himself is blacklisted.
This answers the question, "Is Israel a democracy?"
For Palestinians, the answer is a resounding NO.
Palestinians don't have any rights.
"Although Carter came under ferocious attack by the Israel lobby - he was alleged to be a plagiarist, in the pay of Arab sheikhs, an anti-Semite, an apologist for terrorism, a Nazi sympathizer[1], and a borderline Holocaust denier[2] - his book still landed on the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there for months, reportedly selling several hundred thousand copies in hardback."
Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End, p. 25.
[1] Ezra HaLevi, "Exclusive: Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of Nazi SS guard," 18 January 2007; link to israelnationalnews.com
[2] Deborah Lipstadt, "Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem," Washington Post (20 January 2007)
In the 1960's the NYR ran some important articles by Noam Chomsky denouncing the Vietnam war. Chomsky helped to establish the reputation of the NYR.
But since some time in the 1970's, Chomsky has been banned from the NYR.
(Check it out yourself: try to find articles written by Chomsky in the NYR after the 1970's. You can't. All you can find are some petitions and open letters that Chomsky signed).
Pity that nobody asked Silvers about blacklisting one of the world's most famous intellectuals.
Citizen,
you wrote
"Israel bombed a nuke program site in Iraq, then in Syria."
Let's be wary about what the mainstream media tells us.
On the 1981 Israeli bombing of Iraq, listen to Harvard nuclear physicist (and human-rights activist) Richard Wilson, who writes that Israel bombed a research reactor in Iraq, not a reactor for making bombs. This bombing caused Iraq to start a nuclear weapons program. Richard Wilson, a distinguished physicist and Harvard professor, received the 2012 Sakharov Prize for human rights activism from the American Physical Society.
On Israel's bombing of Syria, read the antiwar Libertarian activist Justin Raimundo. Israel bombed a non-nuclear military base in Syria.
Yes, the mainstream media is lying to us.
Again.
Surprised? Me neither.
A lot of subscribers to the NYT are intermarried. They would not have been dissuaded from intermarrying by reading an article like this NYT op-ed. One of the mighty Sulzbergers was the child of an intermarried couple, and was raised as (gasp!) a Presbyterian.
I wonder how Naomi Schaefer Riley would react if Christians started taking a hard line against intermarriage with Jews: wearing lapel pins and bumper stickers proclaiming "DON'T EVER MARRY A JEW!" This would be denounced as anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, in Israel a couple of decades ago, the rightwingers introduced a bill in the Knesset that would have made sex between Jew and non-Jew a crime, punishable by prison time. The bill failed, but got a lot more votes than sane people might predict. During the debate, opponents pointed out the precedent for such laws: the 1936 Nuremberg laws, passed by Nazi Germany.
Someone should ask Naomi Schaefer Riley whether she favors the imposition of Nuremberg laws to curb the rise of intermarriage.
By the way, Dennis Ross, a (supposedly) US diplomat who is actually an Israeli supporter, is currently employed by the Jewish Agency in Israel, attempting to curb intermarriage, which the Jewish Agency (of course) views as a deadly threat to the existence of the Jewish people blah blah blah etc etc. I wonder if the Jewish Agency got Naomi Schaefer Riley to write the NYT op-ed.
Israel is a Herrenvolk democracy, meaning that it is a democracy for Jews, but not a democracy for non-Jews. The US before the civil rights movement was a Herrenvolk democracy: a democracy for whites, but not for African-Americans.
And in Israel, Jews are defined as a race, not as a religion. Many Israelis don't care about religion at all, an even many of their politicians don't have to pretend to believe in God in order to get elected.
In the segregated South (of the US), whites were defined by skin color, not religion. It was a famous fact that some light-skinned African-Americans could "pass" for whites. And of course, a lot of African-Americans and a lot of southern whites were the same religion, namely Baptists. They were the same religion, theoretically. In practice, southern whites told themselves that their Jim Crow system of racial segregation was endorsed by God, and they cited various Bible verses to prove that God wanted the US to be a white man's country. To most southern whites, racial equality idea was a bad idea and wouldn't work.
Meanwhile, in Israel and the US today, the vast majority of rabbis proclaim that their Jewish Jim Crow system is God's will. God has granted the land to the Jews, not the Palestinians. Racial equality is a bad idea and wouldn't work, in their view. There are a handful of dissidents: Rabbis for Human Rights has about a dozen members, but hawkish rabbis have no trouble getting a thousand US and Israeli rabbis to sign newspaper advertisements endorsing Israel attacking Palestinians with war planes, blowing the Palestinians to bits with cluster bombs or roasting them with white phosphorous.
Rashid Khalidi recommends that the Palestinians break with the "Oslo process", cut the US out, and negotiate only with the Israelis. The US is not an honest broker. In the Oslo process, the US and Israel work as a team, so it's two against one. Khalidi thinks it's better to be one vs one (Palestine vs Israel) instead of one against two (Palestine against Israel/US), particularly because the US representative is typically someone like Dennis Ross, Israeli shill.
The US ruling class thinks that US interests and Israeli interests are for the most part parallel, at least in the long run. Both countries want to keep the Arab world divided, backward, and weak. Both are opposed to Arab nationalism.
There are exceptional cases where US interests and Israeli interests conflict:
Four exmples.
Example#1: Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard remains in jail. Israel wants him freed, but has been unable to spring him.
Example #2: Israel developed its own fighter plane, the Lavi. The US put in a lot of money, and the Israelis put in a lot of money. The result: two prototypes were built. But the plane never went into production. Why not? It would have been a competitor to a US warplane (the F-18, I think).
Example #3: the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty
Example #4: the US forced Israel to give back the Sinai after the 1956 war.
By the way, just because the US ruling class thinks that US interests and Israeli interests are for the most part parallel, it doesn't mean that there is no conflict between the two parties. Walt and Mearsheimer are two card-carrying members of the foreign policy Establishment. They wrote their book because they think the Israel Lobby has too much power. Jimmy Carter, also an Establishment figure, wrote a book with the same intention. The NYT published the Ben Ehrenreich article a few weeks ago. (Why wasn't the all-powerful Israel Lobby able to prevent publication of the article?)
Dear Mr. Dana:
Are you saying that the Israel Lobby has taken over US foreign policy, worming their way into positions of power, and damaging the interests of the US ruling class...but the US ruling class has somehow not noticed this development, or is just too stupid to protect their power?
I agree with Khalidi and Chomsky.
The US ruling class and the Israeli ruling class think of their interests are parallel, at least in the long run and for the most part. They have a common enemy: Arab nationalism. The US fears that Arab nationalism would be a threat to US control of ME oil, while Israel fears that Arab nationalism is a threat to Israel's racist treatment of the Palestinians. (I include Iranian nationalism, though Iranians are Persians, not Arabs).
Countries on the US hit list:
Iran after the Shah was overthrown
Nasser for being an Arab nationalist
Libya for being similar to Nasser's Egypt
Syria - too close to the Russians
Iraq under Saddam Hussein (former ally)
Hezbollah (non-state actor)
So when Israel smashed up Egypt in 1967, Israel proved her worth to the US, and US aid to Israel quadrupled.
In the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the US gave Israel "bunker-buster" bombs to wipe out Hezbollah, but they failed.
Of course there really is an Israel Lobby, and it plays a role. But many US policies would likely be pursued by the US even if there were no Israel lobby.
For example: the US has invaded lots of countries over the decades, especially in Latin America (Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico) and organized coups to get rid of anti-US governments (Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and most recently Honduras). This is similar to Operation Ajax, the CIA coup that installed the Shah in Iran.
So when the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is laid at the feet of the Israel Lobby, my response is: what about all the other US invasions? (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia...)
Thanks for MW for covering Khalidi's talk, even though you disagree with him.
I know a couple where the groom was Jewish and the bride was a mainstream Protestant. Neither one really cares much about religion, so it's not an issue. They celebrate the Jewish holidays and Christmas (which by now is mainly a commercial holiday).
The intermarriage rate in the US between Jew and Gentile is quite high: last time I checked*, about half of marriages of American Jews are to non-Jews. This is the consequence of the decline in anti-Semitism: Jews and non-Jews with the same income level and lifestyle are not, in fact, very different.
This is the 21st century US, not 19th century Poland.
This IS Mondoweiss, so the focus on intermarriage is between Jew and Gentile. Other intermarriage events occur between Protestant and Catholic, or between different Protestant denominations. Take this quick quiz: what's the difference between a Congregationalist and a Methodist? Answer: nobody knows. Centuries or even decades ago, people got killed over these questions. So religious indifference is a positive social good!!
*see the article by Lenni Brenner on
Counterpunch.
This is a great piece. Someone should compile a database of pro-war spokesmen (and -women), and post it online, complete with links and quotes. Let the War Party know that there are some consequences for helping to lie us into war.
Some think tank with a droll sense of humor ought to sponsor a symposium,
"Israeli perspectives", at which the speakers are all Israeli citizens, but ethnic Palestinians, not Jewish.
Thanks to Mike Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) for this eye-opening piece.
Ratner and the CCR have long been a champion of the poor and oppressed. But Ratner himself ignored the Palestinian issue for a long time. Finally, Israel's 2008/2009 assault on the refugees of Gaza was just too much, as Ratner himself explained on his Chelsea Green blog.
The amount of money involved by the Mennonites (etc) is small enough that it won't make a big difference to Israel. What does make a big difference is that this sends a message: we don't approve of the Occupation.
In the near future, other Christian churches are likely to join the divestment movement. And it will become easier for these groups to to adopt resolutions condemning Israeli policy.
About half of the US population are at least nominal Christians. So there is plenty of room for growth.
Until now, the divestment movement had lost a lot of battles. The efforts (even in a losing cause) were not entirely in vain, because the divestment resolutions (and the debate) were revived the next year.
I think the far-right-wing political complexion of the new Israeli government will make it hard for Israel to fend off this kind of campaign.
See also the 2002 article on Salon by Christopher Ketcham, which details the lack of interest by the mainstream media, especially the Washington Post.
Thanks for remembering Anthony Lewis.
About the fraudulent Joan Peters book...
Norman Finkelstein, then a graduate student, gave a careful reading to From Time Immemorial, found it to be a hoax, and tried very hard to interest various liberal media outlets and prominent individuals in publishing it. No luck. The only person to reply to Finkelstein was Noam Chomsky. The supporters of Peters included many people with a lot of influence: Elie Weisel, Bernard Lewis, Saul Bellow, (of course) The New Republic, (of course) Commentary, etc.
When a British edition of the book was published, Chomsky sent copies of Finkelstein's findings to friends in the UK. Naturally the book got savage reviews in Britain. Even the Israeli media thought the book was worthless.
In the US, the only publication that would touch Finkelstein's essay was In These Times, a tiny publication in Chicago.
That was picked up by Alexander Cockburn and (separately) by Edward Said in The Nation.
The New York Review of Books had been silent up to this point. Finally the NYR published a very critical essay by Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath, who labelled it "worthless propaganda".
At that point, Anthony Lewis wrote an essay in the NYT, referring to the Porath piece in the NYR. The Lewis piece came out on the NYT when the Porath piece in NYR was still on the newsstands.
In today's climate, another book in the Peters vein would be discredited in public in a hurry. Back then, it was a long and winding road from Finkelstein to In These Times to the UK reviews of Peters to the NYR, and finally to the NYT.
The publication of the Ben Ehrenreich piece in the Sunday magazine section of the NYT would never have been published 10 or 20 years ago.
Even today, there are still topics that are "too hot to handle." For example:
After 9/11, the US busted a major Israeli spy ring in the USA. About 140 people were deported back to Israel. Journalist Christopher Ketcham wrote an article for The Nation about it, but The Nation killed the piece at the last minute. Alexander Cockburn ran it on CounterPunch.
Thanks, Henry Norr!
This reminds me of an article on counterpunch.org, in which the writer, Lennie Brenner, explores "The Demographics of American Jews". When asked, "what fraction of the US population is Jewish?" BOTH gentiles and Jews give answers that are too high, and sometimes ridiculously so.
Here are the details from Brenner's piece:
***********************************
The best way for us to start is with the reader estimating the percentage of Americans who are Jews. Got your number? Now the scholars’ calculations. Their figures sit between 2.2% and 2.5%. Now compare your estimate and these figures with the guesses put forth by Americans in a 3/90 Gallup poll.
Twenty-four percent had no opinion. Beyond them, the average American thought that America was 18% Jewish.
That broke down to eight percent of Americans thinking that Jews are less than 5% of the people, 10% saying that Jews are between 5% and 9%, 25% believing that Jews are between 10% and 19%, 18% estimating that Jews are between 20% and 29%, 12% coming up with between 30% and 49%, and 3% reckoning that Jews are 50% — or more! — of all Americans.
Pretty wild? But why should gentile Americans know better? Their guesses are based on what they see. Turn on the TV, go to the movies, pick up a newspaper, follow an election, and in every case Jewish involvement is far above 2.5%.
It is much more shocking that most Jewish estimates are also surreal. Here are the numbers given by American Jews in a 3/98 poll, done nationally by the LA Times.
Twelve percent of our Jews think they are 2% of Americans, 13% think Jews are 3%, and 11% say they don’t know, which is also a ‘proper’ answer. But 7% of America’s Jews think they are 1% of Americans. Five percent of the Jews thought Jews are 4%. Ten percent of the Jews said they are 5%. Eighteen percent believed Jews are 6-10%. Six percent estimated our Jews to be 11-15%, and 18% of America’s Jews projected themselves as over 15% of the population, a whopping margin of error of over 600%.
So, where did those delicious Jewish overestimations come from? Jews know the country is overwhelmingly Protestant, and that the Jewish percentage is much smaller than the Catholics. But they watch the same TV, go to the same movies, etc. Thus, while their numbers aren’t as stratospheric as most gentiles, they likewise tend to be on the high side.
The way the system works is that behavior like that of DWS gets rewarded. So we get more of that behavior.
Meanwhile, some people really do learn from their experience. Did you know that way back in 1969, Vivian Gornick was once a secretary to Irving Kristol, the original neoconservative? She learned. Source: Running Commentary, 2010 book by Benjamin Balint.
The case against the 2SS is that for decades Israel's settlement policy has been aimed at preventing any Palestinian state from happening. (Israel and the US have worked together towards this goal, according to Rashid Khalidi's most recent book). Hence, many MW writers conclude, the 1SS is the only possibility.
The case against the 1SS is that it has almost no support from Israeli Jews, not even from Uri Avnery. The 2SS, according to some polls, has some significant support among Israeli Jews. (Naturally, the "settlement industry" has never ceased expanding since 1967, so it's not clear how much the alleged support for the 2SS really means.) There is international support (i.e. the EU) for the 2SS but not for the 1SS. And, finally, Rashid Khalidi points out that the 1SS is what we have now!! One state - Israel. No state for the Palestinians.
My conclusion is that neither the 1SS nor the 2SS is likely to happen in the near future. In the longer run, I don't claim to know. Either one would have to be forced onto Israel. The policy of the Jewish Voice for Peace is to be agnostic on this question.
Khalidi said:
"If we’re a capitalist society and we believe in the sanctity of private property, that should be something that’s not even discussable. These people have a right to their property or a right to compensation."
Remember that Jews have been very insistent about recovering property in Europe that they lost to the Nazis. The property (homes, farms, land) of the Palestinians was simply stolen by the early Israelis in 1947-8, and the ethnic cleansing process continues at a slower pace today.
Rashid Khalidi is a rare voice of sanity, who of course is rarely heard in the mainstream media. Meanwhile, bigfoot pundit Thomas Friedman is omnipresent in the print and electronic media, despite being wrong about Iraq from the beginning.
Norman Finkelstein has demonstrated that American Jews' interest in Israel was fairly weak before the 1967 Six-Day War. Finkelstein read Norman Podhoretz's 1967 autobiography, Making It, and found only a couple of passing references to Israel in the entire book.
Finkelstein describes a symposium on Israel conducted in 1960 by influential American Jews, and found little interest. One of the speakers was Noam Chomsky, ironically.
See Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much. Yes, I know Finkelstein can be controversial, even to readers of MW. But I think he's right on this point.
This is the third recent example of a strong criticism of Israel (and support for the Palestinians), coming from an Establishment source. The first was Jimmy Carter's 2007 book, Palestine, Peace not Apartheid. The second was the publication of Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby (2008). Now this, the NYT, an official gatekeeper medium, with a huge circulation. (It's a newspaper, most Americans don't read books).
Yes, the usual suspects will go nuts: ADL, AIPAC, Foxman, Dershowitz, etc.
To no avail. What are they going to say or do? Accuse a heavily Jewish newspaper of anti-Semitism? Nobody will believe that.
Congratulations to Ben Ehrenreich and his (long-divorced) parents, John and Barbara Ehrenreich, who must be very proud of their son. I would be if I were in their position.
The question remains: why did the NYT publish this piece?
Here's my guess: Israel's current course of action is likely to lead to disaster for everybody, Palestinians, Israelis, and the US as well. (So far, so good; people across the spectrum agree on this).
Israel has no important domestic opposition to their disastrous course of action. Indeed domestic political pressures within Israel are all pushing Israel farther to the right.
Nor can any constraint on Israel's extremism come from the US government. The US Congress is hopeless. Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory (in Pat Buchanan's memorable phrase).
In all three Establishment interventions (Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt, now the NYC) a major puncturing of the Israel balloon may be an attempt to put some limits on Israeli behavior.
Former Presidents don't normally court controversy. Carter did.
Card-carrying members of the Foreign Policy Establishment don't normally go after a powerful Washington Lobby. M&W did.
And the NYT doesn't not normally publish articles favorable to the Palestinian resistance movement. (That's undoubtedly why they sat on the story for 8 months.)
I read the article by Vivian Gornick in The Nation. She refers to the Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua as an important member of the Israeli "peace camp". Let's clarify the record: Yeshoshua supported Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and he also claimed that Israel's 2008 assault on the refugees of Gaza was "necessary". (For an account of Yehoshua's support of Israel's 2008 invasion, see the account in the hawkish Jerusalem Post.)
Some Israelis really are stalwart critics of Israel's racism and violent aggression. But I wouldn't include Yehoshua, who is more of a fair-weather friend.
Rashid Khalidi is always worth reading.
Jerome Slater:
Thanks for posting this piece.
You write that the rabbinical students, rabbis, cantors, etc. are wasting their time appealing to Netanyahu, and instead ought to be appealing to the US Congress.
Maybe. But why not urge them to talk to the Palestinians directly? I'll bet very few of the rabbinical students (and rabbis, cantors, etc.) have had a serious talk with Palestinians. Ever.
It's a VERY segregated situation over there. I think it's much more segregated than the Old South (pre-civil rights), when southern whites often had black servants inside their homes for many hours every day. (How many Israeli Jews have Palestinians domestic servants? Hardly any).
What would the Palestinians get out of person-to-person talks? They might be regarded as human beings by Israeli Jews. And that would be a step forward.
The situation now is that the Palestinians are so thoroughly ghettoized, so exclusively closed off, that many Israeli Jews don't think of Palestinians as human beings. And that gives the Israeli ruling class a blank check to kill Palestinians (e.g., Operation Cast Lead).
Hophmi,
In 1945 about 100,000 Jews survived the Nazi death camps. So how can 100,000 survivors in 1945 result in "hundreds of thousands" of Holocaust survivors in Israel today??
The answer was discovered by Norman Finkelstein: the definition of a survivor was changed. Now, anybody who was in a country that Germany controlled during the Second World War is counted as a "survivor". This includes Jews who were hidden in Christian homes, people who hid out in the forests, etc.: people who were never in a Nazi camp.
You might think, logically, that as time passed, the number of survivors would decrease from 100,000 in 1945. But Finkelstein recounts how the number of survivors actually increased (!!!) from 100,000 to a million. Read Finkelstein's book, "The Holocaust Industry" and you will be enlightened.
At this link, check out footnote # 5.
Some four decades ago, I asked a Palestinian what he thought the Israeli/Palestinian issue could be solved. He said, let the Palestinians return and be Israelis also, with the same rights as the Israeli Jews.
Sounds reasonable. But this, of course, is the famous "call for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state." If Palestinians and Jews had the same rights, Israel would be the state of all of its citizens, not just its Jewish citizens. It wouldn't be an exclusively Jewish state.
But to Israeli partisans, racial equality is a bad thing.
A lot of young Jewish women are feminists, and with few exceptions they hate the orthodox Jews for their flaming male chauvinism. When I lived in NYC long ago, one young Jewish woman acquaintance routinely referred to the orthodox as "fascists".
As another example, consider the outspoken Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who abhors religion, all religion, which she sees as "the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom".
If Brooks really believes in supporting the collective over the individual, then he ought to stop his attacks on Medicare and Medicaid, and start supporting socialized medicine. Actually, he ought to respect the achievements of the late, great Hugo Chavez, the advocate of "socialism for the 21st Century".
If anybody says that American Jews are likely to be Israeli spies, organizations like AIPAC and the ADL go nuts, denouncing this as the vilest kind of anti-Semitism. But in the case of Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who really did spy for Israel, some of the same people say, "let him out! Free Pollard!!"
These folks have no idea what kind of damage they are doing to most American Jews.
The historian Tony Judt, himself once an important Zionist, wrote "Israel today is bad for the Jews."
Actually the whole affair demonstrates how important Adam Shapiro and the International Solidarity Movement really is. Israel is so afraid of Adam Shapiro that they banned him. It's quite rare for a Jew to be banned by Israel*. Off the top of my head, I can think of Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. So, Shapiro has been placed (by Israel) in the same category as Noam Chomsky, the world's most prominent left-wing intellectual!!
The next time that Adam Shapiro gives a public speech, he should advertise it with a leaflet bearing the headline
THE TALK THAT NETANYAHU
DOESN'T WANT YOU TO HEAR
*Oh, wait. I thought of a third one: Meyer Lansky, the gangster, deported by Israel in 1972. Israel's law of return excludes Jews with criminal pasts. (But war criminals are not deported).
This issue pits the Israel Lobby against the Pentagon, which is scheduled for budget cuts. The Pentagon has a LOT of clout, for lots of reasons.
See this report from the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA)
Biden is a political hack. When Obama chose Joe Biden as his VP, here's what economist Michael Yates had to say in the pages of CounterPunch...
"I doubt that we will get much from Obama to inspire working men and women, of whatever part of the country, of whatever age, race, or ethnicity. Now he has chosen a pathetic old hack, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. What exactly has Biden done for workers in his more than thirty years in the Senate? That a man who has been in this elite body (whose members’ stock portfolios have performed better than almost anyone else’s) this long can be called ‘working class’ by Obama himself tell us just how lame U.S. politics are."
So Joe Biden was just running true to form when he groveled before the Israelis.
Thanks, Alex. The media critics at FAIR have been onto Emerson for a couple of decades. See for example this article by Jane Hunter.
One more comment on the use (or misuse) of the comparison of Israel and the Nazi Holocaust.
Consider the statement made (decades ago) by the late Israel Shahak, a professor of organic chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shahak said that so much attention is paid to the final stages of the Holocaust that not enough attention is paid to the beginning stages. He added that, in Israel, we are "far far past the beginning".
The discussion in Israel of "the transfer option" is the open discussion of expelling all the Palestinians. And because the Palestinians won't leave voluntarily, this would likely entail hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of casualties.
In 1982, Israel (Begin and Sharon) massacred around 15,000-20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, culminating with the Sabra-Chatila massacre. (A massacre for which nobody was ever charged, let alone convicted).
Consider a 2004 book by Michel Warschawski, Towards an Open Tomb. Warschawski is the director of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem and a longtime activist. Here's an excerpt from the review on Amazon:
"Warschawski describes the atrocities of the occupation—from the sack of Ramallah to the massacre in Jenin, the razing of houses and refugee camps, shooting at ambulances and hospitals, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields—showing how each of these pushes back the boundaries of what was previously thinkable. He documents the resulting shifts in Israeli political thought, citing Ariel Sharon, army officers and even rabbis who begin by describing Palestinians as Nazis and end by relying on the German army's tactics for subjugating the Warsaw ghetto. Toward an Open Tomb seeks to explain the forces within Israeli society and culture that are leading to this self-defeating result."
Philip Weiss and Jerome Slater, where do you think this is leading?
Someone should send an email to Dan Friedman, asking him
"Are you still on the Israeli payroll? Yes or no"
Then post somewhere on the internet
DAILY NEWS REPORTER ON ISRAELI PAYROLL??
and then act so innocent.
Moore dedicated one of his books to the memory of the late Rachel Corry.
During the colonial period, the colonizers often said, "the natives are just not ready for democracy", a phrase that prettified a very ugly reality.
Speaking of the Irish:
The late actor (and dancer) Gene Kelly (Singing in the Rain, Anchors Aweigh) was of Irish descent. He was also an important funder of the IRA, and even left the IRA some money in his will.
This is similar (but on a much smaller scale) to support for Israel by American Jews.
One important difference is that there are two reasons for US support for Israel: one is the influence of the Israel Lobby, and the other is Israel is viewed as a strategic asset to the US control of the Middle East. (The US and Israel share a common enemy: Arab nationalism).
In the case of the Irish, I don't see any important US strategic interests involved. If there is one, it's the US relationship with the UK. And support of the IRA is contrary to the "special relationship" between the US and the UK.
Another example that is brought up by Walt and Mearshimer is the Cuban-American lobby. And no doubt it is a factor. But even if the Cuban Lobby didn't exist, there would be plenty of reasons for conflict between the US (a capitalist country) and its former colony, Cuba, now a socialist country. In other words, the Cuban lobby does not act alone.
It's been said in Washington DC that once you are the butt of enough jokes, you're finished.
For example: remember "cold fusion", allegedly discovered in the late 1980's by researchers at the University of Utah?
Comedian Mark Russell joked,
"Cold fusion?? In Salt Lake City, you can't even get a cold beer!"
And cold fusion faded away.
Maariv is almost bankrupt, and has only a small fraction of the journalists it used to have. So it likely can't cover the stories it used to cover.
So why is Maariv almost bankrupt? They were competing with a free newspaper, subsidized by Sheldon Adelson.
So if you don't find a lot of links to Maariv, that could be the reason.
Many of the commentators here are talking about a hypothetical white southerner.
In actual fact, in the pre-civil rights era, white southerners would make no bones about it, saying things like:
God created the US as a white man's country. It's the way it is because that's the way God wanted it.
And white southerners would cite passages in the Bible - something about separating sheep from goats - to "prove" that the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was God's will.
It was not just uneducated southern whites who supported the racist Jim Crow system. It was highly educated and influential people too.
For example...
James L. Kilpatrick, a young newspaper editor in Virginia, wrote about a book (c. 1962) entitled The Southern Case for Segregation. Kirkpatrick went on to enjoy a very long and successful career as a conservative pundit.
Want another example? William F. Buckley's National Review openly opposed the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. When Buckley died, many of his ideological opponents said nice things about him. (One who didn't was Alexander Cockburn. Thank goodness for acid-tongued Alex!) Buckley wasn't even a southerner.
I liked the story in The Daily Beast. Abe Foxman, in protesting the SNL skit, is destroying himself in public.
Even the readers of Mondoweiss sometimes need to be reminded of how preposterous the ADL has become.
Here's a blast from the recent past, in 2003, a mere decade ago:
Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi gave a speech in which he whitewashed Mussolini's fascist regime. Shortly afterward the speech, the ADL gave Berlusconi a Distinguished Statesman Award.
Mussolini's government enacted anti-Semitic racial laws, and deported thousands of Jews to Nazi concentrations camps. So why did ADL give Berlusconi an award? Because Italy, under Berlusconi, supported Israel. [Source: Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 59-60.]
The statements by Mike Huckabee are so weird that they're unintentionally funny.
Reminds me...Decades ago, Philip Roth (author of Portnoy's Complaint and many other books, so many that there is now a Journal of Philip Roth Studies, not kidding)
wrote that the challenge to a novelist is that reality is more strange, more grotesque, than anything a novelist can dream up.
How right PR was!!
These official EU statements may or not may not cause serious problems for the Israeli occupation.
To me, it sounds like an opportunity to organize a European mass-based boycott movement, with special attention paid to goods originating in the occupied West Bank.
The model that may be applicable is the 1960's boycott of table grapes, in support of the United Farm Workers in California. Activists would hand leaflets to shoppers entering supermarkets, asking them not to buy table grapes. Support for the farmworkers was a perfectly respectable form of activism, "consumers with a conscience."
It's a favorable environment because in much of Europe, Israel already has a bad reputation.
The significance of the article in Der Spiegel (IMHO) is this: although the high-level EU deliberations can't replace a grassroots activist movement, the high-level EU deliberations also mean that Israel can't bring down the force of law on the boycott activists.
Bravo, David Samel!!
If it is up to the Israeli Jews alone, neither the one-state solution nor the two-state solution will happen. Either solution would have to be forced on Israel.
That was true in South Africa. And in Mississippi and Alabama also.
Long but very thorough expose of the ADL, which was originally a civil rights group, but hasn't been for decades.
One microscopic correction: on footnote #55, it's Rabbi Eric Yoffie, not Joffie, then head of Reform Judaism.
I haven't seen either Gatekeepers or 5 Broken Camera, but either one is an important film.
The Palestinians has been suppressed and silenced, but they are starting to get their story out.
Let's hope both films reach wide audiences, especially 5BC.
eGuard, do you think it's a coincidence that this conflict is occurring in Brooklyn, where the population is heavily Jewish?
It's not a coincidence.
It means that the Israelis and their US supporters are able to drum up support from local elected officials, who fear for their jobs if they offend the Israel Lobby.
Suzanne Nossel was appointed to head of Amnesty USA after she had served in the US State Dept., running the operation that brought down Qaddafi in Libya. But before the 2009 State Department job?
She has written for Dissent magazine. Here's a sample..."The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran—bent on regional domination, aggressive toward Israel, and hostile to the United States—is as serious a threat as the United States has confronted in recent decades."
(Unfortunately the rest of Nossel's articles in Dissent are behind a pay wall).
Sound familiar?
I wonder if Nossel used her articles in Dissent magazine (and also in Foreign Policy in 2004) to raise her public profile, in much the way way the Jeanne Kirkpatrick used an essay a generation ago ("Dictatorships and Double Standards") in Commentary magazine to raise her profile.
How can Yonah Freeman proclaim so confidently that "Adelson is not the mainstream of the lobby". In last November's election, Adelson coughed up $100M or so to his favored candidates. That's a helluva lot of money. That makes him the largest pro-Israel donor in the country.
It's true that Adelson is ideologically more extreme than some other people, but he donates so much money that he defines what the Israel lobby is and does. For example, he is the main underwriter of Birthright, and his free right-wing newspaper in Israel helped to drive Maariv into bankruptcy.
For all I know, AIPAC and Adelson may have decided to run a good cop/bad cop routine, with AIPAC being the good cop while Adelson finances the bad cop (Emergency Committee for Israel). Or maybe the two factions couldn't reach agreement and decided to go their own separate ways. There is no way to decide between these two alternatives, based on public information. Meanwhile, I'm taking Yonah Freedman's confident assertions with a grain of salt.
Thanks, Phil, for the news of the Israeli Opposition Network. I knew nothing about them.
As Mondoweiss readers know all too well, the policies advocated and practiced by the dominant Israeli parties are a dead-end for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians, especially the Palestinians who are the main victims.
One of many problems faced by the Palestinians (in addition to their own internal divisions) is the fact that no Palestinian initiative, no matter how wise or inclusive, is likely to evoke a sympathetic reaction from most Israeli Jewish parties.
Now, that may be beginning to change. There may be the beginning of a movement among Israeli Jews - in exile in the US - that could respond positively to Palestinian initiatives for peace and justice.
It's of course possible that the fledgling Israeli Opposition Network may peter out or prove abortive. Certainly I have no crystal ball.
I hope Phil and MW will continue its coverage of this - potentially very important - development.
To see the iconic picture of the helicopter on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon*, go to
link to internationalviewpoint.org
*Now renamed Ho Chi Minh city.
Both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have "leadership problems:"
The Palestinians have no real leadership at all (PLO or Hamas).
Israeli Jews have semi-competent bad leadership (Nutanyahoo).
Of course, what do we have in the US?
Tea Party (endless denial) vs Obama (endless compromise).
Human Rights Watch had an internal debate about whether or not the Palestinian Right of Return (ROR) was enshrined in international law. Some people inside HRW claimed the answer was "no", and some external people agreed. But in the end HRW stood by its principles.
An internal HRW document that explains it all can be found on Norman Finkelstein's website
here.
Some anonymous person inside HRW leaked it to Finkelstein.
Thanks, Norman!!
When Hamas defeated the PLO in elections in Gaza, one reason was the corruption of the PLO. But another reason was that the PLO had become the party of acquiescence to the occupation: their position was to accept any deal that Israel proposed, no matter how rotten the deal for the Palestinians. Hamas stood for resistance to the occupation. So the choice that voters in Gaza faced was: acquiescence or resistance?
And the Gaza voters went for resistance.
Even though Hamas is the Gaza branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, I don't think that the vote indicated wide support in Gaza for Islamic fundamentalism. Of course, it's no secret that most people in Gaza are Moslems. (And most people in France are Catholic, but often pay little attention to religion.)
Hamas proved it could run for office, and win, with a platform that "Islam is the solution", but governing with that as your platform is very different and quite difficult. Years ago, Edward Said described Hamas' political program as "inchoate".
It's a good thing that Roger Cohen wasn't giving advice to Martin Luther King. Advice like:
"Rev. King, don't insist on equal rights for blacks. It's totally unacceptable to southern whites. Instead, call for 'painful compromises', limit your demands to what is realistically achievable", etc. etc.
Cohen omits another issue: property. Palestinians lost land and houses. In nearly all cases, they never received any compensation. Israel simply took it by force.
Notice that in Europe in the 1930's and 1940's, many Jews lost their property because it was taken from them, by force, by the Nazis or their allies.
Needless to say, Jews have been insistent on getting their lost (European) property back.
One final point: a group of Israeli Jews went to court in Germany a few years ago, and argued that they were forced out of Germany, and demanded the right to return to Germany. The German court agreed with the petitioners. And the Jewish community in Germany has increased a lot in recent years, mainly because of immigration (from Israel and from the former Soviet bloc). [source: Juan Cole's informed comment]
Blathering about "the end of the Jewish state" is hysteria.
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Israel decided to give Palestinians the same rights as Jews. Would that be so terrible? Would that be the "end" of Israel?
I am old enough to remember the civil rights movement in the 1960's, in which another oppressed group rose in revolt. Naturally, southern whites were appalled at the prospect of equal rights for non-whites. They didn't put it in quite the same words, but they might have: the end of Alabama, the end of Mississippi, the overthrow of the southern way of life and its (alleged) virtues. We all know now that the Jim Crow system of racial discrimination was overthrown. Alabama and Mississippi are still there. The former Confederate states had to change their policies, and it was not a small change.
If (or when) the Palestinians gain their rights, the Israelis will have to change their policies. It won't be "the end of Israel", but it will be a change, and not a small change.
Will it be an end to "the Jewish state"? Israel has a minority of 20% non-Jewish Israeli citizens, so even today Israel isn't an exclusively Jewish state.
And since when is racial exclusiveness some kind of moral virtue?
Conservatives and Republicans love to clamor for war.
But in their personal lives, they behave as if they were pacifists. So the real term for this political posture is neither hawk nor dove, but
CHICKENHAWK.
And the ranks of the neoconservatives includes a whole FLOCK of chickenhawks!
If you wanted to conduct an honest poll, you would survey both Israeli Jews and Palestinians (who live in Israel, the Occcupied Palestinian Territories, and in refugee camps in Lebanon and elsewhere). The total population surveyed would be approximately half Jewish and half Palestinian.
My guess is that results would look approximately like this:
Respondent Is Peres trustworthy? Is Netanyahu trustworthy?
Israeli Jew 84% yes 15% no 62% yes 38% no
Palestinian 0% yes 100% no 0% yes 100% no
OVERALL 42% yes 58% no 31% yes 69% no
The headlines would then be
NEARLY 60% THINK SHIMON PERES UNTRUSTWORTHY
and
OVER 2/3 THINK NETANYAHU UNTRUSTWORTHY
If you're looking for an analogy in the US, ask yourself how last November's Presidential election would have turned out if blacks and Hispanics didn't vote. Romney would have won.
I signed the petition for Hagel, and I emailed my Senator in support of Hagel.
You can be critical of my decision: after all, Hagel represents the current US policy towards the Middle East.
My response: Hagel is currently the only realistic alternative to an even WORSE policy, which would involve a US/Israeli attack on Iran.
During the recent election, Netanyahu tried very hard to get Romney elected, but failed. The Republican Jewish Committee (RNC) ran TV advertisements criticizing Obama for allegedly not treating Israel with the respect it deserves. The RNC lost.
So nominating Hagel may really be an in-your-face answer by Obama to the Israel Lobby and Netanyahu.
If Hegel is nominated and confirmed, it will be a victory for the Realists and a defeat for the Neoconservatives. If the Israel Lobby manages to defeat Hagel, it may well be a pyrrhic victory for them.
Early in this exchange, someone threw out a number: 100 years until Israel gives the Palestinians their rights.
In another 100 years (or less!) the oil will be gone. And with it, the US interest in controlling the oil of the Middle East will also be gone. And also gone will the main factor behind the US/Israeli special relationship: a common opposition to Arab nationalism (or anything else that threatens US control of the oil of the Middle East).
The Israelis have a time limit on US support. Their leadership doesn't act as if they realize it.
Al Jazeera, in English, is available on the internet.
link to aljazeera.com
The Angry Arab news blog thinks that Al Jazeera is not reliable about Syria, or Yemen, because after all, it does belong to the Sultan of Oman (or somebody similar). That is a blind spot.
But despite that, Al Jazeera is a breath of fresh air in ME coverage. They actually cover stories in depth, and not in sound bites.
CounterPunch published a useful book a couple of years back, The Politics of "Anti-Semitism". Contributors include Alexander Cockburn, Uri Avnery, and many others.
The accusation of Anti-Semitism gets thrown around a lot as a way of warding off criticism of Israeli policy. Even fully justifiable criticism. ESPECIALLY fully justified criticism.
Philip Weiss reports that
Stephen Kinzer at the Guardian says that Hagel...
"is eager to make a real effort to engage Iran. No American president has done that since Jimmy Carter's presidency was immolated in the wake of the hostage crisis – except for Ronald Reagan, who tried sending Iranian leaders a cake and a Bible, to no avail."
What did Reagan REALLY send the Iranians? Weapons! Stephen Kinzer, a former NY Times reporter, as conveniently forgotten all about the "Iran-Contra Gate" scandal that rocked the Reagan administration. The US sold weapons to Iran, and used the cash from Iran to purchase weapons for the Contras in Nicaragua. The US Senate held public hearings, Oliver North testified...does anybody remember this? No!!!!
Why did Stephen Kinzer forget all about this? Perhaps because Israel was helping the US sell weapons to Iran. And recalling THIS has disappeared down Orwell's "memory hole".
The Israelis don't want anybody to remember that they once helped the US sell weapons to Iran. The US wants the same thing as the Israelis, for the same reasons. Hence Kinzer's sanitized history.
By the way, when Kinzer was at the NY Times, he covered Central America. It was his specialty!
Israel and the US have been grooming the so-called Palestinian Authority* to play the role of the Vichy government in Occupied France: a collaborator who helps disguise the occupation.
If the PA collapses because Israel confiscates the funds of the PA, then the Israelis will lose their sub-contractor and enforcer, and Israel will have to enforce the occupation herself.
This will be a very big burden on Israeli military manpower.
This accounts for the US opposition (and some Israeli opposition) to de-funding the PA.
But I think the PA (=PLO) is so discredited by now among Palestinians that it will collapse anyway (i.e., even if funds are not cut off).
*A bitter joke among Palestinians is that the Palestinian authority has "no power, no sovereignty, and no authority."
Israel's actions are aimed at annexation: more precisely, Israeli leaders aim to annex as much land as possible in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, while annexing as few Palestinians as possible. This principle was the basis of the "Allon plan", named for the former Israeli leader, Yigal Allon. The Allon Plan was first discussed in 1967, right after the Six-Day War. The Allon Plan has its own Wikipedia entry.
Noam Chomsky understands this point, but most people do not, not even (I suspect) among the readership of Mondoweiss.
Incidentally, Yigal Allon was a big wheel in the Israeli Labor Party. This fact refutes the erroneous belief, sincerely held by otherwise informed people, that Israel under the Labor Party was wonderful, until those awful right wingers under Menachem Begin took over and ruined everything.
Letting Pollard out of jail sends a message to Israel and to Israeli spies.
It sends the wrong message.
Keeping Pollard in jail sends the right message.
Hats off to M. J. Rosenberg for his thoughtful article.
When I lived in NYC, my Jewish friends were mostly teachers or social workers, who were not in a position to donate $100M to the Israeli cause, even if they wanted to. Which they didn't.
Smuel asked: "Who exactly is he referring to, Christian Zionists?"
When I refer to Christian Zionists, I mean Christians United for Israel (CUFI), headed by Rev. John Hagee, and similar groups (Pat Robertson, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, etc.). For them, the 1948 (re)establishment of the state of Israel is "a sign of the times", (further) proof that Jesus is about to return and the end of the world is near.
Christian Zionists in the US vastly outnumber the number of Jews (of all political persuasions). But of course for Christian Zionists, middle-east politics is only one issue, and they have a lot of hot-button issues: prayer in schools, evolution, gay rights, gun rights, pornography, abortion, divorce, secular humanism, etc.
The right-wingers in the US have been running around for years claiming that there is a "war against Christmas". I haven't found any evidence of this so-called "war", at least not in the US. Christmas is by now mostly a commercial holiday. For many retailers, the Christmas sales effort makes the difference between profit and loss for the entire calendar year.
Meanwhile, for devout Christians, Easter is a much more important holiday.
But now, at last, proof of a real war against Christmas! This time, it's waged by Israeli rabbis. And as a bonus, a war against celebrating New Year's Eve!
Wait until the evangelical Christian Zionists hear about this! It could throw a monkey wrench into the alliance between the Christian Zionists and the Israelis.
Mondoweiss readers, arrange for your Arab Christian friends to bring Jonathan Cook's article to the attention of local evangelical Christians. (A lot of Arab-Americans are Christians by background, perhaps even a majority.)
Daniel Pipes runs the so-called Middle East Forum (MEF). It's really not a "forum", which implies an exchange of views. The MEF is a one-sided outfit, crawling with neoconservatives. For example, it has run pieces by
- Danny Danon, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset.
- Efraim Karsh, Israeli historian
- Steven J. Rosen, who somehow beat the rap in the AIPAC Israeli spy scandal (the Larry Franklin case).
- Martin Kramer, an American Jew who moved to Israel and ended up with the Moshe Dayan Institute for Strategic Studies, then moved back to the US.
Who's funding this operation? Daniel Pipes refuses to say. And THAT tells us something.
Of course, we can all guess who's funding it!
During the recent election, I saw a lot of television advertisements from the Republican Jewish Committee, urging people to vote against Obama for several reasons, including Obama allegedly not supportive of Israel. Because I live in Nevada, a swing state, the advertisements bombarded me nonstop.
As far as I can tell, these ads had little or no effect. No Jewish friend said to me, "you know, I was going to vote for Obama, but these ads from the Republican Jewish committee made very telling arguments, and I've changed my mind." No non-Jewish friend said anything similar either.
Probably 95% of the electorate had their minds made up several months before the election anyway. Sheldon Adelson wasted almost all of his mega-donation. The one case where his candidate won was the Senatorial race between Shelly Berkley (D) and Dean Heller (R). Heller (a Mormon) defeated Berkley (Jewish) in a very tight race. Berkley had AIPAC support and a statewide Democratic registration edge. But she also had ethics problems, and Berkley's ethics problems were Heller's only real issue.
In early 2002, as the George W. Bush administration prepared to attack Iraq, members of the "military-intellectual complex" rushed to join the war effort. They promoted a petition signed by 60 intellectuals, entitled "What we are fighting for". Signatories included Samuel Huntington (Harvard prof., author of The Clash of Civilizations), Francis Fukuyama (State Dept functionary, author of The End of History), and Michael Walzer (editor of Dissent).
Walzer was thus a very active supporter of the disastrous Second Persian Gulf War, clamoring for war before the war had even started.
Anyone who is familiar with Dissent magazine should not be surprised or shocked. Dissent is simply running true to form. Dissent supported the First Persian Gulf War (1991), so why not support the Second Persian Gulf War as well.
As for the Palestinians, four decades ago Walzer said the Palestinians were "marginal to the nation" (meaning the Jewish nation). Walzer's solution was "helping people to leave who have to leave". Link: link to counterpunch.org
It should be stressed that Walzer has been highly regard throughout his career as a moralist. He is best known for his writings on the theory of Just and Unjust Wars. (Cutting to the chase, Walzer ends up suppporting Israeli and US wars. Duh! Why am I not surprised.)
In his recent book, The General's Son, Miko Peled (son of Israeli GeneralMatthieu Peled) tells how he eventually overcame the Israeli myths that he grew up believing. Miko says that when he got to the US, he found it hard to communicate with American Jews, because most American Jews "only want to hear that Israel is good and the Arabs are bad." As a peace activist who is very critical of Israel, that's definitely not the message that Miko wanted to deliver. Oddly enough, Miko found himself more comfortable with Palestinians (in the US).
Walzer's position is nicely summarized in the slogan that "Israel is good and the Arabs are bad." He wouldn't put it quite that baldly, of course. And Walzer has had a long and influential career, helping to shape and even create the myths that he now defends. Walzer is the long-time editor of Dissent magazine, succeeding founder Irving Howe. (Walzer was a student of Howe.)
Walzer had a long-running intellectual battle with Chomsky over Israel, and (on a related topic), about US imperialism. Look up just about* any conflict between the US and the Third World, and you'll find Walzer supporting US imperialism (either as the lesser of two evils, or as a positive good), while Chomsky is opposed to US imperialism as a matter of principle.
It's very characteristic of the position of social-democracy (Walzer) vs radical leftwing thought (Chomsky).
*[About the only exceptions are World War II (for Chomsky), and the Vietnam war (which Walzer opposed, for once.)]
Yahoo news story says that Carl Levin (D-MI), chair of Senate Armed Services Committee, says Hagel would be "terrific".
link to news.yahoo.com
That's interesting because Senator Carl Levin has received more money ($729K) from the Israel Lobby than any other Senator.
Link: go to
link to wrmea.org
then click on "career recipients"
The Yahoo news story mentions opposition based on the Israel lobby.
So will Hagel be confirmed? Personally, I don't feel confident enough to be able to make a prediction. We'll see!
I have a serious question for those who think that the Iraq war was entirely (or mostly) the work of AIPAC and other Israeli zealots.
The current war is Persian Gulf War II, started in 2003.
No question that the Israel lobby was pushing for war.
Before the current war was Persian Gulf War I, started in 1991.
The President was George H. W. Bush. Nobody (or almost nobody) claims that the first war
was started by the Israel Lobby. George H. W. Bush had a frosty relationship with the Lobby.
His secretary of state, James Baker, is rumored to have said, "Oh, f*ck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway!"
The conclusion that I draw is this: while the Israel lobby has a lot of clout, and used that clout in bellowing for war, the first and second Persian gulf wars probably would have happened anyway, even if the Lobby was not pushing for war.
Avigdor Lieberman is not a smooth talker like the late Abba Eban. Lieberman is a thug. He is unwittingly sabotaging Israeli-EU relations. For that, we are all grateful!
Last week, there was a burst of criticism by EU leaders of Israel's colonization policy in E-1. But unless that is followed by action that raise the price of its illegal actions, Israel will not be deterred from continuing its land theft program. Thanks to FM Lieberman, the EU leaders might actually take some action, but based on their past record I suspect that they won't do anything.
Kathleen, Time magazine is part of the MSM, and they covered the story:
UN Calls on Israel to Open Nuclear Facilities
(see link above).
Of course the MSM isn't as critical of Israel (and the US!) as Mondoweiss, but Time didn't totally ignore the story.
I recall early in the "peace process", when US conventional opinion was that at long last, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was on its way to solution. Liberals and conservatives fell for it.
On the Left, James Weinstein of In These Times fell for it as well, and so did many other people.
Three notable exceptions were Alexander Cockburn and Edward Said (both writing in The Nation) and Noam Chomsky.
Edward Said pointed out that the "agreement" was a rehash of previous Israeli proposals. Said thought that the agreement was so bad that it would have been better not to have an agreement at all.
Chomsky identified it as The Allon Plan (named for Yigal Allon, previous Israeli foreign minister). And I think it was Cockburn who emphasized that Israel never promised to get out of the West Bank, and never promised to obey international law, never promised to follow the UN resolutions, and never promised to return to the 1967 boundaries. The only real commitment that Israel made was to talk. Israel continued to seize more land while continuing "the peace process".
Miko Peled, son of Israeli general Matti Peled, has written a recent book, The General's Son.
Miko Peled comments that when he first visited the US, he had overcome the brainwashing of the environment in which he was raised, and was already a peace activist.
Miko remarked that he found it hard to relate to American Jews, because they only wanted to hear that Israel was good and the Arabs were bad.
He got that right! I think especially for older Jews. Younger Jews grew up in a different era and are more likely to be aware of the Palestinian narrative.
Elie Wiesel is best known as an author and Holocaust survivor. It's not as well known that in the 1940's he was a member of the Irgun, Menachem Begin's group of terrorists. Their most infamous massacre was at Yassin Deir, which played an important role in spreading panic and flight among the Palestinians. Wiesel didn't personally shoot anybody (as far as I know), but was a journalist instead. As a journalist he was an Israeli propagandist, and he still is an Israeli propagandist today.
Wiesel claims to speak in opposition to suffering and massacres, but in fact he supports anything Israel does, including wars of aggression and massacres. He is eloquent, and crafty, so his hypocritical honey-coated words go down well with the general public.
In the early 1980's, a book was published, authored by Joan Peters, entitled From Time Immemorial. As Mondoweiss readers already know, this propagandistic book "proved" that Palestinians only arrived recently in Israel/Palestine. It drew hundreds of favorable reviews and no unfavorable ones. (Book reviews were carefully steered to friendly reviewers, while real middle east experts were avoided). Then a graduate student, Norman Finkelstein, blew the whistle on the book, and called it a hoax. The book was a last-ditch attempt to rehabilitate the old Israeli slogan, "a land without people, for a people without a land". Finkelstein first gained notice as the man who refuted Joan Peters.
What was the role of Elie Wiesel? Supposedly he is a passionate advocate of "memory" about suffering.
Wiesel wrote a blurb praising the Peters book !!
After the book was exposed as a fraudulent piece of pseudo-scholarship, Wiesel declined to discuss his role in promoting the book. And this from a man who drones on and on about the importance of history and memory and justice etc etc.
Wiesel has not been called to account for his behavior, and his career certainly hasn't suffered. Hillary Clinton sees a dinner with Wiesel, respected moralist, as a political advantage for her.
Lena Dunham directs yet another mindless televised sitcom. I had never heard of her or her show until seeing this on Mondoweiss.
Way back in 1961, the chairman of the FCC, Newton Minow, gave a speech in which he denounced television shows as a "vast wasteland". He challenged anyone to watch television for one full day, without a book or magazine as diversion. The speech was controversial at the time because the defenders of the moronizing sludge on TV denounced Minow as an elitist who wanted to deprive the average American of the shows he (or she) enjoys. The producers of the 1960's TV show Gilligan's Island (a vintage airhead sitcom about a shipwrecked crew on a desert island) sneaked in a reference by naming the boat the USS Minow.
The speech is cited even today, over a half century later. Newton Minow, age 86, is still alive. And his accusation is still true. On cable TV, I get over 100 channels, but there's STILL "nothing good on TV." As I write this on a Sunday morning, the televised fare is especially dreary.
After I wrote the previous comment, I found this article by journalist Jim Lobe, "More Voices Urge Obama to Rein in Netanyahu".
I agree that if the US wanted to pressure Israel, Obama has options to exert pressure without the approval of Congress. For example: Obama could...
(1) launch a campaign to remember the USS Liberty, attacked by Israel in 1967. Hear public testimony by the survivors.
(2) revive the criminal case against Larry Franklin and the two AIPAC employees.
(3) open an investigation of the big Israeli spy ring busted in 2001 (140 people deported).
(4) make a public case about Jonathan Pollard. Have Obama (or a surrogate) criticize those calling for Pollard to be released.
These four options requires friends in the media, willing to run stories based on leads from the Administration.
This is more speculative, but note the recent blizzard of verbal protest by the European leaders against Israel's announced plans to colonize the E-1 region. Obama may have quietly encouraged the Europeans to do so. An anonymous Israeli official made this charge recently on Ynet, and it sounds plausible to me.
Obama has given me almost* no reason to believe that he wants to pressure Israel, but he does have options if he wanted to.
*Obama did say once, to a foreign leader, that it was a pain to have to deal with Netanyahu. (Obama spoke when he wrongly thought that his microphone was turned off. It was a Reaganesque moment)
Philip Gourevitch got a very big story very wrong: the massacre in Rwanda. See this chapter, part of an important book, The Politics of Genocide, by David Peterson and Edward Herman. Ed Herman is the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of a comprehensive book, The Political Economy of Human Rights, an oldie but goodie.
Hello, Scott Roth!
Thanks for your brief political biography.
By the way, did you ever thank your cousin for challenging your earlier views?
Just curious.
We all look forward to your contribution to the struggle for peace and justice!