Total number of comments: 89 (since 2010-03-19 07:43:58)
I read this blog daily. When, rarely, I find something that I haven't seen on Mondoweiss or allied blogs, I write about it on my own blog on Middle East affairs, called "The situation is very bad."
Website: http://thesituationisverybad.blogspot.com/
This piece is brilliant. Freeman supplies no footnotes, but those of us who are familiar with the issue know exactly what citation we would use for practically every sentence. The only problem is that the content of the piece is so alien to the average American that they're likely to dismiss it as the ramblings of some crank -- and when you've got the hasbarists peddling the line that Freeman is just a mercenary who's paid by the Arabs and the Chinese, I'm afraid the average American might just accept that explanation for Freeman's dissent from what we usually hear from public officials of both parties as well as from the media.
Take, for example:
We know what this is about: we've all seen the video on YouTube. If a friend tells us that they've never heard of such a thing, and if it were true, wouldn't the media be all over it?, we'll just point them to the video. But nobody has the patience to question us line by line.
Freeman makes a good point here:
When Chuck Hagel got in trouble for having called the Israel lobby the "Jewish" lobby, M.J. Rosenberg pointed out on this site that in his experience working with members of Congress, the only pro-Israel lobbyists that they worry about are Jewish ones. But even if we ignore that fact, if someone's going to object to Freeman's assertion, who are they going to point to? James Hagee and Christians United for Israel, naturally. But even at CUFI, the main guy who does the actual lobbying is its executive director David Brog, who is Jewish.
James Fallows had an article about this incident in the June 2003 Atlantic Monthly, and his last paragraph read:
Just last month, Fallows wrote a follow-up "Ten Years Ago: The al-Dura Case", but for some reason he chooses not to draw attention to his conclusion above. He writes, "I'm not getting back into this." He also says that his article has been criticized by both sides, and then gives a helpful link "to give you a chance for full exposure to the argument and evidence in support of the 'staged' hypothesis" of the Israeli propagandists. For some strange reason, I guess just one of those oversights, he fails to give his readers a link where they can have full exposure to the opposite argument and evidence.
Walid, sorry for getting the party wrong. Dumb of me; I don't think the Quebec Liberal Party has ever announced explicitly that it would consider independence. I was just answering Stephen Shenfield's question about whether there has been a campaign anywhere demanding "either A or B". If we look back at the Quebec slogan "equality or independence" and where that got from the point of view of the people who espoused the slogan 47 years later: they would probably say neither has been achieved (official bilingualism at the federal level not enough to count as "equality", and some transfers of powers certainly not enough to count as "independence"). So there may be lessons for Palestinians about adopting this kind of rhetorical approach.
It's been done before. "Equality or independence" was the main slogan of the winning Liberal Party under the leadership of Daniel Johnson during the Quebec provincial election campaign of 1966. The idea was that they were going to approach the federal government with a demand for equality between French and English within the Canadian confederation, and if that failed, Quebec would pursue independence outside of Canada.
Henry Norr writes:
Actually, Ira Glass, Nancy Updike, and Adam Davidson devoted an entire hour of This American Life to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on August 2, 2002:
link to thisamericanlife.org
Ira Glass himself begins the program with these words:
We hear a number of voices of Palestinians living under occupation, including Sam Bahour. Now one thing I didn't like about this program was the way it promoted Mustafa Barghouti, not because I have anything against Mustafa Barghouti, but because it's not Americans' role to decide who Palestinians should choose as their leader.
Ira Glass also went to Israel to do a story for This American Life about the Nakba on Feb. 14, 2003:
link to thisamericanlife.org
He interviewed Benny Morris and Tom Segev, as well as B.Z. Goldberg of "Promises".
Transcript here (see Act Two):
link to thisamericanlife.org
I thought it was well done, except for the fact that all eight people whose voices are heard in this segment are Jewish. But who else on NPR ever talks about the Nakba in a serious way?
I would even say this headline is misleading, because "AAAS" most commonly refers to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It would be huge news if that AAAS joined this boycott.
Miriam, I am curious if you are basing your comments about the Gaza flotilla participants on any experiences you have had meeting any of them. I have met a number of them, and I did not come away with the impressions of them that you are relating here. But maybe you met some different ones.
Mike:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that you'd tell us that some of your best friends are Palestinians. So why not just ask them?
dimadok:
First, most of those "others" of non-Jewish Israeli citizens are Palestinians. And second, we argue on this blog that most Palestinians ought to have the rights of Israeli citizens, because either they live in the area under Israeli government control, or they have homes in the area now under Israeli government control but the Israeli government bars them from returning not only to those homes, but even to the entirety of the area under Israeli government control.
Horowitz, Weiss and Ajl are not Israelis, so they cannot be traitors to Israel.
Cieply:
As far as I know, anti-Semitism is not in itself a crime in the United States. Cieply's August 5 article goes into the basis of the lawsuit:
The "other traits or conditions" named in the Unruh Civil Rights Act are:
What I find interesting is that Cieply chooses to mention only "sex, race, religion" -- so that by a process of elimination, he is suggesting that religion was the basis of the illegal discrimination (a conclusion reinforced by a headline that mentions the religion of the hotel owner). He could have mentioned ancestry or national origin instead. Cieply is going against the line given by the StandWithUs folks in my area as well as some of the hasbarists who post here that Jews are not defined by religion, but instead, Jews are an "ethnic group" or "a people".
Looking forward to seeing you at UC Berkeley, Pamela, but may I point out that just three days before the event, you still have written "Location TBD". I'm not here to blame you for anything, but just want to know what website to keep checking to find the location once it's decided. Is it this one:
link to fasttimesinpalestine.wordpress.com
Funny to read about intermarriage as a form of "soft oppression" when American laws against intermarriage used to be seen as inherently oppressive.
1. From the manual:
I think this section could be strengthened by quoting from the U.S. law that requires the U.S. government to ensure Israel's "qualitative military edge" in the region.
2. Quoted from birthrightisrael.com:
In response to this: The manual doesn't point out that not all Jews today have the land of Israel as an ancestral homeland (obviously, because for thousands of years, people have become Jews by conversion).
I do like the detailed section about how non-Jews from the land of Israel somehow don't have the "birthright" to visit the place where they were born, but the part of the manual before that is unfair when it asks, "Do you feel like Israel is your homeland? Do you feel more connected to the land in Israel than to the land where you were born, where you grew up?" because the quote from birthrightisrael.com specifically says "ancestral homeland". Plenty of Americans have an unambiguous ancestral homeland in Europe, Africa, or Asia, but feel more at home in America. And they might have immigrant parents who want them to be familiar with their ancestral homeland; liberal-minded Americans don't think there's anything wrong with that.
One thing that isn't mentioned here is that the majority of American Jews trace their ancestry to Europe, not to the land of Israel. I'm not trying to suggest any Khazar theories or anything, just pointing out the plain fact that if you ask any American Jew about his or her ancestors -- with individual names, dates, and places -- in the majority of cases, the most distant individual ancestors known would all be in Europe, and none in the land of Israel.
I don't think this graph is useful. It hides so much, it makes a reasonably sophisticated reader wonder what the person who made the graph is trying to hide. For example, if there was minimal settlement activity in the initial years after 1967, but then it suddenly ramped up to an all-time peak in 1990-1991 and then actually decreased thereafter, then the numbers could look as shown in this graph. I hasten to add that I know that that's not actually what happened, but the point is that the information given in this graph is compatible with settler population growth for every year during 1991-2012 being lower than during the immediately preceding period.
If you were simply trying to be informative, you would show the settler population by year, or perhaps the change in the settler population by year. Wikipedia has an example of the first kind of graph, although only up to 2007, here:
link to en.wikipedia.org
Either this graph, or a graph of settler population growth by year, with the peace-process era marked, would get the point across better.
It's just a tiny little word, but I still think it is worth noting:
Notice that the NYT's Public Editor is describing Phil with the definite article, not the indefinite article ("an anti-Zionist Jewish-American journalist ...") the implication being that the reader is expected to have heard of him. Congratulations!
If the numbers on the power axis are correct, then the area under the power curve is roughly 2 million kT, so this should be the maximum energy, but the energy shown is 1/40,000 of that. They could be using different units, so that one of the kT is wrong, but I can't find any standard unit that is either 40,000 or 1/40,000 kilotons of TNT.
In retrospect, I'm probably wrong. In theory, the graph could be showing power and energy for something you're going to do over a possible range of temperatures, rather than at some fixed temperature, but that could be a far-fetched possibility.
Yes, as doug said, this is just a graph of energy equal to power integrated over time. It is not a probability density function as stated above; I'm sorry to see that Glenn Greenwald makes this same mistake in his Update in the Guardian. I think this graph is most likely showing energy and power of a microsecond laser pulse. See, for example, this page from a course on laser physics.
The most hilarious thing, which I haven't seen mentioned yet, is that "kT" most definitely does not stand for kilotons; it stands for Boltzmann's constant multiplied by temperature, which has the units of energy and comes up often in physics: see this Wikipedia article. Jahn's interpretation is guaranteed to get a good laugh from an audience of physicists! There are a couple of other things wrong with "kT" meaning kilotons:
(1) The unit of tons is always abbreviated by lower case t, never upper-case T (which stands for tesla, a unit of strength of magnetic fields); so kiloton would be abbreviated kt.
(2) Jahn is just being a bad reporter when he says that kilotons are "the traditional measurement of the energy output, and hence the destructive power of nuclear weapons" -- but never mentions that this measurement is about energy output equivalent in kilotons of TNT.
And I have to savor the comment posted by Yitzhak Santis on the AP website:
Santis used to be the chief hasbarist of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, and now works for NGO Monitor.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is just like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who is surprised to learn he's been speaking prose all his life.
A year ago, Mondoweiss had an article entitled "Israeli embassy tried to get alarmist Iran question into 2008 presidential debate, then coordinated Gaza onslaught’s end with Team Obama". Here is the part about the 2008 debate, quoted from Richard Silverstein:
This time, these operatives got the first part of what they wanted, but they also got what they did NOT want in 2008:
The United States gave full official recognition in Washington to South African diplomats throughout the entire apartheid period.
Danny Danon, 17:20 - 17:37 in this video:
They could have chosen a different Danny Danon clip, such as 1:23 - 1:35 in this interview on September 13, 2012:
Funny, I didn't see any Americans in the current video being portrayed in a positive way saying anything like "America must take decisions that are good for America. We don't need to try to satisfy anyone, including our closest ally, Israel."
Irina ends the video (18:20 - 18:25) by saying:
There was an American named George Washington, a man who has commonly been called the father of his country, who had this to say when leaving office in 1796:
Irina says at 17:42 - 17:45, "I am proud that Israel is strong enough to defend itself"
How does it even make sense to be proud that a foreign country (not one's own) is strong enough to defend itself?
A career move. Look at the scenes of her showing off her assets while strutting down the street during 0:18 - 0:29 and again during 18:20 - 18:25. It helps that RightChange's audience is overwhelmingly male.
Although Benny Morris gets criticized on this blog, and rightfully so, he deserves credit for bringing up this context on at least one occasion, which also happens to be the only occasion I've seen him in person. Speaking in Berkeley at the end of January, 2009, where he was there to promote his new book 1948, he was asked what he thought about the recent unpleasantness in Gaza. The first thing he said in his reply was that when thinking about the Gaza Strip, it's essential to remember that about 80% of the people now living there are refugees or descendants of refugees who used to live in what is now Israel but are not permitted to return to their homes there. A lot of audience members looked uncomfortable when he said this, but nobody challenged him on it (how could they, anyway?). I should add that he then shared his own solution to this problem, which is that these refugees should move (or be transferred?) to the underpopulated Sinai area of Egypt.
Abdul-Rahman, you bring up a lot of very good points here, but the following comparison is unfair:
When the United States annexed the Southwest from Mexico, the people who were already living there became citizens of the United States, equal (at least in principle) under the law. One of these people even became governor of California. There was no large-scsale ethnic cleansing.
The paragraph quoted above is actually reminiscent of the verbal sleight-of-hand we hear in Zionist apologetics:
"Americans ... won’t allow ... Mexicans ... to have the southwest of what is today the United States ..."
If you're talking about individual Mexicans who are living in what's now the southwestern U.S., and are descended from people who lived there when it was part of Mexico, and never left, then these people already do "have" that area.
But if you're talking about individual Mexicans who have no ancestral ties to the land that's now the southwestern U.S. but have moved there in recent years from what's left of Mexico, then there is no compelling human-rights reason to allow those individuals to do that.
The Zionist myth is that the Jews of today are descended from people who lived in Palestine thousands of years ago but were forced out. Unless I'm missing something, the Aztlan Reconquista people are not saying that the people living in what's now Mexican territory are descended from people who were forced out of what's now the southwestern U.S. So it's unfair to call this "a stunning act of hypocrisy".
I got so curious about this that I plotted the waveforms of the voice votes. It appears to me that the noes win the first vote (barely), and the other two votes are too close to call. Others are welcome to check them too:
link to thesituationisverybad.blogspot.com
Note that the ad never calls Israel a "Jewish state". This might actually make for an opening. Optimistically, it could even be read as listing standards to which Israel will be held accountable.
I think she is telling her readers that he is the kind of person that we want to be living there. She probably reads her own newspaper, which a few days ago ran an op-ed by the noted American Middle East expert and former (ahem) diplomat Aaron David Miller, saying about Israel: "The country’s demographics look bad — too many ultra-Orthodox Jews, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs and not enough secular Jews."
This is important, because he was one of the Israelis who broke their promise to the United States on an issue to which JFK at least gave a high priority.
And this phrasing, of course, is the Israelis' own. If we go back to 1965, we see a reassurance to the Americans that "The Government of Israel has reaffirmed that Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Arab-Israel area." The latest reaffirmation that I heard was just last week from Ambassador Michael Oren (listen at the 45-minute mark): "Israel has said now for more than half a century that it will not be the first nation to introduce nuclear weaponry into the Middle East. It was our position in the 1960s; it's our position today. And back in the early '60s, there were inspectors sent by the United States to view our peaceful nuclear facilities, and they came back with a clean bill of health." So give their deputy defense minister a medal for that clean bill of health on their peaceful nuclear facilities!
The usual pinkwasher's line is "You wouldn't see this in any other country in the Middle East." But this photo is of two men walking down the street holding hands. That is actually a common sight in the non-Jewish-state Middle East! It is telling that the people who are spreading this photo seem unaware of that.
Fredblogs writes:
It says a lot about Steven Plaut's adopted nation that these writings do not jeopardize his job as a professor at a state-supported university.
At Berkeley, the main argument given by the Israeli consul and Stand With Us against divestment from Caterpillar was that it would make Jewish students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. Well, what would they say about how Prof. Plaut might make Palestinian students at U. Haifa feel?
James Watson was compelled to resign as the head of Cold Spring Harbor Lab because of his comments specifically about black employees not being as intelligent as non-blacks. If I had an opportunity to ask Prof. Plaut one question, I'd ask him what he thinks of the Palestinian students who have been in his classes. I can't see how he can win:
- He might say he's never had any Palestinian students. But why's that? Do they avoid his classes, or does he never let them in?
- He might say that the Palestinian students he's had have been exceptions. In that case, why is he making these sweeping generalizations about Palestinians?
- He might say that the Palestinian students he's had really are horrible people. But this is the kind of statement that would get any university professor in trouble with his administration.
That's what you can expect on a Monday at noon. At evening events, the Commonwealth Club has more younger people (like me) who have day jobs.
Here's another thing that deserves attention:
Someone who uses such logic to argue that this adds up to an attack on the legitimacy of Israel as a whole is saying that ethnic cleansing is some sort of essential component of Israel as a whole. And if that's the case, isn't it then a good thing to attack the legitimacy of Israel as a whole?
Also, what chutzpah for the rabbi to say that people who used to live in what's now Israel, and their descendants in refugee camps, should not be allowed to return to their own homes (unless they happen to be Jewish, I guess), when at the same time, the government of Israel (or is it Israel as a whole) welcomes the rabbi and his congregants on their visits, and even invites them to stay, offering financial assistance to do so. I'd like to hear him talk about the legitimacy of that kind of special treatment.
Palestinian negotiators (who are presumably "the Palestinians" we're talking about in this context) have agreed to allow immigrant, colonialist Jews to stay in the 78%, although it's true that they have not given up the right of those Palestinians who used to live in what's now Israel (or whose parents or grandparents did) to return to their homes. Usually it's seen as a good thing when war refugees return to their homes after the fighting ends. See: Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and what most people are looking forward to happening in Iraq eventually.
One thing I found noteworthy -- or at least it should be noteworthy -- is Beinart's use of the pronoun "we", referring to himself and other American Jews. The pronoun "we" can be either inclusive or exclusive, but if you read this op-ed closely, you see that he's consistent in using "we" in the inclusive sense, that is, "you and I and other American Jews", not "I and other American Jews (not you, dear reader)". If he were publishing this in some specifically Jewish publication, that would make sense, but he's publishing this in the newspaper of record of a country where Jews make up only 2% of the population. I can't even find any part of the piece where he's addressing non-Jewish readers! Another sign that American Jews have become the establishment, as Phil likes to point out.
Elizabeth Warren: "Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons"
Doesn't she belong to the same party as this guy:
Leon Panetta, U.S. Secretary of Defense: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No." (Jan. 8, 2012)
And what about this guy, who also works for the administration:
Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "We also know or believe we know that the Iranian regime has not decided that they will embark on the -- or the effort to weaponize their nuclear capability." (Feb. 20, 2012)
This from a religious leader? If we were to make this up, it would be labelled anti-Semitic. Just imagine if a top cleric of a major Islamic group in America went to the Islamic Republic of Iran and asked a panel of Iranians what they were considering in dealing with Israel: how about nuking the Negev to show the Israelis that their lives are on the line, that Iran won’t go quietly?
Ron Paul's official website, in a page entitled "Ron Paul: The Most Pro-Israel Candidate", says:
What a different Congress back then, if true. But I have been unable to find this congressional resolution on the Library of Congress website. Anyone know how to find the resolution and the votes on it?
Funny that the map on the top of that web page shows the occupied West Bank as being part of Israel. A useful map to point to when AIPAC supporters claim that Jews and non-Jews living "in Israel" have equal rights.
I heard about this today on an hourly NPR news broadcast, which actually referred to Iran as "the nuclear-armed nation" !
The current version of the article on NPR's website doesn't use that phrasing (it substitutes "Tehran" instead), but it does show up in a Google search.
NPR's story appears to have been taken, with minor modifications, from this AP story under Anne Flaherty's byline. Maybe her colleague Matt Lee might start asking Victoria Nuland about a "nuclear-armed nation".
Wikipedia has a scan of the original handwritten copy of the Basel Program of the First Zionist Congress of 1897. The declaration is in German, and it has two references to a place called "Palästina". In the Jewish Virtual Library's version, "Palästina" in German is helpfully translated into English as "EretzIsrael".
Simone writes:
I'm not sure if the Israelis have ever made that particular connection explicit, but in a New York Times op-end on October 13, 2010, Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., did draw out the implications of Netanyahu's new demand "for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people". He writes:
As I wrote a year ago, Bill Maher does deal with Zionism in his film Religulous. But instead of interviewing a religious Zionist (and it would've been extremely easy to find one among Jews or among Christians), he interviews a religious anti-Zionist. Yes, he shows us, religion can give people crazy ideas such as that Jews should not move to Israel en masse and displace and/or dominate the non-Jews living there!
In this interview, around 6:00, when Maher brings up Megiddo:
Maher: "It's in an Arab part of Israel."
Oren: "No, it's in Galilee."
Actually, Jews are a minority in Galilee. The reports don't say so directly, referring only to 53.1% being "of various minorities" (meaning non-Jewish), but since the vast majority of this minority population are Arab, Arabs could even make up a majority in Galilee. This would mean that Galilee is an Arab part of Israel.
I heard Michael Oren say that Hamas aims to kill all Jews worldwide back in February, 2010, on Michael Krasny's Forum program on KQED in San Francisco.
link to kqed.org
Beginning at time 7:40,
The following week, Krasny's guest was Maen Rashid Areikat, chief representative of the PLO mission to the U.S. Obviously not a Hamas guy, he didn't exactly clear this up.
link to kqed.org
Beginning at time 32:02,
Then at time 46:48,
After hearing both programs, the average listener who has heard "both sides" is going to think that Oren was correct.
The part that I found the most objectionable when I heard it on the radio is not in the transcript (but you can hear it on NPR's website): At 1:44, Guy Raz's first question is:
"Why did the Soviets make it almost impossible for Jews to leave? I mean, why did they want them to stay at all?"
But as we all know, the Soviets made it almost impossible for any citizen to leave. And it was actually easier for Jews to get permission to leave than it was for non-Jews. Notice that Gal Beckerman doesn't actually mention that fact in his answer.
This assumption that the rights of Jews should not be measured against the rights of non-Jews is the same one behind the settlement supporters who say that Jews are allowed to live in New York, Paris, or London, so why shouldn't they be allowed to live in Gilo?
So both he and Ethan Bronner are married to Israeli citizens. But as far as we know, Bronner hasn't applied for citizenship himself.
How does this news affect our view of Jonathan Cook's reporting? How would it affect our view of Ethan Bronner's reporting if he had also applied for Israeli citizenship?
Surely, at least some of the mall patrons actually voted for Hamas in 2006.
In June, 2003, the Atlantic had a cover story on "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism" by Bruce Hoffman. The article focused on Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Hoffman traveled to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and talked to all sorts of Israelis, many of whom are quoted in his piece, but there is no hint of evidence that he ever spoke with a single Palestinian on his trip.
The same June 2003 issue of the Atlantic had a revealing article by Fallows on "Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?". What was revealing about it was the clear failure of Fallows to see or care about the big picture. He spent a week in Israel for the single narrow purpose of investigating the shooting of one child in a demonstration. Oh, and he concludes that there is "persuasive evidence that the fatal shots could not have come from the Israeli soldiers"; and he warns us of "the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other cultures -- in particular today's embattled Islam -- will perceive our truths."
I had been an Atlantic subscriber for 10 years, but cancelled my subscription because of the June 2003 issue.
Israel's government disagrees on this matter even with Israel's supreme court. Straight from the Israeli supreme court's own website, in a judgment from 2004:
This was the top story on the latest newscast of the BBC World Service.
I can find the length (28 pages) and the name (NPT/CONF/2010/L.2) of this document, but I'm being frustrated in my search for the text of the document itself.
Here is a UN press release about the document:
link to un.org
And some media have quoted this sentence from the document:
But I don't know if that's the only mention of Israel in the document.
Phil, with all due respect, this post betrays some ignorance on your part.
1. You ask "Why should anyone believe in the two-state solution?", but nobody is suggesting that Israel should hand control of the Golan Heights over to a Palestinian state. The international community considers the Golan Heights to be Israeli-occupied Syrian territory.
2. Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. As you know, Israel has never annexed Gaza or the West Bank (except greater Jerusalem), although that is what one-state supporters want Israel to do. But as far as Israel's own laws are concerned, the Golan Heights are as much a part of Israel as Tel Aviv is.
In comment 1, James Bradley writes:
This is a distortion of what Morris said. His earlier talking point is that non-Jewish Palestinians' right of return is supported only by Muslim countries and a few "banana republics". Notice that he mentions both. Then when Finkelstein says that Morris said earlier on the show that only banana republics support the right of return, Morris interjects to say that this is a mischaracterization of what he said, because he also mentioned the Muslim countries.
Memo to Hoyt: It's not just most of the world, it's every other country in the world, now that El Salvador and Costa Rica have taken their embassies out of Jerusalem.
What does this have to do with feeling? There are parts of the United States that have the feeling of being in some other country; does it then follow that it would be unwise to adopt a hard and fast rule to say that they are in the United States? The point is that we're talking about the legal status of bits of land and of the people living on it.
A correction:
No, he's running for the House (as a Republican in a very safe Democratic district).
In his letter, Joel Pollak writes:
I just read through the first year of postings on Pollak's blog, and I recommend it to other Mondoweiss readers looking for unintended comedy.
link to guidetotheperplexed.blogspot.com
He begins it in February 2007 by tying himself in knots in his efforts to make the case that Israel is not an apartheid state.
I was impressed with the very useful syllabus and readings for Kennedy's course, and I was hoping to find the "alternative materials" suggested by Pollak, but these materials are not to be found on his blog. (The blog entries related to the class are from September through December 2007.)
It's striking to me how naïve and uninformed Joel Pollak is, despite the amount of access and contact he has with influential people. He reminds me of those Ziobot Harvard students who spoke at the AIPAC conference. But he's actually a refreshing change from the thuggish or whining tone of the hasbarists who post on this blog.
Good point. Mearsheimer does go a little bit farther than Stephen Walt in talking about Israeli apartheid as a present reality rather than as a future outcome. But, Israel won't be able to maintain apartheid "in the long run"? It's been maintaining it for almost 43 years already.
I was in the room at the ASUC Senate meeting last night, along with hundreds of others. It was supposed to start at 10:30 (delayed from 8:00), but didn't actually start until 11:30 p.m. So there was a lot of time to wait and look around. It was cool to be in the same room not only with the usual people like Paul Larudee, Henry Norr, and Joseph Anderson, who always show up at events like this, but also Michael Harris of San Francisco Voice for Israel and Akiva Tor, the Israeli consul. I was kind of hoping for an epic battle, but none of those named above actually addressed the whole group (at least while I was there; I left around 1 a.m.). During the hour-long wait, there weren't even any visible skirmishes between those in favor of divestment, who wore green stickers, and those opposed, who wore blue ones. Greens outnumbered blues about 4 to 1.
I'm guessing that video of the meeting will be made available sometime soon, but I haven't seen any links to it yet. So here is my summary of the opening arguments.
Each side was given 20 minutes to present its case. The pro-divestment side went first and showed a video from British media (the Guardian, they said) of reports of the IDF deliberately targeting hospitals and medics in Gaza. Then they had some Christian ministers, a Muslim imam, and Penny Rosenwasser of Jewish Voice for Peace talking about how Israeli actions harm Christians, Muslims, and also Jews, and go against the values of all three religions. I'm not sure why the pro-divestment side decided to take this religious approach at Berkeley of all places.
Then the anti-divestment side presented its case. Rabbi Menachem Creditor of Netivot Shalom, a local Conservative congregation, said that he agrees with the aim of justice for the Palestinians, but this resolution would not help to achieve it. He did not say that some of his best friends are Palestinians, but if he had, I have to say that it wouldn't have been believable. He said that "there's nobody who doesn't support the two-state solution", prompting some murmurs of discontent from the crowd. An Israeli professor of education named Alexander, a visiting professor at Berkeley, adopted a more angry tone, telling us about how Israel had no option but to do what it did in Gaza, in order to defend itself, etc., as we've all heard before. I can't remember whether it was Creditor or Alexander, but one of them said that every Jew who actually identifies with the Jewish people is against this divestment resolution. Also, both of them said that over half of the Jews in the world live in Israel, which is news to me (Wikipedia says it's 33%), and I assume they just made up this fact.
The third speaker on the anti-divestment side was an Israeli law student at Berkeley. She repeated the theme of Creditor and Alexander of how Jewish students at Berkeley are being made to feel marginalized and the object of hostility because of this bill. She responded to the video shown by the pro-divestment side, saying that it was biased because it showed only one side of the story. What it doesn't tell us, she said, is that the Israelis are cooperating with the UN over the damage done by IDF bombing of some 20-odd UN facilities in the Gaza Strip. Also, she told us that one reason for high casualty figures was that the Gaza Strip is very densely populated (not explaining why this is so). She said that it's difficult for not only Israeli students but also all Jewish students at Berkeley to hear people on campus talking about "war crimes", "ethnic cleansing", and "apartheid". As her time was running out, she told us about how Israel is so kind that it is supplying many tons of goods to Gaza.
I was surprised by how bad the case was that was presented by Creditor, Alexander, and especially the law student, who seemed to show zero compassion for those living under Israeli occupation and brought up a whole lot of points that give immediate rise to obvious uncomfortable questions for her own side. And why, for their three speakers, did they choose to have two Israelis and one American Jew (who referred to his strong ties to Israel)? OK, John Yoo probably wouldn't be a wise choice, but you'd think they could find some token gentile. But I guess that would be a little hard to fit in with their overall theme of "Jewish students are being made to feel uncomfortable here."
Rabbi Creditor's blog has an announcement of the meeting and a live report from it. On the blog he brings up the theme of Israel divestment bills being anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent (to use Larry Summers's expression). The irony is that the anti-divestment presentation given by him and the other two was, by itself, what I would characterize as anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent. Seriously, if what they were saying is true, that all real Jews support their side, that all real Jews support what the Jewish state has done and is doing in Gaza, and that all real Jews are, like these three, completely unmoved by reports from real live people on how the Jewish state treats the non-Jewish population under its control, and are far more concerned about how a bill to divest from companies that sell arms to the Jewish state makes Jewish students feel uncomfortable, and all real Jews want to tell Berkeley students that they shouldn't discuss claims of Israeli war crimes or ethnic cleansing or apartheid on the grounds that it makes Jews uncomfortable -- then these strike me as pretty good reasons to be anti-Semitic.
Disregarding the fierce back-and-forth in the comments section, I'd like to comment on something in the original post:
I don't get it. The book of Joshua is all about achieving Jewish statehood through the ethnic cleansing of another people. This important part of the Jewish Bible is all about celebrating Israel without regard for its impact on the indigenous people of Palestine. Many Jews today may not like it, but to call it "un-Jewish" doesn't seem historically correct.
Here's the Mondo link. The zombies at the beginning of the video were all from Harvard.
Clicking on "A Champion for Polish-Americans", you get to a page headlined "A CHAMPION FOR POLISH-AMERICANS".
Clicking on "A Champion for Korean-Americans", you get to a page headlined "A CHAMPION FOR KOREAN-AMERICANS".
Clicking on "A Champion for Armenian-Americans", you get to a page headlined "A CHAMPION FOR ARMENIAN-AMERICANS".
Clicking on "Mark Kirk's Record on the U.S.-Israel Relationship", you get to a page headlined ... what?
Is it "MARK KIRK'S RECORD ON THE U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP"?
No.
How about "A CHAMPION FOR ISRAELI-AMERICANS"?
No, but nice try.
Hmm. Since Israel calls itself the Jewish state, how about (nervously) "A CHAMPION FOR JEWISH-AMERICANS"?
Still no.
Hmm, getting worried now. There's nothing actually positive in the link name, "Mark Kirk's Record on the U.S.-Israel Relationship", because not all relationships are positive. I guess we'll just have to click to see the headline. It turns out to be:
"ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF A PRO-ISRAEL CHAMPION".
Ah, what a relief. Mark, you should have just written that on the referring page so that we wouldn't get all worried like that.
For those who don't bother to click through, I guess I'll supply the punchline by quoting what is on Mark Kirk's page on National Security issues. In his statements on current issues, the countries he mentions on this page are Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran -- but not Israel. Then at the bottom of the page, there are four clickable links, labeled as follows:
1. Mark Kirk's Record on the U.S.-Israel Relationship
2. A Champion for Armenian-Americans
3. A Champion for Korean-Americans
4. A Champion for Polish-Americans
Find the odd man out!
Well. Instead of all this acrimony, how about finding some common ground? All of us (Avi, yonira, wondering jew, Chaos4700, etc.) agree that the Gaza blockade is cruel and that the Israelis should lift it, and also that the Israelis should allow the refugee population of the Gaza Strip (that's 70-80% of the people there) to return to their homes, which are in what's now southern Israel, if they so wish. Right? This action by the state of Israel would even have the added benefit of vastly improving Israel's security, for people who care only about that.
Candy Crowley sounds as if she thinks she's talking with some American pundit, not with the Israeli ambassador, whose job is to speak for his country's government. Why else would she ask this question (at time 2:57):
"Do you look at this and not see anything that Israel has done that has been provocative, that has sort of led to this, what's been a real standstill?"
Interesting observation. If you google the phrase ""Explosive territory for Human Rights Watch", you get some links to the same Times article, but under that headline instead.
Julian:
That might actually be a good idea. HRW is an independent organization that receives no government funds, and having a congressional investigation on it on such trivial grounds as suggested here would really show who sets the agenda in Congress.
I don't know if you really mean this. Consider that since 1979, there have been millions of refugees from Afghanistan living in camps in Pakistan and Iran. In the past 30 years, many children have been born in those camps. Do those children not have the right to return to the same homes in Afghanistan that their parents had fled (along the lines of the HRW statement above)?
P.S. I'm still waiting for you to expose my lies.
yonira:
How does that contradict what I wrote?
I take this charge seriously. Please copy explicitly the instances of my lying that you're referring to, so that the readers of this blog can be made aware of them.
It was only 11 years ago that the U.S. and the rest of NATO fought a war against Yugoslavia with the publicly stated aim of forcing Yugoslavia to repatriate ethnic-Albanian refugees from the Kosovo region. NATO rejected the principle that the Yugoslavs could decide who they could give a right of return to.
Are you referring to what Jews did in the 20th century?
BSDNOW:
You appear to be confused about the meaning of the word "return". Refugees have individual specific homes and properties to which they demand the right to return (but are prevented from doing so by the state of Israel). It's a separate issue where the boundary lines might be drawn between the state of Israel and a future state of Palestine.
Human Rights Watch states its own position in these terms:
Ahmed Moor writes:
This is a good point, and I think it calls for some further research.
Does the U.S. government allow U.S. citizens who are its own employees (such as at the Tel Aviv embassy and the Jerusalem consulate) to be treated by the Israelis as Palestinians?
The State Department should have an answer to this question. The issue must even have come up before, unless the U.S. government deliberately avoids placing such people in jobs in Israel and its occupied territories.
Halevy:
Call me naïve, but to me it sounds as if the shortcomings of the ruling Israelis were exposed by the fact that this crisis happened in this first place.
Ah yes, yet another thing to remember about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is sui generis, for those who are trying to follow the official line.
James Bradley:
Tony Blair, the official envoy of the Middle East Quartet, representing the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia, would live on that same planet, because in his speech at AIPAC last week -- which, if the person introducing him is to be believed, was the sole purpose for his visit to the U.S. -- he actually follows this same script:
The Quartet envoy: "settlement expansion continues in disputed territory."
The Quartet envoy: "Then came the withdrawal from Gaza. Israel got out."
The Quartet envoy: "Israel can't afford what happened in Gaza in 2006 happening in the West Bank in 2012. Rockets from Gaza it can, with difficulty, survive."
Again, the Quartet envoy: "Rockets from Gaza"
Shouldn't there be an international outcry about Blair keeping his job? Seriously, have there been any public complaints by the United Nations, the United States, the European Union or Russia about this speech? I haven't heard of any.
James, I'm not disagreeing with anything you've just posted, but if somebody asked you, "In what Arab countries do citizens have greater rights and liberties than do Palestinian citizens of Israel?", how would you answer? Because if a genuinely curious person doesn't get a straight answer, they'll suspect that the answer is that there is none. It's one thing to object to the question itself (as in: Israel keeps telling us it's a democracy, etc., leading us to have some expectations, at which Israel falls well short), but it's another thing to say, as you're doing here, that there are such Arab countries.
Lebanon? Kuwait? I'm just asking...
James: it's a claim that's made often enough that I think it deserves a serious refutation. So when someone makes the claim, what specific Arab countries do you name where citizens have greater rights and liberties than do Palestinian citizens of Israel (who are always the Palestinians referred to in this context)?
Fowler is being too polite. It's not so much the Jewish vote that the Conservatives are after, but (sorry to say) Jewish money. Probably their greatest single success was in bringing over, from the Liberal party, the billionaire couple Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman, who stated publicly that they switched parties because of the two parties' different reactions to the 2006 Lebanon war.
It's possible that Harper's strong pro-Israel stance in that war may have improved his popularity among Jewish voters, but this was certainly offset by the sharp decrease in the Conservatives' voter intention ratings in the province of Quebec, where the party badly needed more seats if it hoped to get a majority in Parliament (which it still didn't receive in the 2008 election). I think the Quebec reaction was not so much (or not only) the result of Quebec's well-known general anti-war sentiment but also the result of sympathy among francophones for another country where the French language is in common use.
"Stockholm Syndrome" has been uttered several times, including in a comment posted in response to this column by Terry Glavin in the National Post.
I'm citing Glavin's column because I really like this non sequitur -- which is pretty common -- about why Israel shouldn't be blamed for the fact that there are still millions of Palestinians in refugee camps:
"The incubation of fourth-generation Palestinians in squalid refugee camps is indeed a prime cause of what Fowler calls "non-peace" in the Middle East, but I'm afraid you can't simply blame Israel for that. In Israel, the Palestinian community is vested with greater rights and liberties than any Arab country allows its citizens."
Harper and Frum being friends since high school days sounds too much like an urban legend to me, because I don't think they moved in any of the same circles back then. But if you've got some citation for that, I'd be interested in seeing it.
MRW writes: "remember that David Frum was PM Harper’s former school roommate."
Which school would that be? I can't find any evidence that Harper attended any of the same (elite) schools that Frum did.
The National Post is the Canadian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, and it included the full text of Fowler's speech, here:
link to network.nationalpost.com
eGuard writes:
"Tony Blair's words were not the Quartets words. In his very first line he disconnects his job from the Quartet's aim. He spoke first person only."
Yes, in his speech he was speaking first-person only, and he does not say that he is speaking on behalf of the Quartet, but here is his first line (the only time he mentions the Quartet and his job):
"My job is to try to get agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, for the Quartet which tries to get agreement between the US, the UN, the EU and Russia."
Does that line disconnect him from the Quartet and its aim? I don't think so. More like the opposite.
eGuard continues:
"He even refers to West Bank area as "disputed", not occupied: the Israeli formulation."
Yes, that is my point. If we're going to attack NPR for using the Israeli formulation, then we should attack Blair for doing the same thing, and we should attack him even more because it's his job to represent the Quartet, and he should not be going off message like this in a public forum. This was a prepared speech, and Blair's word choice was deliberate.
Henry, thanks for all this research, but at the beginning you refer to "an Israeli formulation -- "disputed" area -- to characterize East Jerusalem, instead of calling it "occupied," the term used by the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and virtually every other international body."
I refer you to Tony Blair, who is currently the official envoy of the Middle East Quartet, representing the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia. In his prepared speech at the AIPAC conference this week, he said that "settlement expansion continues in disputed territory." He never referred to occupied territory. Watch his speech here, or read the transcript here.
One of the people Bill Maher interviews (in order to ridicule) in Religulous is Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta, who opposes Zionism on religious grounds. OK, there are a handful of Jews like Rabbi Weiss. But there are a lot more people, both Jews and Christians, who are pro-Zionist on religious grounds, and they are a lot more powerful and causing a lot more real harm to real people than Naturei Karta. It's very easy to find YouTube videos of Christians United For Israel and others who talk bluntly about God being a real estate agent. And how is that not a lot scarier than Rabbi Weiss's view that Jews shouldn't move to Israel?
The host of this program was also too optimistic: He says that the Quartet is against Israel. Didn't he hear or read about the speech by Tony Blair (transcript here), the official Quartet envoy, who made a special trip to the U.S. to speak at the AIPAC conference? Blair even said "settlement expansion continues in disputed territory" -- never referring to occupied territory.
Finally, I was disappointed that Meagan Buren never had to answer Ali Abunimah's question about Israeli nuclear weapons and Israeli refusal to sign the NPT. Unfortunately, I think she might actually be the most persuasive of the three to the majority of Americans, who know very little about the conflict. Her evasive talking points sound like what Americans want to hear. She looks like the kind of person that Americans want to identify with. Her youth even works in her favor as it makes viewers more forgiving of an inferior command of the facts.
I agree with Citizen: I think Mearsheimer is too optimistic about a "huge shift" in discourse about Israel. However, I do give him credit for (as Ahmed Moor notes) saying that Israel is an apartheid state, rather than is "becoming" one. Here, Mearsheimer goes further than his co-author Stephen Walt, who had a blog post last year (which I complained about at the time) in which Walt describes a possible future option for Israel that he says would constitute "apartheid", but Walt ignores the fact that it's precisely the option that Israel took in 1967 and has continued to this day.
Gary Bauer has posted a "response" to Wright's op-ed in the comments section:
link to community.nytimes.com
He makes some surprising observations such as "many Muslims hate America -- as they hate Israel -- because we exist and insist on pluralism and tolerance" and "Arabs are free to live anywhere in Israel."
The link to the Haaretz article is broken. Here it is:
"U.S.-Israel row clouds opening day of AIPAC conference"
On the bright side, it is noteworthy that the Secretary of State's speech at an AIPAC convention denounces "secret nuclear facilities". And also says that "the right to speak freely, to assemble without fear; the right to the equal administration of justice, and to express your views without facing retribution" are "rights that are universal to all human beings".