Total number of comments: 8868 (since 2009-08-08 06:29:45)
seafoid
I wonder where the struggle between universal human rights and - “A Jew is by the nature of his creation a purer being. Similarly with the holiness of the land: The soil of Israel is essentially holier, the stones are holier because the land was destined by God to serve as the place of the Children of Israel” is headed "Either we are all sacred or none of us is" Paul Fourhorns Tenoso
It is made even worse by the fact that this comes from the representative of a State that was founded to ensure that the world would never again allow Jews to be brutalised, confined to ghettos and starved. 70% of Gazans live on less than $1 per day as a direct result of Israeli policy and are dependent on international relief organisations for food. A few miles up the road in Tel Aviv, patrons of one of the city’s sado masochism clubs pay $6 for a local beer or $8 for imported beer.
This is simply appalling . Give me the hasbara ,hasbaradim.
link to irishtimes.com
...
"The import of construction materials is approved for projects authorised by the Palestinian Authority in consultation with the international donor organisations. Israel’s only role relates to security considerations. There is no humanitarian crisis and no hunger in Gaza.
Food shops and stalls are full and the recently-opened luxury mall is crowded. Life expectancy, infant mortality and literacy rates are better in Gaza than in many Arab and even some EU countries. "
....
I hope that this letter may bring some clarity to the issue. – Yours, etc,
BOAZ MODAI,
Ambassador of Israel,
Pembroke Road,
Ballsbridge,
Dublin 4.
Lefty soi disant progressive Israelis are in denial . They lost their democracy in 1967. Not that it was much of a democracy before that.
Comparisons with Iran are pointless. Israel is a puerile state. There is only Jewish history in Israel. where were the Askenazis in the 12 century? somewhere else.
The Zionist narrative is a fairytale.
I want to see the wikileak of the lobby's work in 2001-2003 to get the war in Iraq they wanted , the one that would silence the Palestinians forever and secure Israeli hegemony into eternity.
"To these media pundits, ladies and gentlemen, who want Saudi Arabia to do more, I say that we have done more to further the cause of peace than any other country. "
Really? Wahhabi madrasa exports are good for peace ?
"they cannot see that the call for independence from Middle East oil is a canard. It defrauds the average consumer of energy by promising him clean energy which is non-existent, and to pay a higher price for that energy, regardless of the abundant availability of the secure source of energy which comes from the Middle East, and at a cheaper price."
He may be royal but he's above all a SALESMAN .
Good observations about Israel however.
Ging is restricted in what he can say by virtue of his role with the UN in Gaza. If he spoke what he thinks of Israel he wouldn’t be let back into Gaza. Simple as that. Too many good people have been silenced by the lobby over forms of words. He probably does support BDS but it would be suicide for him to say that in public. Ging is a thoughtful neighbour of a severely disturbed patient known as Israel and he has to choose his words carefully.
His work and his voice are vital and far more important than what he says about BDS. His role in drawing attention to the inhumanity of the siege of Gaza is more important than having another voice added to BDS. It is not as if his voice would make much difference anyway. BDS will continue to thrive as Israel goes further down the path of self destruction.
The 2 state Solution died when the settlers went back to Hebron and the bulldozers started in East Jerusalem in 1967. One state is in the DNA of Zionism. Israel's existential crisis didn't start yesterday and it won't be solved in one day either .
"The threat of a devastating Israeli attack will foment domestic pressure supporting Hezbollah's disarmament to preempt such an attack;"
Pigs will fly. Lebanon has already endured 7 Israeli wars of choice. Israel doesn't understand Lebanon. It's a nation of vicious backstabbers who unite when attacked. And the tabbouleh is heavenly.
Anyway next time Hezbollah will have better missiles. That IDF barracks in the centre of Tel Aviv would be my top target.
Sharon wanted to remodel Lebanese politics in 1982 by crowning a Maronite king, Bashir Jumayyal, to rule over a Zionist protectorate. It didn’t work out. No Israel grand project ever has. Jumayyal was assassinated and the plan fell apart after Israel set up the Sabra and Shailta massacre.
The people of Lebanon are not going to sleepwalk into another civil war again because of Israel. They didn’t get anything out of the last one.
Marc
That's what I thought as well .
This excellent NY Books article goes into the cult of Santa Muerte and its links to narco gangs in Mexico
link to nybooks.com
The YESHA project was imagined in 1967. When there was no internet. And it will be the internet that destroys it. It is like a story out of hindu mythology.
Hanthala
I like your cartoons !
Good man, Mohammad. Lovely post.
Where does Israel think all of this is going ?
Even if Bibi says he can get a settlement freeze the machine is unstoppable :
link to haaretz.com
I had lunch with an Israeli colleague today. He said Israelis stopped voting Labor "because they are weak on security". Wasn't that a very nifty formulation by the settler lobby as cover for the YESHA project ?
Now that the settlers have what they want, what's next?
Where do Israelis think they are going to be in 2020?
I've read Finkelstein's work on Dershowitz. Maybe his style is suited to the courtroom but to me he comes across as hopelessly blinded by misplaced loyalty to Israel. I always apply a very low credibility factor to what he says. He reminds me of one of the courtiers from "the emperor's new clothes" .
Foxman now reminds me of the last years of HL Mencken . The kids have moved on and there is nothing he can do about it, fierce as he was as a younger man
Super quote in the Monthly Review :
"But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief but true greatness and longer continued mediocrity.”"
link to monthlyreview.org
Israel chose brief but true greatness. And now it is time to pay the piper.
Very interesting analysis by 1948 Palestinian academic
link to electronicintifada.net
It is hard to see Israel's nefarious plans working out, even without Scooby Doo.
Israel has built itself into a corner.
The game will soon be up for Zombie Israel, which is controlled by the YESHA parasite
link to guardian.co.uk
I feel sorry for this guy. He comes across as earnest. He probably thinks he is serving the Jewish community. I doubt he has been to Israel or seen the Hebron settlers up close.
He has no idea how bad things are in Israel. He talks like it's a normal country.
Antitermite !
Same from Switzerland
Mainstream Judaism has thrown in its lot with Zionism, which has a limited shelf life especially post Goldstone. Perhaps it is time to regenerate the Bund.
They were right after all.
WW2 is greatly ovewrrated, Ciizen. It ended up with Eastern Europe saved from one murderous ideology and thrown to another.
YESHA wiped out the Green line, WJ. The Israel of 1966 no longer exists. Israel n ow runs a binational state from the Jordan to the Med in which only half of the people have full civil rights. 67 was undone by YESHA. And YESHA is a one way street.
"it would make things worse in Israel "
Like white phosphorous is already an acceptable Israeli form of communication.
LeaNder
"Bijeeb" means "I bring" and "ishi" means "thing". In Egypt they either use different words eg "hagah" for "thing" or else use different pronunciation . Lebanese arabic has a French sounding j whereas the Palestinians don't. The words themselves are banal but they are linked to the landscape and the people and as long as Palestinians use those words the game is still on.
I'm interested in dialects and accent and I often wonder what East Prussian German sounded like. Now that accent has disappeared since there no longer is a German speaking people in East Prussia.
Shingo
"The Israeli economy is booming" is a total non sequitur. Sanctions would hit Israelis where it hurts. I also think the phrase says a lot about the lobby mindset that places greed over human rights.
In my ideal scenario Israel would be attacked by bond vigilantes with The Goldman Sachs Squid playing both sides as usual.
Hi Bill
It is an arabic phrase used by Palestinians. Literally it means "there will be apricots tomorrow". It translates as "pigs will fly"
Which I what I think when I see J Street saying
"only direct action in the US government and American Jews are capable of effecting a policy change in Israel".
I think what J Street want to do is to work within the parameters of K Street or whatever that Beltway insider thing is.
The beauty of BDS is its inclusivity and unpredictibility.
Walid
I subscribe to a few American magazines (I live in Europe) and what strikes me is the quality of the writing . Except on Palestine. They can't do it. They never interview ordinary Palestinians.
I consider a lot of the insight on here to be top notch. But I never get it in the Progressive or Utne Reader. Or the LA Times. And I started to wonder why this is. And my conclusion is that Palestinians are silenced in the US media. It's an extension of the Zionist narrative about a defeated people. All of the memes are Zionist.
And I don't buy that narrative or those memes. Because something is changing in the Palestinian community. And those people are not going to be stopped by a lobby group or Ameer Makhoul being imprisoned on trumped up charges.
And the fight is going to be taken to the US media. Because those stories have to come out. And if Israel won't change by itself it will be made change. Because there is no future for Israel in the oppression of the Palestinians.
I watched a Zochrot video last night about the ethnic cleansing of al Manshiyeh which was a town that existed side by side with Jaffa and was cleared and destroyed in 1948. And now hosts the Hilton. On top of the graveyards. And I was listening to 2 old people talking in palestinian arabic about what happened. And what caught me were the words. Bijeeb. Ishi. And those words and those accents link Palestinians everywhere. Whether J Street approves or not. This silenced people.
So for me the current shifting is very significant. It is so heartening to see the coming together of Arabs like you and young Palestinian Americans and people of conscience like Annie and Kathleen and the shabaka network and the people in Bil'in and the BDS crowd and Mustafa Barghouti and the various young US Jewish activists and the others. Because the Palestinian people are not going to be silenced for much longer. And there is no amount of PR that is going to stop them.
I also think that Yank indulgence of Israel for the last 62 years has been incredibly damaging to Israeli society's sense of responsibility for its actions.
Foxman and the Dersh have delivered the houses of Congress but more careful parents would have exposed the child more to the real world. Israel isn't ready for the real world.
Walid
I agree. J Street want to tweak Israel and think that will make a difference. I think they are enchanted by the notion that there is some sort of magic bullet that will bring peace and an end to the conflict that won't involve any challenge to the Israeli elites who are generating so much in terms of money and influence from the YESHA project.
That is just deluded.
Israel has to be reformed from the ground up. Existing power structures are no longer fit for purpose. Israel is facing a civil rights disaster and JK Street want to change some PR aspects.
She said there were four reasons BDS wouldn't work :
The Israeli economy is booming :
So far. But is is a very open economy and the GDP depends on the euro goys buying Israeli products.
and it would have zero impact; it would make things worse in Israel by triggering a circle-the-wagons defensiveness;
And what difference would that make ? The wagons circled are in the DNA of Zionism.
only direct action in the US government and American Jews are capable of effecting a policy change in Israel;
bukra fi mishmish
and, finally, because it amounts to the progressive left 'giving up' on the idea of a Jewish democratic state.
Israel gave up on democracy many years ago. I'm sure the Afrikaners had similar moans in the 1970s. And that the Southern Democrats had too in the 1960s.
Jews in the US need to be more forceful in telling Israel that current orthodoxy is a disaster. YESHA has to be dismantled. Otherwise the contagion is going to spread to Israel.
South African perspective on Israeli apartheid from people who have walked the walk :
link to pacbi.org
I think it would be useful to start a discussion on what the post Zionist Israel/Palestine will look like. No Hatikva, no Star of David on the flag, new schoolbooks, a massively reduced army...
Allah ya'teek al afya, Shereen
I read a downbeat Karma Nablusi article in the LRB recently. Her generation's activism went nowhere, she implied. But as Annie says we fight on the shoulders of those who went before us. It is a long way for the people of Palestine from the desert refugee camps of 1949 to the US General Assembly but you were there for them. And what a report !
The wind is behind you.
BTW it is not true to say that you are not going anywhere. You are definitely going places. Israel is rightly afraid of BDS.
Done. Keep up the good work
Well said, Sumud
The US and Israel share a similar military ideology- nothing else to be expected except for the use of violence
A very good example of the serious disconnect between how ordinary Israeli Jewish soldiers following orders see the occupation and how the rest of the world sees it. If this were unspeakably cruel to Israelis they wouldn't video it. They wouldn't post videos of prisoner humiliation on Youtube if they thought it was morally repugnant. But because their highly militarised society has become so brutalised by 43/62 years of degrading treatment of the Palestinians this passes for normal . And Hebrew is a big part of the problem. Because it's a national conversation between people who have gone morally adrift from the rest of the Western world.
I'm not surprised young liberal US Jews are beginning to turn away from Israel. I wouldn't like my kids to grow up thinking this sort of cruelty is normal. Or laudable.
Wow Jim
Wonderful connection. I was thinking of 1960s Soviet politburo watching Bibi.
Bravo Ben
"I saw one young woman crying, she was so upset that her beloved Bibi's speech had been disrupted."
Amazing powerful Finkelstein video from University of Waterloo - zionist crocodile tears
link to youtube.com
Beautiful writing.
You can sing that, Pamela
Israel really messed up over the Mavi Marmara. Turkey could have been a
very important ally. Another self inflicted wound to go with Cast Lead.
Israel came too late to colonialism. That and the fact they couldn't wipe out the natives with influenza . Source of all Israel's troubles.
Keep up the good work, Kathleen
link to haaretz.com
"But at the moment, the people at the GA are more preoccupied with other issues, such as what to do when the kids don't feel a sense of Jewish identity. Or what to do when the people who led the great Jewish organizations and arranged the huge donations are passing 65."
Waxman will fade out too like all the apartheid supporting CEOs from the 70s did. It's funny that in the US sexual hypocrisy is so frowned upon but political hypocrisy gets a bye.
Bibi- flash as a rat with a gold tooth
And all because the parents are not Jewish. And Israel is not racist. And how is this?
"I have a suggestion: let us donate the money to the poor people of our country, and we will show up in the United States for any verbal debate."
I couldn't help noticing the striking similarities between this Israeli article :
link to haaretz.com
And this from India :
link to guardian.co.uk
The same processes, the same contempt for ordinary people
Well said. Of course he doesn't address it honestly. Zionism is far too brittle for robust analysis.
It all goes back to the colonial origins of Israel. So the people of say algeria are all Muslim , have always been muslim , have always lived in the same country and they want to call their state Muslim . What happened in Israel? The land was seized in 1948 and ethnically cleansed by outsiders who decided to call their state Jewish. Against the wishes of the natives who since then have been treated as aliens in their own country. And today there isn't even a Jewish majority in the Zionist space. And 2 out 3 Israeli national historic UNESCO monuments are not even in Israel.
People all over the world are waiting for peace and Israel isn't capable of or even remotely interested in peace. So people are slowly waking up to that. And all of the hasbara in the world won't put that realisation back in the box. Israel = Bad faith
Yitzhak Rabin gave his life to the oppression of the Palestinians. He signed up to Oslo but never stopped the expansion of YESHA. The Oslo deal was deeply unjust.
The US is out of line with the rest of the world on this.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear a few Euro politicians say they are sick of underwriting the occupation especially considering the austerity wave . Israelis read too much into their blanket US support.
The fact that Israel has no interest in peace is becoming more and more obvious.
Israel- meet consequence
Israel has hitched its wagon to a fading star. Bibi may crow at the victory of the Tea party party but it's just another step in the slow decline of the US.
Israel is today what General Motors was in the 1950s. What is good for Israel is good for America(n politicians). Israel had better enjoy its success because it is heading for the same fate as General Motors.
Great news
Where would Israel be without its fig leaves? Step forward Avnery, Hass and Leyv.
For how long have you been reading Ha'aretz, Richard ?
Even if Burston recently had some lefty articles what is his attitude going to be the next time Israel gets out the white phosphorous ?
I've been following Israel for a decade. There is no nuance. The country is following an insane policy that will end in its destruction.
People like you who profess loyalty to Israel need to be pointing this out to Israel. Otherwise your loyalty is as meaningless as Burston's liberalism.
I have been reading Haaretz since 2000 and I have to say that Burston is a symbol of the change in the paper since then- a gradual drift to the hard right that followed the changes in Israeli society and allowed developments such as Jenin 2003, Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2009, Flotilla 2010, all backed by the country’s media elite including Burston.
Burston and Israel badly miscalculated in Gaza. They never expected Goldstone to follow. They tried the old thinking with the flotilla . It flopped. Israel is like a wife beater used to slapping his missus around who is suddenly surprised when the neighbours start disparaging him.
Burston writes in that article about how world opinion has changed in favour of Israel. Everything that has happened since then suggests to me that he was wrong by 180 degrees.
Burston is a liberal only as long as his privileges are protected. Zionist liberal is an oxymoron.
Sumud
Israeli law is a sham and will have to be dismantled post occupation. Under sham Israeli law those are rights that Jews have. There is of course no moral basis to them. I love your name, BTW.
Burston the liberal Zionist who stood behind the IDF as it carpeted Gaza with white phosphorous.
link to haaretz.com
I find it very hard to get worked up about Jews in peril when the Jews in question are standing with one foot on the neck of a Palestinian. And wearing very nice sunglasses and an olive uniform.
Peace is about Israeli Jews giving up privileges and rights. The right to own all of Jerusalem. The right to steal land and water under the law. The right to torture non Jews. The right to 95% of the economic value generated in the Zionist space in any given year. The right to a first world standard of living amongst a third world native population. The exclusive right to violence.
Peace and the giving up of these rights is the only option for the survival of the Jewish state . Why would any Israeli Jew give up these rights? Call it the Zionist paradox.
I think the mistake the Zionists made was to mistake their state for the end of history. Zionists always had a very vague understanding of real history anyway. For them it ended in AD 73 and restarted with the first aliyah in 1880 or thereabouts. Puerile.
With their state following so closely on from the Shoah they had a bad case of messianism and the idea that g-d was now with them as written in the Torah meaning they could do as they wish. Which they pretty much have since 1948. And most of the damage has been off the Zionist balance sheet. So it is generally ignored and is consequently very dangerous.
They have this constant referring to eternity. Statecraft is far more nuanced. You have to work on it every day. And nobody outside cares about what stories you tell your people. Zionism has always been about pushing limits, never about responsibility. For Bibi for example Israel is just a playground for his neoliberal economics ideas. No strategic thinking. Very dangerous.
Ultimately they gambled their state for YESHA and the assumption that it would all work out and the Palestinians would disappear into history. Perhaps they thought G-d would help this somehow. But he hasn't.
I'm interested in the patterns around the Greek financial collapse. Ireland is in trouble now and if you look at the pattern of Irish bond yields over a few months they pretty much follow the pattern of Greek bond yields from early Spring. And I think it is the same for Israel. It is following the same pattern as South Africa maybe 25 years ago. And the momentum seems unstoppable.
I believe Bradley Burston lives in the EJ settlement of Gilo. If he would go AIPAC rather than welcome a long overdue injection of decency into Israeli society it says a lot more about him than it does about us goys.
Another way of looking at it is that Israel has been hijacked by morons and extremists. Look at Citibank under Chuck Prince. Same sort of thing.
And if you break Israel there won't be a replacement. And there is no going back to 1966.
This is the problem with the concept of national sovereignty. There is nobody to stop this appalling treatment of the Palestinians. Nobody to protect them. The world in Israel is upside down. The Hebrew bubble keeps Jewish dissent to a minimum.
Israeli trade is the Achilles heel. They need our business even though they clearly don't share our enlightenment values. Yalla BDS !
Except the Palestinians aren't going anywhere. The precarious status of Palestinians in the Zionist space ranges from relatively comfortable in Nazareth to recently made homeless twice refugeed in Gaza and covers a lot of scenarios in between.
When you look at it from a wider perspective there are as many Jews as Palestinians in the Zionist space and this is what will ultimately define every thing. The Zionist assumption that the Palestinians would leave if impoverished them enough has not corresponded to reality and it is no assumption upon which to build a national aspiration.
Masr ta'baan, Walid. The Government doesn't care about the sha'ab.
The Palestinian refugees are entirely the reponsibility of Israel. Maybe the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs could chip in but Egypt is in no position to pay. The recent food price inflation brings most of Egypt closer to the breadline.
"Never again" looks so hollow when I see that video. What is the point of a Jewish refuge when it treats people like that?
It would be interesting to compare Israeli torture of Palestinians with how the Cossacks and Imperial forces used to treat the Jews of the shtetls.
Zionism is all about spin and smears. The ideology doesn't stand up to the light. It goes way back. "Publish it not" is a very good history of what sort of thuggery earlier generations of Zionists managed.
Think of the lies and falsehoods surrounding the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndalll or Cast Lead , the blinding of Emily Henchowicz (sp), the flotilla or the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp.
Look at the litany of Israeli imposed misery that Seham posts daily and see why Hasbara is so vital to the Zionist effort.
She's a divider. People either love her or hate her. And there aren't enough who love her to make a voting majority.
Walid
Knowing her politics she would bomb you with clusterlets and finish you off with white phosphorous.
Netanyahu's predecessors promised that the Israeli hold over the Sinai was eternal. They would never leave sharm el sheikh. Jerusalem is also supposed to be the eternal capital of Israel. Eternal shmernal.
In general, Israeli architecture is very shoddy as well.
The PLO used to have a representative office in East Jerusalem- Orient House . Israel shut it down in 2003. It was one of the key events in the coarsening of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians after Camp David. Carpet bombing followed afterwards. So much for a desire for peace.
Nice to see the IDF's thuggery on video.They have been doing this sort of thing for 43 years.
The only place worse than Hebron is Gaza. Bibi didn't have the balls to bring the settlers from Hebron home in 1996. Another 14 years and things are far worse now.
Does anyone think these soldiers could expel the Kahanists from Hebron in a peace deal?
"But a majority would happily boot out supporters of a Greater Israel if they felt confident about a Greater Peace."
Sure they would. The peace has been on the table since 1988. Israelis prefer Yesha and the prosperity that oppression brings them.
Jew equals Israeli doesn't work when more than half of Jews don't want to live in Israel. Even the Dersh and Foxman don't want to live in Israel.
Zoabi is a real hero to set against the parasites in Congress, the ZoA, the ADL and across the benches in the Knesset where the exercise of power has lost all link to justice. She reminds me of the great Dr Ambedkar of India who stood up for the rights of his Dalit people and too spoke truth to power in his time.
It is very hard to see how the attacks on the Palestinian community within Israel are in the interests of the ordinary Jews of that country. Zionism, drunk on power, doesn't know how to use it. Perhaps that is the key design flaw in Zionism. Ultimately Netanyahu etc are no more than shtetl thugs with no concept of genuine leadership.
The last warmongering
link to guardian.co.uk
I think that is why Israel is so reluctant to yield anything to the Palestinians, Avi. They are afraid of what they did to the Palestinians being revisited on Israel. If historical narratives are meaningless then what value does the Zionist historical narrative ultimately have?
I think this is why they are so anal about placenames. If you engage the Palestinians the people may stop believing. Zionism ultimately is more a cult rather than a national liberation movement.
There appear to be strong parallels with Scientology.
If you add up the costs of Zionism to the US since 1948 the costs are impressive. USD 140bn in direct aid. The war in Iraq cost USD 3 trillion. It would have been easier to just flush the money down the toilet.
Here we go again. Zionists promising the world if a Middle Eastern rival is taken out. The Herzliya conference 2002 papers make fascinating reading. Haven't they learnty anything after Iraq? Oh, I forgot. The chickenhawks sent others to do the dying.
Very interesting post, Kathleen. Step 8 is imperative but Israel is not yet ready. Every step away from coexistence is a step away from Israel's long term future. The process hasn't even started. They need our prayers.
Walid
Maybe it looks different from Lebanon but I don’t see that time is running out for the Palestinians. Companies fail and disappear but people don’t. And the sha’ab al filisteeni may be in a bad state but it is not going to disappear and it is not going anyhere. History doesn’t ever end. It goes on and on, just like life. So the notion of time running out is misplaced, I think. I was very impressed by a campaign run by the Palestinian mobile company Jawaal a few years ago. It was called “al quds fil baal” (Jerusalem in the mind) and was a sticker collection for kids in the OT who were denied the right to visit Jerusalem by the Israeli regime.So even if they could not go to the haram ash sharif they could learn of its centrality to the Palestinian nation. Keeping the values ticking over. The Israelis can’t stop that process of culture. They can only operate on the economic level.
I met 2 old ladies at ar Ram checkpoint in 2004. Wearing the traditional dress. They had travelled from Jenin. And nobody was going to stop them visiting the holy mosques. Money doesn’t come in to it. . And that is something Zionism has never been able to do – deny the link between the people and the land.
I see Israel going down a one way street with fewer and fewer options. There might be a few more wars and will probably be more suffering especially for Gaza and Lebanon. But there is no exit from the current path for Israel. They depend on foreign trade with consumers who believe in their good faith. And they have been living in a Zionist bubble with themselves at the centre and a stronget and stronger move to the right over the last 10 years. And their worldview is now uniquely deluded. You see it on You tube. When people think as they do their hasbara videos make sense. But there are a nonsense to outsiders.- And that is problem that will not go away.
With Yesha it is all or nothing. Whatever constraints there were in the past have been washed away. And nothing it will be.
The Palestinians just need a period of sumud. the fruit will eventually fall from the tree.
Caterpillar shareholders are unlikely to be interested. Ethics might take 30% off the top line. There's a lot of money to be made propping up Yesha. Which is why nothing will change until the whole Zionist project collapses.
"Klein is shamelessly trafficking in the language of bigotry and anti-discrimination in an effort to criminalize campus human rights activism in favor of justice and peace in Palestine and Israel. "
Same as Foxman. I watched that interview with him elsewhere on the site, standing up for Israeli Jewish human rights abusers, imagining him as his Cossack and Polish predecessors would have been , excusing away another pogrom against the Jews.
Israel still has decent political capital but how sustainable is it? The best tactic would be to bring this latest GC outrage to the attention of the wider world. Israel will get away with it this time but there is going to be another war of choice along shortly and it is the aftermath that is worth playing for. Israel should be made to pay for such blatant brutality and contempt for human rights.
You can't have 80% of US Jews supporting Israel in Operation Cast Lead without some dirty journalism backing it up.
Israel is the most isolated of the OECD countries. The national conversation is driven by the Army in a language nobody else speaks. Hebrew is the linguistic framework underpinning the Zionist project. Without Zionism so much of Hebrew discourse would be meaningless. The very way Israelis see the world is mediated by the Army.
If Gilo is a suburb of Israeli Jerusalem, Ciudad Juarez would become an integral part of El Paso.
Good letter in the Guardian today
link to guardian.co.uk
Jonathan Freedland (Comment, 27 October) is a good man fallen among Zionists. He believes in a Jewish state. He also believes in a Palestinian state. The two beliefs are irreconcilable. His perspective on the conflict is 20 years out of date. Israel now stretches from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. In one area of that state, the Palestinians, the indigenous people, are treated as unwelcome immigrants and a demographic threat, and hedged in by discriminatory practices; in the other, they are locked into ghettos by walls, checkpoints, settlements and roads they are barred from using. In that context, the so-called peace process is nothing but a cover for entrenching the status quo. In any case, the mandate – and the credibility – of President Abbas ran out long ago. Freedland's tangled arguments show only that, when it comes to resolving the conflict, Zionist thinking has nothing to contribute . Obama is not the only one who needs "to change course".
Wow. What a fabulous idea. Fairuz should be invited to sing as well. She has a great song in arabic (bien sur) about Jerusalem.
Like a website is going to make any difference. What use will a website be when Israel launches its next carpet bombing of Lebanon?
Neither is there any magic hasbara to wash away the stain of "Cast Lead".
Thanks to the internet anyone can watch Cast Lead any time. Relive those civilian deaths and admire the hasbara.
Foxman has real old man trousers. Pulled up quite high.
Apartheid is South Africa. Sure it is.
Israel is a democracy. Sure it is. It is such a pity that there are no such videos from the 70s of pillars of the British and Yank establishments feeding the media their spin on South Africa.
Who will replace Foxman when he leaves the stage ? Is the younger generation as rabid?
Loving the New York accent.
The Dersh and Foxman built a fine sandcastle over several decades but things are changing. I read a great biography of HL Mencken a few years ago. He was ferocious in his day but when the fade came he could do nothing. The kids didn't want to listen to him.