Palestine Israeli Conflict

Ilan Pappé: Neo-Zionists Recapture the history of 1948

2010-11-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

An abridgment of Ilan Pappé’s 2009 article, “The Vicissitudes of the 1948 Historiography [i] of Israel,” in the Journal of Palestine Studies is available on the DESIP website at:

http://desip.igc.org/MiddleEast/MidEPappe.htm#_edn1

Pappé’s article describes the two-fold transition from the original Zionist myths to the New Historians, only to culminate in the relatively quick re-emergence of the neo-Zionists. Pappé observes that the neo-Zionists view the catastrophe of the Palestinians as an essential element making possible the State of Israel.

Selections from the abridgment follow.

Ilan Pappé

“The Vicissitudes of the 1948 Historiography of Israel”

History is more than a simple sequencing of events. It’s a way of extracting a plot out of collected facts. Current political realities inevitably influence the agendas of historians--especially when the subject involves a disputed land and when the narrative is seen as playing a crucial, even existential, role in that land’s ongoing struggle and self-image.

In view of the political demands, it should not be surprising that the case of Palestine and particularly the narrative of the 1948 war has undergone two major transitions in less than two decades. First from the classical Zionist narrative of a heroic Jewish struggle for survival that ended in the voluntary flight of the Palestinians, to the ‘New History’ narrative of the 1980s. This new narrative fundamentally challenged the earlier version, but around the year 2000, it gave way to what I will call the “neo-Zionist” narrative that re-embraced the spirit, if not the details, of the original Zionist version. This two-fold transition encompassed the movement from adherence to the national consensus, to recognition by certain elites of its many contradictions and fabrications [the post-Zionist phase], to the current phase of a rejection of the post-Zionist questioning of the national consensus.

The time that elapsed between the challenge posed by the New Historians/post-Zionists and their disappearance was short, less than two decades. The reason for this brevity is doubtless because the 1948 war is not only a story closely linked to current politics but is also a foundational myth.

Foundational myths provide the narrative that justifies the existence of the state, and as long as they remain relevant to the existing social order, they retain their force. Since the social order had not essentially changed since 1948, society quickly reverted to its long held beliefs. And because the history of the 1948 war is linked to the future direction of the country, conclusions about it remain extremely relevant to the political scene.

The new neo-Zionist historiography didn’t exactly repeat itself. …The difference from the neo-Zionist version lay in the response or interpretation of the facts. What the New Historians saw as human and civil rights abuses or even atrocities and war crimes are treated in the new research as normal and sometimes even commendable behavior by the Israeli military. First and foremost was the categorical rejection of the New Historian view that the dispossession of the Palestinians was an Israeli crime. The neo-Zionists attacked them on moral grounds for dangerously undermining the legitimacy of the state. Succinctly articulating this approach is a quote from an article in the journal Techelet: “No nation would be able to keep its vitality if its historical narrative were to be presented in public as morally defunct.”

Testimony of a Palestinian POW from the 1948 war.

We were loaded into waiting trucks…Under guard we were driven to Um Khalid…and from there to forced labor. We had to cut and carry stones all day. Our daily food was only one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at night. They beat anyone who disobeyed orders. After 15 days they moved 150 men to another camp. I was one of them. It was a shock for me to leave my two brothers behind. As we left the others, we were lined up and ordered to strip naked. To us this was most degrading. We refused. Shots were fired at us. Our names were read: we had to respond ‘Sir’ or else. We were moved to a new camp in Ijlil village. There we were put immediately to forced labor, which consisted of moving stones from Arab demolished houses. We remained without food for two days, then they gave us a dry piece of bread.

http://desip.igc.org/MiddleEast/MidEPappe.htm#_edn1

[i] Wikipedia defines historiography as the study of the history and methodology of the discipline of history.

Walid Khalidi: Reconquering Palestine

2010-10-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

A summary or précis of Walid Khalidi ‘s article “The Hebrew Reconquista of Palestine” in the Autumn 2009 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies has been posted on the DESIP website at: http://desip.igc.org/MiddleEast/khalidiMEReconquista.htm

Professor Khalidi’s article, about twice as long as the précis, addresses some of the myths regarding the transformation of the former Palestine into the State of Israel.

Here are a few selections from the summary.

Since the issue [of who should inherit Palestine was divine right], questions of who fired the first shot, and who did or did not accept partition are mere diversions and irrelevancies.

The genius of the Zionist narrative is its ability to depict the Palestinians’ resistance to this plan to dispossess them as Palestinian aggression, and the Zionist drive to impose this revolutionary status quo on the Palestinians by force of arms as Jewish self-defense.

Aggression and offensive action were built into the very concept of the UN partition resolution. The area of the proposed Jewish state was 15 million dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 sq meters) while Jewish land ownership in 1948 totaled 1.7 million dunams. The UN was effectively saying to the Yishuv: go seize those additional 13.3 million dunams that you don’t own from those who do.

The outcome of the [1948] regular war was already sealed in favor of Israel by the time it began. The “existential threat” supposedly posed by the Arab armies, like the ostensible equity and moral viability of the UN partition resolution, is a myth. Ben Gurion was without doubt the most capable political leader operating in the Middle East in the 40s and 50s. He had his priorities right. Unlike the leaders of the Irgun and Stern gang who fought the British, Ben Gurion understood that the real enemy was the Palestinians and Arabs. (Although one could argue that it came down to a question of shared responsibility: Stern and Irgun would fight the British-–with discreet help from Ben Gurion–-and so Ben Gurion could devote the bulk of his energies to uprooting the natives.)

Perhaps the mother of all ironies is that Ben-Gurion spent 1916 researching the history of Palestine in—of all places—the New York Public Library. One of the conclusions of his research was that the Palestinian peasantry were the real descendents of the ancient Hebrews.

Read more: http://desip.igc.org/MiddleEast/khalidiMEReconquista.htm

Don Peretz, 1958: Abandoned Arab Property Critical to early days of Israeli State

2010-09-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

"'Abandoned' Property" insert from "Original Sin" by Zachary Lockman. in Middle East Report, May-June 1988, Review Essay.

from Don Peretz, Israel and the Palestine Arabs (Washington, D.C.: Middle East Institute, 1958), p. 143

"Abandoned property [belonging to Arabs who had become refugees] was one of the greatest contributions toward making Israel a viable state. ... Of the 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and the beginning of 1953, 350 were on absentee property. In 1954, more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. They left whole cities like Jaffa, Acre, Lydda, Ramleh, Baysan, Majdal; 388 towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns, containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel. Ten thousand shops, businesses and stores were left in Jewish hands. ... In 1951-52, former Arab [citrus] groves produced one-and-a-quarter million boxes of fruit, of which 400,000 were exported. Arab fruit sent abroad provided nearly 10 per cent of the country's foreign currency earnings from exports in 1951. In 1949 the olive produce from abandoned Arab groves was Israel's third largest export, ranking after citrus and diamonds. The relative economic importance of Arab property was largest from 1948 until 1953, during the period of the greatest immigration and need. After that, as the immigrants became more productive, national dependence upon abandoned Arab property declined relatively."

Justin Raimondo: Obama vs the Lobby

2008-05-14T18:35:00.001-07:00

May 14, 2008
Obama vs. The Lobby

No matter how much he grovels, it's never enough

by Justin Raimondo

Poor Obama. No matter how much he tries to placate the Israel lobby, they just won't take yes for an answer. The Lobby has been after him for months, trying to dig up "evidence" that someone with the middle name of "Hussein" is necessarily an enemy of Israel. The best they could come up with so far were the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's jeremiads, which didn't have much of an effect at the polls, as the North Carolina and Indiana primary results – and subsequent national polls – attest.

Yet Obama still keeps trying to appease the Lobby. He's purged staff members who so much as looked cross-eyed at the Israelis, such as one poor adviser who meekly suggested that talking to Hamas might not be such a bad idea. He was out faster than you can say Mearsheimer and Walt.

Speaking of which: the Obama-oids have gone out of their way to distance themselves – i.e., "reject and denounce" – those two hate-criminals, even though, as Philip Weiss trenchantly avers, a book by Obama's point man on the Middle East says pretty much the same thing. In response to all this, Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, dryly remarked: "At this point one wonders whether the people who deny the dramatic influence of the Israel lobby on American politics feel a little bit silly."

Obama's latest ritualized act of kowtowing takes place in the pages of the online edition of The Atlantic. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg – a male Judy Miller who retailed Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" and other fables while still managing to keep his job and his reputation – Obama jumps through all kinds of hoops with admirable dexterity, while ultimately avoiding abject humiliation and even showing signs of resistance.

Goldberg is relentless from the get-go, demanding to know: Does Zionism "have justice on its side?" Obama goes into a soliloquy about his "Jewish-American camp counselor" whose tales of life in Israel he found "powerful and compelling." Obama, the wanderer, has instinctive sympathy for a people who want only to "return home." All very affecting and authentic, but it's not enough for David Frum, who kvetches:

"Now, how long do you think it takes Obama to deliver a 'yes' or 'no' to that question? I count five long paragraphs – interrupted by two follow-up questions – before we get to 'yes.' That's a long time. And when the answer is delivered, it is immediately followed by a disclaimer."

No explanations, no dilly-dallying, no loitering in the middle ground – Commissar Frum wants answers, "straight" answers, and he wants them now! So what is this supposed "disclaimer"? It's when Obama says:

"That does not mean that I would agree with every action of the state of Israel, because it's a government and it has politicians, and as a politician myself I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don't always act with justice uppermost on our minds."

How dare he refuse to give a moral blank check to whomever is elected prime minister of Israel?! Frum takes the Ann Lewis line, which is, as she put it at a forum on Israel: "The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel."

According to the strictures set down by the Frum-Lewis Doctrine, we are obligated to carry out whatever edicts the Israeli government issues – and if Obama doesn't buy that, well, then, he's obviously a Farrakhan-loving secret Muslim.

Goldberg isn't satisfied, either. He presses the issue:

"Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don't know you – Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski – then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don't feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it."

Unconditional support isn't enough: the Lobby demands love. At the end of his interrogation, Obama is expected, like Winston Smith, to love Big Brother.

Obama's smooth "I find that really interesting" is devastating, in its way: what equanimity! He segues into a personal account, talks about his trip to Israel, lists all the admirable qualities of the pioneers who have built a modern democracy in a "hardscrabble land," among them a strong sense of morality and a long tradition of open discussion and disputation: "What I also love about Israel is the fact that people argue about these issues, and that they're asking themselves moral questions."

Here Obama hits back, if ever so subtly. The poor guy was no doubt annoyed at being hectored by this tiresome fanatic, so who can blame him for making reference to the well-known fact that discussion in the U.S., when it comes to Israel, is far less open than it is in Israel itself? (Although that is changing.)

He pulls back, though, and resorts to the some-of-my-best-friends argument, another way of groveling. Yet Goldberg is clearly pissed off, because he pops him with the Ahmed Yousef question. Poor Obama: another Rev. Wright-like tar baby, albeit this time an Arabic version, one that the Lobby hopes will stick. Obama, however, isn't having it:

"My position on Hamas is indistinguishable from the position of Hillary Clinton or John McCain. I said they are a terrorist organization and I've repeatedly condemned them. I've repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements."

Goldberg has got him. The man who would talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and Raúl Castro won't deal with the elected government of Palestine. Why single them out for special disfavor? After all, the Cuban commies, for one example, have imprisoned and killed their internal critics, as have the Iranians. Chavez is no angel, either. Why a different standard for the Palestinians? He's acknowledged their suffering; why won't he recognize their legitimacy?

Much of Obama's appeal is personal, rather than ideological. He's just the kind of president one can imagine pulling off a series of diplomatic triumphs based on the sheer power of his personality alone. The Obama campaign knows this, of course, and that's partly why the candidate continually emphasizes the value of diplomacy, of talking to our alleged adversaries, and giving America options other than war. It's pretty humiliating for him to have to drop this tack because it so rankles the Lobby.

What's more, you can bet John McCain will point to this contradiction during the coming debates. If I were McCain, I'd ask: Well, Barack, if you're going to talk to Ahmadinejad, then why not have a cup of coffee with Ahmed Yousef?

Goldberg, clearly enjoying himself, digs the knife in deeper and inquires if Obama was "flummoxed" upon receiving the Ahmed Yousef seal of approval.

Obama – flummoxed? Surely he jests.

It's time for Obama to play his trump card, and he does so by citing his support for Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, in which factories, hospitals, and Christian churches were bombed and thousands of Lebanese civilians were killed, in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of three more. That, at least, was the ostensible rationale for a sustained assault on Lebanon's physical and socio-economic infrastructure, although military action to take out Hezbollah was planned long before that incident.

In any case, Goldberg keeps throwing him some pretty hard fastballs: what about the settlements? And you'll note how Goldberg phrases the question, asking whether President Obama "will denounce the settlements publicly." "Denounce" is a pretty strong word: I doubt that's what Obama would do. The point is that what the Lobby fears most is public criticism by an American chief executive, or, really, by any American official. The settlements, answers Obama, are not helpful, and he doesn't deny that he'll say this in public. He won't take a vow of silence.

Goldberg comes back with an echo of a persistent suspicion, oft voiced in Likudnik circles: "Do you think that Israel is a drag on America's reputation overseas?"

Clearly exasperated at this point, Obama cuts to the core of the issue by inserting a heretical concept – that an American president ought to be upholding American interests:

"No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I'm not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that's the safest ground politically."

Obama is here engaging the Lobby, challenging its claim to set the terms of the debate – and refusing to grovel. Good for him. The very idea that American and Israeli interests are in any way separable – and even, at times, in opposition to each other – is the Lobby's worst nightmare. For that would mean the end of our policy of unconditional public support – although, in private, recriminations abound.

Obama really goes on the offensive toward the end of the Goldberg interview, especially when he avers:

"My job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now, and that won't lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article."

Of course Obama has read Goldberg's article, and the mirror metaphor is really devastating, yet more evidence of the candidate's underrated ability to lash out – but with a rapier, not a broadsword.

Existential dread – that's what Obama evokes in the Lobby. They've had it easy during the Bush II era, with the American Netanyahu ensconced in the White House. Settlements? Go right ahead. The Wall of Separation? Higher, please. Assassinations timed to derail the "peace process"? Fire away! Those days will be over if Obama makes it to the Oval Office, and the Lobby knows it.

The great problem for Obama is that no matter what he does or says, the Lobby will fight him every inch of the way, and the smears will get more outrageous. The "he's-a-secret-Muslim" meme is just the beginning. The guilt-by-association strategy is by no means exhausted. How many penny-ante anti-Semites who spent two minutes with him shaking his hand, and would enjoy the publicity of being the focus of media attention, can be dug up between now and November?

We'll soon find out.

H.Clark: Truman and Israel: The power of the Lobby

2006-06-03T17:50:00.000-07:00

June 3, 2006

A pdf of this article with footnotes can be found on Clark's website.

http://www.counterpunch.org/clark06032006.html
How It All Began

Truman and Israel
By HARRY CLARK

The Truman Administration's policy on Palestine challenges at its start the "strategic asset" view of the US-Israel relationship, and reinforces the "Israel lobby" view, as argued in the recent article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Truman's support for the creation of a Jewish state was due entirely to the US Jewish community, without whose influence Zionist achievements in Palestine would have been for nought. Long before any strategic argument was made, indeed, while a Jewish state was considered a strategic liability, long before Israel's fundamentalist Christian supporters of today were on the map, the nascent Israel lobby deployed its manifold resources with consummate skill and ruthlessness.

Rabbi Abba Silver, a Cleveland Zionist with Republican contacts, and Zionist official Emmanuel Neumann, initiated "Democratic and Republican competition for the Jewish vote." In 1944 they "wrung support from the conventions of both parties for the Taft-Wagner [Senate] resolution" supporting abrogation of the Palestine immigration limits in the 1939 British white paper, and the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth. Ensuring the traditional loyalty of Jewish voters was a paramount concern of Democratic politicians, up to the president himself, in the New York mayoral election of 1945, the 1946 congressional elections, and the 1948 presidential election.

Gentile opinion was also courted in non-electoral ways, through the American Palestine Committee of notables, constituted in 1941 by Emmanuel Neumann of the American Zionist Emergency Committee. By 1946 it included "sixty-eight senators, two hundred congressmen and several state governors" with "seventy-five local chapters." It became "'the preeminent symbol of pro-Zionist sentiment among the non-Jewish American public.'" It was entirely a Zionist front.

Zionist control was discreet but tight. The Committee's correspondence was drafted in the AZEC headquarters and sent to [chairman New York Senator Robert] Wagner for his signature. Mail addressed to Wagner as head of the American Palestine Committee, even if it came from the White House or the State Department, was opened and kept in Zionist headquarters; Wagner received a copy. The AZEC placed ads in the press under the committee's name without bothering to consult or advise it in advance, until one of its members meekly requested advance notice.

Dewey Stone, a Zionist businessman, had financed Truman's vice-presidential campaign in 1944, and businessman Abraham Feinberg, with jewelry magnate Edmund Kauffman, led fundraising for the otherwise penniless 1948 presidential campaign. "If not for my friend Abe, I couldn't have made the [whistle-stop train] trip and I wouldn't have been elected," Truman stated. "Feinberg's activities began a process that made the Jews into 'the most conspicuous fundraisers and contributors to the Democratic Party.'"

Key White House advisors ensured the domination of Zionist viewpoints in the highest circles of the Truman Administration. Jewish aides David Niles, administrative assistant to Truman, and Max Lowenthal, special assistant on Palestine to Clark Clifford, himself "Truman's key advisor on Palestine at the White House," were especially crucial. Niles was one of two presidential aides retained from the Roosevelt Administration, the other being Samuel Rosenman. Niles was Truman's chief political liaison with the Jewish community. Lowenthal was the Harvard-trained former counsel to the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee on which Truman had served, who specialized in drafting Zionist memoranda. In 1952 Truman stated in a letter to Lowenthal, "I don't know who has done more for Israel than you have." Clifford, an ambitious Missouri lawyer, like so many non-Jewish Democrats saw the manifest political advantages of Zionism; Truman's 1948 victory launched Clifford's career as consummate Washington insider. The "White House through its busy and assorted 'aides' never wanted for advice on the Palestine question. All together the quantity of well-argued advice coming in through various unofficial channels was enormous and would provide an efficient counter to that coming from the president's official foreign policy-making body, the State Department."

This formidable apparatus was deployed at every twist and turn on the sinous path of events that culminated in Israel's creation. In 1945 the Zionist lobby linked concern for the Jewish displaced persons languishing in European camps to the Palestine question, and pressured Truman to endorse a Jewish Agency proposal for the British to admit 100,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine. In April, 1946, a joint Anglo-American commission, with US Zionist members, duly endorsed the immigration proposal, among others, and talks about a comprehensive political settlement continued, resulting in the Morrison-Grady plan for a federal state with autonomy for Arab and Jewish provinces. Truman thought this then and later "the best of all solutions proposed for Palestine." The plan fell short of Zionist aspirations toward partition, and under intense pressure, with the fall elections looming, Truman reluctantly declined to endorse it.

The Jewish Agency Executive, the governing body of the Zionist settlement in Palestine, proposed partition in early August. On October 4, 1946, the eve of Yom Kippur, Truman delivered his famous statement noting the Morrison-Grady plan, and the Jewish Agency partition proposal, calling the latter a solution which "would command the support of public opinion in the United States." Despite Truman's further observations that "the gap between the proposals" could be bridged, and that the US government could support such a compromise, the statement was intepreted as support for partition and a Jewish state, as Niles predicted to the author, the Jewish Agency representative in Washington, whose original draft had been modified by the State Department.

The Yom Kippur statement marked a watershed in the political and diplomatic struggle for the Jewish state. The British saw in the statement a demonstration of Jewish political power and gave up their quest for an Anglo-American consensus on Palestine. [British Foreign Secretary] Bevin began issuing threats that the British would evacuate Palestine, and in February 1947 they did indeed refer the question with no recommendation to the United Nations.

The United Nations Special Commission on Palestine was formed after the British announcement. Truman, "undoubtedly embarrassed by accusationsthat he had exploited the Palestine question for domestic political gain" with his Yom Kippur statement, thereafter remained silent. Before the UNSCOP decision, Truman still retained hope for the 1946 Morrison-Grady plan. When on August 31, 1947, UNSCOP announced its majority decision recommending partition, the administration came under overwhelming pressure to endorse it.

The State Department, like the War Department and most of the government, and elite opinion generally, viewed good relations with the Arab states and people as the basis of US interests in the region's oil, in trade and investment, military basing rights, and excluding the rising bogey of Soviet influence. But the Zionist machine was at full throttle, Democratic politicians from Congress to the Cabinet protested vehemently to Truman about the political consequences, and a statement endorsing partition was made at the UN on October 11. Truman did fear that if partition became a US plan, it would require US military forces to implement. Neither the US nor the USSR, which endorsed partiton two days after the US, lobbied for votes among member states, and on Wednesday, November 26, the General Assembly approved the final draft partition resolution by one vote less than the required two-thirds majority. The partition forces postponed the final vote, and over the Thanksgiving holiday the president, his aides and US diplomats went to work. That Saturday, November 29, partition passed by 33 to 13, with ten abstentions. Truman took personal credit for changing several votes.

The Zionists had been waging war against the British to drive them out of Palestine, and after the UN partition vote, civil war broke out with the Palestinian Arabs, who rejected partition. In February the State Department prepared plans for a UN trusteeship, with White House knowledge and approval. On March 18, a UN commission to monitor events in Palestine, which had predicted further chaos and bloodshed after the British withdrawal on May 14, reported its failure to arrange any agreement between Jews and Arabs. The following day the US ambassador to the UN announced the trusteeship proposal, which brought a political firestorm down on Truman, and on March 25, at a press conference he explained that trusteeship was only a means of eventually implementing the UN resolution for partition. The Arabs rejected it, as did the Zionists.

Yet Truman's political fortunes continued to plummet; the Democratic Party revolted against his presidential candidacy. As Zionist forces achieved partition (and more) in battle, pressure built for recognition of the Jewish state, expected to be proclaimed on the final day of British withdrawal, May 14. The State Department was opposed; Secretary Marshall feared Jewish military successes would be temporary, that the Zionists would partition Palestine with King Abdullah of Transjordan without reaching a settlement with the Palestinian Arabs (which did happen), and that recognition would prejudice efforts to arrange a truce under UN auspices after May 14. Zionist pressure was ferocious; the White House "aides" were very busy; Clifford essentially commissioned the request for recognition from the Jewish Agency representative in Washington, which was duly delivered to the White House, and at 6:11 PM on May 14 Truman announced de facto recognition of the State of Israel, flummoxing the US delegation at the UN, and US allies. Marshall stated that, during a May 17 discussion, Truman "treated it somewhat as a joke as I had done but I think we both thought privately it was a hell of a mess," and felt that the US "had hit its all-time low before the U.N."

US diplomacy in the ensuing Arab-Israeli war was conducted along similar lines. For all his accommodation of Zionism, Truman received only 75% of the Jewish vote, compared to Roosevelt's typical 90%. Truman lost New York, Dewey's home state, where there was also a large vote for Wallace. Truman did narrowly win Ohio, Illinois and California, helped by Jewish voters. After describing this tour de force of domestic power politics, Michael Cohen, whose work is mainly quoted here, argues that Israel's military prowess changed the views of the British and US diplomatic and military establishments. "[T]he White House and State Department, if only ephemerally, came to a consensus on Israel's vital importance to the West as a 'strategic asset."' The qualification "ephemerally" acknowledges the Eisenhower presidency, during which Israel was largely not regarded as a strategic asset.

Cohen attributes Truman's susceptibility to Zionist influence to a "unique set of circumstances that converged to determine the fate of Palestine," including Jewish friends, White House advisors, key Jewish Democratic Party fundraisers, and Zionist military prowess, which "should not be expected ever to repeat themselves." The circumstances were not at all unique, but have been practically a recipe for quasi-sovereign Jewish influence on foreign policy in Democratic administrations. By institutionalization throughout the political culture, this influence extends to Republican administrations as well; Eisenhower was an exception. Such influence is not sinister or conspiratorial, but the overt working of US-style capitalist democracy, albeit on behalf of racism, war and genocide, and with a paralyzing effect, in this case, on the liberal circles which usually oppose such matters.

The chauvinism of US organized Jewry is a distinctive feature of US society and history, comparable in importance to classic US singularities like slavery, and the absence of a socialist left, and their crippling legacies. Jewish influence in the Democratic Party, and its impact on foreign policy, notably on the inability of Democrats to mount a critique of the Iraq war and Middle East policy, is comparable to the influence of the Dixiecrats, the segregationist Southern Democrats, on civil rights, labor law and other issues. The moral antipode to organized Jewish power is not an orthodoxy which misattributes Jewish influence to "strategic interest," but anti-Zionism. Left internationalism, in which Jews were prominent, and classical Reform Judaism, once the dominant Jewish creed, emphatically rejected Zionism as a reactionary ideology, rejected modern Jewish nationality, and affirmed the Jewish place as a minority in liberal or revolutionary society. Anti-Zionism need not mean, immediately, a secular democratic state in Palestine, but the moral and intellectual framework which rejects Zionist claims on Jewish identity and gentile conscience, and asserts liberal and revolutionary values against radical nationalism.

Harry Clark grew up in the Illinois congressional district represented for twenty-two years by Paul Findley, a centrist Republican. Findley's support for the Palestinians aroused the ire of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which eventually drove him from office. Studying Zionism is an avocation.

A pdf of this article with footnotes can be found on Clark's website.

© 2006 by Harry Clark

*Kathleen and Bill Christison: The Rise of the Israel Lobby

2006-05-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Friends:
Many thanks to Kathy and Bill Christison (K&B) for this brilliant article and for focusing on Chomsky’s and Finkelstein’s extraordinary (or not) defense of the Lobby.

As Harry Clark and surely others have pointed out, K&B show that the Chomsky supported (if not inspired) idea of Israel as a U.S. strategic asset is bogus; that Israel has from the beginning been a dreadful millstone working against the national, regional and international interest – on a scale it is impossible to quantify or exaggerate.

Standing on their shoulders and on those of Mearshimer/Walt, Blankfort, Sniegoski and others we can perhaps begin a little to advance the discussion and start to tease out where the Israeli interest ends and the U.S. interest begins.

As K&B properly note, the two U.S. presidents not in conformity with the wishes of the Lobby are Carter and the elder Bush – not to mention Eisenhower in an earlier era. The other administrations either worked actively against the U.S. interest (Reagan and Bush II) or effectively did so by acceding to Israeli demands. (As an example, note that according to Seymour Hersh, JFK had no choice but to accede to Israel’s ongoing program of developing nuclear weapons.)

The point is that each administration is more or less different, but that they can be roughly divided into the two classes above: either they are ruled by radical neocon, permanent war ideology or not. (The neocons are the pro-Israeli descendents of the same extremist ideology as General MacArthur’s who wanted war against China and Russia, just as the neocons do today).

In the Reagan administration, chief neocon Sec of State Alexander Haig was in charge until the Israeli war in Lebanon spun out of control and wiser heads prevailed, and he was cashiered. Today in the Bush administration, Cheney and Rumsfeld are firmly in control and there is no adult supervision in sight, surely not from the Democrats. So who is going to save the world? It’s not as if we can’t see what is happening to the Afghanis, the Iraqis and if they have their way, soon the Iranians.

Coming back to the main idea that should be obvious, but is apparently controversial, that different presidents enact different policies, I wonder how many readers would agree that if we still had democracy in this country and Gore won, we would not be in Iraq today.

Thus from the perspective that there are differences between one president and another, between one administration and another, we can suggest that Bush’s war against Iraq served both the extremist right in Israel and also their U.S. counterparts --Bush, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld. The latter’s agenda of permanent war while it was enabled by the lobby, can be distinguished from Israel’s more limited goals for regional dominance. Perhaps it is when the extremist right gains power as in Reagan and Bush II that Israel becomes a true strategic asset, enabling destabilization, chaos and war. --Ronald

CounterPunch

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
May 16-31, 2006 VOL. 13, NO. 10
Ten, even five years ago, a fierce public debate over the nature and activities of the Israeli lobby would have been impossible. It was as verboten as the use of the word Empire to describe the global reach of the United States. Through its disdain for the usual proprieties decorously observed by Republican and Democratic administrations in the past, the Bush administration has hauled many realities of our political economy center stage. Open up the New York Times or the Washington Post these days and there may well be another opinion column about the Lobby.

CounterPunch has hosted some of the most vigorous polemics on the Lobby. In May we asked two of our most valued contributors, Kathy and Bill Christison, to offer their evaluation of the debate on the Lobby’s role and power. As our readers know, Bill and Kathy both had significant careers as CIA analysts. Bill was a National Intelligence Officer. In the aftermath of the September, 2001, attacks we published here his trenchant and influential essay on “the war on terror”. Kathy has written powerfully both here and on our website on the topic of Palestine. Specifically on the Lobby they contributed an unsparing essay on the topic of “dual loyalty” which can be found in our CounterPunch collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

In mid May they sent us their measured assessment, rich in historical detail. We are delighted to print it here in its entirety, which means our subscribers get the bonus of an 8-page issue. Which is the tail? Which is the dog? asked Uri Avnery here, a few issues back, apropos the respective roles of the Israel Lobby and the US government in the exercise of US policy in the Middle East. Here’s an answer that will be tough to challenge. A.C./J.S.C.

The Rise of the Israel Lobby:
A Measure of Its Power

By Kathleen and Bill Christison

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the University of Chicago and Harvard political scientists who published in March of this year a lengthy, well documented study on the pro-Israel lobby and its influence on U.S. Middle East policy, have already accomplished what they intended. They have successfully called attention to the often pernicious influence of the lobby on policymaking. But, unfortunately, the study has aroused more criticism than debate – not only the kind of criticism one would anticipate from the usual suspects among the very lobby groups Mearsheimer and Walt described, but also from a group on the left that might have been expected to support the study’s conclusions.

The criticism has been partly silly, often malicious, and almost entirely off-point. The silly, insubstantial criticisms – such as former presidential adviser David Gergen’s earnest comment that through four administrations he never observed an Oval Office decision that tilted policy in favor of Israel at the expense of U.S. interests – can easily be dismissed as nonsensical . Most of the extensive malicious criticism, coming largely from the hard core of Israeli supporters who make up the very lobby under discussion and led by a hysterical Alan Dershowitz, has been so specious and sophomoric, that it too could be dismissed were it not for precisely the pervasive atmosphere of reflexive support for Israel and silenced debate that Mearsheimer and Walt describe.

Most disturbing and harder to dismiss is the criticism of the study from the left, coming chiefly from Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, and abetted less cogently by Stephen Zunes of Foreign Policy in Focus and Joseph Massad of Columbia University. These critics on the left argue from a assumption that U.S. foreign policy has been monolithic since World War II, a coherent progression of decision-making directed unerringly at the advancement of U.S. imperial interests. All U.S. actions, these critics contend, are part of a clearly laid-out strategy that has rarely deviated no matter what the party in power. They believe that Israel has served throughout as a loyal agent of the U.S., carrying out the U.S. design faithfully and serving as a base from which the U.S. projects its power around the Middle East. Zunes says it most clearly, affirming that Israel “still is very much the junior partner in the relationship.” These critics do not dispute the existence of a lobby, but they minimize its importance, claiming that rather than leading the U.S. into policies and foreign adventures that stand against true U.S. national interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt assert, the U.S. is actually the controlling power in the relationship with Israel and carries out a consistent policy, using Israel as its agent where possible.

Finkelstein summarized the critics’ position in a recent CounterPunch article (“The Israel Lobby,” May 1, emphasizing that the issue is not whether U.S. interests or those of the lobby take precedence but rather that there has been such coincidence of U.S. and Israeli interests over the decades that for the most part basic U.S. Middle East policy has not been affected by the lobby. Chomsky maintains that Israel does the U.S. bidding in the Middle East in pursuit of imperial goals that Washington would pursue even without Israel and that it has always pursued in areas outside the Middle East without benefit of any lobby. Those goals have always included advancement of U.S. corporate-military interests and political domination through the suppression of radical nationalisms and the maintenance of stability in resource-rich countries, particularly oil producers, everywhere. In the Middle East, this was accomplished primarily through Israel’s 1967 defeat of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser and his radical Arab nationalism, which had threatened U.S. access to the region’s oil resources. Both Chomsky and Finkelstein trace the strong U.S.-Israeli tie to the June 1967 war, which they believe established the close alliance and marked the point at which the U.S. began to regard Israel as a strategic asset and a stable base from which U.S. power could be projected throughout the Middle East.

Joseph Massad (“Blaming the Israel Lobby,” CounterPunch, March 25/26) argues along similar lines, describing developments in the Middle East and around the world that he believes the U.S. engineered for its own benefit and would have carried out even without Israel’s assistance. His point, like Chomsky’s, is that the U.S. has a long history of overthrowing regimes in Central America, in Chile, in Indonesia, in Africa, where the Israel lobby was not involved and where Israel at most assisted the U.S. but did not benefit directly itself. He goes farther than Chomsky by claiming that with respect to the Middle East Israel has been such an essential tool that its very usefulness is what accounts for the strength of the lobby. “It is in fact the very centrality of Israel to U.S. strategy in the Middle East,” Massad contends with a kind of backward logic, “that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around.” (One wonders why, if this were the case, there would be any need for a lobby at all. What would be a lobby’s function if the U.S. already regarded Israel as central to its strategy?)

The principal problem with these arguments from the left is that they assume a continuity in U.S. strategy and policymaking over the decades that has never in fact existed. The notion that there is any defined strategy that links Eisenhower’s policy to Johnson’s to Reagan’s to Clinton’s gives far more credit than is deserved to the extremely ad hoc, hit-or-miss nature of all U.S. foreign policy. Obviously, some level of imperial interest has dictated policy in every administration since World War II and, obviously, the need to guarantee access to vital natural resources around the world, such as oil in the Middle East and elsewhere, has played a critical role in determining policy. But beyond these evident, and not particularly significant, truths, it can accurately be said, at least with regard to the Middle East, that it has been a rare administration that has itself ever had a coherent, clearly defined, and consistent foreign policy and that, except for a broadly defined anti-communism during the Cold War, no administration’s strategy has ever carried over in detail to succeeding administrations.

The ad hoc nature of virtually every administration’s policy planning process cannot be overemphasized. Aside from the strong but amorphous political need felt in both major U.S. parties and nurtured by the Israel lobby that “supporting Israel” was vital to each party’s own future, the inconsistent, even short-term randomness in the detailed Middle East policymaking of successive administrations has been remarkable. This lack of clear strategic thinking at the very top levels of several new administrations before they entered office enhanced the power of individuals and groups that did have clear goals and plans already in hand – such as, for instance, the pro-Israeli Dennis Ross in both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, and the strongly pro-Israeli neo-cons in the current Bush administration.

The critics on the left argue that because the U.S. has a history of opposing and frequently undermining or actually overthrowing radical nationalist governments throughout the world without any involvement by Israel, any instance in which Israel acts against radical nationalism in the Arab world is, therefore, proof that Israel is doing the United States’ work for it . The critics generally believe, for instance, that Israel’s political destruction of Egypt’s Nasser in 1967 was done for the U.S. Most if not all believe that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was undertaken at U.S.behest, to destroy the PLO.

This kind of argumentation depends too much on a presumption of policy coherence. Lyndon Johnson most certainly did abhor Nasser and was not sorry to see him and his pan-Arab ambitions defeated, but there is absolutely no evidence that the Johnson administration ever seriously planned to unseat Nasser, formulated any other action plan against Egypt, or pushed Israel in any way to attack. Johnson did apparently give a green light to Israel’s attack plans after they had been formulated, but this is quite different from initiating the plans. Already mired in Vietnam, Johnson was very much concerned not to be drawn into a war initiated by Israel and was criticized by some Israeli supporters for not acting forcefully enough on Israel’s behalf. In any case, Israel needed no prompting for its pre-emptive attack, which had long been in the works.

Indeed, far from Israel functioning as the junior partner carrying out a U.S. plan, it is clear that the weight of pressure in 1967 was on the U.S. to go along with Israel’s designs and that this pressure came from Israel and its agents in the U.S. The lobby in this instance – as broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt: “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction” – was in fact a part of Johnson’s intimate circle of friends and advisers.

These included the number-two man at the Israeli embassy, a close personal friend; the strongly pro-Israeli Rostow brothers, Walt and Eugene, who were part of the national security bureaucracy in the administration; Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas; U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg; and numerous others who all spent time with Johnson at the LBJ Ranch in Texas and had the personal access and the leisure time in an informal setting to talk with Johnson about their concern for Israel and to influence him heavily in favor of Israel. This circle had already begun to work on Johnson long before Israel’s pre-emptive attack in 1967, so they were nicely placed to persuade Johnson to go along with it despite Johnson’s fears of provoking the Soviet Union and becoming involved in a military conflict the U.S. was not prepared for.

In other words, Israel was beyond question the senior partner in this particular policy initiative; Israel made the decision to go to war, would have gone to war with or without the U.S. green light, and used its lobbyists in the U.S. to steer Johnson administration policy in a pro-Israeli direction. Israel’s attack on the U.S. naval vessel, the USS Liberty, in the midst of the war – an attack conducted in broad daylight that killed 34 American sailors – was not the act of a junior partner. Nor was the U.S. cover-up of this atrocity the act of a government that dictated the moves in this relationship.

The evidence is equally clear that Israel was the prime mover in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and led the U.S. into that morass, rather than the other way around. Although Massad refers to the U.S. as Israel’s master, in this instance as in many others including 1967, Israel has clearly been its own master. Chomsky argues in support of his case that Reagan ordered Israel to call off the invasion in August, two months after it was launched. This is true, but in fact Israel did not pay any attention; the invasion continued, and the U.S. got farther and farther embroiled.

When, as occurred in Lebanon, the U.S. has blundered into misguided adventures to support Israel or to rescue Israel or to further Israel’s interests, it is a clear denial of reality to say that Israel and its lobby have no significant influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Even were there not an abundance of other examples, Lebanon alone, with its long-term implications, proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt conclusion that the U.S. “has set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state” and that “the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.’”

As a general proposition, the left critics’ argumentation is much too limiting. While there is no question that modern history is replete, as they argue, with examples of the U.S. acting in corporate interests – overthrowing nationalist governments perceived to be threatening U.S. business and economic interests, as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and elsewhere – this frequent convergence of corporate with government interests does not mean that the U.S. never acts in other than corporate interests. The fact of a strong government-corporate alliance does not in any way preclude situations – even in the Middle East, where oil is obviously a vital corporate resource – in which the U.S. acts primarily to benefit Israel rather than serve any corporate or economic purpose. Because it has a deep emotional aspect and involves political, economic, and military ties unlike those with any other nation, the U.S. relationship with Israel is unique, and there is nothing in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nothing in the government’s entanglement with the military-industrial complex, to prevent the lobby from exerting heavy influence on policy. Israel and its lobbyists make their own “corporation” that, like the oil industry (or Chiquita Banana or Anaconda Copper in other areas), is clearly a major factor driving U.S. foreign policy.

There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the U.S. military-industrial complex with Israeli military-industrial interests. Chomsky acknowledges that there is “plenty of conformity” between the lobby’s position and the U.S. government-corporate linkage and that the two are very difficult to disentangle. But, although he tends to emphasize that the U.S. is always the senior partner and suggests that the Israeli side does little more than support whatever the U.S. arms, energy, and financial industries define as U.S. national interests, in actual fact the entanglement is much more one between equals than the raw strengths of the two parties would suggest. “Conformity” hardly captures the magnitude of the relationship. Particularly in the defense arena, Israel and its lobby and the U.S. arms industry work hand in glove to advance their combined, very compatible interests. The relatively few very powerful and wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of U.S. arms corporations and, as globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. In every way, the two nations’ military industries work together very easily and very quietly, to a common end. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in the U.S. Congress and tell them quite credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their own districts will be lost. That’s power. The lobby is not simply passively supporting whatever the U.S. military-industrial complex wants. It is actively twisting arms – very successfully – in both Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of a definition of U.S. “national interests” that many Americans believe is wrong, as does Chomsky himself.

Clearly, the advantages in the relationship go in both directions: Israel serves U.S. corporate interests by using, and often helping develop, the arms that U.S. manufacturers produce, and the U.S. serves Israeli interests by providing a constant stream of high-tech equipment that maintains Israel’s vast military superiority in the region.

But simply because the U.S. benefits from this relationship, it cannot be said that the U.S. is Israel’s master, or that Israel always does the U.S. bidding, or that the lobby, which helps keep this arms alliance alive, has no significant power. It’s in the nature of a symbiosis that both sides benefit, and the lobby has played a huge role in maintaining the interdependence.

The left’s arguments also tend to be much too conspiratorial. Finkelstein, for instance, describes a supposed strategy in which the U.S. perpetually undermines Israeli-Arab reconciliation because it does not want an Israel at peace with its neighbors, since Israel would then loosen its dependence on the U.S. and become a less reliable proxy. “What use,” he asks, “would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S. bidding?”

Not only does this give the U.S. far more credit than it has ever deserved for long-term strategic scheming and the ability to carry out such a conspiracy, but it begs a very important question that neither Finkelstein nor the other left critics, in their dogged effort to mold all developments to their thesis, never examine: just what U.S.’s bidding is Israel doing nowadays?

Although the leftist critics speak of Israel as a base from which U.S. power is projected throughout the Middle East, they do not clearly explain how this works. Any strategic value Israel had for the U.S. diminished drastically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They may believe that Israel keeps Saudi Arabia’s oil resources safe from Arab nationalists or Muslim fundamentalists or Russia, but this is highly questionable.

Israel clearly did us no good in Lebanon, but rather the U.S. did Israel’s bidding and fumbled badly, so this cannot be how the U.S. uses Israeli to project its power. In Palestine, Finkelstein himself acknowledges that the U.S. gains nothing from the occupation and Israeli settlements, so this can’t be where Israel is doing the U.S.’s bidding. (With this acknowledgement, Finkelstein, perhaps unconsciously, seriously undermines his case against the importance of the lobby, unless he somehow believes the occupation is only of incidental significance, in which case he undermines the thesis of much of his own body of writing.)

Owning the Policymakers
In the clamor over the Mearsheimer-Walt study, critics on both the left and the right have tended to ignore the slow evolutionary history of U.S. Middle East policymaking and of the U.S. relationship with Israel. The ties to Israel and earlier to Zionism go back more than a century, predating the formation of a lobby, and they have remained firm even at periods when the lobby has waned. But it is also true that the lobby has sustained and formalized a relationship that otherwise rests on emotions and moral commitment. Because the bond with Israel has been a steadily evolving continuum, dating back to well before Israel’s formal establishment, it is important to emphasize that there is no single point at which it is possible to say, this is when Israel won the affections of America, or this is when Israel came to be regarded as a strategic asset, or this is when the lobby became an integral part of U.S. policymaking.

The left critics of the lobby study mark the Johnson administration as the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but almost every administration before Johnson’s, going back to Woodrow Wilson, ratcheted up the relationship in some significant way and could justifiably claim to have been the progenitor of the bond. Significantly, in almost all cases, policymakers acted as they did because of the influence of pro-Zionist or pro-Israeli lobbyists: Wilson would not have supported the Zionist enterprise to the extent he did had it not been for the influence of Zionist colleagues like Louis Brandeis; nor would Roosevelt; Truman would probably not have been as supportive of establishing a Jewish state without the heavy influence of his very pro-Zionist advisers.

After the Johnson administration as well, the relationship has continued to grow in remarkable leaps. The Nixon-Kissinger regime could claim that they were the administration that cemented the alliance by exponentially increasing military aid – from an annual average of under $50 million in military credits to Israel in the late 1960s to an average of almost $400 million and, in the year following the 1973 war, to $2.2 billion. It is not for nothing that Israelis have informally dubbed almost every president since Johnson – with the notable exceptions of Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush – as “the most pro-Israeli president ever”; each one has achieved some landmark in the effort to please Israel.

The U.S.-Israeli bond has always had its grounding more in soft emotions than in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Scholars have always described the tie in almost spiritual terms never applied to ties with other nations. A Palestinian-French scholar has described the United States’ pro-Israeli tilt as a “predisposition,” a natural inclination that precedes any consideration of interest or of cost. Israel, he said, takes part in the very “being” of American society and therefore participates in its integrity and its defense.

This is not simply the biased perspective of a Palestinian. Other scholars of varying political inclinations have described a similar spiritual and cultural identity: the U.S. identifies with Israel’s “national style”; Israel is essential to the “ideological prospering” of the U.S.; each country has “grafted” the heritage of the other onto itself. This applies even to the worst aspects of each nation’s heritage. Consciously or unconsciously, many Israelis even today see the U.S. conquest of the American Indians as something “good,” something to emulate and, which is worse, many Americans even today are happy to accept the “compliment” inherent in Israel’s effort to copy us.

This is no ordinary state-to-state relationship, and the lobby does not function like any ordinary lobby. It is not a great exaggeration to say that the lobby could not thrive without a very willing host – that is, a series of U.S. policymaking establishments that have always been locked in to a mindset singularly focused on Israel and its interests – and, at the same time, that U.S. policy in the Middle East would not possibly have remained so singularly focused on and so tilted toward Israel were it not for the lobby. One thing is certain: with the possible exceptions of the Carter and the first Bush administrations, the relationship has grown noticeably closer and more solid with each administration, in almost exact correlation with the growth in size and budget and political clout of the pro-Israel lobby.

All critics of the lobby study have failed to note a critical point during the Reagan administration, surrounding the debacle in Lebanon, when it can reasonably be said that policymaking tipped over from a situation in which the U.S. was more often the controlling agent in the relationship to one in which Israel and its advocates in the U.S. have increasingly determined the course and the pace of developments. The organized lobby, meaning AIPAC and the several formal Jewish American organizations, truly came into its own during the Reagan years with a massive expansion of memberships, budgets, propaganda activities, and contacts within Congress and government, and it has been consolidating power and influence for the last quarter century, so that today the broadly defined lobby, including all those who work for Israel, has become an integral part of U.S. society and U.S. policymaking.

The situation during the Reagan administration demonstrates very clearly the closeness of the bond. The events of these years illustrate how an already very Israel-centered mindset in the U.S., which had been developing for decades, was transformed into a concrete, institutionalized relationship with Israel via the offices of Israeli supporters and agents in the U.S.

The seminal event in the growth of AIPAC and the organized lobby was the battle over the administration’s proposed sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, Reagan’s first year in office. Paradoxically, although AIPAC lost this battle in a head-on struggle with Reagan and the administration, and the sale to the Saudis went forward, AIPAC and the lobby ultimately won the war for influence. Reagan was determined that the sale go through; he regarded the deal as an important part of an ill-conceived attempt to build an Arab-Israeli consensus in the Middle East to oppose the Soviet Union and, perhaps even more important, saw the battle in Congress as a test of his own prestige. By winning the battle, he demonstrated that any administration, at least up to that point, could exert enough pressure to push an issue opposed by Israel through Congress, but the struggle also demonstrated how exhausting and politically costly such a battle can be, and no one around Reagan was willing to go to the mat in this way again. In a real sense, despite AIPAC’s loss, the fight showed just how much the lobby limited policymaker freedom, even more than 20 years ago, in any transaction that concerned Israel.

The AWACS imbroglio galvanized AIPAC into action, at precisely the time the administration was subsiding in exhaustion, and under an aggressive and energetic leader, former congressional aide Thomas Dine, AIPAC quadrupled its budget, increased its grassroots support immensely, and vastly expanded its propaganda effort. This last and perhaps most significant accomplishment was achieved when Dine established an analytical unit inside AIPAC that published in-depth analyses and position papers for congressmen and policymakers. Dine believed that anyone who could provide policymakers with books and papers focusing on Israel’s strategic value to the U.S. would effectively “own” the policymakers.

With the rising power and influence of the lobby, and following the U.S. debacle in Lebanon – which began with Israel’s 1982 invasion and ended for the U.S. with the withdrawal of its Marine contingent in early 1984, after the Marines had become involved in fighting to protect Israel’s invasion force and 241 U.S. military had been killed in a truck bombing – the Reagan administration effectively handed over the policy initiative in the Middle East to Israel and its American advocates.

Israel and its agents began, with amazing effrontery, to complain that the U.S. failure to clean up in Lebanon was interfering with Israel’s own designs there – from which arrogance Reagan and company concluded, in an astounding twist of logic, that the only way to restore stability was through closer alliance with Israel. As a result, in the fall of 1983 Reagan sent a delegation to ask the Israelis for closer strategic ties, and shortly thereafter forged a formal strategic alliance with Israel with the signing of a “memorandum of understanding on strategic cooperation.” In 1987, the U.S. designated Israel a “major non-NATO ally,” thus giving it access to military technology not available otherwise. The notion of demanding concessions from Israel in return for this favored status – such as, for instance, some restraint in its settlement-construction in the West Bank – was specifically rejected. The U.S. simply very deliberately and abjectly retreated into policy inaction, leaving Israel with a free hand to proceed as it wished wherever it wished in the Middle East and particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Even Israel, by all accounts, was surprised by this demonstration of the United States’ inability to see beyond Israel’s interests. Prime Minister Menachem Begin had attempted from early in the Carter administration to push the notion that Israel was a strategic Cold War asset to the U.S. but, because Israel did not in fact perform a significant strategic role for the U.S. and was in many ways more a liability than an asset, Carter never paid serious attention to the Israeli overtures. Begin feared that the United States’ moral and emotional commitment to Israel might ultimately not be enough to sustain the relationship through possible hard times, and so he attempted to put Israel forward as a strategically indispensable ally and a good investment for U.S. security, a move that would essentially reverse the two nations’ roles, altering the relationship from one of Israeli indebtedness to the U.S. to one in which the United States was in Israel’s debt for its vital strategic role.

Carter was having none of this, but the notion of strategic cooperation germinated in Israel and among its U.S. supporters until the moment became ripe during the Reagan administration. By the end of the Lebanon mess, the notion that the U.S. needed Israel’s friendship had so taken hold among the Reaganites that, as one former national security aide observed in a stunning upending of logic, they began to view closer strategic ties as a necessary means of “restor[ing] Israeli confidence in American reliability.” Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in his memoirs years later of the U.S. need “to lift the albatross of Lebanon from Israel’s neck.” Recall, as Shultz must not have been able to do, that the debt here was rightly Israel’s: Israel put the albatross around its own neck, and the U.S. stumbled into Lebanon after Israel, not the other way around.

AIPAC and the neo-conservatives who rose to prominence during the Reagan years played a major role in building the strategic alliance. AIPAC in particular became in every sense of the word a partner of the U.S. in forging Middle East policy from the mid-1980s on. Thomas Dine’s vision of “owning” policymakers by providing them with position papers geared to Israel’s interests went into full swing. In 1984, AIPAC spun off a think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, that remains one of the pre-eminent think tanks in Washington and that has sent its analysts into policymaking jobs in several administrations. Dennis Ross, the senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from the Washington Institute and returned there after leaving the government. Martin Indyk, the Institute’s first director, entered a top policymaking position in the Clinton administration from there.

Today, John Hannah, who has served on Vice President Cheney’s national security staff since 2001 and succeeded Lewis Libby last year as Cheney’s leading national security adviser, comes from the Institute. AIPAC also continues to do its own analyses in addition to the Washington Institute’s. A recent Washington Post profile of Steven Rosen, the former senior AIPAC foreign policy analyst who is about to stand trial with a colleague for receiving and passing on classified information to Israel, noted that two decades ago Rosen began a practice of lobbying the executive branch, rather than simply concentrating on Congress, as a way, in the words of the Post article, “to alter American foreign policy” by “influencing government from the inside.” Over the years, he “had a hand in writing several policies favored by Israel.”

In the Reagan years, AIPAC’s position papers were particularly welcomed by an administration already more or less convinced of Israel’s strategic value and obsessed with impeding Soviet advances. Policymakers began negotiating with AIPAC before presenting legislation in order to help assure passage, and Congress consulted the lobby on pending legislation. Congress eagerly embraced almost every legislative initiative proposed by the lobby and came to rely on AIPAC for information on all issues related to the Middle East. The close cooperation between the administration and AIPAC soon began to stifle discourse inside the bureaucracy. Middle East experts in the State Department and other agencies were almost completely cut out of decision-making, and officials throughout government became increasingly unwilling to propose policies or put forth analysis likely to arouse opposition from AIPAC or Congress. One unnamed official complained that “a lot of real analysis is not even getting off people’s desks for fear of what the lobby will do”; he was speaking to a New York Times correspondent, but otherwise his complaints fell on deaf ears.

This kind of pervasive influence, a chill on discourse inside as well as outside policymaking councils, does not require the sort of clear-cut, concrete pro-Israeli decisions in the Oval Office that David Gergen naively thought he should have witnessed if the lobby had any real influence. This kind of influence, which uses friendly persuasion, along with just enough direct pressure, on a broad range of policymakers, legislators, media commentators, and grassroots activists to make an impression across the spectrum, cannot be defined in terms of narrow, concrete policy commands, but becomes an unchanging, unchallengeable mindset, a sentimental environment that restricts debate, restricts thinking, and determines actions and policies as surely as any command from on high. When Israel’s advocates, its lobbyists, in the U.S. become an integral part of the policymaking apparatus, as they have particularly since the Reagan years – and as they clearly have been during the current Bush administration – there is no way to separate the lobby’s interests from U.S. policies. Moreover, because Israel’s strategic goals in the region are more clearly defined and more urgent than those of the United States, Israel’s interests most often dominate.

Chomsky himself acknowledges that the lobby plays a significant part in shaping the political environment in which support for Israel becomes automatic and unquestioned. Even Chomsky believes that what he calls the intellectual political class is a critical, and perhaps the most influential, component of the lobby because these elites determine the shaping of news and information in the media and academia. On the other hand, he contends that, because the lobby already includes most of this intellectual political class, the thesis of lobby power “loses much of its content”. But, on the contrary, this very fact would seem to prove the point, not undermine it. The fact of the lobby’s pervasiveness, far from rendering it less powerful, magnifies its importance tremendously.

Indeed, this is the crux of the entire debate. It is the very power of the lobby to continue shaping the public mindset, to mold thinking and, perhaps most important, to instill fear of deviation that brings this intellectual political class together in an unswerving determination to work for Israel. Is there not a heavy impact on Middle East policymaking when, for instance, a lobby has the power to force the electoral defeat of long-serving congressmen, as occurred to Representative Paul Findley in 1982 and Senator Charles Percy in 1984 after both had deviated from political correctness by speaking out in favor of negotiating with the PLO? AIPAC openly crowed about the defeat of both men – both Republicans serving during the Republican Reagan administration, who had been in Congress for 22 and 18 years respectively. Similarly, does not the media’s silence on Israel’s oppressive measures in the occupied territories, as well as the concerted, and openly acknowledged, efforts of virtually every pro-Israeli organization in the U.S. to suppress information and quash debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, have an immense impact on policy? Today, even the most outspoken of leftist radio hosts and other commentators, such as Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, and now Cindy Sheehan, almost always avoid talking and writing about this issue.

Does not the massive effort by AIPAC, the Washington Institute, and myriad ther similar organizations to spoon-feed policymakers and congressmen selective information and analysis written only from Israel’s perspective have a huge impact on policy? In the end, even Chomsky and Finkelstein acknowledge the power of the lobby in suppressing discussion and debate about Middle East policy. The mobilization of public opinion, Finkelstein writes, “can have a real impact on policy-making – which is why the Lobby invests so much energy in suppressing discussion.” It is difficult to read this statement except as a ringing acknowledgement of the massive and very central power of the lobby to control discourse and to control policymaking on the most critical Middle East policy issues.

Interchangeable Interests
The principal problem with the left critics’ analysis is that it is too rigid. There is no question that Israel has served the interests of the U.S. government and the military-industrial complex in many areas of the world by, for instance, aiding some of the rightist regimes of Central America, by skirting arms and trade embargoes against apartheid South Africa and China (until the neo-conservatives turned off the tap to China and, in a rare disagreement with Israel, forced it to halt), and during the Cold War by helping, at least indirectly, to hold down Arab radicalism. There is also no question that, no matter which party has been in power, the U.S. has over the decades advanced an essentially conservative global political and pro-business agenda in areas far afield of the Middle East, without reference to Israel or the lobby. The U.S. unseated Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile, along with many others, for its own corporate and political purposes, as the left critics note, and did not use Israel.

But these facts do not minimize the power the lobby has exerted in countless instances over the course of decades, and particularly in recent years, to lead the U.S. into situations that Israel initiated, that the U.S. did not plan, and that have done harm, both singly and cumulatively, to U.S. interests. One need only ask whether particular policies would have been adopted in the absence of pressure from some influential persons and organizations working on Israel’s behalf in order to see just how often Israel or its advocates in the U.S., rather than the United States or even U.S. corporations, have been the policy initiators. The answers give clear evidence that a lobby, as broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt, has played a critical and, as the decades have gone on, increasingly influential role in policymaking.

For instance, would Harry Truman have been as supportive of establishing Israel as a Jewish state if it had not been for heavy pressure from what was then a very loose grouping of strong Zionists with considerable influence in policymaking circles? It can reasonably be argued that he might not in fact have supported Jewish statehood at all, and it is even more likely that his own White House advisers – all strong Zionist proponents themselves – would not have twisted arms at the United Nations to secure the 1947 vote in favor of partitioning Palestine if these lobbyists had not been a part of Truman’s policymaking circle. Truman himself did not initially support the notion of founding a state based on religion, and every national security agency of government, civilian and military, strongly opposed the partition of Palestine out of fear that this would lead to warfare in which the U.S. might have to intervene, would enhance the Soviet position in the Middle East, and would endanger U.S. oil interests in the area. But even in the face of this united opposition from within his own government, Truman found the pressures of the Zionists among his close advisers and among influential friends of the administration and of the Democratic Party too overwhelmingly strong to resist.

Questions like this arise for virtually every presidential administration. Would Jimmy Carter, for instance, have dropped his pursuit of a resolution of the Palestinian problem if the Israel lobby had not exerted intense pressure on him? Carter was the first president to recognize the Palestinian need for some kind of “homeland,” as he termed it, and he made numerous efforts to bring Palestinians into a negotiating process and to stop Israeli settlement-building, but opposition from Israel and pressures from the lobby were so heavy that he was ultimately worn down and defeated.

It is also all but impossible to imagine the U.S. supporting Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories without pressure from the lobby. No conceivable U.S. national interest is served – even in the United States’ own myopic view – by its support for Israel’s harshly oppressive policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and furthermore this support is a dangerous liability. As Mearsheimer and Walt note, most foreign elites view the U.S. tolerance of Israeli repression as “morally obtuse and a handicap in the war on terrorism,” and this tolerance is a major cause of terrorism against the U.S. and the West. The impetus for oppressing the Palestinians clearly comes and has always come from Israel, not the United States, and the impetus for supporting Israel and facilitating this oppression has come, very clearly and directly, from the lobby, which goes to great lengths to justify the occupation and to advocate on behalf of Israeli policies.

It is tempting, and not at all out of the realm of possibility, to imagine Bill Clinton having forged a final Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement were it not for the influence of his notably pro-Israeli advisers. By the time Clinton came to office, the lobby had become a part of the policymaking apparatus, in the persons of Israeli advocates Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, both of whom entered government service from lobby organizations. Both also returned at the end of the Clinton administration to organizations that advocate for Israel: Ross to the Washington Institute and Indyk to the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which is financed by and named for a notably pro-Israeli benefactor. The scope of the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking councils has been unprecedented during the current Bush administration. Some of the left critics dismiss the neo-cons as not having any allegiance to Israel; Finkelstein thinks it is naïve to credit them with any ideological conviction, and Zunes claims they are uninterested in benefiting Israel because they are not religious Jews (as if only religious Jews care about Israel). But it simply ignores reality to deny the neo-cons’ very close ties, both ideological and pragmatic, to Israel’s right wing.

Both Finkelstein and Zunes glaringly fail to mention the strategy paper that several neo-cons wrote in the mid-1990s for an Israeli prime minister, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq these same neo-cons later carried out upon entering the Bush administration. The strategy was designed both to assure Israel’s regional dominance in the Middle East and to enhance U.S. global hegemony. One of these authors, David Wurmser, remains in government as Cheney’s Middle East adviser – one of several lobbyists inside the henhouse. The openly trumpeted plan, crafted by the neo-cons, to “transform” the Middle East by unseating Saddam Hussein, and the notion, also openly touted, that the path to peace in Palestine-Israel ran through Baghdad grew out of the neo-cons’ overriding concern for Israel. Both Finkelstein and Zunes also fail to take note of the long record of advocacy on behalf of Israel that almost all the neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous right-wing, pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington) have compiled over the years. The fact that these individuals and organizations are all also advocates of U.S. global hegemony does not diminish their allegiance to Israel or their desire to assure Israel’s regional hegemony in alliance with the U.S.

The claimed interchangeability of U.S. and Israeli interests – and the fact that certain individuals for whom a primary objective is to advance Israel’s interests now reside inside the councils of government – proves the truth of Mearsheimer’s andWalt’s principal conclusion that the lobby has been able to convince most Americans, contrary to reality, that there is an essential identity of U.S. and Israeli interests and that the lobby has succeeded for this reason in forging a relationship of unmatched intimacy. The “overall thrust of policy” in the Middle East, they observe quite accurately, is “almost entirely” attributable to the lobby’s activities. The fact that the U.S. occasionally acts without reference to Israel in areas outside the Middle East, and that Israel does occasionally serve U.S. interests rather than the other way around, takes nothing away from the significance of this conclusion.

The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests – that is, not what should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish and self-defined “national interests” of the political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the U.S. government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. and of Israel – groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy.

This convergence of manipulated “interests” has a profound effect on U.S. policy choices in the Middle East. When a government is unable to distinguish its own real needs from those of another state, it can no longer be said that it always acts in its own interests or that it does not frequently do grave damage to those interests. Until the system of sovereign nation-states no longer exists – and that day may never come – no nation’s choices should ever be defined according to the demands of another nation. Accepting a convergence of U.S. and Israeli interests means that the U.S. can never act entirely as its own agent, will never examine its policies and actions entirely from the vantage point of its own long-term self interest, and can, therefore, never know why it is devising and implementing a particular policy. The failure to recognize this reality is where the left critics’ belittling of the lobby’s power and their acceptance of U.S. Middle East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy is particularly dangerous. CP

Kathleen Christison is the author of Perceptions of Palestine, which analyzes the evolution of U.S. policy on the Palestine issue over the last century and in the process traces the exponential growth since World War I in the influence on policymakers of Israel’s powerful American advocates.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, CounterPunch’s history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

They can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.

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Xymphora & Angry Arab: Munich and Spielberg

2005-12-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

Blogger Xymphora wrote:
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
Munich and Spielberg
The Angry Arab reviews Steven Spielberg's latest bit of Zionist propaganda called 'Munich'. Guess what? He really doesn't like it. An enthusiastic two thumbs down! Of course, any movie on this subject is supposed to remind people of murdering Palestinians, and serve as the usual Israeli distraction from the real issue, which is what provokes the Palestinians to react. The fact that Spielberg apparently depicted the targeted assassination squad as sympathetic characters just adds to the propaganda load. The worst thing about it is that the Zionist PR machine has managed to build this movie up by describing how 'courageous' Spielberg was to make it. Spielberg would have been courageous if he had made a movie about the murder of Rachel Corrie. 'Munich' is more of the same bad faith by North American Jews that makes them morally responsible for the ethnic cleansing being conducted by Israel under the fog of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hatred.

By the way, has there ever been a more overrated film director in the history of movies than Spielberg? If you look at the list (scroll down a bit) of movies he's directed, it's the sorriest pile of sappy, maudlin crap you'll ever see. 'Duel' and 'Jaws' are the only projects that aren't embarrassing, and they are hardly in the group of greatest movies of all time. His movies in this decade are a particular travesty. People write about him as if he was in the same league as Renoir or Kurosawa or Hitchcock. Are they on crack?

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Blogger Angry Arab, aka by As'ad AbuKhalil, writes:
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2005/12/spielberg-on-munich-humanization-of.html
Monday, December 26, 2005
Spielberg on Munich: the humanization of Israeli killers, and the dehumanization of Palestinian civilians. Or the Celebration of the Israeli Killing Machine.

And who is retaliating against whom in the Arab-Israeli conflict? THIS is the question.

It reminds me of a line that George Carlin—yes, that Carlin—used to use in his comedy routine and went roughly like this: “why do “we” call Israeli terrorists commandos, and we call Palestinian commandos terrorists?” That line never got a laugh the two times I saw him use it with a live audience. The thrust of the Spielberg movie is simple, fanfare notwithstanding: Israeli killers are conscientious and humane people, while Palestinians are always--no matter what--killers. But a Spielberg movie about current affairs is like a Thomas Friedman’s column about…Emanuel Kant.

What do you expect. But you know? Did you notice how one lone critical opinion of the movie by one Israeli diplomat, which only mildly criticized the movie, got so much press in the US? It was needed; and it even helped to promote the movie to give a “balanced” cast to the narrative, that it of course does not deserve. This one critical opinion reminded me of O’Reilly; how he every night finds one email from somebody in Montana who tells him that he is too liberal. He needs to that to maintain an image that does not exist, just as Spielberg needs to maintain an image that he does not deserve.

This movie could easily have been a paid Israeli advertisement for its killing machine. In fact, it could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads. I mean that. In fact, it is a celebratory movie of Israeli murder of Palestinians. Israel killing is always moral, and always careful, and always on target.

Today, yet another New York Times reviewer who also thinks that Spielberg was not sympathetic enough to the Israeli killers, even had the audacity to describe Israeli killings at the time as "targeted assassinations" when even Israel had not invented that propaganda term back then. He must have forgotten to remember.

That's all. Where do I begin. I mean yes, I was quite angry watching it; and I got more angry as I watched the Berkeley liberal audience react sympathetically to the movie, rooting for the Israel head killer, as he went about his "civilized" killing. I watched the audience root for an Israeli killing team, and this WAS a true story, and Palestinian victims were real people, with real blood.

The most emotional moment for Spielberg, and presumably for American audiences was when the head killer talked with his baby daughter in New York, that he missed very much. Oh, ya. That was the point at which you were expected to shed a tear or two; the music got particularly sentimental at that point. It had to be.

But where to begin; the movie was based on a book that took the Israeli account as it was delivered. But the book was honest and more accurate at least on one count: in the book by George Jonas titled Vengeance (only Israelis are entitled to vengeance as you know, the more violent the better as far as some US movie audiences are concerned), the killers did not express regret or second-thoughts. None. In the book but not in the movie, the killers, according to Jonas, had "absolutely no qualms about anything they did." How could Spielberg miss that. Well, he just managed. Hell, that was the whole movie, and the whole political project behind it.

Of course, it was not easy for me to watch this movie, I mean not only at the political and intellectual levels, but also at the personal level. I can connect to the story, in its details and personalities. The first victim of the movie was Wa’il Zu`aytir, and I knew his niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan Salamah’s son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building where the three PLO leaders were massacred in Beirut. And let me tell you that NONE of the five people mentioned here had anything to do with Munich--but more on that later. NONE.

But why should this movie, a Spielberg’s movie for potato’s sake, bother with facts, especially if they come in the way of a smooth pro-Israeli narrative? But this movie is intended for mass audiences who know nothing about the facts of the conflict. That is exactly why it will work, and why it will deliver the (propaganda) goods.

Let me start by saying this: this, Munich that is, was not as planned an operation as has often been maintained. This was not planned months in advance, as Abu Iyad maintained in his account with Eric Rouleau (translated into English as My Home, My Land by dear Linda Butler). Abu Iyad for years exaggerated the claims about the “carefully planned” operation, and PLO media at the time lied about how the PLO gunmen threw grenades into the helicopters, so as to make the last shootout more of a fight that it actually was.

Angry Palestinians who were being hit by Israeli fighter jets in their refugee camps demanded heroes and heroism, and the PLO had to give them some, even if they were not legitimate heroes. The German troops were going to take them out, no matter what, and no matter how much they, the Germans in this case, endangered the lives of the hostages, and they presumably had Israeli consent.

The Arab League diplomat talked about this recently when he broke his silence in an interview on Ziyarah Khassah on Al-Jazeera. He should know: he was the negotiator with the Palestinian team in Munich. Yes, I know. It can be argued that the Palestinian attackers risked the lives of the hostages by taking them hostages, even if they did not intend to kill them. That is true. This is like hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible, and should be held responsible for whatever endangerment to the lives and health of victims. That is true. But it is also true that the State of Israel has taken a nation as a hostage, and has been endangering the lives of Palestinians since the inception of the state of Israel. This is why it is all a question of who is retaliating against whom?

One of the many false premises of the movie is that Israel only went on a killing rampage—and only against Palestinian “killers”--after Munich. That Munich was a watershed. Watershed it was not, except in Israeli propaganda brochures. Israel has been going on killing rampages against Palestinians, civilians mostly, since before the creation of the state of Israel.

And how could you even talk about Golda Meir and forget to mention her most memorable quote: that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.” Spielberg must have missed that, just as he needed to show her as grandma goodness who was pushed into vengeance by Palestinian cruelty. More humanization. That is why we had to see the head Israeli killer with his child: you need to see him as a human being. Do you know that not a single Palestinian in the movie appeared unarmed? They all were terrorists, and their murder had to be justified, and Spielberg did a great service for the state of Israel in that regard. They should name some stolen Palestinian property in Israel in his honor, I argue. A street, a destroyed Arab village, or a stolen olive tree. Anything. He deserves it.

And let us see what Israel was doing before Munich. Before Munich, NOT AFTER—did you get that, Israel placed a bomb under the car seat of Palestinian writer/artist, Ghassan Kanafani and killed him and killed his niece (14). The niece was not plotting the Munich operation when she was murdered by the Israelis; nor was her uncle. That was BEFORE Munich. Kanafani was best friends with my uncle; they both used to write in Al-Hurriyyah magazine during their days at the Movement of Arab Nationalists.

Israel also—BEFORE Munich—sent a letter bomb to Bassam Abu Sharif (a writer and journalist with the PFLP), and left him with life-long scars and bodily damage, and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh, a scholar and researcher, who was not a member of any group. But he was a really diligent researcher, and Israel did not appreciate it--I am assuming.

This is not easy for me; I have shaken the hands--or what was left of their hands--of both of those men, and Abu Sharif never had a military role—I say this although I never liked Abu Sharif or respected him (read my review of his memoir in Journal of Palestine Studies a few years ago). But those were innocent victims of Israeli killing. They never held guns those two, or those three, or four. This story is personal for me, of course. I see them as human beings, and not as armed and vengeful characters that they appear in Spielberg’s movie.

And typical of US movies where Arabs appear, Arabs when they speak Arabic never need subtitles. We need them when people speak in French and German, but Arabic is not important. It is not important to know what cheap natives say; we only need to know what expensive people say: Europeans and Israelis. And do you notice that Hollywood still portrays Israelis as Europeans: they still don’t want to accept that some half of all Israelis come from Asian and African countries. This makes it easier for the White Man to identify with them.

And there is this element that is never mentioned about Palestinian attacks: and this is true of the present and of the past. It is not that some Palestinian leaders recruit or compel Palestinians to attack Israelis. It is the other way round. Palestinians, regular rank-and-file and sometimes civilians, pressure Palestinian leaders and commanders to send them on military or suicidal missions against Israeli targets.

Munich occurred exactly like that. Palestinians in the camps in Lebanon, those who were trained by Fath and by other groups, were lobbying for “action.” Why?, you may ask? Well, not only for the loss of Palestine but also because Israel was KILLING Palestinians. In February of the same year PRIOR to Munich, Israeli jets bombed Palestinian refugee camps, and killed tens of innocent people. This is what is missing in the movie, among many other things. Most Palestinians who are killed by Israelis are unarmed and are killed not by assassins who are conscientious and sensitive—as they are outrageously portrayed in this movie—but by pilots who bomb refugee camps filled with unarmed civilians. Palestinians who are bombed from the air, long before Munich, are elderly and people and children in their beds. These are the victims that you will never see in a Spielberg movie. So Israel was killing Palestinians, and this was the context of pre-Munich.

So a small group decided to do something, but they were not sure what, and this was only 3 months before Munich. And one of the handful of people who knew about this, and this will never make it into the press was Abu Mazin--yes, that Abu Mazen the head of the puppet Palestinian Authority.

But do you notice that US/Israel always forgive the past of those who submit to Israeli dictates? Look at how US and Israel forgave Anwar Sadat for his anti-Semitic Nazi past. Abu Mazin was the money guy, and he dispersed the funds for Abu Dawud, who engineered the operation. And the American public in US media and popular culture is so enamored with the Mossad, that the image of the Mossad does not match its actual reality.

The best evidence is this movie: look at this obsession with Abu Hasan Salamah as the “mastermind” of Munich when he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Munich. To be sure, Abu Hasan was a braggart, and had a big mouth, and would take credit for things he did not do, and would distance himself from failed “operations” that he planned, like the Sabena failed hijacking in 1972. That was Abu Hasan: he lived the life of a playboy, and enjoyed a unique indulgent pampering from Abu `Ammar [Arafat] who treated him like a son. Abu `Ammar would never say no to Abu Hasan, on anything. But Abu Hasan had nothing to do with Munich, and this ostensibly all-knowing Mossad, did not know it, and probably still does not know it.

Former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, once said that the Mossad is a mediocre organization, but that it is outstanding in PR--only in PR. Former CIA man in Beirut Robert Baer said this about the Mossad--I am translating this from an interview he gave to Al-Jazeera: “Let me tell you something, what people most err in in the Middle East, and I am responsible for my words to the end, is related to Israeli intelligence. To be sure, they can kill somebody in Paris or Rome or killing the wrong person in Finland or wherever else they did that in [he meant Norway]. To be sure they know Europe and Palestinians, and they know many things about Palestinians, but when it comes to the rest of the Middle East, I have not seen anything from their part that indicated their knowledge of those countries.”

But this can never be maintained in a country that wants to exaggerate the prowess and knowledge of an intelligence agency not only to help feed the Israeli propaganda myth, but to also prepare the American public for more ruthless times and ways. So a very small number of people knew about it, and of course Abu Iyad was one of them. And Abu Iyad is the most important person on the list, and yet his name was NOT on the list, just to show you about how much--or how little-- Israel knew.

Abu Iyad spoke more than he needed not only because he wanted to send a message to the enemy, but also because the wars of factions and "Abu"s within Fath necessitated a game of one-up-manships, and of wild exaggerations at times. And while Black September was a paper name, and did not have a separate organizational existence or structure, several factions used the name for their own ends. Nobody consulted with Abu Iyad about Abu Hasan’s use of the name for the Sabena’s failed hijacking mentioned above.

Abu Dawud is a key person here. And while his name was mentioned in passing, it was added after the fact in Israeli propaganda accounts. Abu Dawud was arrested in France for another reason in 1977, and he was released because there were no German or Israeli warrants about his involvement in Munich. That shows you. Now, I will not give a blow-by-blow account of Munich. But I personally believe the account of Abu Dawud more than I believe Spielberg, i.e. Israeli propaganda claims, or even German police. (Abu Dawud's account is found in Abu Dawud, Filastin: Mina-l-Quds Ila-Muikh (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1999)).

German police lied quite a bit about the case; they leaked to the press fanciful accounts of Palestinian infiltration of the workforce at the Olympic city, when none of that actually took place. They were too embarrassed to tell the truth. Similarly, the Israelis wanted to back the German account, especially as the violence at Munich was a propaganda bonanza for the Israelis in the West, just as Munich—this is not known in the West—was a propaganda bonanza for Fath in the Middle East, as horrific as the outcome was for all. And in that sense, the Germans, the Israelis, and Abu Iyad (and certainly Abu Hasan) lied about Munich, but not Abu Dawud, in my opinion.

Abu Dawud is one of those 2nd tier PLO leaders who did not get corrupted in the messy Lebanese scene, and who did now allow the Gulf money that corrupted many PLO leaders to affect him. This was a man who was in charge of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and yet his name does not appear in any chronicle of the war because he was too low key, and because he never bragged. (Hell, he never talked even when the brutal mukhabarat in Jordan held him from his feet for days, while torturing him. People who saw him in jail at the time did not recognize him. But you know this: your reliable "moderate" friends in Jordan are quite "good" in torture. They are probably the best; they are helping you in that regard as we speak.)

Most Lebanese did not even know his name. But this also explains why he survived, unlike say Abu Hasan Salamah, who married a Lebanese former Miss Universe, who introduced him to Lebanese bourgeois society, and he could not get enough of that life. He developed a routine, and lived in a fancy apartment on Madame Curie Street in Beirut, and the routine he developed (going to the GYM at the same time every day), made him an easy target. Abu Hasan could get all the money he wanted for his own group from `Arafat, and was doing a good job of maintaining not only good relations with the CIA but also with Lebanese right-wing groups. He became good friends with some right-wing militia leaders. Read the novel by David Ignatius, Agents of Innocence: it is about Abu Hasan, although the author does not admit it.

It is interesting that in the movie, the Israeli head killer (who was in the movie Troy), was cast to be most appealing to the audience: a good looking and charismatic figure. But say what you want about Abu Hasan (and many people in Palestinian struggle, like Abu Dawud, did not like him) but he was a good looking and charismatic figure in real life, but not the actor who played him in Spielberg’s movie. But Spielberg did not want the viewer to identify with any Palestinian in the movie: that was contrary to him and to his political goal. He just wanted to identify with the expensive human beings: the Israelis.

The Arabs are worse than they were in Renoir’s painting, the Mosque, as an unidentifiable blob. They were just armed, with no humanity. They were not supposed to evoke emotions, and you were not supposed to see them bleed, and if you did, you had to cheer for their killers. The only ones that you had to feel sorry for: were the Israelis who get killed, including the killers when they kill. The music that played when Israelis die, was different from the music that played when Palestinians died.

And no speaking roles for Palestinians were necessary. Why bother. Give one a line, and you have done your "objective" duty. And the list of prisoners that attackers submitted to German authorities did not have “200 Arab prisoners” on it, as the movie said. It had some 234 Arab and NON-Arab names on them, including Japanese and German prisoners, but that was not in the movie. And the statement that was issued by the attackers gave a name to the “operation”: Bir`im and Ikrit, names of two (predominantly Christian) villages in northern Palestine, the people of which were expelled by Israeli occupation forces in 1948 for “security reasons.”

In 1972, the people of those villages petitioned the courts to return to their villages, and the courts of course turned them down. But if you were to use the name of the “operation” you would have to tell the audience those burdensome details that would have distracted from the celebration of the Israeli killing machine. But this begs the question: why is Munich more famous than the savage bombardment of Palestinian refugee camps back in February prior to Munich? And why did the letter bombs to three Palestinian writers not get any world attention? Why did American liberals and PEN not notice it back then?

Could you imagine what would happen if a Palestinian threw even a rose at an Israeli writer? Could you imagine what would happen among American leftists if a Palestinian were to say even a bad word to Amos Oz for example? That was the stature of Ghassan Kanafani among Palestinians and Arabs.

Now, I will not get into the military/intelligence background of the Israeli hostages as Abu Dawud does in his memoirs because the attackers did not know that information prior to the “operation.” Abu Dawud gives many details about the military backgrounds of some of the hostages, but I do not think that this is appropriate because even Abu Dawud did not know that before hand. I will not get into what actually happened at the site at the airport when the hostages were being transferred by their captors not only because the captors were responsible by virtue of the hostage "operation", but you can raise questions regarding the actual responsibility of the killing of the hostages.

Abu Dawud cites Israeli newspapers from the 1990s in which writers raised questions about German responsibility, and on how the German government never published autopsy reports of the hostages, etc. The Israeli government also did not want to examine the bullets that killed the Israeli hostages. That would have settled the question, of course. Abu Dawud stressed that the attackers were under strict instructions to not shoot at the hostages, and you noticed in the scene, even in the movie, that when they were storming the compound, they clearly struggled with the door and avoided shooting, while that could have shortened the time of entry, and Abu Dawud says that they were under strict instructions to avoid using the grenades. And Abu Dawud raises the possibility that the helicopter may have exploded from a bullet that hit it gas tank, but I don’t know, and I have never relied on Spielberg, or on the silly book on which he based his account, for historical accuracy.

And another thing comes to mind: Palestinians also have managed to assassinate Israeli military and intelligence leaders but that never gets attention because the trend in US media and popular culture is that you should only show Palestinians when they are killing civilians. And it is not true that the Israeli response was confined to the assassination of the 11 Palestinians as was shown in the movie: Israel was also killing other Palestinians. Israeli “response” or initiative we should call it, was more massive and brutal that the operation of the secret team.

Three days after Munich, Israel ordered an air strike which required the use of some 75 Israeli aircrafts (the largest attack since 1967) and the attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon resulted in the killing of more than 200 mostly civilians. And this is not because the Israelis knew that there was a camp north of Sidon that was used for training the Munich attackers. That camp was not even hit (another sign that Israelis had no information about the real culprits of Munich) and other camps with civilians were hit. And then while the assassinations were taking place, Israeli bombing of camps continued uninterruptedly.

And the most glaring omission in the film, which shows you that the Israeli team was not only savage but also ignorant of their targets, was what happened on July 21st 1973, when `Ali Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter resting with his pregnant wife around a swimming pool in Norway, was murdered by that assassination team merely because `Ali resembled what the hit team thought Abu Hasan Salamah looked like. (The Norwegian police tracked and arrested the killers, but they were all released in a secret deal with the Israeli government--is that not nice?) Should that not have made it to the movie? But that would have made them look more brutally clumsy than Spielberg wanted them to look like.

And even Wa’il Zu`yatir, the PLO representative in Rome. He knew nothing about Munich, and was an academic with close ties to socialist circles in Italy. Zu`ytir was shot 14 times. He never held a gun in his life. These Israeli team members were killers who really relished killing, and did not seem susceptible to moral second-thinking as was stressed over and over again in the movie. Zu`ytir was more interested in literature than he was in military affairs, on which he knew nothing. And PLO representative in France Mahmud Hamshari also had nothing to do with Munich; Israeli propaganda later had to contend with that, and claimed after killing him that the attackers passed through France on their way to Munich. In reality, the attackers never stepped on French soil when they went to Germany.

And the movie, it seems really enjoyed covering the 1973 massacre in Beirut. Spielberg I could tell really enjoyed learning and covering that massacre by Israeli terrorist squads. But who were the three PLO personalities killed in that "operation"? And who cares about the details? Kamal `Udwan was the Fath/PLO leader responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. He not only had no responsibilities in Europe, but he opposed “operations” in Europe, and even those by Black September. More than that, `Udwan was one of the most moderate Fath leaders having accepted the two-state solution back in 1970, before any of his colleagues in Fath.

Abu Yusuf An-Najjar was in charge of intelligence in Lebanon—Lebanon, not Europe. While `Udwan had no knowledge of Munich, Abu Yusuf may have heard about it but had no role whatever in it. The third person was a poet: and you know how much Israelis like to murder Palestinian poets, artists, and writers. Kamal Nasir was a poet, and was killed in his bed. The movie did not tell you that by the time the Israeli terrorists finished with their “mission,” some 100 Palestinians and Lebanese were murdered on that day in April 1973.

I also was amused--not really--how Spielberg portrayed the neighborhood where the PLO leaders AND others were killed: it had all the features of Orientalist imagination. It was traditional and the houses were old styles with arches, and the place was protected like a military base. In reality, the PLO leaders lived in a residential building in the most modern and upper class neighborhood of Verdun in Beirut. But why bother with that detail too.

And the Fath representative in Cyprus also had nothing to do with Munich; he was the intelligence envoy of Abu Yusuf An-Najjar. And some people on the list of the Israeli murder team were not only not involved with Black September, but some were not even members of the Fath organization. Basil Al-Kubaysi was a Palestinian scholar who had just completed his PhD in political science; I recently had dinner with Basil’s best friend in college in Canada. Kubaysi was in the PFLP and not in the Fath organization.

The same for Muhammad Budia: he was with Wadi` Haddad, and not with Black September. But then again: I read that Spielberg offered the script to Dennis Ross and to Bill Clinton to verify the “accuracy” of Middle East political and historical references. The two are experts on the Middle East, in case you have not heard. More than that, the movie did not tell you that on September 16th, and 17th, Israel launched a savage invasion of South Lebanon, erasing the refugee camp of Nabatiyyah, and the Lebanese newspapers at the time (I even remember that as a 12 years old) had on the first page that famous picture of a smashed civilian car with seven Lebanese civilians smashed inside when an Israeli tank ran over the car near Jwayya in South Lebanon.

That must have been too messy for Spielberg to cover. Why bother? And the car had stopped at the Israeli checkpoint that was set up at the entrance to the village. Were those civilians in the car also involved in Munich? Later, as the movie ended, it was written on the screen that Abu Hasan Salamah was later “assassinated.” Spielberg forgot to add that he was “assassinated” by a massive car bomb in a crowded street in Beirut, which killed and injured tens of people—oh, and those people also were not involved with Munich.

The reviews of the movie in US media almost expressed frustration that Spielberg did not express enough sympathy for the Israeli killers. Only Michelle Goldberg of Salon to her credit (great review Michelle) pointed out that contrary to that lousy review by Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic “many of those [Israelis] in Munich are, if anything, slightly unbelievable in their constant self-interrogation and closely guarded humanism.”

I was thinking after the movie that public ignorance of the Middle East greatly helps Israeli propaganda; this explains why Zionist organizations express contempt and wrath at Middle East expertise and specialty (as in MESA) because those who get to know and learn about the Middle East overwhelming find it difficult if not impossible to consume the unbelievable dosages of Israeli propaganda delivered via US media and popular and political cultures.

*Three of the Munich Palestinian attackers survived. One died from a heart attack; the remaining two are...somewhere in the Middle East.

posted by As'ad @ 2:32 PM link

Paul Eisen

2005-12-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

Jewish Power
by Paul Eisen (February 2005)

Note: This copy of Paul Eisen's article was copied from Qumsiyeh: A Human Rights Web, and the disclaimer that follows is by Mazin Qumsiyeh.

DISCLAIMER: Posting articles on my website does not imply endorsement or agreement with ideas expressed. I think it is useful to post controversial material that start discussions and exchanges. Some have questioned this article. Here is one response to this article by Joel Finkel http://www.nimn.org/Perspectives/american_jews/000308.php?section=American%20Jewish%20Voices

Paul Eisen -- Director of Deir Yassin Remembered

Jewish Power

The future is always open and nothing can ever be ruled out; but, for now, it’s hard to see how Israel can be stopped. After over fifty years, it is clear that Israel will only relinquish its eliminationist attitude to Palestinians and Palestinian life when it has to. This need not be through military action but it is hard to see how anything else will do. The conventional wisdom - that if America turned off the tap, Israel would be brought to its knees - is far from proven. First, it’s not going to happen. Second, those who believe it may well be underestimating both the cohesiveness of Israeli society and the force of Jewish history which permeates it. Even more unlikely is the military option. The only force on earth which could possibly confront Israel is the American military, and, again, that is not going to happen.

Palestinian resistance has been astonishing. After over fifty years of brutal assault by what may well one day be seen as one of the most ruthless and irrational powers of modern times, and with just about every power on earth ranged against them, Palestinians are still with us, still steadfast, still knowing who they are and where they come from. Nonetheless, for the time being effective resistance may be over (though the possibility of organised non-violent resistance can never be ruled out), and, for now, the only strategy open may be no more than one for survival.

For us it is so much easier to deny this reality than to accept it, and doubtless the struggle will continue. How fruitful this will be no-one can say. Although the present seems hopeless, survival is still vital and no-one knows when new opportunities may arise. Anyway, to struggle against injustice is always worth doing. But what if the struggle becomes so delusional that it inhibits rather than advances resistance? What if the struggle becomes a way of avoiding rather than confronting reality? Those slogans “End the Occupation!” and “Two States for Two Peoples!” are now joined by a new slogan, “The One-State Solution!” This is every bit as fantastic as its predecessors because, just as there never was going to be an end to the occupation, nor a real Palestinian state, so, for now, there is no possibility of any “one state” other than the state of Israel which now stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and the only “solution” is a final solution and even that cannot be ruled out.

“Zionism is not Judaism; Judaism is not Zionism….”

The crime against the Palestinian people is being committed by a Jewish state with Jewish soldiers using weapons with Jewish religious symbols all over them, and with the full support and complicity of the overwhelming mass of organised Jews worldwide. But to name Jews as responsible for this crime seems impossible to do. The past is just too terrible. All of us know of the hatred and violence to which accusations against Jews have led in the past. Also, if we were to examine critically the role of Jews in this conflict, what would become of us and of our struggle? Would we be labelled anti-Semites and lose much of the support that we have worked so hard to gain?

The present, too, is full of ambiguities. Zionism is not Judaism; Judaism is not Zionism has become an article of faith, endlessly repeated, as is the assertion that Zionism is a secular ideology opposed, for much of its history, by the bulk of religious Jews and even now still opposed by true Torah Jews such as Neturei Karta. But Zionism is now at the heart of Jewish life with religious Jews amongst the most virulent of Zionists and Neturei Karta, despite their impeccable anti-Zionism, their beautiful words and the enthusiasm with which they are welcomed at solidarity rallies, etc., may well be just Jews in fancy dress, a million miles from the reality of Jewish life.

And even if Zionism can still be disentangled from Judaism, can it be distinguished from a broader Jewish identity or Jewishness? So often Zionism is proclaimed to be a modern add-on to Jewish identity, another, albeit anachronistic, settler-colonial ideology simply adopted by Jews in response to their predicament. But, could it be that in our need to avoid the accusation of anti-Semitism and our own conflicted perceptions and feelings, our insistence that Zionism and Jewishness are separate, has led us seriously to misunderstand the situation? Has our refusal to look squarely at the very Jewishness of Zionism and its crimes caused us to fail to understand exactly what we are up against?

Jews, Judaism and Zionism

Jews are complex; Jewish identity is complex and the relationship between Judaism the religion, and a broader, often secular, Jewish identity or Jewishness is very complex indeed. Jewishness may be experienced a long way from synagogue, yeshiva or any other formal aspect of Jewish religious life, yet is often still inextricably bound to Judaism. That is why secular Jews are able to proclaim their secularity every bit as loudly as they proclaim their Jewishness. Marc Ellis, a religious Jew, says that when you look at those Jews who are in solidarity with Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of them are secular but, from a religious point of view, the Covenant is with them. For Ellis, these secular Jews unknowingly and even unwillingly may be carrying with them the future of Jewish life.

Jewish identity, connecting Jews to other Jews, comes from deep within Jewish history. This is a shared history, both real and imagined, in that it is both literal and theological. Many Jews in the west share a real history of living together as a distinct people in Eastern, Central and then Western Europe and America. Others share a real history of settlement in Spain followed by expulsion and then settlement all over the world, particularly in Arab and Islamic lands. But this may not be what binds all Jews, because for all Jews it is not a real, but maybe a theological, history that is shared. Most Palestinians today probably have more Hebrew blood in their little fingers then most western Jews have in their whole bodies. And yet, the story of the Exodus from Egypt is as real to many of them, and most importantly was as real to them when they were children, as if they, along with all Jews, had stood with Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai.

And histories like that don’t stop at the present. Even for secular Jews, though unacknowledged and even unrealized, there is a sense, not only of a shared history, but also of a shared destiny. Central to Jewish identity both religious and non-religious is the sense of mission centered on exile and return. How else to explain the extraordinary devotion of so many Jews, religious and secular, to the “return” to a land with which, in real terms, they have very little connection at all?

For many Jews, this history confers a ‘specialness’. This is not unique to Jews - after all, who in their hearts of hearts does not feel a little bit special? But for Jews this specialness is at the centre of their self-identification and much of the world seems to concur. For religious Jews, the specialness comes from the supposed covenant with God. But for secular Jews, the specialness comes from a special history. In either case this can be a good, even a beautiful, thing. In much of Jewish religious tradition this specialness is no more than a special moral obligation, a special responsibility to offer an example to the world, and for so many secular Jews it has led them to struggle for justice in many places around the world.

At the heart of this Jewish specialness is Jewish suffering and victimhood. Like the shared history itself, this suffering may, but need not, correspond to reality. Jews have certainly suffered but their suffering remains unexamined and unexplained. The Holocaust, now the paradigm of Jewish suffering, has long ceased to be a piece of history, and is now treated by religious and secular alike, as a piece of theology - a sacred text almost - and therefore beyond scrutiny. And the suffering never ends. No matter how much Jews have suffered they are certainly not suffering now, but for many Jews their history of suffering is not just an unchallengeable past but also a possible future. So,, no matter how safe Jews may be, many feel just a hair’s-breadth away from Auschwitz.

Zionism is at the heart of this. Zionism is also complex and also comes from deep within Jewish history with the same sense of exile and return. Zionism also confirms that Jews are special in their suffering and is explicit that Jews should ‘return’ to a land given to them, and only them - by God if they are religious, or by history if they are not - because they simply are not safe anywhere else on earth.

But so what? If Jews think that they are a people with a religious link to a land and have a deep wish to ‘return’, why should we care, so long as the land is not already populated by Palestinians? And if Jews feel that they are special and that God has made some kind of special arrangement with them, so what, so long as this does not lead them to demand preferential treatment and to discriminate against others? And if Jews feel that they have suffered like no-one else on the face of the earth, fine, so long as they do not use this suffering to justify the imposition of suffering on others and to blackmail morally the whole world into quiescent silence?

This is the problem with Zionism. It expresses Jewish identity but also empowers it. It tells Jews (and many others too) that Jews can do what Jews have always dreamed of doing. It takes the perfectly acceptable religious feelings of Jews, or if you prefer, the perfectly harmless delusions of Jews, and tries to turn them into a terrible reality. Jewish notions of specialness, choseness and even supremacism, are fine for a small, wandering people, but, when empowered with a state, an army and F16s become a concern for us all.

Zionism as Jewish empowerment in statehood changes everything. Israel is not just any state, it is a Jewish state and this means more than just a state for Jews. This Jewish state is built on traditions and modes of thought that have evolved amongst Jews for centuries amongst which are the notions that Jews are special and that their suffering is special. By their own reckoning, Jews are “a nation that dwells alone” it is “us and them” and, in many cases, “us or them”. And these tendencies are translated into the modern state of Israel. This is a state that knows no boundaries. It is a state that both believes, and uses as justification for its own aggression, the notion that its very survival is always at stake, so anything is justified to ensure that survival. Israel is a state that manifestly believes that the rules of both law and humanity, applicable to all other states, do not apply to it.

Their own worst nightmare

It is a terrible irony that this empowerment of Jews has come to most resemble those empowerments under which Jews have suffered the most. Empowered Christianity, also a marriage of faith and power, enforced its ideology and pursued its dissidents and enemies with no greater fervor than has empowered Judaism. In its zeal and self belief, Zionism has come to resemble the most brutal and relentless of modern ideologies. But unlike the brutal rationality of Stalinism, willing to sacrifice millions for political and economic revolution, this Jewish ideology, in its zealotry and irrationality, resembles more the National Socialism which condemned millions for the attainment of a nonsensical racial and ethnic supremacy.

Of course there are differences but there are also similarities. National Socialism, like Zionism, another blend of mysticism and power, gained credibility as a means to right wrongs done to a victimized people. National Socialism, like Zionism, also sought to maintain the racial/ethnic purity of one group and to maintain the rights of that ethnic group over others, and National Socialism, like Zionism, also proposed an almost mystical attachment of that group to a land. Also, both National Socialism and Zionism shared a common interest to separate Jews from non-Jews, in this case to remove Jews from Europe and actively co-operated in the attainment of this aim. And if the similarity between these two ideologies is simply too great and too bitter to accept, one may ask what National Socialism with its uniforms, flags and mobilized youth must have looked like to those Germans, desperate after Versailles and the ravages of post-First World War Germany. Perhaps not so different from how the uniforms, flags and marching youth of pre- and post-state Zionism must have looked to Jews after their history of suffering, and particularly after the Holocaust.

This is, for Jews, their own worst nightmare: the thing they love the most has become the thing they hate the most And for those Jews and others, who shrink from the comparison, let them ask themselves this: What would an average German, an enthusiastic Nazi even, have said in, say, 1938 had they been confronted with the possibility of an Auschwitz? They would have thought that you were stark, staring mad.

American Jews and Jewish America

At the heart of the conflict is the relationship between Israel and America. The statistics billions in aid and loans, UN vetoes, etc., etc. need not be repeated here - American support for Israel seems limitless. But what is the nature of this support? For many, perhaps most, the answer is relatively simple. Israel is a client state of America, serving American interests or, more particularly, the interests of its power elites. This view is underpinned by the obvious importance of oil, the huge strategic importance of the region and the fact that, if Israel did not further the interests of those who control America, then we can be sure America would not support Israel. Also, there is no doubt that, in the IDF, America has found a marvellously flexible and effective force, easily aroused and let loose whenever any group of Arabs get a little above themselves.

But is this the whole story? Does Israel really serve America’s interests and is their relationship wholly based on the sharing of these interests? Consider how much in terms of goodwill from other nations America loses by its support for Israel, and consider the power and influence of the “Jewish”, “Zionist” or “pro-Israel” lobby, as when many an otherwise responsible lawmaker, faced with the prospect of an intervention in their re-election campaign from the Jewish lobby, seems happy to put his or her re-election prospects way in front of what is good for America.

The details of the workings of AIPAC and others, and the mechanics by which these groups exert pressure on America’s lawmakers and governors, have been dealt with elsewhere; we need only note that this interest group is undoubtedly extraordinarily effective and successful. Not just a small group of Jews supporting Israel, as its supporters would have us believe, these are powerful and committed ideologues: billionaires, media magnates, politicians, activists and religious leaders. In any event, the power of the Jewish lobby to make or break pretty well any public figure is legendary not for nothing is it often referred to simply as “The Lobby”.

But again, there may be far more to the Israel/U.S. relationship than just a commonality of interest and the effectiveness of certain interest groups. That support for Israel must be in the interests of those who control America is certainly true, but who controls America?
Perhaps the real relationship is not between Israel and America but between Jews and America.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in America live their lives just like any other Americans. They’ve done well and are undoubtedly pleased that America supports their fellow Jews in Israel but that’s as far as it goes. Nonetheless, an awful lot of Jews certainly do control an awful lot of America not the industrial muscle of America - the steel, transport, etc., nor the oil and arms industries, those traditional money-spinners. No, if Jews have influence anywhere in America, it’s not over its muscle and sinew but over its blood and its brain. It is in finance and the media that we find a great many Jews in very influential positions. Lists abound (though you have to go to some pretty unpopular websites to find them) of Jews, prominent in financial and cultural life: Jews in banks; Jews in Forbes Magazine’s Richest Americans; Jews in Hollywood; Jews in TV; Jewish journalists, writers, critics, etc., etc.

Nor have Jews been slow in exploiting their position. Jews have not hesitated to use whatever resources they have to advance their interests as they see them. Nor does one need to subscribe to any conspiracy theory to note how natural it is for Jews in the media to promote Jews and their values as positive and worthy of emulation. When did anyone last see a Jew portrayed in anything other than a favourable light? Jews are clever, moral, interesting, intense, warm, witty, complex, ethical, contradictory, prophetic, infuriating, sometimes irritating, but always utterly engaging. Nor is it any wonder that Jews in influential positions are inclined to promote what they see as Jewish collective interests. Is it really all that incredible that Jewish advisers around the Presidency bear Israel’s interests at heart when they advise the President on foreign affairs?

But so what? So there are a lot of Jews with a lot of money, and a lot of Jews with a lot to say and the means to say it. If Jews by virtue of their ability and use of resources (as honestly gained as by anyone else) promote what they perceive as their own collective interest, what’s wrong with that? First, with some notable exceptions, the vast majority of Jews can, in good faith, lay hands on hearts and swear that they never take decisions or actions with collective Jewish interests in mind, certainly not consciously. And even if they did, they are acting no differently from anyone else. With a few exceptions, Jews have earned their advantageous positions. They came with nothing, played according to the rules and, if they use their influence to further what they perceive as Jewish interests, what’s so special about that? Do not the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Gun lobby, the Christian Evangelicals also not work to further their group interests?

The difference between Jews and other groups is that they probably do it better. Jews are, by pretty well any criteria, easily the most successful ethnic group in America and, for whatever reason, have been extraordinarily successful in promoting themselves both individually and collectively. And there would probably be nothing wrong with this were it not for the fact that these same people who exert so much control and influence over American life also seem to refuse to be held accountable. It is the surreptitiousness with which Jews are perceived to have achieved their success which arouses suspicion. Jews certainly seem cagey about the influence they have. Just breathe the words “Jewish power” and wait for the reaction. They claim it’s because this charge has so often been used as a precursor to discrimination and violence against them, but never consider the possibility that their own reluctance to discuss the power they wield arouses suspicion and even hostility.

But there is another claim, subtler and more worrying. This is that it doesn’t exist; that Jews do not wield power, that there is no Jewish lobby; that Jews in America do not exert power and influence to advance Jewish interests, even that there are no such things as Jewish interests! There are no Jewish interests in the war in Iraq, there are no Jewish interests in America; most amazing, there are no Jewish interests even in Israel and Palestine. There is no Jewish collective. Jews do not act together to advance their aims. They even say that the pro-Israeli lobby has actually not all that much to do with Jews, that the Jewishness of Israel is irrelevant and the Public Affairs Committees (PACs) which lobby so hard for Israel are in fact doing no more than supporting an ally and thus looking after America’s best interests even to the extent of concealing their true purpose behind names such as “American for Better Citizenship”, “Citizen’s Organised PAC” or the “National PAC” none of which make one reference in their titles to Israel, Zionism or Jews. Similarly, Jews and Jewish organisations are said to be not so much furthering Jewish interests and values as American, or, even, universal interests and values. So, the major Holocaust Museum, styled as a “Museum of Tolerance”, focuses not only on anti-Semitism, but on every kind of intolerance known to mankind (except that shown by Jews to non-Jews in Israel and Palestine). Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League is but an organisation for the promotion of universal principles of tolerance and justice, not just for Jews but for everyone.

This conflation of Jewish interests with American interests is nowhere more stark than in present American foreign policy. If ever an image was reminiscent of a Jewish world conspiracy, the spectacle of the Jewish neo-cons gathered around the current presidency and directing policy in the Middle East, this must be it. But we are told that the fact that the Jewish neo-cons, many with links with right wing political groups within Israel, are in the forefront of urging a pro-Israel policy, is but a coincidence, and any suggestion that these figures might be influenced by their Jewishness and their links with Israel is immediately marginalised as reviving old anti-Semitic myths about Jewish dual loyalty. The idea that American intervention in Iraq, the one viable military counterweight to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and therefore an inspiration to Arab and Palestinian resistance, primarily serves Israeli rather than American interests has also been consigned to the nether world of mediaeval anti-Semitic myth. The suggestion that those Jews around the president act from motives other than those to promote the interests of all Americans is just anti-Semitic raving. And maybe they’re right. Perhaps those who promote Jewish interests are in fact promoting American interests because, for now at least, they appear to be one and the same.

Jewish America

In Washington, D.C. is a memorial to a terrible tragedy. Not a memorial to a tragedy visited on Americans by a foreign power as at Pearl Harbour or 9/11, nor to a tragedy visited by Americans on Americans such the sacking of Atlanta. Nor is it a memorial of contrition to a tragedy inflicted by Americans onto another people, such as to slavery or to the history of racial injustice in America. It is to none of these. The Holocaust memorial is to a tragedy inflicted on people who were not Americans, by people who were not Americans, and in a place a very long way from America. And the co-religionists or, even, if you like, the co-nationals, of the people on whom the tragedy was visited and to whom the memorial is built make up around two percent of the American population. How is it that a group of people who make up such a tiny percentage of the overall American population can command such respect and regard that a memorial to them is built in the symbolic heart of American national life?

The Jewish narrative is now at the centre of American life, certainly that of its cultural and political elites. There is, anyway, much in the way that Americans choose to see themselves and their history which is quite naturally compatible with the way Jews see themselves and their history. What more fitting paradigm for a country founded on immigration, than the story of the mass immigration of Jews at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? For many Americans, the story of those Jews who came to their Goldenes Medina, their Golden Land, with nothing and, through hard work and perseverance, made it to the very top of American society, is also their story. Similarly, what greater validation for a country founded on a narrative of conquest and ethnic cleansing than the Biblical narrative of the conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Promised Land with the addition of the equally violent settlement of modern Palestine with its own ethnic cleansing and then “making the desert bloom”? And what could be more inspirational for a country, if not officially but still viscerally, deeply Christian than the story of the Jews, Jesus’ own people and God’s chosen people, returning to their ancient homeland and transforming it into a modern state. And for a nation which sees itself as a beacon of democracy in the world, what better international soul-mate than the state of Israel, widely held to be “the only democracy in the Middle-East”?

Most resonant, of course, is the notion of Jews as a suffering people. The fact that this “suffering people” is now enjoying a success beyond the dreams of any other ethnic group in America seems irrelevant. Also ignored is how American Jews have made it to the very top of American society whilst, every step of the way, complaining about how much they’re being discriminated against. Nonetheless, to America, Jews have an enduring and ongoing history of suffering and victimhood. But this history has rarely been examined or even discussed.

A Suffering People

That Jews have suffered is undeniable, but Jewish suffering is claimed to have been so enduring, so intense and so particular that it is to be treated differently from other sufferings.
The issue is complex and cannot be fully debated or decided here but the following points may stimulate thought and discussion.

- During even the most terrible times of Jewish suffering such as the Crusades or the Chmielnitzky massacres of seventeenth century Ukraine, and even more so at other times in history, it has been said that the average peasant would have given his eye-teeth to be a Jew. The meaning is clear: generally speaking, and throughout most of their history, the condition of Jews was often far superior to the mass of the population.

- The above-mentioned Ukrainian massacres took place in the context of a peasant uprising against the oppression of the Ukrainian peasantry by their Polish overlords. As has often been the case, Jews were seen as occupying a traditional position of being in alliance with the ruling class in their oppression of the peasantry. Chmielnitzky, the leader of this popular uprising, is today a Ukrainian national hero, not for his assaults on Jews (there are even references to his having offered poor Jews to join the uprising against their exploitative co-religionists the Jews declined) but for his championing of the rights of the oppressed Ukrainians. Again, the inference is plain: outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence, though never justified, have often been responses to Jewish behaviour both real and imaginary.

- In the Holocaust three million Polish Jews died, but so did three million non-Jewish Poles. Jews were targeted but so were Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and Poles. Similarly, the Church burned Jews for their dissenting beliefs but then the church burned everyone for their dissenting beliefs. So again, the question must be asked: what’s so special about Jewish suffering?

The Holocaust, the paradigm for all anti-Semitism and all Jewish suffering, is treated as being beyond examination and scrutiny. Questioning the Holocaust narrative is, at best, socially unacceptable, leading often to social exclusion and discrimination, and, at worst, in some places is illegal and subject to severe penalty. Holocaust revisionist scholars, named Holocaust deniers by their opponents, have challenged this. They do not deny a brutal and extensive assault on Jews by the Nazi regime but they do deny the Holocaust narrative as framed by present day establishments and elites. Specifically, their denial is limited to three main areas. First, they deny that there ever was an official plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe; second, they deny that there ever existed homicidal gas-chambers; third, they claim that the numbers of Jewish victims of the Nazi assault have been greatly exaggerated.

But none of this is the point. Whether those who question the Holocaust narrative are revisionist scholars striving to find the truth and shamelessly persecuted for opposing a powerful faction, or whether they are crazy Jew-haters denying a tragedy and defaming its victims, the fact is that one may question the Armenian genocide, one may freely discuss the Slave Trade, one can say that the murder of millions of Ibos, Kampucheans and Rwandans never took place and that the moon is but a piece of green cheese floating in space, but one may not question the Jewish Holocaust. Why? Because, like the rest of the Jewish history of suffering, the Holocaust underpins the narrative of Jewish innocence which is used to bewilder and befuddle any attempt to see and to comprehend Jewish power and responsibility in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere in the world.

Jewish Power

What is a Jew?

Israel Shamir, the Russian-born Israeli writer, advocates the right of all people, whatever their ethnicity or religion, to live together in complete equality between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Shamir condemns the behaviour of Israel and of Diaspora Jews and calls for an end to their preferential treatment, but he also proposes an opposition to Judaism itself for which he stands accused of being anti-Jewish a charge he does not deny but actually embraces.

Shamir proposes the existence of a Jewish ideology, or "Jewish paradigm" as he puts it, and proposes that it is the voluntary adherence to this “spirit” which makes a Jew into a Jew. For him, Jewishness is neither race nor ethnicity there is, for Shamir, no such thing as a Jewish ‘tribe’ or ‘family’ - no biological or ethnic body from which there can be no escape. Further, this ideology, based on notions of choseness, exclusivity and even supremacism is, at least when empowered, incompatible with peace, equality and justice in Palestine or anywhere else for that matter.

No-one wants to oppose any Jews simply for being Jews, or even for what they believe, but only because of what they do. The problem is that since, according to Shamir, what Jews believe and even do is precisely what makes them into Jews, so opposition to Jewishness as an ideology surely comes dangerously close to opposition to Jews simply for being Jews. But for Shamir, Jews are Jews because they choose to be Jews. Someone may be born of Jews and raised as a Jew but they can if they wish reject their Jewish upbringing and become a non-Jew. And many have done just that including such famous escapees as Karl Marx, St. Paul, Leon Trotsky (and Shamir himself), etc. Opposition to Jews is not, therefore, like opposition to Blacks or to Asians or to other common racist attitudes since the object of the opposition is perfectly able to relinquish the ideology in question.

Shamir has never in any way called for any harm to be done to Jews or anyone else, nor for Jews or anyone else to be discriminated against in any way. Adherence to this Jewish ideology is, for Shamir, regrettable, but not, in itself, a matter for active opposition. Nor does this mean that Shamir is opposed to any individual Jew just because he or she is a Jew. What Shamir actively opposes is not “Jews” but “Jewry”. Analogous to say, the Catholic Church, Jewry consists of those organised Jews and their leaders who actively promote corrosive Jewish interests and values, particularly now in the oppression of the Palestinians

One doesn’t have to be in complete agreement with Shamir to understand what he is talking about. Why should Jews not have a “spirit”; after all, such a concept has been discussed with regard to other nations?

“It is dangerous, wrong, to speak about the “Germans,” or any other people, as of a single undifferentiated entity, and include all individuals in one judgment. And yet I don’t think I would deny that there exists a spirit of each people (otherwise it would not be a people) a Deutschtum, an italianitia, an hispanidad: they are the sums of traditions, customs, history, language, and culture. Whoever does not feel within himself this spirit, which is national in the best sense of the word, not only does not entirely belong to his own people but is not part of human civilization. Therefore, while I consider insensate the syllogism, ‘All Italians are passionate; you are Italian; therefore you are passionate,” I do however believe it legitimate, within certain limits, to expect from Italians taken as a whole, or from Germans, etc., one specific, collective behavior rather than another. There will certainly be individual exceptions, but a prudent, probabilistic forecast is in my opinion possible.” Primo Levi
And for Jews it is, perhaps, even more appropriate. The place of Judaism as an ideology at the centre for all Jewish identity may be debated, but few would dispute that Judaism is at least at the historic heart of Jewishness and, whatever else may bind Jews together, it is certainly true that religion plays an important part. Second, for a group of people who have retained such a strong collective identity with no shared occupation of any land, language, nor even, in many cases, a culture, it is hard to see what else there could be that makes Jews into Jews. Surely for Jews, in the absence of other, more obvious factors, it is precisely such a spirit that has enabled them to retain their distinctive identity for so long and in the face of such opposition.

But if there is some kind of Jewish spirit or ideology, what is it? As far as Judaism, the religion, goes it seems fairly clear that there is an ideology based on the election of Israel by God, the special relationship Jews are supposed to have with God and the special mission allocated to Jews by God. So for observant Jews there is a special quality intrinsic to the covenant and to Judaism itself, though not all of them find it appealing:

"There is a strain in Jewish thought that says there is a special Godly something or other that is passed down in a certain genetic line which confers a special quality on people and Jewishness is a special quality. I call that metaphysical racism." Rabbi Mark Solomon

But whilst easy to see such a common spirit in religious Jews after all it is precisely that which makes them religious it is so much harder to define it in secular Jews, those Jews who reject, often quite vociferously, all aspects of Jewish faith. They often claim that they don’t have an ideology, or that their ideology is one of, say, the left: not only not Jewish, but opposed to all religions including Judaism. Yet seemingly so free of all such ignorant superstition, these same people still call themselves Jews, still more often than not marry other Jews and still turn up to solidarity rallies only with other Jews and under Jewish banners. What is their ideology?

For my money it is much the same sense of specialness found in religious Jews but with a special reference to victimhood. “Yes, but only in the Hitlerian sense”, answered philosopher Maxime Rodinson when asked if he still considered himself a Jew. For many of these Jews it is their identity as a threatened and victimized people that makes them Jews. “Hitler said I was a Jew, so I may as well be a Jew” is one response or “To be a Jew somehow denies all those who ever persecuted Jews a victory so I’m a Jew”. For these Jews, albeit estranged from Jewish religious and often community life as well, Emil Fackenheim’s famous post-Holocaust 614th commandment (to add to the other 613): Thou shall survive! is an absolute imperative. But whatever the motive, this self-identity runs very deep indeed. Amongst these Jews, no matter how left or progressive they may be, one may criticise Israel to the nth degree, poke fun at the Jewish establishment and even shamefully denigrate Judaism as a religion, but depart one iota from the approved text on anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering, and you are in deep trouble. For these rational folk, Jewish suffering and anti-Semitism is every bit as inexplicable, mysterious and therefore, unchallengeable as for any religious Jew.

Jewish secularism is often offered as evidence that there is no such thing as a Jewish identity gathered around any shared ideology. After all, if all Jews subscribe to the same basic ideology, then how come so many Jews so obviously don’t? And if all Jews essentially support the same interests, how come so many Jews so obviously don’t? But is it that obvious? Not only do secular Jews very often seem to subscribe to Jewish notions of specialness and victimhood, but also, in their attitudes to non-Jews in general, and Palestinians in particular, they are by no means all that different from religious Jews.

It is often quoted how many Jews are in solidarity movements with Palestinians and how many of these are secular. And it’s true: there are many Jews in sympathy with the Palestinians and the overwhelming majority are secular, and the main thrust of post-1967 virulent Zionism has come to be associated with the religious right. But this secular Jewish tradition, in fact, has been at the forefront of Zionism’s assault on the Palestinians. It was secular Labour Zionists who created the Zionist ideology and the pre-state Jewish-only society. It was secular Zionists - good, humanistic, left-wing kibbutzniks - who directed and carried out the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of their towns and villages. It was secular Zionists who established the present state with all its discriminatory practices; and it was a largely secular Labour government that held the Palestinian citizens of Israel under military government in their own land for eighteen years. Finally, it was a secular, Labour government which conquered the West Bank and Gaza, and first built the settlements, and embarked on the Oslo peace process, coolly designed to deceive the Palestinians into surrendering their rights.

And even those secular Jews who do support Palestinian rights, on so many occasions, the solidarity they offer is limited by self interest. That these people, at least as much as anyone else, act out of their highest motives may be true. Many have been lifelong activists for many causes and many find their activism springs, consciously or unconsciously, from what they see as the highest ideals of their Jewishness. But nonetheless for many of them, solidarity with Palestinians means above all, the protection of Jews. They call for a Palestinian state on 22 per cent of the Palestinian homeland, but only to keep and protect the ‘Jewishness’ of the Jewish state. The Palestinian state they call for would inevitably be weak, dominated by the Israeli economy and under the guns of the Israeli military surely they must know what this would mean!

At rally after rally, in speeches and on leaflets and banners, these Jews denounce the occupation: “Down with the occupation…down with the occupation…down with the occupation…” but not a word of the inherent injustice of a state for Jews only; perhaps a mention of the ill-gotten gains of 1948, but nothing of the right of return of the refugees, no restitution merely ‘a just solution’ taking account, of course, of Israel’s ‘demographic concerns’. “We are with you….we are with you….we are with you” they say “…...but …” Whether it be condemnation of some form of Palestinian resistance of which they disapprove, or some real or perceived occurrence of anti-Semitism, for these Jews there is always a but.”

They should take a leaf from Henry Herskovitz. He is part of an organisation called Jewish Witnesses for Peace, which holds silent vigils outside synagogues on shabbat. Of course, all the other Jewish activists are shrieking at him that you mustn't target Jews for protest, that you must draw a distinction between Jews, Israelis and Zionists, that you'll only alienate the people we want to engage.... but he doesn't care. He knows that support from the Jewish mainstream, as Tony Cliff the Trotskyite used to say, “….is like honey on your elbow - you can see it, you can smell it but you can never quite taste it!” Henry also knows that to say that Jews in America individually and in their religious and community organisations should not be held accountable for what is happening is a lie and discredits all Jews before the non-Jewish world.

So these secular Jews often end up being just another round of Michael Neuman’s “veritable shell game” of Jewish identity. "Look! We're a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry--a religion!" Because this is the key to maintaining Jewish power if it’s indefinable, it’s invisible. Like a stealth bomber (you can’t see it on your radar but you sure know when you’ve been hit) Jewish power, with its blurred outlines and changing forms, becomes invisible. And if you can’t see it you can’t fight it. Meanwhile the assault on the Palestinians continues.

“The Jews”

The phrase is itself terrifying because of its past association with discrimination and violence against Jews, but Jews themselves have no problem with it. The notion of a Jewish People is at the centre of Jewish faith with Jews of all or no degrees of religious adherence over and over again affirming its existence. It is also at the heart of Zionism even in its most secular forms and is written into the foundational texts of the state of Israel. The concept even received international legal approval when the Jewish people were declared, by the West German state, to be the post-war residual heirs of intestate Jews. And yet it is an absolute article of faith for everyone, including those in the solidarity movement, that while we may criticize and confront Israel and Israelis, we may not criticize and confront the Jewish people and Jews. Unlike Israel and any other state, the Jewish People has no common policy and any attack on the Jewish people is, therefore, aimed at what they are and not at what they do.
But is speaking of the Jews doing this or doing that any more or less acceptable than speaking of, say, the Americans? If the American military lays waste a third world country, it is done by order of the government (a small group) with the full support of the ruling elites (another small group), the tacit support of a substantial segment of the population (a larger group), the silent denial of probably the majority of the population (a very large group) and the opposition of a tiny minority (a small group). Is it all that different with Jews?

It may be. Unlike the United States, ‘the Jews’ are not a legally constituted body and they do not have an obvious and defined common policy. ‘The Jews’ do not have an officially designated leadership, nor do they inhabit one area of land, nor do they speak a common language or even share a common culture. Theoretically at least there seem to be so many differences as to render any comparison untenable. In practice this may not be the whole story.
It is true that ‘the Jews’ do not constitute a legally recognized body, but Zionism, with its claim to represent all Jews, has increasingly confused the issue. It is also true that the Zionists do not represent all Jews but they do represent the views of very many Jews indeed, and certainly the most powerful and influential Jews. And there is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of organized Jews are fully behind the Zionist project. That ‘the Jews’ do not have a formally designated leadership does not mean that they have no leadership - bodies again to which the overwhelming majority of organized Jews owe allegiance: the Israeli Government, the World Zionist Organization; numerous large and powerful Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, The Simon Wiesenthal Centre; lesser bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews and similar organizations in every country in which Jews reside. Then there is the extensive network of Jewish bodies often linked, through synagogues to the whole spectrum of mainstream Jewish religious and community life. All these bodies with their vast and interconnected network do provide leadership; they do have clearly defined policies and they are all four-square behind Zionism and Israel in its assault on the Palestinians.
Does this constitute a definable Jewish collective engaged in advancing Jewish interests? Officially, perhaps not, but, effectively, when one notes the remarkable unanimity of intent of all these bodies, the answer may well be yes. They do not of course represent all Jews nor are all individual Jews responsible for their actions, but nonetheless ‘the Jews’ - organized, active and effective Jews - are as responsible for the pursuit of Jewish interests in Palestine and elsewhere as ‘the Americans’ in Vietnam, ‘the French’ in Algeria, and ‘the British’ in India.

So why should our response be different? Why should ‘the Jews’ not be as accountable as ‘the Americans’ and even ordinary Jews as accountable as ordinary Americans? Why do we not picket the offices of the Anti-Defamation League or The Conference of Presidents or the offices or even the homes of Abe Foxman, Edgar Bronfman and Mort Zuckerman in the U.S. and Neville Nagler in the U.K.? Why do we not heckle Alan Dershowitz in the U.S. and Melanie Phillips in the U.K.? What about the U.K. Chief Rabbi who in his time has had lots to say about Israel and Palestine? Why do we not take the struggle to every synagogue and Jewish community centre in the world? After all, every Shabbat a prayer is said for the state of Israel in every mainstream synagogue in the land, most of which are focal points for Zionist propagandizing and fundraising, so why should these Jew who choose to combine their prayers and their politics be immune while at prayer from our legitimate protests at their politics? And for those few Jews who are really prepared to stand up and be counted for their solidarity with Palestinians, why can we not still give to them due honour and regard as we did to those few Americans who opposed American imperialism and those white South Africans who opposed apartheid?

The answer is that we are frightened. Even knowing that Jews are responsible and should be held accountable, still we are frightened. We are frightened because criticism of Jews with its woeful history of violence and discrimination seems just too dangerous a position to take it may open the flood-gates to a burst of Jew hatred. We are frightened that if we were to discuss the role of Jews in this conflict and in other areas and begin to hold Jews accountable, we might be labelled anti-Semites and lose support. And, perhaps most of all, we are frightened of the conflicted inner passions that confound us all whenever we come to look at these things.

Does speaking the truth about Jewish identity, power and history lead to Jews being led to concentration camps and ovens? Of course it doesn’t! It is hatred, fear and the suppression of free thought and speech which leads to these things whether the hatred, fear and suppression is directed against Jews or by Jews. Anyway, despite efforts to convince us to the contrary, we do not live in the thirteenth century. Californians are unlikely to pour out of their cinemas showing Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion’ chanting “Death to the Jews!” And, at a time when Jews in Israel/Palestine, overwhelmingly backed by Jewish organisations in the west, are desecrating churches and mosques wholesale and brutally oppressing entire Christian and Muslim populations, we may be forgiven for finding it hard to get excited about graffiti daubed on some synagogue somewhere.

If we were to begin to engage with the role of Jews in this conflict, we may well be labelled anti-Semites and we may well, initially at least, lose support. The anti-Semite curse has long served as a frightener to silence all criticism of Jews, Israel and Zionism, and undoubtedly will be used to discredit our cause. But so what? They call us anti-Semites anyway so what’s to lose? Edward Said spent a lifetime picking his way through the Israel/Zionism/Judaism minefield and never once criticised Jews, and he was called an anti-Semite his whole life, right up to and even after his death. As a movement we have probably spent as much time being nice to Jews as we have speaking up for Palestinians, and for what? Where has it got us? We are not racists and we are not anti-Semites, so let them do their worst. We shall speak our minds.

For so long now Jews have told the world that black is white and not only that, but also if anyone should dare to deny that black is white they will be denounced as anti-Semites with all the attendant penalties. We are held in a moral and intellectual lock, the intention of which has been to silence all criticism of Israeli and Jewish power. In saying the unsayable we may set ourselves and others free. And think how it will feel the next time you are called an anti-Semite to say “Well, I don’t know about that, but I do have some very strong but legitimate criticisms to make of Jews and the way they are behaving….and I intend to speak out”?

And you never know; we may be pleasantly surprised. Israel Shamir, who has no trouble whatsoever in calling a Jew a Jew, was cheered spontaneously recently when he introduced himself from the floor at a London solidarity meeting. I saw it with my own eyes. His first English-language book has just been published; he corresponds freely and reciprocally with many highly respected figures and is on the boards of advisers of The Association for One Democratic State in Palestine and of Deir Yassin Remembered. Perhaps it’s all just a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps we’re all just waiting for some innocent child to blow the whistle.

The situation facing the Palestinian people is truly terrible. Old political strategies have got us nowhere. We need a new and widened debate. It may be that a new and credible discourse which puts Jews and Jewishness at the critical centre of our discussions is part of that.

And one final point: In a previous piece, paraphrasing Marc Ellis I wrote:

“To the Christian and to the entire non-Jewish world, Jews say this: ‘You will apologise for Jewish suffering again and again and again. And, when you have done apologising, you will then apologise some more. When you have apologised sufficiently we will forgive you ... provided that you let us do what we want in Palestine.’

Shamir took me to task, “Eisen is too optimistic”, he said, “Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews…..the world is.”

Well, I don’t know about that, but, if as now seems likely, the conquest of Palestine is complete and the state of Israel stretches from Tel-Aviv to the Jordan River, what can we expect? Will the Jews of Israel, supported by Jews outside of Israel, now obey the law, live peaceably behind their borders and enjoy the fruits of their victory, or will they want more? Who’s next?

Paul Eisen is a director of Deir Yassin Remembered dyr@eisen.demon.co.uk

mazin@al-awda.org

J.Goldberg: AIPAC and an FBI sting

2005-12-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

REAL INSIDERS
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
A pro-Israel lobby and an F.B.I. sting.
Issue of 2005-07-04
Posted 2005-06-27
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/050704fa_fact

Several years ago, I had dinner at Galileo, a Washington restaurant, with Steven Rosen, who was then the director of foreign-policy issues at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The group, which is better known by its acronym, aipac, lobbies for Israel’s financial and physical security. Like many lobbyists, Rosen cultivated reporters, hoping to influence their writing while keeping his name out of print. He is a voluble man, and liked to demonstrate his erudition and dispense aphorisms. One that he often repeated could serve as the credo of K Street, the Rodeo Drive of Washington’s influence industry: “A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”

Lobbyists tend to believe that legislators are susceptible to persuasion in ways that executive-branch bureaucrats are not, and before Rosen came to aipac, in 1982 (he had been at the rand Corporation, the defense-oriented think tank), the group focussed mainly on Congress. But Rosen arrived brandishing a new idea: that the organization could influence the outcome of policy disputes within the executive branch—in particular, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council.

Rosen began to court officials. He traded in gossip and speculation, and his reports to aipac’s leaders helped them track currents in Middle East policymaking before those currents coalesced into executive orders. Rosen also used his contacts to carry aipac’s agenda to the White House. An early success came in 1983, when he helped lobby for a strategic coöperation agreement between Israel and the United States, which was signed over the objections of Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, and which led to a new level of intelligence sharing and military sales.

aipac is a leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs, although it is, by comparison, much smaller. (aipac has about a hundred thousand members, the N.R.A. more than four million.) President Bush, speaking at the annual aipac conference in May of 2004, said, “You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.” aipac is unique in the top tier of lobbies because its concerns are the economic health and security of a foreign nation, and because its members are drawn almost entirely from a single ethnic group.

aipac’s professional staff—it employs about a hundred people at its headquarters, two blocks from the Capitol—analyzes congressional voting records and shares the results with its members, who can then contribute money to candidates directly or to a network of proIsrael political-action committees. The Center for Responsive Politics, a public-policy group, estimates that between 1990 and 2004 these pacs gave candidates and parties more than twenty million dollars.

Robert H. Asher, a former aipac president, told me that the pacs are usually given euphemistic names. “I started a pac called Citizens Concerned for the National Interest,” he said. Asher, who is from Chicago, is a retired manufacturer of lamps and shades, and a member of the so-called Gang of Four—former presidents of aipac, who steered the group’s policies for more than two decades. (The three others are Larry Weinberg, a California real-estate developer and a former owner of the Portland Trail Blazers; Edward Levy, a construction-materials executive from Detroit; and Mayer “Bubba” Mitchell, a retired builder based in Mobile, Alabama.)

aipac, Asher explained, is loyal to its friends and merciless to its enemies. In 1982, Asher led a campaign to defeat Paul Findley, a Republican congressman from Springfield, Illinois, who once referred to himself as “Yasir Arafat’s best friend in Congress,” and who later compared Arafat to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

“There was a real desire to help Findley out of Congress,” Asher said. He identified an obscure Democratic lawyer in Springfield, Richard Durbin, as someone who could defeat Findley. “We met at my apartment in Chicago, and I recruited him to run for Congress,” he recalled. “I probed his views and I explained things that I had learned mostly from aipac. I wanted to make sure we were supporting someone who was not only against Paul Findley but also a friend of Israel.”

Asher went on, “He beat Findley with a lot of help from Jews, in-state and out-of-state. Now, how did the Jewish money find him? I travelled around the country talking about how we had the opportunity to defeat someone unfriendly to Israel. And the gates opened.” Durbin, who went on to win a Senate seat, is now the Democratic whip. He is a fierce critic of Bush’s Iraq policy but, like aipac, generally supports the Administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Durbin says that he considers Asher to be his “most loyal friend in the Jewish community.”

Mayer Mitchell led a similar campaign, three years ago, to defeat Earl Hilliard, an Alabama congressman who was a critic of Israel. Mitchell helped direct support to a young Harvard Law School graduate named Artur Davis, who challenged Hilliard in the Democratic primary, and he solicited donations from aipac supporters across America. Davis won the primary, and the seat. “I asked Bubba how he felt after Davis won,” Asher said, “and he said, ‘Just like you did when Durbin got elected.’ ” Mitchell declined to comment.

aipac’s leaders can be immoderately frank about the group’s influence. At dinner that night with Steven Rosen, I mentioned a controversy that had enveloped aipac in 1992. David Steiner, a New Jersey real-estate developer who was then serving as aipac’s president, was caught on tape boasting that he had “cut a deal” with the Administration of George H. W. Bush to provide more aid to Israel. Steiner also said that he was “negotiating” with the incoming Clinton Administration over the appointment of a pro-Israel Secretary of State. “We have a dozen people in his”—Clinton’s—“headquarters . . . and they are all going to get big jobs,” Steiner said. Soon after the tape’s existence was disclosed, Steiner resigned his post. I asked Rosen if aipac suffered a loss of influence after the Steiner affair. A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table. “You see this napkin?” he said. “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

Rosen was influential from the start. He was originally recruited for the job by Larry Weinberg, one of the Gang of Four, and he helped choose the group’s leaders, including the current executive director, Howard Kohr, a Republican who began his aipac career as Rosen’s deputy. Rosen, who can be argumentative and impolitic, was never a candidate for the top post. “He’s a bit of a kochleffl”—the Yiddish term for a pot-stirrer, or meddler—Martin Indyk, who also served as Rosen’s deputy, and who went on to become President Clinton’s Ambassador to Israel, says. Rosen has had an unusually eventful private life, marrying and divorcing six times (he is living again with his first wife), and he has a well-developed sense of paranoia. When we met, he would sometimes lower his voice, even when he was preparing to deliver an anodyne pronouncement. “Hostile ears are always listening,” he was fond of saying.

Nevertheless, he is a keen analyst of Middle East politics, and a savvy bureaucratic infighter. His views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not notably hawkish; he once called himself “too right for the left, and too left for the right.” He is a hard-liner on only one subject—Iran—and this preoccupation helped shape aipac’s position: that Iran poses a greater threat to Israel than any other nation. In this way, aipac is in agreement with a long line of Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who fears Iran’s nuclear intentions more than he ever feared Saddam Hussein’s. (aipac lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war, but Iraq has not been one of its chief concerns.) Rosen’s main role at aipac, he once told me, was to collect evidence of “Iranian perfidy” and share it with the United States.

Unlike American neoconservatives, who have openly supported the Likud Party over the more liberal Labor Party, aipac does not generally take sides in Israeli politics. But on Iran aipac’s views resemble those of the neoconservatives. In 1996, Rosen and other aipac staff members helped write, and engineer the passage of, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on foreign oil companies doing business with those two countries; aipac is determined, above all, to deny Iran the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran was a main focus of this year’s aipac policy conference, which was held in May at the Washington Convention Center. Ariel Sharon and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others, addressed five thousand aipac members. One hall of the convention center was taken up by a Disney-style walk-through display of an Iranian nuclear facility. It was kitsch, but not ineffective, and Rosen undoubtedly would have appreciated it. Rosen, however, was not there. He was fired earlier this year by Howard Kohr, nine months after he became implicated in an F.B.I. espionage investigation. Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, expects him to be indicted on charges of passing secret information about Iranian intelligence activities in Iraq to an official of the Israeli Embassy and to a Washington Post reporter. A junior colleague, Keith Weissman, who served as an Iran analyst for aipac until he, too, was fired, may face similar charges.

The person who, in essence, ended Rosen’s career is a fifty-eight-year-old Pentagon analyst named Lawrence Anthony Franklin, who is even more preoccupied with Iran than Steven Rosen. Franklin, until recently the Pentagon’s Iran desk officer, was indicted last month on espionage charges. The Justice Department has accused him of giving “national-defense information” to Rosen and Weissman, and classified information to an Israeli official. Franklin has pleaded not guilty; a tentative trial date is set for September. If convicted, he will face at least ten years in prison.

I first met Franklin in November of 2002. Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was receiving the Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson award from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a conservative-leaning group that tries to build close relations between the American and Israeli militaries. In the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Pentagon City, a shopping mall, were a number of American generals and the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon.

Franklin, a trim man with blond hair and a military bearing, is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve who spent several years as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has a doctorate in Asian studies and describes himself as a capable speaker of Farsi. In addition, he was a Catholic in a largely Jewish network of Pentagon Iran hawks.

Franklin was particularly close to the neoconservative Harold Rhode, an official in the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank. Franklin was also close to Michael Ledeen, who, twenty years ago, played an important role in the Iran-Contra scandal by helping arrange meetings between the American government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is one of the most outspoken advocates in Washington of confrontation with the Tehran regime.

The conversation at the banquet, and just about everywhere else in official Washington at that time, centered on the coming war in Iraq. “We may well hope that with the demise of a truly evil and despotic regime in Iraq, we will see the liberation of one of the most talented peoples in the Arab world,” Wolfowitz said in his speech. Franklin did not seem especially concerned with the topic at hand. As we stood outside the banquet hall, he said that Iran, not Iraq, would turn out to be the most difficult challenge in the war on terror.

Then, as now, the Administration was divided on the question of Iran. Many of the political appointees at the Defense Department hoped that America would support dissidents in an attempt to overthrow Iran’s ruling clerics, while the State Department argued for containment. Even within the Defense Department, many officials believed that it would be imprudent to make regime change in Tehran a top priority. “There are neocons who thought Iran should come sooner and neocons who thought it should come later,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me. As for Franklin, Gerecht, a former Iran specialist in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations, said, “It’s fair to say that Larry was impatient with Bush Administration policy on Iran.” In the Pentagon’s policy office, I learned later, it was sometimes said that Franklin inhabited a place called Planet Franklin. Gerecht referred to him as “sweet, bumbling Larry.”

A year later, on a reporting assignment in Israel, I ran into Franklin at the Herzliya Conference, which is the Davos of the Israeli security establishment. He said that he was there on Defense Department business. We talked briefly about Iraq—it was eight months after the invasion—and, as we spoke, General Moshe Ya’alon, then the Israeli Army chief of staff, swept into the room surrounded by bodyguards and uniformed aides. “Wow,” Franklin said.

We stepped outside, and he talked only about Iran’s threat to America. “Our intelligence is blind,” he said. “It’s the most dangerous country in the world to the U.S., and we have nothing on the ground. We don’t understand anything that goes on. I mean, the C.I.A. doesn’t have anything. This goes way deeper than Tenet”—George Tenet, who was the director of central intelligence at the time. He continued, “Do you know how dangerous Iran is to our forces in the Gulf? We have great force-concentration issues now”—the presence of American troops in Iraq—“and the Iranians are very interested in making life difficult for American forces. They have the capability. You watch what they’re doing in Iraq. Their infiltration is everywhere.”

Franklin seemed more frustrated with American policy in Iran than he had the year before. “We don’t understand that it’s doable—regime change is doable,” he said. “The people are so desperate to become free, and the mullahs are so unpopular. They’re so pro-American, the people.” Referring to the Bush Administration, he said, “That’s what they don’t understand,” and he added, “And they also don’t understand how anti-American the mullahs are.” Franklin was convinced that the Iranians would commit acts of terrorism against Americans, on American soil. “These guys are a threat to us in Iraq and even at home,” he said.

Franklin was not a high-ranking Pentagon official; he was five steps removed in the hierarchy from Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. For two years, though, he had been trying to change American policy. His efforts took many forms, including calls to reporters, meetings with Rosen and Weissman and with the political counsellor at the Israeli Embassy, Naor Gilon. According to Tracy O’Grady-Walsh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, he was not acting on behalf of his superiors: “If Larry Franklin was formally or informally lobbying, he was doing it on his own.”

Franklin also sought information from Iranian dissidents who might aid his cause. In December of 2001, he and Rhode met in Rome with Michael Ledeen and a group of Iranians, including Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, who helped arrange the meeting, told me that the dissidents gave Franklin and Rhode information about Iranian threats against American soldiers in Afghanistan. (Rhode did not return calls seeking comment.) Franklin was initially skeptical about the meeting, Ledeen said, but emerged believing that America could do business with these dissidents.

Franklin’s meetings with Gilon and with the two aipac men make up the heart of the indictment against him. The indictment alleges that Rosen—“CC-1,” or “Co-Conspirator 1”—called the Pentagon in early August of 2002, looking for the name of an Iran specialist. He made contact with Franklin a short time later, but, according to the indictment, they did not meet until February of 2003. In their meetings, according to several people with knowledge of the conversations, Franklin told the lobbyists that Secretary of State Colin Powell was resisting attempts by the Pentagon to formulate a tougher Iran policy. He apparently hoped to use aipac to lobby the Administration.

The Franklin indictment suggests that the F.B.I. had been watching Rosen as well; for instance, it alleges that, in February of 2003, Rosen, on his way to a meeting with Franklin, told someone on the phone that he “was excited to meet with a ‘Pentagon guy’ because this person was a ‘real insider.’ ” Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman met openly four times in 2003. At one point, the indictment reads, somewhat mysteriously, “On or about March 10, 2003, Franklin, CC-1 and CC-2”— Rosen and Weissman—“met at Union Station early in the morning. In the course of the meeting, the three men moved from one restaurant to another restaurant and then finished the meeting in an empty restaurant.”

On June 26, 2003, at a lunch at the Tivoli Restaurant, near the Pentagon, Franklin reportedly told Rosen and Weissman about a draft of a National Security Presidential Directive that outlined a series of tougher steps that the U.S. could take against the Iranian leadership. The draft was written by a young Pentagon aide named Michael Rubin (who is now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute). Franklin did not hand over a copy of the draft, but he described its contents, and, according to the indictment, talked about the “state of internal United States government deliberations.” The indictment also alleges that Franklin gave the two men “highly classified” information about potential attacks on American forces in Iraq.

In mid-August of 2002, according to the indictment, Franklin met with Gilon—identified simply as “FO,” or “foreign official”—at a restaurant, and Gilon explained to Franklin that he was the “policy” person at the Embassy. The two met regularly, the indictment alleges, often at the Pentagon Officers’ Athletic Club, to discuss “foreign policy issues,” particularly regarding a “Middle Eastern country”—Iran, by all accounts—and “its nuclear program.” The indictment suggests that Franklin was receiving information and policy advice from Gilon; after one meeting, Franklin drafted an “Action Memo” to his supervisors incorporating Gilon’s suggestions. Gilon is an expert on weapons proliferation, according to Danny Ayalon, the Israeli Ambassador, and has briefed reporters about Israel’s position on Iran. According to Lawrence Di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, it is part of the “job description” of Defense Department desk officers to meet with their foreign counterparts. “Desk officers meet with foreign officials all the time, not with ministers, but interactions with people at their level,” he said. The indictment contends, however, that on two occasions Franklin gave Gilon classified information.

The issue of Israel’s activities in Washington is unusually sensitive. Twenty years ago, a civilian Naval Intelligence analyst named Jonathan Pollard was caught stealing American secrets on behalf of an Israeli intelligence cell—a “rogue” cell, the Israelis later claimed. Pollard said that he was driven to treason because, as a Jew, he could not abide what he saw as America’s unwillingness to share crucial intelligence with Israel. Pollard’s actions were an embarrassment for American Jews, who fear the accusation of “dual loyalty”—the idea that they split their allegiance between the United States and Israel. For Israel, the case was a moral and political disaster. And there are some in the American intelligence community who suspect that Israel has never stopped spying on the United States.

Earlier this month, Ayalon told me that Israel does not “collect any intelligence on the United States, period, full stop. We won’t do anything to risk this most important relationship.” In any case, he said, there was no need to spy, “because coöperation is so intimate and effective between Israel and the U.S.” Ayalon also said that Gilon, who is returning to Jerusalem later this summer, remains an important member of his staff; in recent months, Gilon has attended meetings at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House.

In June of 2004, F.B.I. agents searched Franklin’s Pentagon office and his home in West Virginia, and allegedly found eighty-three classified documents. Some had to do with the Iran debate, but some pertained to Al Qaeda and Iraq. (A separate federal indictment, citing the documents, has been handed down in West Virginia.) According to a person with knowledge of Franklin’s case, the agents told Franklin that Rosen and Weissman were working against America’s interests. Franklin faced ruin—the documents found in his house could cost him his job, the agents said. Franklin, who did not have a lawyer, agreed to coöperate in the investigation of Rosen and Weissman, although apparently he was not given in return a specific promise of leniency. Soon, he was wired, and was asked to contact the two aipac employees. On July 21st, Franklin called Weissman and said that he had to speak to him immediately—that it was a matter of life and death. They arranged to meet outside the Nordstrom’s department store at Pentagon City.

A month before that meeting, The New Yorker had published an article by Seymour Hersh about the activities of Israeli intelligence agents in northern Iraq. Franklin, who held a top-secret security clearance, allegedly told Weissman that he had new, classified information indicating that Iranian agents were planning to kidnap and kill the Israelis referred to by Hersh. American intelligence knew about the threat, Franklin said, but Israel might not. He also said that the Iranians had infiltrated southern Iraq, and were planning attacks on American soldiers. Rosen and Weissman, Franklin hoped, could insure that senior Administration officials received this news. It is unclear whether what Franklin relayed was true or whether it had been manufactured by the F.B.I. The Bureau has refused to comment on the case.

Weissman hurried back to aipac’s headquarters and briefed Rosen and Howard Kohr, aipac’s executive director. According to aipac sources, Rosen and Weissman asked Kohr to give the information to Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle East official on the National Security Council. Kohr didn’t get in touch with Abrams, but Rosen and Weissman made two calls. They called Gilon and told him about the threat to Israeli agents in Iraq, and then they called Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent at the Washington Post, and told him about the threat to Americans.

A month later, on the morning of August 27, 2004, F.B.I. agents visited Rosen at his home, in Silver Spring, Maryland, seeking to question him. Rosen quickly called aipac’s lawyers. That night, CBS News reported that an unnamed Israeli “mole” had been discovered in the Pentagon, and that the mole had been passing documents to two officials of aipac, who were passing the documents on to Israeli officials.

Within days, the names of Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman were made public. The F.B.I. informed Franklin that he was going to be charged with illegal possession of classified documents. Franklin was said by friends to be frightened, and surprised. He said that he could not afford to hire a lawyer. The F.B.I. arranged for a court-appointed attorney to represent him. The lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, advised him to plead guilty to espionage charges, and receive a prison sentence of six to eight years.

At about this time, Franklin received a call from Michael Ledeen, his ally in matters of Iran policy. “I called him and said, ‘Larry, what’s going on?’ ” Ledeen recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t worry. Sharansky’ ”—Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident—“ ‘survived years in the Gulag, and I’ll survive prison, too.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He told me what was going on. I asked him if he had a good lawyer.” Ledeen called the criminal-defense attorney Plato Cacheris. “I knew him from when he served as Fawn’s attorney,” Ledeen said, referring to Fawn Hall, who was Colonel Oliver North’s secretary at the time of the Iran-Contra affair. Cacheris has also represented Monica Lewinsky and the F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen, who spied for Moscow. Cacheris offered to represent Franklin pro bono, and Franklin accepted the offer.

aipac launched a special appeal for donations—for the organization, not for Rosen and Weissman. “Your generosity at this time will help ensure that false allegations do not hamper our ability or yours to work for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a safe and secure Israel,” aipac’s leaders wrote in the letter accompanying the appeal.

But in December four aipac officials, including Kohr, were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia. In March, aipac’s principal lawyer, Nathan Lewin, met with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Paul McNulty, who agreed to let Lewin see some of the evidence of the Pentagon City sting. According to an aipac source, an eleven-second portion of the telephone conversation between Rosen, Weissman, and the Post’s Glenn Kessler, which the F.B.I. had recorded, was played for Lewin. In that conversation, Rosen is alleged to have told Kessler about Iranian agents in southern Iraq—information that Weissman had received from Franklin. In the part of the conversation that Lewin heard, Rosen jokes about “not getting in trouble” over the information. He also notes, “At least we have no Official Secrets Act”—the British law that makes journalists liable to prosecution if they publish classified material.

Prosecutors argued to Lewin that this statement proved that Rosen and Weissman were aware that the information Franklin had given them was classified, and that Rosen must therefore have known that he was passing classified information to Gilon, a foreign official. Lewin, who declined to comment on the case, recommended that aipac fire Rosen and Weissman. He also told the board that McNulty had promised that aipac itself would not be a target of the espionage investigation. An aipac spokesman, Patrick Dorton, said of the firing, “Rosen and Weissman were dismissed because they engaged in conduct that was not part of their jobs, and because this conduct did not comport with the standards that aipac expects and requires of its employees.”

When I asked Abbe Lowell, Rosen’s lawyer, about the firings, he said, “Steve Rosen’s dealings with Larry Franklin were akin to his dealings with executive-branch officials for more than two decades and were well known, encouraged, and appreciated by aipac.”

Last month, I met with Lowell and Rosen in Lowell’s office, which these days is a center of Washington scandal management. (He also represents the fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff.) Lowell had instructed Rosen not to discuss specifics of the case, but Rosen expressed disbelief that his career had been ended by an F.B.I. investigation. “I’m being looked at for things I’ve done for twenty-three years, which other foreign-policy groups, hundreds of foreign-policy groups, are doing,” Rosen said, and went on, “Our job at aipac was to understand what the government is doing, in order to help form better policies, in the interests of the U.S. I’ve never done anything illegal or harmful to the U.S. I never even dreamed of doing anything harmful to the U.S.” Later, he said, “We did not knowingly receive classified information from Larry Franklin.” Lowell added, “When the facts are known, this will be a case not about Rosen and Weissman’s actions but about the government’s actions.” Lowell said that he would not rehearse his arguments against any charges until there is an indictment.

Rosen said that he was particularly upset by the allegation that, because he had informed Gilon that Israeli lives might be in danger, he was a spy for Israel. “If I had been given information that British or Australian soldiers were going to be kidnapped or killed in Iraq, I think I would have done the same thing,” he said. “I’d have tried to warn them by calling friends at those embassies.” He wants to believe that he could return to aipac if he is exonerated, but this does not seem likely. aipac leaders are downplaying Rosen’s importance to the organization. “aipac is focussed primarily on legislative lobbying,” Dorton told me. Rosen’s severance pay will end in September, although aipac, in accordance with its bylaws, will continue to pay legal fees for Rosen and Weissman.

Rosen’s defenders are critical of aipac for its handling of the controversy. Martin Indyk, who is now the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a think tank within the Brookings Institution, thinks that aipac made a tactical mistake by cutting off the two men. “It appears they’ve abandoned their own on the battlefield,” he says. “Because they cut Steve off, they leave him no choice.” Indyk wouldn’t elaborate, but the implication was clear: Rosen and Weissman will defend themselves by arguing that they were working in concert with the highest officials of the organization, including Kohr.

Until there is an indictment, the government’s full case against Rosen and Weissman cannot be known; no one in the Justice Department will comment. The laws concerning the dissemination of government secrets are sometimes ambiguous and often unenforced, and prosecutors in such cases face complex choices. According to Lee Strickland, a former chief privacy officer of the C.I.A., prosecutors pressing espionage charges against Rosen and Weissman would have to prove that the information the two men gave to Gilon not merely was classified but rose to the level of “national-defense information,” meaning that it could cause dire harm to the United States. Yet a reporter who called the Embassy to discuss the same information in the course of preparing a story—thus violating the same statute—would almost certainly not be prosecuted. Strickland continued, “Twice in the Clinton Administration we had proposals to broaden the statutes to include the recipients, not just the leakers, of classified information. The New York Times and the Washington Post went bat-shit about this legislation. They saw it as an attempt to shut down leaks.” If American law did punish those who receive, and then pass on, or publish, privileged information, much of the Washington press corps would be in jail, according to Lee Levine, a First Amendment lawyer. So would a great many government officials, elected and appointed, for whom classified information is the currency of conversation with reporters and lobbyists.

Strickland, who said that he had spent much of his career at the C.I.A. “shutting down” leaks, called the aipac affair “uncharted territory.” It is uncommon, he said, for an espionage case to be built on the oral transmission of national-defense information. He also said, “Intent is always an element. If I were a defense attorney, I would argue that this was a form of entrapment. The F.B.I. agents deliberately set my client up, put him in a moral quandary.” He added, however, that although a jury might recognize the quandary, the law does not. “Just because you have information that would help a foreign country doesn’t make it your job to pass that information.”

Even some of aipac’s most vigorous critics do not see the Rosen affair as a traditional espionage case. James Bamford, who is the author of well-received books about the National Security Agency, and an often vocal critic of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, sees the case as a cautionary tale about one lobbying group’s disproportionate influence: “What Pollard did was espionage. This is a much different and more unique animal—this is the selling of ideology, trying to sell a viewpoint.” He continued, “Larry Franklin is not going to knock on George Bush’s door, but he can get aipac, which is a pressure group, and the Israeli government, which is an enormous pressure group, to try to get the American government to change its policy to a more aggressive policy.” Bamford, who believes that Weissman and Rosen may indeed be guilty of soliciting information and passing it to a foreign government, sees the case as a kind of brushback pitch, a way of limiting aipac’s long—and, in Bamford’s view, dangerous—reach.

Other aipac critics see the lobby’s behavior as business as usual in Washington. “The No. 1 game in Washington is making people talking to you feel like you’re an insider, that you’ve got information no one else has,” Sam Gejdenson, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, says. When Gejdenson opposed a proposal to increase Israel’s foreign-aid allocation at the expense of more economically needy countries, aipac, he said, responded by “sitting on its hands” during his reëlection campaigns, despite the fact that he is Jewish. “It’s like any other lobbying group,” he said. “Its job isn’t to come up with the best ideas for mankind, or the U.S. It’s narrowly focussed.”

aipac officials insist that the case has not affected the organization’s effectiveness. But its operations have certainly been hindered by the controversy of the past year, and the F.B.I. sting may force lobbyists of all sorts to be more careful about trying to penetrate the executive branch—and about leaking to reporters. And aipac now seems acutely sensitive to the appearance of dual loyalty. The theme of this year’s aipac conference was “Israel, an American Value,” and, for the first time, “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, was not sung. The only anthem heard was “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

T.Reinhart (8/05) re Gaza Withdrawal + discussion

2005-11-23T09:45:00.000-08:00

August 19, 2005
Friends:

I'm still trying to work things out in my mind since I followed Reinhart's line on the disengagement. I agree with her basic thrust that events conspired to keep Sharon from blocking the disengagement and that the US had a major and crucial role.

I don't agree with Cantarow's flat statement about Chomsky being right and I think Miriam provides a useful corrective both to Cantarow and to Reinhart.

Ronald

Ellen Cantarow re Reinhart:

For me this really confirms Chomsky's views, which I have always supported.

Miriam Reik re Cantarow re Reinhart on why Sharon left Gaza.

Tanya is trying to explain why she wrote an article before saying that Sharon was just bluffing--she was wrong and is now writing that she was right, but he had to change in midstream. I don't agree with her analysis: there is no direct relationship with Iraq and Gaza. There are many other ways to construe disengagement.
For instance, we know that about 6 months ago Bush made a turn-around on the West Bank, co-opting final status talks by saying that the big blocs were facts on the ground. Did Sharon do that in return for Gaza? Or, for instance, Bush needs more help from the Saudis for his war on terror. They have been very active, but might have required that Bush do something about the Palestinian mess in return. When he pressures Sharon, Sharon offers up Gaza in return for Jerusalem, the wall moves ahead rapidly, and West Bank settlement too. There are other scenarios, of course, but we can be pretty sure that Gaza is tied to the West Bank rather than Iraq.

How we left Gaza

Tanya Reinhart
Yediot Aharonot, August 18, 2005. Translated from Hebrew by Edeet Ravel

We will never know with certainty what took place in the mind of Ariel Sharon in February 2004, when he first declared, without consulting anyone, that he is ready to evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza. But if we try to put together the pieces of the disengagement puzzle, the scenario that makes most sense is that Sharon believed that this time, as before, he would find a way of evading the plan. This would explain, for example, why the Gaza settlers have not yet received compensation money and why, as the Saturday Supplement of Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot revealed on August 5, almost no steps have been taken to prepare for their absorption into Israel. (1)

Sharon had good reason to believe that he would succeed in his avoidance tactics. In the previous round, when confronted with the Bush administration's road map, he committed himself to a cease fire, during which Israel was to revert to the status quo of pre-September 2000, freeze settlement construction and remove outposts. None of this was carried out. Sharon and the army claimed that Mahmud Abbas (in the previous round) was not trustworthy and had failed to rein in Hamas. The army continued its assassination policy and succeeded in bringing the Occupied Territories to an unprecedented boiling point, followed by the inevitable Palestinian terror attacks that shattered the cease fire. During the entire time, the first-term Bush administration stood by Sharon's side and dutifully echoed all his complaints against Abbas.

During the current period of calm, the Israeli army also continued with incursions into towns, arrests and targeted assassinations. It seemed as if the next terrorist attack, in the wake of which the calm would explode, was imminent, and the Israeli press was full of details outlining the "Fist of Iron" operation, which was expected this summer in Gaza. But the Bush administration suddenly changed direction. While Israel continued to declare that Abbas was not fulfilling his task, the Bush administration insisted repeatedly that Abbas must be given a chance. What had changed?

Until this turn-around, there was general agreement in Israel that there had never been a U.S. president who was friendlier towards Israel than George W. Bush. Presumably no one thought that a love of Jews on the part of the evangelical Bush was behind this support. But there was a feeling in Israel that with its superior air force, Israel was a huge asset in the global war that Bush had declared in the Middle East. With the euphoria of the power that was felt at the time, it seemed as if Afghanistan and Iraq were already "in our hands" and now we would proceed together towards Iran and maybe even Syria.

But in early 2005, the wheels began to turn the other way. The United States was sinking in the mire of Iraq incurring defeats and casualties. Iran, which after the war with Iraq was ready for any terms of surrender, drew encouragement from Iraq's resistance and from its ties with the Shiite militia. The oil agreements with China gave a boost to its economy and its status. Suddenly the possibility of an attack on Iran didn't seem as certain. It turned out that even the most advanced weapons may not suffice to bring to their knees entire regions which the U.S. was eyeing. In the meantime, support for Bush had sunk to under forty percent and after each world terrorist attack, one heard the paired words, Iraq and Palestine. Bush will not give up on Iraq so fast. But the headache of Palestine, he really doesn't need.

Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. steamroller has been moving steadily. First the all-powerful Israeli lobby in the U.S. was quietly neutralized. Two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have been indicted on charges of assisting the transferring of classified information to an Israeli representative. If convicted, this could spell the end of AIPAC and the entire lobby. In the meantime, they will have to sit quietly, regardless of Bush's actions towards Israel.

The next move was to freeze military support in Israel under cover of the China arms sales crisis. It would have been possible to handle this pesky problem with one small blow, as in the past, but the U.S. imposed real sanctions this time. Contracts for the purchase of military arms were frozen, and the U.S. suspended cooperation on development projects. In Washington, the doors were closed on Israeli military officers.

Under these circumstances, the declared date of the disengagement approached. In light of the open preparations in Israel for a military operation, suspicions grew in the U.S. administration that Sharon would not carry out the plan. According to the New York Times of August 7, the Bush administration exerted pressure to prevent this from happening, and to prohibit the military operation. On July 21, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice arrived in Jerusalem for an unfriendly, hard-line visit. The New York Times reported remarks of Middle East Security Coordinator General William Ward: "General Ward, a careful man, confirmed that two weeks ago, American pressure helped stay the Israeli military when it was poised to go into Gaza... He predicted that there could be similar pressure should the need arise. 'That scenario is a scenario that none of us would like to see,' he said. 'There is a deep realization on the part of the Israeli leadership, including the military, about the consequences of that type of scenario.' " (2)

Over the years we have become accustomed to the idea that "US. pressure" means declarations that have no muscle behind them. But suddenly the words have acquired new meaning. When the U.S. really does exert pressure, no Israeli leader would dare defy its injunctions (and certainly not Netanyahu). And so we have pulled out of Gaza. If the U.S. continues to lose ground in Iraq, maybe we will be forced to pull out of the West Bank as well.

(1) According to the article, from the very beginning, back in 2004, "the Prime Minister rebuffed the recommendation of [Major General Giora] Eiland, [National Security Advisor and Head of the IDF's disengagement Planning Branch] and decided that the government will not build temporary housing."
(2) Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, August 7, 2005

http://www.let.uu.nl/~tanya.reinhart/personal/

Gush ad on Gaza Disengagement -- A Planned Mess

2005-05-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

G u s h S h a l o m - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033, Israel

עברית בהמשך

PLANNED MESS

A year after the decision to evacuate 1700 settler families from the Gaza Strip, nothing is ready. The building of new homes for them has not even begun.

At the same time, the government is building with great energy thousands of housing units for the West Bank settlers.

Conclusion: The fiasco of the resettlement of the Gush Katif settlers is a planned failure. Sharon wants to create the impression that the evacuation of the small settlements in Gaza is a huge undertaking, straining his capabilities to the utmost, so that no one should even dream of evacuating 200 thousand settlers from the West Bank.

That is a false presentation.

When Israel will reach the conclusion that all the occupied territories must be evacuated, it will be equal to the test. The sooner this happens, the easier and cheaper it will be.

The continuation of the occupation will be by far more expensive.

G u s h S h a l o m
ad in Ha'aretz, May 27, 2005

Bleier and Ha'aretz on the Disengagement Charade

2005-05-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Subject: Bleier and Ha'retz on the Disengagement Charade

My article on "Sharon's Disengagement Charade: A Screen for Oppression," is available now on Left Curve's website. http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/SharonsCharade.html

As the Ha'aretz article below points out, Sharon's intent is to keep the mass evacuation of Gaza settlers always on the horizon, but never any closer. This tactic has worked brilliantly for him for more than a year. He does nothing and gets everything, including a sympathetic press concerned that he may be the object of an assassination attempt. The media misses the point that since Sharon is on the side of the most rabid settlers, they have no reason to kill him, unlike Rabin, who was actually giving up tiny portions of territory to Palestinian autonomy. --Ronald Bleier

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

Last update - 01:51 10/05/2005
The evacuation is only on the horizon
By Amir Oren

A senior general staff officer involved in the planning of the evacuation of Gaza was surprised to hear from a civilian last week asking what would happen after Tisha B'Av. As every year, the yeshiva students would go on their three-week summer vacation, but unlike every other year, this year they will use the leisure time to hook up with the disengagement opponents. There will be several hundred, maybe a few thousands, from the hesder yeshivot, who are like Nahal soldiers. The army could call them up for active service (or cancel the arrangement with their yeshiva and thus worsen their military service conditions), but it's doubtful they will obey their commander if his orders clash with the rabbis'.

After Tisha B'Av was discovered as a date that could postpone the disengagement, that new bit of information will no doubt be entered as data in the equation to waste all of August. Then, with the agreement of the teachers unions, the school year will begin, and it is inconceivable that the babes of the rabbis should have their holy studies interrupted.

Behind the sudden wrapping in the tallit, like behind the discovery that the demolition of the settlers houses and the evacuation of the rubble would very much extend the evacuation, there lurks a stubborn suspicion that the government of Ariel Sharon, with Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz in the role of Dov Weissglas' arm, is maneuvering to turn the evacuation into a horizon - always there, approached but never quite reached.

The longer the execution of the evacuation is delayed, the intensity of the vow in its name will increase. It won't be canceled, just its timing will go through occasional updating, from time to time, as required by developments on the ground, keeping in mind the rulings of the religious teachers of our era.

When Mofaz found out, from a conversation with rabbis, the meaning of the days between the 17 of Tamuz and the 9 of Av, he recommended to Sharon a postponement of the evacuation. That is the division of labor between them, just as it was in the days when Mofaz was chief of staff. Mofaz knows what he is supposed to recommend, and Sharon, in his generosity, accepts the recommendation.

Soldiers are told that they cannot deviate from the chain of command and obey instructions from another authority, a rabbinical one in this case; but the head of the chain of command accepts with surrender, and perhaps love, such instructions, for extraneous reasons. Sharon cannot cancel the evacuation, lest he ignite George Bush's rage. But nor can he actually go through with it. That's the perfect situation as far as he is concerned: an eternal limbo, an evacuation that neither lives nor dies.

The Labor Party is in the government on condition: as a subcontractor for the dismantling of settlements and with the declared intention to quit at the end of the disengagement and force early elections to the Knesset. The longer the delay in the evacuation - as long as it is not actually shelved - Labor will be imprisoned in the government and will reach the fall of 2006 without being able to offer an alternative to Sharon.

Sharon is at a disadvantage inside the Likud against the disengagement opponents, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Given the winding ways of politics, that might be a fluid and reversible situation, but if Hamas takes over Gaza and terror is renewed the day after the withdrawal, Sharon will be defeated in any internal competition for the party leadership. He'll be like Peres in the 1996 elections, after handing over the Palestinian towns to the Palestinian Authority, the elections there and the terror attacks of February-March that followed.

It would be best for Sharon if the elections took place before the evacuation and not after. Without batting an eye, Sharon will contradict his previous arguments and explain that he was persuaded that the demand to go to the people to let them make such a fateful decision is just and proper.

Sharon, as he said on Sunday, won't give up the role of being the one to call Pini Gershon after the next championship. On the eve of Independence Day, his Ben-Gurionesque dream finally came true, to be both prime minister and defense minister. The man who has the other title never had an original thought and maybe it's best that way. Mofaz is just a feeble chorus for Sharon, an echo and not the head.

/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=574316

T.Reinhart (4/05) Behind the Smoke Screen of the Gaza Pullout

2005-05-06T04:33:00.000-07:00

Once again, Tanya Reinhart points to evidence that the Gaza disengagement will not happen. She points out again that no compensation has been paid to the settlers, so none can leave. Here she presents new information indicating that the Disengagment is conditional on the completion of the Wall, which might take the rest of this year, postponing the evacuations even further. Also she points out that Sharon's preparations for the Disengagement (as to be expected) are remarkably inefficient, as opposed to his efficiency in setting up infrastructure and settlements on the West Bank.

Note to those interested. If you click on the link, you will see some of the accompanying photos, including a dramatic one of the Wall in the West Bank. --RB

Opinion/Editorial
Behind the smoke screen of the Gaza pullout
Tanya Reinhart, The Electronic Intifada, 19 April 2005
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3786.shtml

Ariel Sharon travelled to the United States as a hero of peace, as if he had already evacuated Gaza and only the follow-up remained to be worked out. What has completely disappeared from the public agenda is what is happening, meanwhile, in the West Bank. The media continue to deluge us daily with disengagement storms, like the Nitzanim bubble. But for now the disengagement exists only on paper. On the ground, no settler has yet received compensation. Even those who agreed to accept compensation are now waiting, because if they have a chance to get Nitzanim settlement on Gaza's beach — the pearl of Israeli real estate — why hurry?

In the meantime, three and a half months before the projected date of evacuation, it is still not clear where the evacuees will be housed until the discussions regarding their final relocation destination are concluded. Contrary to the prevailing impression, no infrastructure has been set up even for their temporary dwellings.

On 8 April 2005, Ofer Petersburg reported in Yediot Ahronot that "The Settlement Department of the Jewish Agency, responsible for providing the 'caravillas' [the caravans that were supposed to host the evacuated settlers temporarily] has so far received no order from the government."

If Sharon intends to evacuate the Gaza settlements, he is doing so with outrageous inefficiency. He is far more efficient in the West Bank. There, plans are carried out precisely as scheduled. Right from the start, during the first agreements between Sharon and Netanyahu one year ago about the disengagement plan, it was agreed that the disengagement would not be put into effect before the separation fence was completed on the western side of the West Bank.[1]

Indeed, the construction of the wall is moving towards completion. In July, which is the announced date for the beginning of the Gaza evacuation, the wall surrounding East Jerusalem and cutting it off from the West Bank, will be in place. The Palestinians who live there will be able to leave only with permits. The centre of life in the West Bank will become an enclosed prison. As well, the northern wall, which has already imprisoned the residents of Tulkarem, Qalqilya and Mas'ha, and which has robbed them of their land, continues to advance southwards. Now the bulldozers are headed for the land of Bil'in and Safa, bordering the settlements of Modi'in Elit. The farmers who are losing their land are trying to stand their ground, together with Israeli opponents of the wall. But who will hear about their sufferings and their struggle amidst the tumult over the disengagement?

The disengagement plan was born in February 2004, at the height of a wave of international criticism over the wall and on the eve of the opening of deliberations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In the ruling that was handed down in July, the Court determined that the route of the wall was a blatant and serious violation of international law. Moreover, the court indicated that there was a danger of "a further change in the demographic composition as a result of the departure of the Palestinian population from certain areas" (at para 122). In other words, the court warned of a process of transfer.

According to United Nations data, 237,000 Palestinians will be trapped between the wall and the Green Line and 160,000 others will remain on the Palestinian side, cut off from their land. The route that was approved at the government's meeting in February 2005 reduces their number only slightly.[2]

What is to be expected for those people, for the farmers who lose their land, for the imprisoned who are cut off from their families and their livelihoods? In the ghost towns of Tulkarem and Qalqilya and the villages around Mas'ha, many have already left in order to seek subsistence on the edges of towns in the centre of the West Bank. How much longer will the others be able to hold on under conditions of despair and atrophy, inside villages which have become prisons?

"Transfer" is associated in the collective memory with trucks arriving at night to take Palestinians across the border, as occurred in some places in 1948. But behind the smoke screen of disengagement, a process of slow and hidden transfer is being carried out in the West Bank today. It is not easy to judge which method of "transferring" people from their land is more cruel. Nearly 400,000 people, about half the number of Palestinians who were forced to leave their land in 1948, are now candidates for "voluntary emigration" to refugee camps in the West Bank. And all this is currently being passed over in silence because maybe Sharon will disengage.

Prof. Tanya Reinhart is a lecturer in linguistics, media and cultural studies at the Tel Aviv University. She is the author of several books, including Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, from which this article was excerpted from an updated chapter. This article first appered in Yediot Aharonot on 13 April 2005 and was translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall.

Footnotes
1. For example, some reports from April last year:

"The prime minister took a commitment that the separation fence will be completed before evacuation starts... Security echelons estimate that the fence can be completed at the earliest towards the end of 2005. In other words: it is possible that Israel will not be able to complete the evacuation at the date that was promised to the US" (Yosi Yehushua, Yediot Aharonot, 19 April 2004).

"Netanyahu announced that he intends to support the disengagement after the three conditions he posed were met ...[including] completion of the fence before the evacuation" (Itamar Eichner and Nehama Duek, Yediot Aharonot, 19 April 2004).

2. These figures are from the ICJ advisory opinion of July 9. Similar figures were provided in the Israeli media — for example, Meron Rappaport, Yediot Aharonot, 23 May 2003; Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, 16 February 2004. The new line of the barrier as approved by the Israeli cabinet on 20 February 2005 reduces the size of Palestinian land to be annexed by the barrier by 2.5%, mainly in the Southern Hebron area, where work is only starting (so the barrier route can still change many times as the work progresses). There were smaller adjustments in other areas, dictated by decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, which means that some of the encircled villages should get some of their land back. But this does not effect the total number of Palestinians encircled by the wall. In Khirbet Jbara in the Tulkarm Governorate, the cabinet approved moving a 6km section of the barrier closer to the Green Line. As a result, the Palestinian population in this area will no longer be located in a completely closed area, but rather on the West Bank side of the barrier. This will reduce the overall Palestinian population completely isolated from the West Bank by about 340 persons, according to UN OCHA report of March 2005 on the preliminary analysis of the effects of the new wall route approved in February 2005 (www.ochaopt.org).

T.Reinhart: (3/05) No change in Sharon --Gaza settlements will stay

2005-03-26T17:51:00.000-08:00

Despite the universal agreement that the Gaza settlements will be removed this summer, Tanya Reinhart remains a lonely voice pointing out the obvious: Sharon remains Sharon and has given no evidence of change. Rather he has demonstrated devilishly brilliant political maneuvering to get not only Labor but also Left Wing parties on his side. Her op ed points out again that unlike the Yamit operation, the Sharon government has not compensated the large proportion of settlers who would leave if given the money. She also hints at what the disengagement will look like. As Uri Avnery has also indicated, Sharon may decide to remove, or stage a showy attempt at removal of a few settlers from a minor Gaza settlement this summer, with the end result that everyone will agree that the succeeding stage of settlement removal should be postponed until after the next domestic or international political milestone. -- RB

THE ISRAELI LEFT IS OPTING FOR SUICIDE
Tanya Reinhart
Yediot Aharonot, March 23, 2005. Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall

To judge by the political discourse, being a leftist today means supporting Sharon. Even when his government decides yet again to postpone the evacuation of the illegal outposts to an unknown future date, the pundits explain that the mere fact that he even raised the matter for discussion in the government is indicative of the seriousness of his intentions. Sharon will evacuate Gaza first, they say, and afterwards the outposts, and in the end maybe even the West Bank. And those who most believe that Sharon will dismantle settlements are the parties of the Left. On what basis?

Sharon is known as a man who has not always told the truth. At the time of the Lebanon war, he succeeded in concealing his plan even from the then-Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. He has no problem making promises and then not fulfilling. For three years now he has been promising the US that he will immediately evacuate at least the outposts that were created during his current term as Prime Minister. So what? - He can always propose a new commitment that would postpone the realization of the previous one. Why should the Gaza “Disengagement” be any different? The answer that the Right and the Left agree on is that this time Sharon has changed. That is an interesting answer in the realm of psychology. But what confirmation does it have in the realm of facts? It is much easier at the present to imagine many scenarios in which there will not be any evacuation of settlements in July, than the one in which there will be an evacuation.

Let’s take for example the problem of the evacuees. That is a real problem. The Gaza Strip settlers went there at the behest of the Israeli government. They must be compensated for this dreadful idiocy, to allow them to rebuild their lives. A government that really wanted to evacuate them would have already given them the compensation, so they could leave before the evacuation. In the evacuation of Yamit, in 1982, the overwhelming majority of the residents were compensated and left before the evacuation. Those who were present in the confrontation on the scene were settler activists from the outside, with whom it is easier to deal than with families actually living there. According to Yonatan Bassi, head of the Disengagement Administration, over half of the present Gaza Strip settlers have already expressed their willingness to leave (1). So why doesn’t Sharon facilitate their immediate departure? Could it be that he wants the photographs of the first attempt to evacuate them to show us entire families with their children, whose world has been destroyed, so that we will understand through empathy that it is simply impossible to evacuate?

And why this foot-dragging over the Budget? What the right-wing opponents of the Budget are demanding is a referendum. The mainstream of the settlers camp is not interested in a complete break with Israeli society. Their leaders are saying that they will be ready to accept the decision, but only if it is proven clearly that it is the will of the majority. The Likud rebels of course have their own agenda, which they hitch to this demand. But precisely on this issue, it is a simple matter to call their bluff by giving them what they demand. According to all the polls, there is a decisive and stable majority of 60%-70% in favour of the evacuation of Gaza. Even in the poll taken a couple of days after the terror attack at the Stage Club in Tel Aviv, 66% said they would have voted “yes” for the plan, had a referendum taken place that day (2). The disengagement will pass in a referendum. That is clear even to the Right. Why then does Sharon oppose it? Perhaps he does not really want the settlers to compromise and accept the will of the majority? Maybe he is afraid that if the evacuation decision passes in the referendum it will have to be actually carried out sooner or later?

All there is, then, is the faith that Sharon has changed. In its name, all the parties of the Left are obediently lined up behind him. Not only the Labour, which would be probably willing to sit in any government, even one headed by “Gandhi”*; but also Yahad and Hadash**. Sharon is submitting for approval a budget of plunder and robbery, that cuts further the surviving remnants of public services, and all the left-wing parties have to say is that we have to help him to pass it, because he said that he will evacuate settlements.
Of the 100,000 people who showed up for the demonstration of the Left parties a year ago, that demanded a pullout from Gaza, 90,000 stayed home in this week’s demonstration. Could it be that many of them feel in their heart of hearts that they are being deceived? The Israeli Left chose to commit suicide. It is no longer beholden to its voters. It is beholden only to Sharon.

* “Gandhi” is the peculiar nickname in Israel of Rehavam Ze’evi, a former general and politician who was assassinated in 2001 while serving as Israel’s Minister of Tourism. He had a reputation as an extreme nationalist and anti-Arab chauvinist who openly supported transfer. The present Sharon- Labour government decided lately to establish a national memorial day for him, similar to that of Rabin. [M.M] ]
** Yahad is a moderate Zionist party headed by Yossi Beilin. It supports a two-state solution. Hadash is the Israeli Communist Party, headed by Muhammad Barakeh. It is a non-Zionist Jewish/Arab party. [M.M]

==========
(1) “Some 800 of the 1,700 families living in Gush Katif and northern Samaria have already expressed willingness in principle to leave their homes under the disengagement plan and negotiate over financial compensation, according to Yonatan Bassi, who heads the disengagement administration. Of the remaining 900 families, he believed …[only] 300 families, the hard core of settlers opposed to the evacuation, would refuse to leave of their own accord” (Gideon Alon, Ha’aretz, March 2, 2005).
There is ample information in the Israeli media regarding the frustration of the Gaza Strip settlers, who feel that the government is leaving them in the dark. Alex Fishman interviewed Itzick Ilia, deputy Mayor of the regional council of the Gaza Strip settlements, who says he represents between 70 and 80 percents of the settlers who are willing to leave. He reports a meeting where “people poured out their problems… People cried and shouted. No one talks to them. There is some new law that appeared in the internet, but people don’t even know what exactly are their compensation rights” (Yediot Aharonot, Weekend Supplement, March 18, 2003).

(2) Sima Kadmon, Yediot Aharonot, Weekend Supplement, March 4, 2005, (Mina Zemach’s “Dahaf”’ poll).

http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart

Israel & Palestine and the Spread of Empire and Desolation

2005-02-14T09:38:00.000-08:00

The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the spread of Empire and Desolation

A talk presented at the Friends Peace Center
San Jose, Costa Rica,

January 27, 2005

by Ronald Bleier

Good evening. My name is Ronald Bleier. I’d like to begin with a few words about my background. I was born during the Second World War, in November 1942, on a tiny island called Lopud off the Croatian coastline near Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, while my parents were escaping from the Nazis. Fifteen months later, my brother was born in February 1944 on yet another of these islands called Vis, as my parents continued their escape. In due course, we made it safely to a refugee camp in Italy from where were fortunate to find passage along with about 1,000 mostly Jewish refugees who were granted temporary asylum in the United States by President Roosevelt during the war. About a year after the war, our entire group was granted permanent residency leading to citizenship by an act of Congress during the Truman presidency. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York where I attended yeshiva elementary and high school and where I was indoctrinated in Zionism, an ideology that I didn’t question for many years. After graduating from Brooklyn College, I spent two years with the Peace Corps in Iran.

It was only in the aftermath of the 1967 war when it became clear to me that the Israelis did not intend to withdraw from the territories they captured, and were bent on an indefinite military occupation, that my views slowly changed. In the fullness of time I was to meet with a series of disillusionments that culminated in my present anti-Zionist views. The horrific Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 made me understand some of the depths of the savagery and the ruthlessness of Israeli policy. The first Palestinian uprising in December 1987 sparked tremendous interest and activism on the Palestinian issue and roughly coincided with the publication of several revisionist histories by such writers as Simcha Flapan, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Avi Schlaim and others which opened my eyes to the myths surrounding the birth of Israel. It was then that I learned that Israel was born out of the expulsion of the Palestinian people, and that cruelty and oppression was required in order to retain control of a second class population. Around that time, I realized that I needed to determine for myself the meaning of Zionism. I deduced that it meant the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the former Palestine. From this I concluded that Zionism is manifestly racist in theory and in practice since it treats only Jews as first class citizens.

In my yeshivas we were taught ethical, universal Judaism. We learned about the Torah, the Law of Moses and the Talmudic tradition. I was imbued by my rabbis with the notion of Judaism as a religion embodying justice and human rights. Only much later did I begin to recognize the reality of Israel as a state like other states, engaging in the very worst atrocities of which it was capable in order to further its political goals. And later still I began to recognize the special, terrible way Israel was different from other states since it acted with the full diplomatic, economic and military support of the United States.

My next great disillusionment was to find that I was alone among my family and friends in taking an objective and critical view of Israeli policy. I can still recall the moment in the early 80s when I broached my new views of Israel with my father, a dedicated Zionist. We were in a restaurant and his first reaction was to laugh at my ignorance and naiveté. He couldn’t believe that his son would take the side of the Arabs – that’s how he saw it. His second reaction was to ask me to lower my voice lest others overhear my outlandish views. My father and I very quickly had to agree to disagree on the issue.

I underwent another disillusionment with regard to the role of the media. I had already been something of a critic of the press, not to mention TV news, but it was a completely new world to learn of the power of the “friends of Israel” lobby to obscure the reality of the crimes of Israel. As it happened, my first publications appeared in the now unfortunately defunct magazine, Lies of Our Times. The rumor going around when the magazine died was that its forthright stand on the Israeli Arab issue doomed its funding in the post Oslo period. On the power of the Israeli lobby to ruin careers, to stifle dissent and to procure political support and scores of billions of dollars in military and economic aid for Israel, I read Paul Findley, Moshe Menuhin, Donald Neff, Jeffrey Blankfort, Alfred Lilienthal and others who pointed to the dramatic and rigid control by Zionists and their supporters over the media and over Congress and the administration on Middle East Policy.

The Widening Gyre

Until the advent of the current Bush administration and the terrible events of 9/11, it may have been possible even for those sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, to view events in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, as confined to that area of the world, with relatively minimal effects on daily life elsewhere. Needless to say there was more than an element of denial in such a view as we had to put to one side the corruption of our national discourse and the censorship of information coming out of the Middle East, not to mention the raiding of the U.S. Treasury of $3-6 billion a year or more to satisfy Israeli demands.

But today, in the wake of 9/11 and the reinstallation of George W. Bush for a second term as president, once again, many believe through fraudulent means, we are confronted with an energized and radical neo conservative movement with nowhere to go but onward and down. I think my father said it best a few months before he died a year and a half ago, “they don’t do anything good.” He was absolutely right. They are bent on an ideological destruction of the mission of government which is supposed to be by, for, and of the people.

One way to get some perspective on what is happening to the Palestinians and their prospects is to examine in some detail Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Gaza Disengagement plan which was published in the Israeli papers April 16, 2004. The disengagement plan appeared at the height of the corruption scandal that engulfed Sharon and his sons and served to deflect domestic criticism as well as growing international opposition to Israel’s construction of the Wall on Palestinian territory. Sharon’s plan provided President George W. Bush with sufficient cover to reverse long-standing U.S. policy relating to the Palestinians. In particular, Bush brushed aside the critical principle, often reiterated at the U.N., of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory conquered by force. In his dramatic joint press conference in Washington with Sharon on April 14, 2004, President Bush, bowing, as he put it, to “new realities on the ground,” declared that Israel could permanently keep major settlements in the West Bank. Bush also rejected the Palestinian right of return to Israeli territory and froze the Palestinian leadership out of negotiations. At the same time, Bush effectively gave carte blanche to the continued Israeli construction of the Wall albeit with the meaningless reservation that it was to be regarded as a temporary structure. In June 2004, both houses of Congress, by lop sided majorities, followed up with resolutions unreservedly endorsing President Bush’s giveaway to Sharon.

The disengagement plan provided Sharon with cover on the military front. A succession of ruthlessly brutal intensive major Israeli Defense Forces operations followed the March 2004 assassination of wheelchair bound Hamas political leader Sheik Yassin in Gaza and continued the next month with the murder of his successor, Dr. Abd al- Rantisi. This was only the beginning for Gaza residents as operations followed from May 2004 through October. Typical of the brutality, in a two-week period during Operation Rainbow in southern Gaza in May, at least 60 Palestinians were killed, almost 300 Palestinian homes demolished, and close to 4,000 people made homeless. Throughout these operations, large amounts of Palestinian farmland and property including olive groves were confiscated and bulldozed.

One reason that Sharon has continued to get a free ride on the strength of his disengagement plan, despite his long history as a tireless and powerful opponent of Palestinian national rights, is that many cannot believe that he would be so reckless as to propose the unilateral removal of Jewish settlements in Gaza without the intention of following through. But such a view of Sharon fails to take into consideration his willingness to take unprecedented risks, as well as his shrewd calculation of both the domestic and international political landscape. In Israel, there is no opposition to speak of. In the United States, Bush and his radical, pro Israeli neocon team is firmly in place for a second term and wholly supportive of Sharon’s goals and vicious tactics. Moreover, as a veteran of more than 50 years on the Middle East scene, Sharon understands that pretexts can always be found to break, postpone and put off indefinitely agreements and treaties with the Arabs.

Thus far only a few lonely voices in Israel have pointed to the counterintuitive nature of the disengagement plan and have openly questioned Sharon’s intention to remove the Gaza settlements. Israeli author and academic Tanya Reinhart has gone further than anyone else, providing invaluable documentation demonstrating the lack of any practical steps Israel is taking that would indicate a serious intent to remove the settlers. Despite the absence of such evidence, the media and the international community largely continue to take Sharon’s disengagement plan seriously. Meanwhile Israel continues to pour resources into the settlements, suggesting that so far from evicting Jewish settlers from Gaza, the plan is to maintain them over the long term. In that case, it’s not the Israeli settlers who will be leaving, but rather a million Palestinians who will be forced from Gaza.

As part of her expose, Tanya Reinhart also reveals that compensation to settlers willing to leave Gaza is to be postponed indefinitely. She explains that if the Israeli government were seriously interested in removing settlements, they would begin to compensate those willing to leave in order to isolate the remaining hardcore. Many believed that the compensation plan was approved by the Knesset in November. However, upon closer examination we find that the required 2nd and 3rd readings of the bill “will take place only after the government decides on actual evacuation, in March 2005 or later. Till then no one will be compensated.” Meanwhile, the Israeli press reported that in December, 11 more families moved into a Gaza settlement.

Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst who has been following Middle East issues for three decades, in a recent article, summarized some of the bitter reality Palestinians confront under the current regime. The picture she paints is important because it is evidence that Sharon is in the midst of a campaign to make civil life impossible for the Palestinian community. The current dimension of the situation, she writes, goes back to the April 2002 siege of the West Bank when

Israeli forces rampaged through the territory, destroying the entire infrastructure of Palestinian civil society: Israeli soldiers laid waste Palestinian civil ministries for education and health and agriculture; smeared feces throughout the Ministry of Culture; destroyed computers and hard disks and, with them, the entire written record of Palestinian society; ransacked Palestinian businesses and banks; bulldozed whole housing blocks; destroyed land registry maps and census records, as if to erase all trace of Palestinian existence. …

Gaza is largely in ruins, a Middle Eastern Dresden, thanks to repeated Israeli air and bulldozer assaults. Nearly two thousand homes have been demolished in Gaza since the [September 2000] intifada began, leaving many more thousands of innocent civilians homeless, and Israeli helicopter gunship attacks and assassination operations have wrought still more destruction.

Israel's separation wall has destroyed prime Palestinian agricultural land, bulldozed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian olive trees, destroyed or more often appropriated for Israeli use most Palestinian water wells, destroyed Palestinian markets [and] homes. Israeli closure policies have prevented most Palestinians from working inside Israel since the beginning of the peace process a dozen years ago. Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank impede movement and halt commerce. …Yet the West wonders why the Palestinian economy is not thriving.

Israel has reduced every Palestinian security headquarters throughout the West Bank and in Gaza to rubble. These structures, which served…as security headquarters [and also] as the center of municipal governance, with mayor's offices, jails, and health clinics [are] now mere heaps of concrete.

Arafat’s sudden illness and death in November [2004] briefly put a halt to some of Israel’s most high profile deadly and destructive military operations. Yet, only a month later in mid December, using the pretext of rockets fired by the military wing of Hamas, Israel resumed its pitiless assaults in a two-day operation that killed 11 Palestinians in Khan Yunus in Gaza. Confiscations of Palestinian land also resumed. In early January, Dr. James Zogby appeared on BBC TV news, pointing out that in the previous two weeks, Israel had appropriated 3,000-4,000 acres of Palestinian land.

Arafat’s death and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as new president of the Palestinian Authority spurred hopes that we might be entering a new period of reconciliation and movement toward a meaningful peace process. However, even the mildly positive atmospherics did not last beyond a week or two after the election as Sharon used a predictable “terror” incident as a pretext to “temporarily” end such discussions as had been envisioned. Nor is this a surprise since Sharon is dead set against giving up anything to the Palestinians in negotiations since he holds all the political and military cards. Sharon’s immediate plan is to destroy any and all remnants of Palestinian resistance. He is embarked on a campaign to make civil life more and more impossible for the Palestinian community as he pursues the logic of Zionism, which foresees a land of Israel for Jews only. Such a plan would involve ethnic cleansing on a massive scale – the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people similar in scope to the events of 1948 when upwards of 750,000 Palestinians were expelled.

Turning now to US foreign policy and the origins of the Iraq war we see evidence of Israeli influence on US actions –what one writer called “The Fatal Embrace.” First I’d like to tackle the question of whether the Iraq war was fought for oil. I have always believed that the issue of US control over Iraqi oil was subsidiary to ideological goals. Now that we see oil prices near $50 with no apparent prospect of returning below $30, some are beginning to realize that if regime change in Iraq was about oil, it hasn’t succeeded. Had the Administration’s purpose been about providing US drivers with a steady and cheap supply of Middle East oil, the last thing they would have done was go to war against Iraq. Rather, I argue, war against Iraq was driven by a coterie of neoconservatives who have a long record of supporting a Likudnik agenda of destabilizing and fragmenting all of Israel’s potential enemies. Those like Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams and others in senior government positions are interested in extending U.S. military power abroad not in the interests of democracy as they claim, but in order to sow chaos, confusion, and violent conflict.

They aim to maintain and grow the military budget and starve domestic social spending. In order to maintain an aggressive posture and ensure maximum freedom of action they are determined to subvert the international order that has been the foundation of the stability that has allowed the US and many other nations to grow and prosper over the last century. They eschew conflict resolution and diplomacy because that would threaten to bring peace, which is their anathema. Their modus operandi is to create desolation and call it democracy.

We are confronted in the age of George W. Bush with the enormous success of the neocon program. Many of the neocons were former Democrats in the 70s who were opposed to the liberal agenda of demilitarization, social spending and criticism of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. From relatively modest beginnings we find today that they have achieved their goal of regime change in Iraq against the best advice of major elements of the Republican Party including George H.W. Bush, the father of the president. They have pursued the Iraq war against the greatest outpouring of protest in the US and the rest of the world since the Vietnam War, and against common sense and the best interests of the security of the United States. So the question becomes how did they pull it off? One part of the answer that concerns us tonight is the assistance provided by the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States. The ability of the Israeli lobby to smooth the way for war was highlighted by the furor over Virginia Congressman Jim Moran's response in early March 2003 to a constituent question during a town hall meeting. He said: that "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should."

Congressman Moran was correct and extraordinarily courageous in pointing to the leadership of the major Jewish organizations, suggesting that they could have blocked the war. As a 13-year veteran member of the House, Jim Moran has been around long enough to understand how political power on Middle East issues operates in Congress. War against Iraq has so isolated the United States and made so little sense that were it not perceived as good for Israel, in all likelihood it would not have gained sufficient traction in the media or in Congress.

It’s probably not possible to reconcile opposing sides on the question of whether Tel Aviv or Washington drives US Mideast policy, but one element of this issue may be worth emphasizing. I would stress the difference between Prime Minister Sharon’s brutal and ruthless pragmatism as he drives forward toward his goal of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and the Arab nation. From a Zionist perspective, it is a zero sum game with winners and losers. On the other hand, the Washington neocons, are bent on war for the sake of war, with tragedy, and death the only winners. Fallujah today is an excellent example of the desolation that the public relations people call democracy. Other examples of the new dark age are the ruins of the Baghdad Museum, the destroyed Baghdad Library, the ravaged Iraqi universities and archeological sites, the murder of scores of the cream of the Iraqi academic, professional and diplomatic classes, not to mention the deaths of more than 100,000 ordinary Iraqis.

The Dimensions of the present problem
There is no point in attempting to soften our description of the nature of the current crisis that we face with the reinstallation of George W. Bush for another four years. With the results of the election in place, the most radical of the neocons are entrenched and empowered to forward their extremist agenda. No doubt there are many like me in tonight’s audience who first read George Orwell’s 1984, awakened but at the same time confident that we would never live to see a US administration that could embody such evil. Lo and behold, we are now confronted with an administration bent on the continual creation of enemies and fighting endless war.

The current devastation and horror that Bush has made of Iraq while not exactly a PR bonanza, is not necessarily perceived by them as a total defeat. For example, if Iraq should wind up fragmented into its three main groups, that would play into neocon and Israeli hands since a potential area counterforce will have been eliminated. Moreover the anarchic climate in Iraq, a perfect breeding ground for terrorism suits their purpose by fomenting real, imagined and created enemies against whom the US leadership can rally and unify the populace, stifle dissent, and push through the most extreme of their radical domestic and international agenda.

The next target on the Bush-Cheney neocon agenda is Iran, now Israel’s strongest enemy. On January 20th, the same day that George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term, Vice President Cheney with astonishing chutzpah, gave Israel the green light to attack Iran. In a radio interview, he said that Iran is “right at the top of the list” of the world’s trouble spots and given that “Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.” The naked irresponsibility and recklessness of such a statement is staggering. For added measure we learn from articles in current issues of the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh that plans have already been made for attacking Iran and reconnaissance for such an attack has already begun including on the ground infiltration of commando forces. (As an aside it may be interesting to speculate that US government leaks to Hersh were intended as a trial balloon in order to measure domestic US reaction as well as to spread confusion in Iran.)

One measure of the contretemps we are in is that there is no one in sight with the stature or courage to challenge Cheney’s characterization of Iran’s posture, which is essentially defensive. If there was one thing that the Bush-Cheney wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have taught Iran and North Korea and the rest of the world it is that weak countries including those without a nuclear deterrent are vulnerable to threats from the US and/or Israel. Iran would be “crazy,” as one analyst elegantly put it, if it did not seek a nuclear deterrent against threatening superpowers. Meanwhile, in Western circles, Israel’s nuclear monopoly is ignored while Iran’s nuclear potential is characterized as a threat to peace. Israel and the US neocon Likudniks are determined to maintain the nuclear status quo in the Middle East because an Iranian nuclear capability might serve as a brake to Israeli and US aggression.

One question raised by US-Israeli threats is whether an attack against Iran would lead to a wider Middle East war. But it is difficult to see who would be or could be waging war against the two superpowers. The military balance in the Middle East is not comparable to that of Europe for example of the 20th and earlier centuries where the various states worked to achieve balance through alliances and détentes. Especially now with Iraq effectively out of the picture, there is no foreseeable combination of Middle Eastern powers that could stand up to an Israel backed by the US. Moreover the latest version of Iran’s Shebab 3 medium range missile, rumored to be able to reach Israel, carries no nuclear warhead and so its deterrent capability is strategically limited. Moreover, Iranian missile strikes against Israel, while doing relatively little damage would serve as pretexts for Israel’s disproportionate retaliations, exactly as we see today in the Occupied Territories. Some analysts have pointed out that Israel’s potential air attacks against Iran may originate in US controlled airbases in Iraq. Thus Israel’s continued nuclear monopoly means that Iran is virtually defenseless against Israeli aggression.

Would an Israeli/US attack on Iran lead to a wider war? One radical faction, led by veteran neoconservative Michael Ledeen who heads the Coalition for Democracy in Iran seems bent on regime change in Saudi Arabia, but it is hard to see how such a change would benefit the US. A destabilized Saudi Arabia would put much of the world oil supply at risk and have nightmare ramifications for the international economy. The Bush-Cheney administration which has longstanding business and personal relations with the Saudi leadership seems to be resisting the concept of regime change there since such plans seem to pass the line of recklessness into pure stupidity. But since the administration seems determined to attack Iran (and Syria for some of the same reasons) we may be in a situation where events are in the saddle and pressures may build to the point where a shaky Saudi monarchy is toppled.

But here we are approaching the horizon of foreseeable events. Suffice it to say for now that the world faces a challenge similar to 1939 with the US and Israel bent on regime change, destabilization, tension, chaos, and endless war.

On the other hand, it may be useful to pull back and remind ourselves that the US is mired in a quagmire in Iraq and that neither the US or Israel have the forces to invade or occupy Iran. Perhaps just as important, on the economic front the US has become a debtor nation big time, no better than a banana republic. Even worse, the Bush Cheney regime shows every evident intention to apply foot to the pedal and drive the US further into bankruptcy by spending endlessly on the Iraq war, and on their military toys, spy satellites and Star Wars programs. Similarly on the domestic front they appear to be determined to continue destroying the economy, with more tax cuts for the wealthy and the huge costs involved in “strengthening” social security. Is it possible that such policies can be sustained another four years? Who knows?

One interesting historical footnote takes us back to the 1956 Suez war when France, England and Israel combined to attack Egypt and Gaza. At the time President Eisenhower – the only US president until Jimmy Carter to stand up to Israel -- was enraged and was able to reverse the tripartite attack by applying pressure on England which at the time was deeply in the US debt for World War Two costs. Is it possible that economically based constraints can save us from the most extreme military daydreams of the current gang in Washington? But even in that least worst case scenario, there will be much desolation, despair and suffering for hundreds of millions of people everywhere.

Solutions

How do we speak of solutions confronted as we are with the magnitude of the current challenges to peace and democracy? My own instincts are to begin by looking the devil – that is to say, reality – in the eye. Our job is first to describe and understand the situation we face as best and as clearly as we are able. That is exactly our purpose this evening. Our next step is to find ways to struggle for our visions and our dreams and our futures. One way to do this is to build community and that is the essential second element of our purpose tonight. From small local beginnings we can try to work to forge the unity and the leadership that we require to survive and prevail. There are certainly no easy answers and no single answer. There is only a difficult and puzzling and impossible process and we need to find ways to plug into that process and to make it happen. And for that task we are armed only with the hope that day will follow night and that we can toil our way toward a better future than the one we seem headed towards now.

The End

1. Ronald Bleier is a freelance writer based in NYC. He edits DESIP, an environmental and security website.
2. Uri Avnery, December 18, 2004. “The Mountain and the Mouse. Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon’s disengagement” from Gaza,” March 30, 2004 and “What kind of state deserves to exist, Yediot Aharonot, April 20, 2004.
3. Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon’s Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!” November 2004. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3331.shtml
4. Ha’aretz, December 17, 2004. Nadav Shraga, “11 new families settle in Gaza’s Nissanit.”
5. Kathleen Christison, January 3, 2005, “Patronizing the Palestinians: The Trouble with Optimism” http://www.counterpunch.org/christison01032005.html
6. Al Jazeera, December 19, 2004, “Israeli helicopters strike Gaza towns.”
7. BBC TV news, January 10, 2005.
8. Here and in some of the analysis below I am indebted to Stephen J. Sniegoski, “The Future of the Global War on Terrorism,” Current Concerns , September 3-5, 2004.
9. Others like Philip Zelikow, the Executive director of the 9/11 Commission, outgoing Senator Ernest “Fritz’ Hollings, Patrick Buchanan, Justin Raimondo and others have expressed similar views but Moran’s case seemed to attract more media attention in part because, as a result of his remarks he was seen as vulnerable.
10. Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld, International Herald Tribune, August 21, 2004. Cited in Khalid Amayreh, “Israel to U.S.: Now for Iran,” August 29, 2004.
11.Sniegoski, op.cit.
12. Based on 2004 analysis by Andrew Cordesman.

T.Reinhart (3/04) Sharon's "Disengagment" from Gaza

2005-01-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

Sharon's "Disengagement" from Gaza
Tuesday, March 30th, 2004
Tanya Reinhart

http://www4.alternativenews.org/opinion/display.php?id=3644

Tanya Reinhart, a professor in Tel Aviv University and the author of "Israel/Palestine: How to End the 1948 War" and "Detruire la palestine" (French), is a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN).

A Pacifier for the Majority

At the start of the Oslo process, the majority believed that Israel was withdrawing first from the Gaza Strip. But Rabin gave the concept of withdrawal a new meaning: he left all of the settlements intact, increased their territory, and built a heavy fence around the areas left for the Palestinians. With the Gaza strip imprisoned and isolated, there began a process of eternal negotiations with the Palestinian leadership over the details of further stages that would, perhaps, materialize at some future point. The majority believed at the time not only that we had already left Gaza altogether, but also that we were just about to get out of the rest of the occupied territories and end the occupation. This continued until the explosion that Barak created reminded us that, in fact, we have not yet gotten out of anything.

In February of 2002, Ami Ayalon and the council for Peace and Security called for a break from the route of eternal negotiations. It is both possible and necessary, they said, to withdraw unilaterally from the territories that the majority agrees we will get out of at the end of the process: all of the Gaza strip and all of the West Bank, excluding 6%-10% of the big settlement blocks. This means evacuating unilaterally and immediately all of the settlements in these areas, even before the final agreement. At the polls, 60% supported this idea, but what came out of it at the end was an extensive campaign to 'let us first build a fence' (kodem gader ve-az nedaber). In the elections of 2003, Mitzna stepped into the spotlight with a more modest version of the idea of unilateral withdrawal - Let us evacuate the settlements of the Gaza strip immediately. But during his election campaign, "immediately" has turned into "in a year or two after the elections", and in the meanwhile, let us strengthen the fence.

But now, so the papers say, we have finally reached a historical turn. The majority is asked to believe that of all Israeli leaders, it is Sharon who will get us out of Gaza. Sharon, who shaped the map of the settlements in the Gaza strip in the seventies, and explained persistently the supreme strategic importance of the Netzarim settlement in cutting the strip into halves, Sharon of the Lebanon war, Sharon of Jenin - he is the one who will now dismantle the Gaza settlements and end the occupation there.

For those who doubt, ample evidence is provided by the world of politics. Intensive negotiations of the plan take place, with the U.S. and with Egypt. Low and behold, the right wing is already protesting, the settlers are furious, the chief of staff Ya'alon has reservations, and Sharon may be about to loose his coalition - a strong indication of how serious he is. Those who still doubt remember that there have already been many plans in the past, and road maps and diplomatic convoys, and still it turned out at the end that Sharon did not really mean what he said. To restore their faith, the political discourse is filled with explanations on why this time it is different. Some say that Sharon has changed, or that he has had to yield to the will of his voters, to whom he has promised peace. Others explain that what drives Sharon is the need to distract attention away from the various scandals and allegations of corruption in which he is involved, or that perhaps he is willing to give up on the Gaza settlements in order to gain international support for his fence plan in the West Bank.

The point is that in order to achieve the goals assumed in these explanations, one does not need to dismantle a single settlement. It is sufficient to declare intentions, and start a new process of negotiations. This is precisely what all Israeli governments have done successfully since 1993, and what Sharon has done for the last three years. The only innovation is that now negotiations take place with everyone except the Palestinians. All that is needed is to throw a pacifier at the majority and to convince them that this time Sharon really means it. This way, the majority will continue to sit silently another year, and let Sharon apply the Gaza model also in the West Bank.

The American historian Howard Zinn formulated a simple rule: Governments lie. It appears that this generalization is one of the most difficult for people to internalize and digest in a democratic society. Until this changes, the majority is doomed to believe again and again the same lie.

Narrowing the prison cells

Sharon's "disengagement" plan was introduced in early February 2004, at the peak of international criticism of Sharon's project of the wall, with the Hague hearing scheduled to begin just a few weeks later, on February 23.

In an interview with Ha'aretz, Sharon announced that "this vacuum for which the Palestinians are to blame, cannot go on forever. So as part of the disengagement plan I ordered an evacuation - sorry, a relocation - of 17 settlements with their 7,500 residents, from the Gaza Strip to Israeli territoryThe aim is to move settlements from places where they cause us problems or places where we won't remain in a permanent arrangement. Not only settlements in Gaza, but also three problematic settlements in Samaria." (Yoel Marcus, Ha'aretz, Feb 3, 2004). Although the headlines presented this as a plan for an immediate unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip, modeling Israel's withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, Sharon, in fact, clarified already in this interview that "the process will take one to two years". He explained that a long process of negotiations lies ahead, not with the Palestinians, who will be excluded from any negotiations about the plan, but with the U.S., with whom, "agreement is needed on both the evacuation and the matter of the fence" (ibid).

Three days later, full details were given on what Sharon asks of the U.S. in return for his generous concessions - "shifting the separation fence to the east, with U.S approval, to a temporary security line that will surround more settlements than the present path of the fence The new security line will be maintained until the full application of the road map. After negotiations [with the Palestinians] resume and an agreement reached, [Israel] will move the fence to the border that will be determined." (Aluf Ben, Ha'aretz, Hebrew edition, Feb 6, 2004). Sharon also seeks U.S. permission "to expand the big settlement blocks in the West Bank, which are to be annexed to Israel in the permanent agreement" (ibid).

Indeed, the fence-route has been at the center of intense Israeli negotiations with the U.S. Nachum Barnea, one of the most well briefed Israeli journalists, reports that "Israel does not ask for money to finance the evacuation, although it will be glad to get it. It mainly seeks support of the fence-route." (Yediot Aharonot Saturday supplement, Feb 20, 2004).

Apart from the negotiations with the U.S., there is no sign on the ground of any intention to evacuate from Gaza. A committee was formed to make plans about how to compensate the settlers there, but so far there are no reports of any interviews or contacts made by the committee with any of the settlers, nor of any concrete plans it has come up with. There isn't even a list of the settlements that supposedly will be evacuated from Gaza. Shortly after Sharon's ceremonial announcement to Yoel Marcus in Ha'aretz, we heard that "sources in Sharon's office have said that the planned evacuation of Gaza will include less than the 17 settlements that Sharon mentioned in the interview with Yoel Marcus. According to a diplomatic source in Jerusalem, Sharon may propose to evacuate in the first stage only the isolated settlements and postpone the evacuation of the Katif block [the largest settlements block in the Gaza strip] to a second stage" (Aluf Ben and Arnon Regular, Ha'aretz, Hebrew edition, Feb 9, 2004).

One could infer that at least isolated settlements such as Netzarim are being prepared for evacuation in the near future. This, in fact, would be a significant step forward. As Sharon has repeatedly explained, the Netzarim settlement was not erected arbitrarily. It lies close to the seashore in the middle of the strip. In order to reach it from the mainland, Israel built a special road dotted with Israeli army posts.. This road, with its constantly widening "security strip" separates the northern area of Gaza city from the rest of the strip. Transit between the northern part of the strip and its southern part is completely at the mercy of the Israeli army, which means that, in reality, it is not possible for Palestinians. Evacuating at least this settlement with its road and army posts would enable some territorial continuity in the crowded Gaza strip. But on the ground, work on fortifying this settlement has only intensified in recent weeks. "The IDF is currently building, at the cost of millions of shekels, a new electronic fence for Netzarim The new fence will prevent penetration under foggy weather conditions The chief of staff approved the plan and the region commander issued the orders, including the appropriation of land from Palestinians" (Nachum Barnea, Yeddiot Aharonot Saturday Supplement, March 12, 2004).

But since both Israelis and the world are so eager to believe that Sharon intends to evacuate the Gaza settlements soon, who would notice the daily horrors? At least the fence project in the West Bank is a focus of some world attention. In the Gaza strip, the fence was already completed during the first stages of the Oslo process. The strip has become a huge prison, further divided internally into smaller prison units. But the present project of the military is narrowing the prison cells even further. This is done through a steady erasure of houses and orchards along the "security strips". Alex Fishman, the senior military analyst of Yediot Aharonot, describes one of the projects that continues as Israel "prepares to withdraw". "In the Gaza battalion, they keep executing gradually but systematically the old dream: to widen the "Philadelphia" road [along the border with Egypt] to at least one kilometer in width The realization of this dream has been happening for two years already. Every time the IDF spokesman announces that our forces are operating in the area of Rafa to expose tunnels, a few rows of houses are erased in the refugee camp. In some of the segments of the road, the width is already a few hundred meters, and their hands are still outstretched." (Yediot Aharonot Saturday Supplement, March 19, 2004).

Now that Sharon "intends to withdraw", this project can continue undisturbed. Since the announcement of the new initiative, there have already been three murderous Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza (reported on February 12, March 8, and March 17-21). At the same time, new prospects are opened for the future maintenance of the prison, e.g. who should be responsible for feeding the prisoners. National Security Advisor Giora Eiland, who is in charge of composing the full details of the disengagement plan, explained in a meeting of the security establishment with Sharon that as Israel withdraws from the Gaza strip "it would no longer be responsible for what happened there. 'Let the world worry about them,' he said. 'I will no longer be the occupier in Gaza, so it will be as much the Egyptians' and Europeans' business as mine' " (Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, March 18, 2004).

Here is how Amira Hass describes the daily reality of the Gaza strip:

This is an admission of failure. The written word is a failure at making tangible to Israeli readers the true horror of the occupation in the Gaza Strip. This admission of the failure of the written word is not meant to enhance the role of photography. A picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, but for the Israeli occupation to approach some level of comprehension, Israelis need to see tens of thousands of photographs, one after the other, or watch documentaries that are at least eight hours long each, so they could grasp in real time the fear in the eyes of the school children when some whistling above turns into twisted crushed metal with charcoaled bodies inside.

Another movie should show the viewers the vineyards of Sheikh Ajalin, the ripe grapefruits, the peasants who for years nurtured the fruit with great love only to see it all turned to scorched earth left behind by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. No movie has yet been produced that would enable Israelis to taste the wonderful grapes of Sheikh Ajalin. The vineyards are gone so the military positions can protect Netzarim.

How would photographs illustrate the following facts - from September 29th up to Monday this week, 94 Israelis have been killed - 27 civilians and 67 soldiers, according to the IDF. From that same date up to February 18th this year 1,231 Palestinians have been killed - all of them were terrorists? Lacking a central Palestinian agency, there are differences between the data provided by Palestinian groups and none claim to be 100 percent accurate.

The failure to bring all this home to readers is not because of the weakness of words or a lack pictures. It is because Israeli society has learned to live in peace with the following facts. There are 8,000 Jews and 1.4 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The total area of the Strip is 365 square kilometers. The settlements occupy 54 square kilometers. Along with the areas held by the IDF, according to the Oslo accords, 20 percent of the Strip is under Israeli control. That's 20 percent of the territory for half of one percent of the population.

The proximity of every expansive settlement to the densely populated, suffocating crowded Palestinian community is what causes the large number of Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip, including many civilians. It is what determines the flexible rules of engagement, the type of bombs that break into fragments, the unmanned aircrafts that fire missiles.

- Amira Hass, "Words have failed us," Ha'aretz, March 3, 2004.
http://world.mediamonitors.net/

T.Reinhart (4/04) What kind of state deserves to exist?

2005-01-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

What Kind of State Deserves to Exist?
Tanya Reinhart

Yediot Aharonot, Tuesday, April 20, 2004;
Translated from Hebrew by Netta Van Vliet

Amidst the political storm in Israel regarding the "Gaza disengagement" plan, only one really meaningful fact emerges: Sharon received Bush's approval to proceed with his plan for the wall in the West Bank.

With regard to the Gaza strip, the disengagement plan published in the Israeli papers on Friday, April 16th specifies that within a year and a half, the Israeli occupation there should be declared to be over. In every other aspect, the situation will remain as is. The Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza strip. (1) But since the strip will no longer be defined as an occupied territory, Israel will not be subject to the fourth Geneva Convention. Clause f of section I in the published plan states that "the disengagement move will obviate the claims about Israel with regard to its responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip". In other words, what Israel does today in violation of international law will become legal: It would presumably become formally permissible to starve people and to kill whoever Israel determines - from a child throwing stones, to the successor of a spiritual leader, himself executed a month before.

The text of the plan also declares that Israel will evacuate the settlements and the army posts inside the strip. It is not clear how this could be accomplished given that the declared intention is to keep the strip under full Israeli "security control". After all, the isolated settlement of Netzarim (like the others) was founded precisely in order to divide the strip into separate parts, thus enabling control of it from the inside. Those who want to, may believe that Sharon will eventually dismantle Netzarim. In the meanwhile, however, Israel invests in its fortification. On channel 1 TV news on April 15, there was an interview with a pretty relaxed settler from Netzarim. "If the defense minister is building right now a new security fence for us" - he said - "then surely no one intends to evacuate us". In any case, the position agreed upon by Sharon and Netanyahu, and which was confirmed in the cabinet meeting of April 18, is that no settlement in the Gaza strip is to be evacuated before the wall in the West Bank is completed.

As for the West Bank, the innovation in the Bush-Sharon agreement is not found at the level of declarations. In the plans of Clinton and of Beilin-Abu Mazen, as well, it was clear that Israel was not offering return to the precise line of the 1967 borders, nor a full realization of the right of return. However, these were plans for negotiation - proposals awaiting the approval of the Palestinian people. Now the Palestinians are not even asked. Now it is Israel and the U.S. who are determining the facts on the ground. Israel marks the land that it desires, and builds a wall on that route.

In the Clinton plan, the Palestinian territory to be annexed to Israel consisted of 5-7% of the West Bank. But when the present route of the plan was first approved by the previous Sharon government, Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, protested that it robbed the Palestinians of 22% of their lands. Since then, the segment of the wall which is already under construction has been extended much further onto Palestinian land. According to a UN report from November of 2003, this segment, which did not include yet the region of Jerusalem, has already appropriated 14.5% of Palestinian land. Along this route, Israel is uprooting tens of thousands of trees, dispossessing Palestinian farmers of their land, and pushing them into small enclaves between fences and walls, until, at the final stage, the wall will surround them on all sides, as in the Gaza strip.

In 1969, the Israeli philosopher Yesayahu Leibovitz anticipated that in the areas of the occupation "concentration camps would be erected by the Israeli rulers... Israel would be a state that would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it". How far are we from Leibovitz prophecy in the fenced Gaza strip?

In the West Bank, the situation is still different. Along the route of the wall, the internal struggle of the Israeli society is now taking place - between the self-proclaimed “land redemptionists” who, no matter how much land they have, will always want more, and those who want to live in a state that deserves to exist. Along that route, there are Israelis who, alongside the Palestinians, are putting their bodies in front of the bulldozers and the Israeli army.

===============
(1) The published plan is available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtmlitemNo=416024&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y.

Here are some of the clauses that the summary in this paragraph is based on (Italics added):

III: Security reality after the evacuation
1. Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip.
3. Israel reserves for itself the basic right of self-defense, including taking preventative steps as well as responding by using force against threats that will emerge from the Gaza Strip.

VI. The border area between the Gaza Strip and Egypt ("Philadelphi Route")
During the first stage, Israel will continue to maintain a military presence along the border line between the Gaza Strip and Egypt ("Philadelphi Route"). This presence is an essential security need, and in certain places, it is possible that there will be a need for the physical enlargement of the area in which the military activity will be carried out.

XII. The international crossing point.
1. The existing arrangements will remain in force.
http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart

Tanya Reinhart (6/04): Labor and Sharon

2005-01-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

The address for protest is Labor's headquarters
Tanya Reinhart
Yediot Aharonot, June 8, 2004. Translated from Hebrew by Edeet Ravel

How can we explain the conjurer's trick by which Sharon has turned into the darling of the Israeli peace camp?
Sharon is the worst prime minister we have ever had. No one else has managed to destroy so much in so little time. In the occupied territories, Sharon is realizing with frightening efficiency his long-standing vision of evicting the maximum number of Palestinians from their land. We have become a land of walls and fences and checkpoints in Rafah, in Jerusalem, in the West Bank. And now Israeli Arabs in Lydda are also being imprisoned behind a wall. We have an army that acts in unthinkable ways. Reading a newspaper fills one with shame; it is shameful to be an Israeli abroad.

Internally as well, devastation reigns: people whountil recently led a dignified existence are lining up at soup kitchens. They will soon be joined by municipal workers. Seniors are abandoned, foreign workers are treated like slaves, the environment is being destroyed, the universities are strangled.

Along with our society and state, the last recourse the rule of law is rapidly disintegrating. In a healthy society, a prime minister whose name has been linked to corruption and bribery scandals would resign even before the matter reached the courts.Here, the government'sAttorney General usurps the authority of the courts. Sharon’s trial has been conducted for months now in the inner recesses of AG Mazuz’s mind. In the final analysis, only if Mazuz the prosecutor can convince Mazuz the judge that there is a decisive basis for indicting Sharon, will Mazuz theAttorneyGeneral decide that there are grounds to put him on trial. Thus the prime minister remains above the law.

We have had poor leaders in the past. Netanyahu also sold off state assets, violated agreements with the Palestinians, and was accused of corruption. But no one has been as odious as Sharon. And yet, when an opportunity to bring him down presents itself at last, the Labor Party hurries to his rescue. - It doesn’t matter what he is doing or will do - Labor spokesmen explain - he has to be given a free hand because he has promised to get us out of Gaza within a year and a half. In fact, Sharon has yielded to all the demands of the dissenting ministers, and the decision on evacuating the settlements has been postponed until March 2005. Building and development in the Gaza settlements will continue, with the authorization of a special committee. (1,2) Yet none of this dissuades Labor from backing Sharon.

In his writings, Noam Chomsky persistently asks how it is possible in a democratic society for a small powerful group to impose on the majority a social order that is contrary to the majority’s wishes and interests. In Soviet-style dictatorships, the question does not arise: when there is only one candidate in the elections; when the Party decides and Pravda promulgates, the majority has no say in the matter. In a democracy, one of the processes that can lead to the same result is emptying the political system of content and eliminating genuine opposition.

In the last Israeli elections, many voters who were fed up with Sharon voted for Labor candidate Amram Mitznah. But now their elected representatives are keeping Sharon afloat. Whoever is elected becomes part of the system in exchange for a few crumbs of power, instead of representing the people who voted for them and opposing the government. The disappearance of opposition is supported by an acquiescent media. Haaretz, supposedly the paper of the liberal peaceniks, tells its readers day after day that what is important now is to save the worthy Sharon, who so badly wants to get out of Gaza.

But the virtue of democracy is that, in spite of all this, voters can still impose their will on their elected representatives. The place to address protests in the coming weeks is Labor Party headquarters. Sharon has to go. He must not be given a safety net.

[Background: On Monday, June 7, there were two non-confidence votes in the Israeli Parliament, one submitted jointly by the Beilin's Yahad party and the Arab parties. Labor party sustained, thus giving Sharon the majority he needed to survive.]

===================
(1) Ha'aretz, Monday, June 7, 2004, PM: Disengagement is on its way
By Aluf Benn, Gideon Alon, and Nathan Guttman:

At the end of a dramatic cabinet meeting yesterday, the government passed Ariel Sharon's revised disengagement plan, by a vote of 14-7, but the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements and the prime minister will have to go back to the cabinet when he actually wants to begin the evacuation process. ...The decision on the evacuation of settlements will be brought to the government at the end of a preparation period. Sharon told the cabinet the preparation period would end next March 1. ...

.
(2) Ha'aretz, Mon. June 7, 2004
What's been approved, what's changed [][]By Aluf Benn

[][]The government approved the revised disengagement plan and the preparation of the groundwork for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria.
[]

[]
The actual implementation of the evacuation will require additional approval by the government, in accordance with the compromise that was reached yesterday and that enabled enlistment of the support of the senior Likud ministers for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan. In the framework of the compromise, six areas in Sharon's original plan were modified at the request of Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu, Limor Livnat and Silvan Shalom:

1. The name of the plan was changed from the "four-stage disengagement plan" to the "revised disengagement plan."

2. There was no approval of actual evacuations. The draft Sharon presented to the government last week contained a decision in principle to evacuate 25 settlements, which were divided into four groups, with a separate discussion being set for each group. This was rejected by the senior ministers on the grounds that it contradicted the May 2 Likud referendum that had rejected Sharon's original plan.

A compromise suggested by Likud Minister Tzipi Livni stated that the amended plan would not specifically approve evacuation of settlements, and that a second government discussion would be held in this regard, "taking into account the circumstances at the time." This phrasing was the key to the compromise that was reached. ...

3. A "softening" of the timetable. Sharon's proposal stated that "the process of evacuation was to be completed by the end of 2005." In yesterday's decision the government merely "stated its intention" to complete the evacuation by the end of 2005.

4. Cancellation of the ministerial committee. Sharon wanted to set up a special ministerial committee on the evacuation, to be headed by himself and ministers who supported his plan. The approved plan states that the evacuation will be monitored by the political-security cabinet.

5. Watering down of the freeze on construction. Sharon's draft contained a complete and immediate freeze on all government plans for construction and development in areas slated for evacuation. The approved plan ensures "support for the needs of daily life" in settlements slated for evacuation. Bans on construction permits and leasing of lands were also removed from the prime minister's proposal.

6. Change in the panel approving deviations from the plan. The committee under the revised plan will be headed by the directors-general of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), the Finance Ministry and the Justice Ministry.

Preparations for the evacuation will be undertaken in several areas. The defense establishment is planning the army's redeployment around the Gaza Strip and in northern Samaria. A special committee will formulate criteria for compensating settlers and begin negotiating with them. The Ministry of Justice will prepare the necessary legislation. The Jewish Agency will assist in resettling the evacuated settlers. At the PMO, a committee will be set up to oversee the evacuation and compensation process, with the authority to hand out advances to those willing to evacuate of their own free will.

Avnery on Sharon's disengagement fraud

2004-12-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

December 19, 2004

Thanks to Uri Avnery’s reporting, we learn that Sharon has openly declared that he will try to avoid implementation of the Gaza disengagement plan. Avnery provides his rough transcription of Sharon’s speech at Herzaliyah (see below). Here is the relevant portion.

(1) If it is possible to avoid the implementation of the plan altogether, especially the evacuation of settlements, without losing the sympathy of the world and the Israeli public, fine.

(2) If there is no alternative and implementation must start - everything must be done to drag out the matter, and especially the evacuation of settlements, for as long as possible. Evacuate one settlement and rest. Evacuate another one and rest again. It should take years.

(3) Either way, the disengagement should not change the plans concerning the West Bank.

Contrast Avnery’s reporting with the cover-up by the rest of the Israeli press which prefers to ignore these points.

See for example Uzi Benziman’s who gives high marks to the same speech and makes no mention of Sharon ‘s intention to avoid removing any Jewish settlers from Gaza. “Can a leopard change its spots?” December 19, 2004.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=516127

---Ronald Bleier

Uri Avnery
December 18, 2004

The Mountain and the Mouse

by Uri Avnery

Ariel Sharon’s speech at the “Herzliya Conference”, an annual gathering of Israel’s financial, political and academic aristocracy, proved again his wondrous ability to conjure up an imaginary world and divert attention away from the real one. Like every successful con-man, he knows that the audience desperately wants to believe good tidings and will be happy to ignore bad ones.

It was an optimistic message, as the bewitched commentators proclaimed. According to him, we are on our way to paradise, 2005 will be a year of tremendous progress in all fields and all our problems will be solved.

Most of the speech was devoted to his fabulous achievements since he launched, at the same conference a year ago, the “Unilateral Disengagement Plan”.

This (in my own free translation) is what he said: America is in our pocket. President Bush supports all of Sharon’s positions, including those that are diametrically opposed to Bush’s own former positions. Europe has resigned itself to him. The Great of the World are standing in line to visit us, starting with Tony Blair. Egypt and the other Arab states are cosying up to us. Our international position has improved beyond recognition. The economy is advancing by leaps and bounds, our society is flourishing. Apart from the right-wing lunatic fringe, there is no opposition left. The Labor Party is joining the government and will support all its steps. (He somehow forgot to mention Yossi Beilin’s Yahad party, which, too, has promised him an “iron bridge”.)

Sharon has achieved all this solely by talking. His words have not been accompanied, up to now, by even one single action on the ground. There is no certainty that Sharon really intends to implement the “disengagement” at all. His intentions can be defined as follows:

(1) If it is possible to avoid the implementation of the plan altogether, especially the evacuation of settlements, without losing the sympathy of the world and the Israeli public, fine.

(2) If there is no alternative and implementation must start - everything must be done to drag out the matter, and especially the evacuation of settlements, for as long as possible. Evacuate one settlement and rest. Evacuate another one and rest again. It should take years.

(3) Either way, the disengagement should not change the plans concerning the West Bank.

And in the meantime: In the Gaza Strip, from which Sharon is supposed to “disengage”, the Israeli army is in action every single day and night, killing from three to ten Palestinians every 24 hours. Houses are being destroyed wholesale. Some of the atrocities committed by the army have shocked the Israeli public. Not one single settler has been removed. On the contrary, new settlers have still been arriving.

All this does not point to any real determination to implement the promised disengagement. Sharon’s actions on the West Bank, on the other hand, show a solid determination to implement his plan there.

In the West Bank, the occupation has intensified . The cruel checkpoints continue to prevent any possibility of normal life. The photo showing a Palestinian violinist compelled to play for the soldiers at a roadblock has evoked terrible memories in the minds of many Israelis. The building of the annexation-wall goes on, with a few changes of the route to placate the Israeli court, while disregarding the decision of the International Court. The settlers uproot Palestinian olive groves in order to build new neighborhoods in their place. Settlements are being expanded all over the West Bank, a network of “Jews Only” roads is being built, more “illegal” outposts come into being under army protection and with the tacit help of all relevant ministries. Plenty of money flows into these projects, while pensions are being cut and sick people lie around in the corridors of the hospitals.

Is this how a statesman with a vision of peace acts? He behaves more like a doctor who treats the hand of a patient while sticking a knife into his belly.

All this is happening while the world gives Sharon enthusiastic support, solely on the strength of his talking. As long as he holds forth on the “disengagement”, he can pretty much do on the ground whatever he fancies.

David Ben-Gurion once said: “It is not important what the Gentiles say, what is important is what the Jews do.” Sharon’s version is: “It is not important what we say, what is important is what we do.”

The most important part of the speech was the part that was not there. There was no peace offer to the Palestinians. He did not talk about peace at all.

Throughout the world, the conviction is spreading that there now exists a “window of opportunity”, that this is the time for a new, redeeming peace initiative. Indeed, Sharon mentioned with great satisfaction that Yasser Arafat is dead and that there is now a chance for the emergence of a “moderate Palestinian leadership”. So what did he offer this moderate leadership in his speech?

Not a thing.

He hinted vaguely at “long-term arrangements”. Meaning: more interim agreements on top of the existing interim agreements, whose sole aim is to push a real peace agreement beyond the horizon. It emerges from his speech that Israel will retain forever not only the “large settlement blocks”, but also “areas essential to our security”. Which areas could he mean? This is well-known: the Jordan valley and the other territories designed in the Oslo agreements as “Area C”. The final result of the “Disengagement Plan” will therefore be the annexation of 58% of the West Bank to Israel, as Sharon has wanted all along.

The Palestinians will retain, under this plan, 10-12% of pre-1948 Palestine, including the Gaza Strip (which is a mere 1.5% of the country). Sharon’s “Palestinian State” will consist of a number of enclaves cut off from the world. That is what he means when he talks about “the end of the occupation”, making “very painful concessions” and “our unwillingness to rule over another people”, words that have attracted widespread admiration.

To rule out any doubt, Binyamin Netanyahu, too, outlined in his speech at the conference the future borders between us and the Palestinians: “Not the Green Line and not even close to the Green Line.”

Nobody is offering the new Palestinian leadership peace negotiations. At most, some coordination of the steps leading to the withdrawal from Gaza. What else? The Minister of Defense, Shaul Mofaz, promised in his speech at the conference that the army would leave the Palestinian towns “for 72 hours” for the elections. Between roadblock and checkpoint, between one “targeted liquidation” and the next, Palestinian democracy will flourish for three days.

Sharon boasted that for all practical purposes the army has already vanquished terrorism. That was said a few days after the Palestinians, in a commando action that elicited some silent admiration even from the army, succeeded in destroying an entire army outpost on the “Philadelphi Axis” by detonating a huge amount of explosives in a tunnel dug beneath it and storming the remains. (This did not cause too much excitement in Israel, because all the five soldiers killed were Arabs, mostly Bedouin volunteers from among the state’s Arab citizens.)

For the time being, the number of violent attacks on Israeli citizens has indeed fallen, but mainly because of Abu Mazen’s efforts. This may well continue for some time, as long as the Palestinian public has some hope of seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. As soon as they lose this hope, they will give the green light to a new wave of attacks.

Sharon promises Israelis a wonderful year, a year of security and tranquility, economic growth and social progress. There is no chance of this coming about as long as he is blocking the road to peace and keeps the peace process “in formalin”, as described by his closest advisor.

European leaders talk about making a huge donation to the Palestinian authority after the election of Abu Mazen. This is an illusion as old as Zionism itself: that the Palestinian people – or any other people fighting for its freedom, for that matter - can be bought off and will give up its land and independence for a mess of pottage.

If the money is not accompanied by a massive European intervention for the speedy termination of the occupation and the attainment of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian solution, the mountain (as the ancient saying goes) will give birth to a mouse.

T.Reinhart: (11/04) Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!

2004-11-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3331.shtml

Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!
Tanya Reinhart, The Electronic Intifada, 16 November 2004

This article is the text of a speech given at the Euro/Palestine concert, Paris, on 6 November 6 2004.

We gather here at difficult times, when it seems that the Palestinian cause
has been almost eliminated from the international agenda. The Western world is hailing the new "peace vision" of Sharon's disengagement plan. The day this plan passed in the Israeli Knesset ("Parliament") last week was hailed by Le Monde as a historical day. Who would pay attention to the two line news piece that on that same day, the Israeli army killed 16 Palestinians in Khan Younis?

It is pretty much known even in the West that Sharon's plan is not about ending the occupation. With regard to the Gaza Strip, the disengagement plan published in the Israeli papers on Friday, April 16, specifies that "Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip". In other words, the Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza Strip. In return for this "concession", Israel would be permitted to complete the wall and to maintain the situation in the West Bank as is. The innovation in the Bush-Sharon agreement that approved this plan is that this is not a proposal awaiting the approval of the Palestinian people. Now the Palestinians are not even asked. It is Israel and the U.S. who are determining the facts on the ground. Israel marks the land that it desires, and builds a wall on that route.

For those who oppose Israeli occupation, it is clear, then, that Sharon's disengagement is just a plan for maintaining the occupation with more international legitimacy. However, there is one presupposition shared in all discussions of this plan - that in the process, Sharon also intends to dismantle the settlements of the Gaza Strip, and return the land they are built on to the Palestinians. I should say that had I believed this might happen, I would have supported the plan. The Gaza settlements, together with their land reserves, security zones, Israeli-only roads, and the military array protecting them, occupy almost a third of the strip's land, which is one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Had this land been returned to its owners, it would be a step forward. We should never forget that the Palestinian struggle is not only for their liberation, but for regaining their lands in the occupied territories - lands that Israel has been appropriating since 67. As long as the Palestinians manage to hold on to their land, under even the worst occupation, they will eventually also gain their liberation. Without land, what is at stake is not just their liberation, but their survival.

But what basis is there to believe that Sharon indeed plans to dismantle settlements at some point? Certainly not the content of the resolution passed by the Israeli Knesset on October 26 - the day that has been depicted by Israeli and virtually all Western media as a "historical" day with "dramatic" resolution. In fact, the Israeli parliament voted to approve "the revised disengagement plan", which was previously approved in another "historical meeting" of the Israeli Cabinet, on June 6, 2004. So it is appropriate to check what was actually approved at that Cabinet meeting.

Ha'aretz's ceremonial headlines on June 7 declared "Disengagement on its way". But here are the smaller letters in the body of the report:
"At the end of a dramatic cabinet meeting yesterday, the government passed Ariel Sharon's revised disengagement plan, by a vote of 14-7, but the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements and the prime minister will have to go back to the cabinet when he actually wants to begin the evacuation process. ...The decision on the evacuation of settlements will be brought to the government at the end of a preparation period... [that] would end next March 1" ( Aluf Benn, Gideon Alon, and Nathan Guttmanm, Ha'aretz, June 7, 2004).

Elsewhere in that paper it is explained that " there was no approval of actual evacuations... A second government discussion would be held in this regard, 'taking into account the circumstances at the time' " (Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, June 7, 2004). The only thing the Israeli government, followed now by the Israeli Knesset, have approved, then, is to have a discussion of the idea of dismantling Gaza settlements sometime next year. It was also decided that in the meanwhile, building and development in the Gaza settlements may continue: "The approved plan ensures 'support for the needs of daily life' in settlements slated for evacuation. Bans on construction permits and leasing of lands were also removed from the prime minister's proposal" (ibid). And indeed, on the ground, slots of land are still being leased (for ridiculously cheap prices) to Israelis who wish to settle in Gaza, and building permits are granted by a special committee appointed by the government in the same "dramatic" meeting on June 6.[1]

Still, none of these facts were registered in public consciousness. The actual content of the cabinet decision was reported only once - on that same day - and then disappeared from the papers that keep recycling the stories about its heroic significance. Precisely the same happened in the present round. The fact that the Knesset has only voted to approve "the amended disengagement plan" that contains no decision to dismantle settlements was reported in the Israeli media:
Knesset members voting tonight on the disengagement plan have received a copy of the "amended disengagement law" the cabinet passed on June 6, plus appendices containing the principles of the plan and its implementation... According to the compromise negotiated at the time... the cabinet decision "contains nothing to evacuate settlements." To remove any doubt in this regard, the cabinet decision also states that "after the conclusion of preparatory work, the cabinet will reconvene to separately debate and decide whether or not to evacuate settlements, which settlements, and at what speed, in consideration of circumstances at that time. (Yuval Yoaz, Ha'aretz, Oct 26, 2004)

But again, this information appeared only once or twice, buried underneath bold headlines that even compared Sharon to Churchill. This is how a myth is built.

Another test-case for how serious the evacuation intentions are is the issue of compensations for the evacuated settlers. Since the cabinet's decision in June, many of the Gaza settlers began inquiring, directly or through hired lawyers, how and when they can be compensated. Behind the noisy protest of the settlers' leadership, many are relieved to be able to finally leave, and are just waiting for the compensations. Anybody intending seriously to evacuate them, would start by compensating first those who are ready to leave immediately, leaving only the ideological minority to be evacuated forcefully. Indeed, for five months, since the cabinet's decision in June, both the settlers and the Israeli public believe that this is about to happen any moment now. Again, a faith with no basis.

Special committees have worked with much publicity on every detail of the compensation plan. Many believe this was finally approved by the Knesset on November 4. Only in the small letters of what actually happened one can learn that the compensation law has passed only its preliminary first hearing (reading). In principle, the second and third hearing could take place within few weeks, but it was clarified in advance that the second reading will take place only after the government decides on actual evacuation, in March 2005, or later (Yosi Verter, Ha'aretz, Oct 8, 2004.) Till then, no one will be compensated. As Aluf Ben summarized this, "the Knesset will vote in the first reading of the Implementation of the Disengagement Plan Law, which authorizes the government to evacuate settlements and compensate those evacuated. Then there will be debates in the committees, and a second and third reading... and the law could be blocked at any stage" (Ha'aretz, Oct 27, 2004).

Outside Israel, the details of what was actually decided didn't even make it into the news once, and all that is repeated over and over again in the Western media is the propaganda produced by the Israeli political system - headlines from which one could infer that the dismantling of settlements is around the corner. Thus, the political debate around Sharon's plan concentrates only around whether it is good enough. The possibility that this is just another Israeli deceit does not even arise. And if you try to bring it up, you are perceived as having landed from the moon, as has happened to me in several European media interviews.

Deception and lies have been a corner stone in Israeli policy, brought to a new level of perfection since Oslo. While the world believed that Rabin promised to eventually end the occupation and dismantle the settlements, the number of Israeli settlers actually doubled during his rule. At the same time that Barak declared he intended to dismantle the Golan Heights settlements, in 1999, he actually poured money into their expansion. As Sharon promised to dismantle at least the illegal settlement posts in the West Bank, their number kept increasing. Still, none of this is ever remembered. Each new lie is received with welcome cheers by the Israeli peace camp and by European governments. Since Oslo, every Israeli government knows that all it takes, to ease diplomatic pressure, is to come up with a new "peace plan".

The ritual repeats itself with each new "plan" of this sort. The crucial factor in convincing the world that this time "it is for real" is right wing protest. Of course when the government comes up with a new scheme of deception, the right wing and settlers believe it as well. Rabin's deceit has cost him his life. The same threats are now being directed at Sharon. This is sufficient to convince the Israeli peace camp that Sharon is determined to dismantle settlements. Even serious anti-occupation thinkers write articles warning of the danger of "civil war" with the settlers (forgetting that for this to be even remotely possible, someone should try indeed to evacuate them first). The implication is almost unavoidable: In view of this coming civil war, Sharon is our leader. We should all unite behind him, against the dark forces in Israel.

Indeed, this massive Israeli propaganda works. Throughout the Western world, Sharon is now depicted as a messenger of peace, because he has declared that he is willing to evacuate some of the territories. All of a sudden, Sharon is viewed as the sane center of Israel, withstanding right wing pressure. The prevailing perception is that Israel is finally led by a man of peace, with a respectable determination to carry out painful concessions. And as long as this is the perspective, Sharon can do whatever he wants. The Israeli army terrorizes the Gaza Strip. dozens of Palestinians are being killed, including children on their way to school, houses are demolished and agricultural land destroyed.

At the time of operation "Defensive Shield" in the West Bank and Jenin refugee camp two years ago, there was substantial world protest. The last operation "Days of Penitence" in the Jabalia camp in the Gaza Strip has hardly received any coverage. Backed by the U.S., Sharon is realizing with frightening efficiency his long-standing vision of evicting the maximum number of Palestinians from their land. In the spirit of Orwell, it was even explained that one of the aims of "Days of Penitence" is to "expand the security zones" around the Gaza settlements (namely to enlarge their lands, pushing more Palestinians out of these lands), in order to guarantee that when they are evacuated, it would not be "under fire". (Aluf Ben, Ha'aretz, Oct 4, 2004). But Europe looks the other way, reassured of Sharon's new vision of peace.

These are difficult days, when Orwell seems to pale, compared to the power of present day propaganda, when it seems that the European governments are immovable in their support of Israel, no matter what crimes it commits; and the Palestinians are dying slowly, with their suffering not even being reported. But in such times, when governments are unwilling to impose international law, the people of the world can still take matters in their hands. Largely unreported, there is a growing on-going joint struggle of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals from the International Solidarity Movement, who stand daily in front of the army and the settlers in the Palestinian territories, in nonviolent, peaceful protest, documenting the crime, protecting as much of the land as they can, and slowing down Sharon's massive work of destruction. For the first time in the history of the occupation, we are seeing joint Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Along with Israel of the army and the settlers, a new Israel-Palestine is forming.

The breathtaking scenery of the West Bank has been sliced up by the new roads that the rulers have built for their own exclusive use. Beneath them lie the old roads of the vanquished. There, on the lower level, is where the other Israel-Palestine treads. For almost two years, Israeli youths arrive in settlement buses and then make their way on foot and in Palestinian taxis among the checkpoints. They trek between the villages in groups or alone. Some sleep in the villages. Others will travel the same route the next day to reach the demonstration. Everywhere they go they are greeted with blessings and beaming faces.

"Tfaddalu," the children in the doorways say, as if they had never heard of stone-throwing. All along the "seam line" in the West Bank, along the root of the wall, the Palestinians have opened their hearts and their homes to the Israelis and internationals who come to support their non-violent resistance to the wall and the occupation robbing them of their land. These days, hundreds of Israelis are going almost daily to the West Bank to protect the Palestinian olive harvest from the settlers, who, protected by the Israeli army, try to prevent the harvest.

What has brought young Israelis to stand with the Palestinians in front of the army is the conviction that there is a basic line of justice that must not be crossed, that there is a law that is higher than the army's laws of closed military zones: there is international law, which forbids ethnic cleansing, and there is the law of conscience. But what makes them return, day after day, is the new covenant that has been struck between the peoples of this land, a pact of fraternity and friendship between Israelis and Palestinians who love life, the land, the evening breeze. They know that it is possible to live differently on this land.

This daily struggle is our hope. It has become possible with the help of individuals from all over the world who come there to join the new form of resistance. They are facing harassment. Many are being stopped and deported, but they still keep coming. As long as more people come, even for a short time, as long as they are backed and supported by many others at home who could not join in yet, the struggle will go on, offering hope where governments fail.

Related Links

BY TOPIC: Sharon's "Gaza Disengagement Plan" (early February 2004)

BY TOPIC: Israeli raid on northern Gaza, "Operation Days of Penitence" (28 September-15 October 2004)

BY TOPIC: Israel's "Operation Rainbow" in Rafah, Gaza (13 May 2004-)

Footnotes 1. eg. "Yesterday, press photographers were invited in to take a picture of the first session of the committee to deal with the construction in the [Gaza] settlements, headed by PMO Director General Ilan Cohen. The committee is meant to examine the issue of construction and other development projects in settlements that are designated for evacuation. Cohen says Sharon told him 'not to compromise over security needs'. Gaza Regional Council Chairman Avner Shimoni won approval for 26 bullet-proofed buildings in Gush Katif. The new buildings are meant for residences, and school rooms are meant for Kfar Darom, Netzarim and Neveh Dekalim. So far, some 350 development projects have been submitted to the committee" (Aluf Benn and Nir Hason, Ha'aretz, July 27, 2004).

Prof. Tanya Reinhart is a lecturer in linguistics, media and cultural studies at the Tel Aviv University. She is the author of several books, including Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. This article is the text of a speech given at the Euro/Palestine concert, Paris, on 6 November 6 2004.

Sharon's Phony Disengagement

2004-11-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

http://desip.igc.org/desip/Sharon'sPhonyDisengagement.html

Sharon’s Phony Disengagement

by Ronald Bleier
June 2004

It’s remarkable that Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan is not more widely recognized for the hoax that it is, as only a few lonely voices have done. Left journalist Haim Baram has termed it a “fairy tale,” and Gush Shalom activist Uri Avnery has called it a “fraud,” “an exercise in deceit,” while author and academic Tanya Reinhardt has provided documentation demonstrating the lack of any practical steps Israel is taking that would indicate a serious intent to remove the settlers (see below). Nevertheless, despite the absence of such evidence the media and the international community largely continue to take Sharon’s disengagement plan seriously, aiding his agenda. Meanwhile Israel continues to pour resources into the settlements, even as it consistently moves the pullout date further and further into the future. At the same time the Israeli government maintains its hard line policy against the Palestinians, driving military incursions into Gaza and the West Bank at will, without let or hindrance from the U.S. or the international community. Sharon refuses to negotiate with the Palestinians, continues work on the separation Wall, gobbling up Palestinian land and water resources and as his government relentlessly strengthens its crushing encirclement of hundreds of thousands of thousands of West Bank Palestinians.

Sharon advanced the Gaza disengagement plan at the height of the corruption scandal that seemed to enmesh him and his sons. Sharon’s plan cleverly shifted the agenda and provided the political cover enabling President George W. Bush by means of an exchange of letters in mid-April to reverse long standing U.S. policy and U.N. resolutions relating to the Palestinians. In particular, President Bush brushed aside the critical principle, often reiterated at the U.N., of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory conquered by force. In his dramatic joint press conference in Washington with Ariel Sharon on April 14th, President Bush, recognizing “new realities on the ground,” declared that Israel can permanently keep major settlements in the West Bank, For good measure he also rejected the Palestinian right of return to Israeli territory. In addition, while freezing the Palestinian leadership out of these negotiations, Bush effectively gave carte blanche to the continued Israeli construction of the Wall on Palestinian territory, albeit with the meaningless reservation that it was to be regarded as a temporary structure.

While the Bush concessions to Sharon were not in themselves binding, nevertheless the Israeli prime minister well understood their value as an historic precedent that it may be difficult even for a succeeding Kerry administration to ignore or overturn. It’s no wonder that on the return flight from Washington, Sharon and his colleagues celebrated with champagne. In a Knesset speech two weeks later, Sharon bragged that the U.S. concessions represented “the harshest blow to fall on the Palestinians since 1948.” Not surprisingly, when Israel’s attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, a member of Sharon’s government, announced that Sharon was cleared of all corruption charges, aside from a relatively quiet opposition, there was little hint of effective public protest against a leader who had successfully brought about a crucial change in U.S. policy.

Ironically and tragically, the Gaza disengagement plan also provided political cover for the brutal ravages Sharon ordered this winter and spring in Gaza. These included the assassinations of Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Dr. Abd al- Rantisi, an extensive Israeli invasion of Rafah in which at least 60 Palestinians were killed, almost 300 Palestinian homes demolished, and close to 4,000 people made homeless. These outrages should be seen as more than merely an attempt to defeat the Palestinians: the Palestinians were soundly defeated in 1948 and once again in 1967. Sharon’s purpose goes much further. His aim is to continue the consolidation of Israeli control over all of the former Palestine and ultimately to make it impossible for the bulk of the 4.8 million Palestinians who now live there to remain.

Sharon’s apparent plan is to continue to put tremendous pressure on selected areas in the occupied territories, biding his time until events allow him to proceed with large-scale expulsions from the West Bank and Gaza (and later from Israel). Shraga Elam, a Swiss based Israeli investigative journalist, suggests that the Operation Rainbow Rafah operation was conducted along the lines of the old master plan, “Field of Thorns” which foresees a mass deportation of the Palestinians.[1] The photos that appeared in April of Palestinian families carrying away their belongings as best they could from their homes in Rafah in fear of Israeli tanks and bulldozers, could not but bring up memories of the mass expulsions of Palestinians in 1948. The images from Rafah are harsh reminders of how relatively simple from a military point of view it will be for the IDF to carry out expulsion orders once the political shoe has dropped.

Despite these stark realities, commentators continue to put forward the theory that Sharon’s brutalities in Gaza and the West Bank are meant to put the Palestinian community on notice in preparation for the day that the Israelis leave! Much also is made in Western analysis of the supposed Israeli willingness to be rid of Gaza. Yitzhak Rabin’s statement in 1992 that he wished that Gaza would just “sink into the sea,” is perceived as expressing a consensus Israeli attitude. But such a view doesn’t take into account the Zionist goal of a creating a Jewish state in all of the former Palestine. Removing Israeli settlers would be at cross-purposes with everything the Zionist community has worked toward since well before the birth of Israel.

Sharon’s Gaza disengagement plan is not new. As Meron Benvenisti, longtime critic of Israeli settlement policy, explained in Ha’aretz, similar plans have come and gone “quite a few times over the past 20 years.”[2] Moreover, if the Western media weren’t generally prejudiced to favor Israel over the Arabs, more would be able to see through Sharon’s parliamentary maneuvers and his recurrent “Cabinet Crises.” The May 2nd Likud party referendum that voted down his plan was widely seen as a personal defeat for Sharon, even though the vote suited his purpose to delay any substantive changes to the Gaza settlements. It’s telling that Sharon decided not to present his scheme to a national referendum that stood excellent chances of winning.

On the ground, there is no evidence of Israeli plans to leave Gaza. Instead, circumstantial evidence supports the view that the Israeli settlers are planning to stay indefinitely and in good time will increase their numbers. Tanya Reinhart pointed out in March that there was “no sign on the ground of any intention to evacuate from Gaza.” Work on fortifying the strategically important settlement of Netzarim that separates the northern area including Gaza City from the rest of the strip “has only intensified.” At the cost of millions of shekels, the Israeli government continued to build a new electronic security fence around Netzarim. Reinhart emphasized that the Israeli chief of staff approved these plans and the region commander issued orders that included the appropriation of land from the Palestinians.[3]

Two weeks later Reinhart noticed a “pretty relaxed” settler from Netzarim appearing on Israeli TV who reasoned that “If the defense minister is building right now a new security fence for us, then surely he does not intend to evacuate us.” [4] Even the New York Times noticed that the settlers have little cause for concern. A relevant story in early April quoted an unnamed Israeli official to the effect that there were no plans in the offing to dismantle Gaza settlements and that settlement projects “in the pipeline” are going forward. The same article quoted Eran Sternberg, a spokesman for the Gush Qatif settlement bloc in Gaza who flatly contradicted an Israeli government announcement that settler development would be halted. “On the ground there are a lot of projects, a lot of families coming here all the time.”[5]

In early May, Sharon’s own national security advisor, Giora Eland appeared to be confident enough of the strength of the Israeli position to state flatly that the disengagement plan “could be dead.” At a Washington Institute symposium, Eland, the chief architect of the disengagement plan, said: “Frankly, I don’t know what would be the political solution that would enable [Sharon] to move forward [with the plan], if such a solution can be found.”[6]

But such brash truth telling, was at cross-purposes with U.S. diplomatic requirements that demanded a more comforting cover story. Thus, on June 6, 2004, Sharon engineered a 14-7 cabinet vote in favor of his proposal. Even so, the approved plan included “contradictory language about the evacuation of Jewish settlements.” Disengagement from Gaza was approved but there was no decision to dismantle the Jewish communities there.[7] In order to enable this sleight of hand in plain sight, Sharon was forced to pay a political prince, effectively narrowing his parliamentary majority down to 62 of the Knesset’s 120 members. Two members of Sharon’s coalition quit, Effic Eitam of the National Religious Party (NRP) and Likud member, Yitzhak Levy, the deputy social affairs minister. A few days earlier, when it appeared that otherwise Sharon would narrowly lose a 12-11 vote, he dismissed two extreme right wingers from his cabinet: Transport Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Tourism Minister Benny Elon.

But compared to his achievements, Sharon’s parliamentary losses are marginal, especially since his attorney general has cleared him of corruption charges. Relieved of this pressure, Sharon was able to regain the initiative in his negotiations with Labor and if he decides to include them in his government, clearly it will be on his terms. In addition, Sharon has deflected any serious criticism from Washington. At least through the U.S. election season, the likelihood that he will experience any pressure to advance the peace process or to negotiate with the Palestinians is close to zero. Moreover Sharon’s program of devastation in the West Bank and Gaza continues, as he shrewdly continues to increase the military pressure on the Palestinians in such a way as to keep the violence below a critical threshold to minimize any international criticism.

The propaganda campaign continues

In early June Israel announced that it would offer compensation to Jewish settlers who are willing to pull out of Gaza. Settlers were given a September 1, 2005 deadline to leave voluntarily. If they don’t leave, according to the announcement, the Israeli army, would then evacuate any remaining settlers by September 15th. Each of the evacuated families would receive an average of $300,000 according to press reports.

Once again, this new compensation initiative seems merely a public relations move to satisfy the U.S., Arab leaders and the international community. The latest plan puts off the date of settler evacuation until September 2005, almost a year after the U.S. presidential elections. (An earlier deadline had been set at March 2005.) Moreover, it was announced that the withdrawal will take place in four stages, with each stage requiring a positive vote in the cabinet. It’s not difficult to imagine that those votes will come out the way Sharon decides they should.

As far as compensation for those settlers who voluntarily choose to leave, if payments are eventually made, it’s not unlikely that the U.S. will find a way to pick up a large proportion of the tab, resulting in a win-win situation for Israel. Even as Israel continues to pour money into the Gaza settlements, some Israelis would receive payments to relocate elsewhere (perhaps temporarily?) while Sharon’s government will find ways to postpone indefinitely the removal of the Gaza settlements.

It’s all in the fine print

The details of the June 6 revision of the disengagement plan confirm that no actual removal of settlers is mandated, or even allowed. Tanya Reinhardt referenced two articles in Ha’aretz detailing the changes that emphasize, “the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements.” Special roadblocks to removing settlers are created, especially one that forces the prime minister to return for another positive cabinet vote should he wish to begin the evacuation process. Moreover, when this cabinet discussion takes place, the members are enjoined to take “into account the circumstances at the time.” According to reporter Aluf Ben, “this phrasing was the key to the compromise that was reached.” In addition, “A softening of the timetable was adopted whereby the government merely ‘stated its intention’ to complete the evacuation by 2005, instead of the previous: "the process of evacuation was to be completed by the end of 2005.”

Ben also reported that the freeze on construction in the Gaza settlements was significantly watered down. Under the guise of an allowance for the “support for the needs of daily life,” virtually no restriction are placed on the resources that could continue to pour into the settlements. And to emphasize that the revised Sharon plan would not interfere with current and future plans for the expansion of the Gaza settlements, the Knesset also removed any and all bans on construction permits and leasing of lands for the Gaza settlements. [8]

In this election season, the Bush administrations as well as prospective Democratic nominee John Kerry seem more than ever subservient to Israeli wishes. The same can be said for the U.S. Congress, unable to voice even the smallest protest against the assassination of the top Palestinian political leadership in Gaza in March and April. In late June, both houses of Congress, acknowledged the power of the Zionist lobby with lop sided majorities voting for resolutions strongly endorsing President Bush’s giveaway to Sharon. Absent the kind of pressure only two presidents, Eisenhower and Carter, were able to mount to force Israel to return captured Arab territory, it’s hard to see what motive Sharon would have for displacing settlers he has worked so diligently to implant. It’s true that American interests vis à vis the Arab and Muslim community would be served if some positive movement regarding Israeli settlers, not to mention negotiating with the Palestinians, could be offered. But Sharon understands as well as any previous Israeli leader that it is not his job to please the Americans. It’s their job to please him.

The End

Notes:
[1] See http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2000/dec/Shagra_Elam.htm

[2] April 8, 2004, quoted in Middle East International, No. 723, April 16, 2004.

[3] Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon's ‘Disengagement’ from Gaza, March 30th, 2004, http://www4.alternativenews.org/opinion/display.php?id=3644

[4] Yediot Achronot, April 20, 2004, Tanya Reinhart, translated by Netta Van Vliet.

[5] New York Times, April 3, 2004. James Bennett, “Sharon Says He Has Ordered a Halt to Gaza Development.”

[6] Forward, May 14, 2004. Ori Nir. “White House Pressures Sharon on Disengagement Plan,”

[7] Washington Post, June 7, 2004. Robin Shulman, “Compromise Plan on Gaza Approved by Israeli Cabinet.”

[8] Yediot Achronot, June 8, 2004. Tanya Reinhardt, “The address for protest is Labor’s headquarters.” Ha’aretz, June 7, 2004. Aluf Ben, Gideon Alon, and Nathan Guttman, “Disengagement is on its way.” Ha’aretz, June 7. Aluf Ben, “What’s been approved and what’s been changed.”
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