Jan Egeland, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, on the world’s greatest problems in 2008:
One is still eastern Congo, catastrophically neglected. It was the biggest loss of lives on our watch these last fifteen years: five million people died. Darfur has spread as a conflict and as a catastrophe to Chad and the Central African Republic. But certainly Iraq and Afghanistan is still unfolding as a hemorrhage of human life.
Last year I co-founded Independent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV) as a forum for alternative Jewish perspectives. The last year has seen a host of campaigns and media coverage. Try here, here and here.
Now, two original signatories, Peter Slezak and Eran Asoulin, have started blogging on the site, with more to come.
The aim is to “widen the debate to include a range of opinions not reflected in mainstream Jewish media or official community organizations. As part of this effort, our blogs provide a forum for independent Jewish opinions that are, of course, those of their authors and not those of IAJV organizers or signatories of any IAJV petitions or statements.”
The following article, co-written with a colleague, appears in today’s Age newspaper:
On the world stage, Israel has been traditionally cast as David in a battle against Goliath. But this is too simplistic, for Israel is not without its sins, write Peter Slezak and Antony Loewenstein.
Speaking honestly about Israel and Palestine has always been fraught. Contrary to popular perception, the official public voice of the Australian Jewish community is not without dissent among Jews around the country. Indeed, there is a belief among some that the mainstream view is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the facts, and that Israel and its supporters can no longer justifiably portray the Jewish state as victim, acting only in self-defence.
In their controversial book The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt point out that the popular image of David confronted by Goliath, cultivated to maintain Jewish support, is the reverse of the truth. Even from the 1948 War of Independence, well before large-scale US aid, Israeli military power was always superior to that of its neighbours.
Notwithstanding Israel’s military strength, the recent Lebanon war was not just the military disaster to which the Winograd report confined its attention, but a disproportionate response to supposed provocation and involved large-scale war crimes.
While rockets from Hezbollah or Hamas fired on civilians are undeniably crimes, the excesses of Israeli military action, collective punishment and targeted assassinations may be condemned in the same terms and are harder to see as self-defence.
Even more difficult to justify as self-defence is a brutal 40-year military occupation and nearly half a million Israeli settlers on Palestinian land in violation of international law. Despite pious rhetoric from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that echoes that of US leaders, the very possibility of a just two-state solution appears remote.
The discrepancy between popular image and tragic reality is not new. For example, conveniently forgotten amid the rhetoric of “existential threat” and Israeli virtue is the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that caused around 20,000 civilian deaths that cannot conceivably be characterised as unintended “collateral damage”. These do not include thousands of victims at Sabra and Shatila for which then defence minister Ariel Sharon was found personally culpable. Such ugly truths have become difficult for Jews to condone in silence.
Despite the efforts of the local Israel lobby, such uncomfortable facts have been highlighted by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, Israel’s press and academia. For all its faults, Israel has a vigorous and more open intellectual culture and media where the myths sustaining Diaspora communities have been overturned.
For example, a poll conducted by the daily newspaper Haaretz and Tel-Aviv University revealed that nearly two-thirds of the Israeli population wants to negotiate directly with Hamas, contrary to typical media representations of the so-called “peace process”. In reality, the “peace process” is a US-driven policy — in this case subverting the elected Palestinian Government through funding and arming Fatah proxies and their attempted coup in Gaza.
Despite outrage in the Jewish community at the common description of Israel as a racist state responsible for “ethnic cleansing”, the evidence to warrant such confronting language is undeniable. Israel is not the state of its citizens but only of the Jewish people, thereby officially discriminating against a fifth of its population, quite apart from the many administrative, financial and other systematic ways in which Israeli Arabs are disadvantaged.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel recently found that half of Israelis would not live in the same building as Arabs, would not let them into their homes and would not allow their children to befriend them.
The systematic, planned dispossession of Palestinians since 1948, and accompanying atrocities such as the massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948 are rarely discussed in the West, even though they have been extensively documented by Israeli historians such as Ilan Pappe in his recent book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The Zionist myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land” continues to be propagated despite being exposed by several Jewish historians as a fraud that has hidden the real tragedy of Palestinian dispossession. The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, privately wrote that “We must expropriate gently” and Arab expulsion must be discreet.
Leading Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and defence minister, Moshe Dayan, “repeatedly voiced the hope that Israel could complete its historic mission and round out its borders (as well as expel its own, inconvenient Arab minority)”. Ben-Gurion had said as early as 1938: “I support compulsory transfer (of Palestinian Arabs). I do not see in it anything immoral.”
Facing these facts in the Jewish community is discouraged by those who, in American broadcaster Ed Murrow’s familiar words, confuse dissent with disloyalty. Those who voice them are denounced as anti-Semitic or ostracised as “self-hating” Jews. It is revealing that the intense debate about the role of the Israel lobby in the US has not featured in the Australian Jewish community — a symptom of the local lobby’s success in discouraging dissent from the official line.
However, the true friends of Israel are not those who serve as propagandists for official myths but those who stand with the many Israelis to condemn not only the crimes of Palestinians, but also those of the state of Israel. Independent Australian Jewish voices who speak out against crimes committed in their name recognise a responsibility to the wider community, especially Australian Palestinians, to participate in a more balanced dialogue.
Dr Peter Slezak lectures in philosophy at the University of NSW. Antony Loewenstein is a journalist and author of My Israel Question (MUP 2007).
After the recent Chinese crackdown in Tibet, CNN has become a target of Chinese rage over its perceived anti-Beijing coverage.
Bloggers are equally vitriolic.
In a freak accident today on the strip of Harvard, Professor Stephen Walt was crushed to death under a Caterpillar tractor. The incident happened in front of the Kennedy Government Center. A school spokesperson said the land was being cleared for new law student settlements. The Dozer operater, A. Dershowitz, was on loan to The Harvard Defense Forces from another department when the incident occurred. Dershowitz said he did not see Walt jumping up and down in a red vest in front of the tractor nor did he hear his screams of agony.
The humanity of Jewish musician Daniel Barenboim continues to reverberate around the world:
Controversial conductor to lead orchestra of Israeli, Palestinian youths in concert ‘against ignorance’ in Jerusalem, says he will not partake in upcoming festivities marking Israel’s independence out of respect for Palestinian suffering
Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim will lead an orchestra of 33 young Israeli and Palestinians in Jerusalem Friday in what he called a concert ”against ignorance and lack of curiosity” on both sides of the conflict.
At a news conference Thursday in the concert hall of the YMCA on the Jewish side of the city, Barenboim said Friday’s two performances, entitled ”A concert for two peoples,” will be the first time the young musicians have played together in public.
My following book review appears in today’s edition of Sydney’s Sun-Herald newspaper:
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
Jonathan Cook
(Pluto Press, $42.95)
The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington caused the Western media and political elite to seriously examine their behaviour in the Middle East. Most concluded that maintaining client states was the only viable way forward; the desperate need for oil supplies supplanted most other considerations.
The US-led invasion of Iraq was a radical form of shock treatment designed to unseat a once friendly Washington-friendly dictator. The nationalist insurgency crushed those plans, leaving the world’s sole super-power battling a relatively small number of fighters whose sole goal was the removal of an unforgiving occupation.
One country that has received relatively little scrutiny in the years since September 11 has been Israel.
The Jewish state has the most powerful military in the region, with an estimated 200 nuclear warheads, and an arsenal of cluster bombs that it used against civilians in Lebanon in the final days of its botched 2006 campaign against Hizbollah.
During the recent Australian parliamentary motion to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described the country as a “custodian of freedom” amongst dictatorships. In his compelling new book, Jonathan Cook, former Guardian journalist and current resident of Nazareth, challenges this perception and concludes that, like the Bush administration, Israel actively pursue policies that lead to civil war and partition. Cook bravely skewers the mainstream narrative of a Jewish state constantly striving for peace with the Palestinians.
Israel’s security establishment developed ideas in the 1980s that advocated dissolving many of the Middle East nations, leaving Israel, like the Ottomans in centuries past, to be the local imperial power. “In this way, hoped Israel and the [predominantly Zionist] neo-cons”, Cook writes, “large and potentially powerful states such as Iraq and Iran could be partitioned between their ethnic rivalries and sectarian communities.”
Aid agencies reported in 2007 that eight million Iraqis, nearly a third of the population, required emergency aid and millions were both internally and externally displaced. Was this the intended goal?
The similarities between the Israeli occupation of Gaza and West Bank and America’s plans in Iraq are meticulously examined. Cook argues that Washington found an invaluable template for its own occupation after carefully studying the Jewish state’s record in dividing and conquering the indigenous population.
Cook approvingly quotes Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi who has written of a “Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists.”
David Rose, in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, reported on Bush administration plans to trigger a civil war between Hamas and Fatah after the former won a free and fair election in the Palestinian territories in 2006. The “wrong” party had won. Nabulsi’s nightmare had come true.
“As far as the neocons were concerned, whatever Israel wanted, it should get”, writes Cook, whose summary of the last eight years is reflected in the public utterances of Washington’s leading power-brokers. After Israel’s futile war against Lebanon in 2006 – with over 1000 Lebanese civilians killed – leading neocon Meyrav Wurmser, whose husband was a former senior advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, lamented Israel’s performance. “The anger [in the White House] is over the fact that Israel did not fight against the Syrians”, she said. “The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space [before the UN resolution ended the conflict.]”
These noble ideas were clearly what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had in mind when she talked during the war about “birth pangs” of a new Middle East. Cook explains that there are times when Washington tries to push Israel into actions it would not rather not do itself and other times when the Jewish state acts recklessly, such as the ever-growing expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and America remains mute. It’s a relationship that is widely accepted by the foreign policy elite and the vast majority of the establishment media.
Challenging its integrity guarantees charges of anti-Semitism or disloyalty by the Zionist lobby.
This book, while not containing a great deal of original research, is an important contribution to understanding why “Israel’s role [is] to dictate and terrify other states in the region with threats of punishment so that they dare not step out of line.”
The result, while temporarily successful on military grounds, has left the Jewish state isolated internationally and reviled across the Arab world. If Israel is to survive for another 60 years, it will need to understand that the ongoing occupation has corrupted its soul. The current signs are that its leadership doesn’t grasp this basic fact.
While Israel’s Supreme Court endorses the country’s implementation of apartheid roads the Palestinians are unable to use, Jews around the world are starting to stand up and publicly challenge the state’s illegality. Such as Canada:
More than 100 Jewish activists from across Canada will gather March 28-30th in Toronto at a conference to form a network of anti-occupation groups dedicated to building real peace and justice in the MiddleEast. Convened by the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (ACJC), the conference will gather Canadian Jews belonging to 18 groups who are coming together to challenge the views of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee and B’nai Brith, along with the Stephen Harper government-all of whom uncritically support the Israeli government’s violations of international and humanitarian law.
Author Naomi Klein will kick off the conference this Friday evening with a talk entitled “The challenges facing us: Why we need a Canadian Jewish progressive movement”.
One of the Arab world’s most widely respected non-governmental organizations is charging that at least 14 Middle East and North African governments are systematically violating the civil liberties of their citizens — and most of them are close U.S. allies in the war on terror.
Cuba is seemingly changing after decades of state repression (small steps, perhaps, but an encouraging start):
The Cuban president, Raúl Castro, today lifted restrictions on ownership of mobile phones.
Castro’s move was another indication that he is prepared to grant more freedom to the island’s residents.
The right to own mobile phones had been restricted to the employees of foreign firms or those holding key posts in the communist-run state.
Some Cubans had evaded the ban by asking foreigners to sign contracts in their names, but mobile phones remain relatively uncommon in Cuba compared with the rest of the world.
Other positive developments here.
Yet another scoop from Wikileaks:
The U.S. military says it is taking steps to alleviate conditions at the Iraqi-run city jail in Fallujah after recent visitors found a filthy, overcrowded facility where prisoners had to provide their own food. The episode demonstrates how far Iraq’s judicial and penal institutions still have to go under U.S. tutelage before they meet minimally acceptable standards.
Lt. Col. Michael Callanan told United Press International that shortly after an inspection of the jail by the new commander of coalition forces in western Iraq, Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, U.S. forces had stepped in to “advise and assist” the Iraqis with the management of the jail.
Callanan, the point man for the U.S. military on rule-of-law issues in Anbar province, which includes Fallujah, told UPI in a phone interview Monday that cash from a special commander’s contingency fund known as CERP was being used to provide food in the jails in Fallujah and in the provincial capital Ramadi.
“They are being fed now,” said Callanan of the prisoners, who until recently had to provide their own food or starve.
Iraqi contractors had been hired to feed “the majority of the prisoners” in both city jails.
The controversy over Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ film on Islam, Fitna, is not hard to understand. It’s a crude, embarrassingly racist compilation of the most extreme Islamic statements and anti-Semitic rants. The clear attempt is to argue that all Muslims share the al-Qaeda view of the world and want to kill all non-Muslims. Please. It’s about as sophisticated as a weekly rant by a Murdoch columnist who’s just returned from an all-expenses paid trip to Israel.
The short film is worth watching, however (hence my posting of it below.) Wilders has the right to make his film and the right to compare Islam to Nazism. It’s defamatory, false and offensive – and conveniently ignores the many racist outbursts by Jews and Christians – and will only inflame racial tensions. But it’s vital to understand that this virulent strain of Islam-hatred is alive and well in the West:
Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
Some journalists, in the words of John Pilger, “pretend to be objective while ensuring his or her words remain within the undeclared limits set by authority”.
Two American journalists were central figures in pushing the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq, erroneously linking al-Qaeda to Saddam.
Of course, their careers have blossomed since 2003.
Iraq is falling apart and turning against the American occupation…
American tax-dollars at work, finding new ways to kill the enemy, any enemy:
A recently declassified US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons reveals outlandish plans for “ray gun” devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people’s heads.
The Israeli Left cannot claim to hold much political sway – despite the occasional move such as protesting the influence of the IDF in schools – but the Jewish state is facing a far greater problem these days. Many global Jews simply don’t want to move there anymore. In only a matter of years, Palestinians will outnumber Jews in the entire land:
Founded with the express purpose of “ingathering of the exiles” — but with no more large groups of Jews to save — Israel is facing the end of the era of mass aliyah.
Recent reports that the Jewish Agency for Israel was considering shutting down its flagship aliyah department have prompted discussion about the future of immigration to Israel even as agency officials quickly denied the department was closing.
“Israel cannot throw away the idea of aliyah because it is one of basics of the ideology of having a Jewish state,” said David Raz, a former Jewish Agency emissary abroad. “You have to create a situation that people will want to come, from the element of being together with Jews. But it’s not simple. There is a trickle, but basically from the free world the majority does not want to come.”
Since Abu Ghraib first came to the world’s attention in 2004, nearly 300 photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse have been shown to the public. But soon an enormous archive of new material – including more than 1,500 other photos, unredacted court papers and interview transcripts – will be posted online by filmmaker Errol Morris, whose latest documentary “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure” examines the scandal in horrific detail.
Morris says few, if any, members of the public are aware, for example, that children were kept at the prison as hostages, ostensibly in order to make family members talk.
