Antony Loewenstein

Amira Hass, Haaretz, November 27:

If it’s not the power getting cut, leaving entire neighborhoods in darkness, then it’s the water not reaching the top floors or the cooking gas running out. If you have an electric generator, some small part of it is bound to be broken and unfixable, because even before the hermetic three-week siege, Israel prohibited bringing in any spare parts for cars, machines and household electric appliances.

And if you somehow manage to find the money for a generator that was smuggled through the tunnels (its price has doubled or tripled since last month), it’s at the expense of buying a heater (not electric, of course), English lessons, clothes for the children and visits to the doctor.

This is Gaza in November 2008.

How the internet is finally changing the face of Italian society (and we can thank Prime Minister Silvio Berluscon).

(While the vast majority of Egyptian web users allegedly support the idea of government net censorship.)

Following my talk yesterday at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre on The Blogging Revolution, a live-blog featured some of the more interesting elements of the discussion, such as this:

Q: I was born in Poland and saw the Solidarity movement go from tiny to 1/3 of the population supporting it, in just a couple of months. It was so successful not because the NY Times supported it (which it did). I haven’t seen similar movements come about through the Net or cell phones. Why is it that even though we have all of this beautiful technology, we haven’t seen anything like Solidarity happening?

A: Blogging communities generally don’t have massive mainstream support. Many of the bloggers are not dissidents. E.g., Iranian bloggers are frequently pro-regime. Blogging plays one role among many. Bloggers on their own won’t bring down a regime. Frequently the reforms are old school. It’s not easier to get people on the streets to protest. No one I spoke to is looking for a violent revolution.

UPDATE: What the Berkman blog wrote about my event.

I’m dangerous, allegedly.

Am I am threat to Jews/Muslims/terrorists/insurgents/US soliders in Iraq/all of the above?

The Saudi Arabian based Arab News – not always known for its nuanced understanding of the Middle East – gets it right in a recent editorial:

The five Palestinians convicted Monday of channeling $12 million to Hamas via the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation are indeed guilty under US law. The reason is that since 1995 the US has designated Hamas a terrorist organization.

But this does not mean the law is right. Significantly, US prosecutors did not seek to prove the money raised by the men was used to finance terrorism, merely that the humanitarian aid, which they accepted that it did indeed fund, was used to promote Hamas and allowed it to divert other funds to militant activities.

The five now face jail sentences ranging up to 55 years. Yet a jury last year failed to reach a verdict in this case, almost certainly because some members could not accept that raising humanitarian aid for the Israeli-besieged Gaza ghetto was really a crime. The Bush White House was not, however, having any of that. The Justice Department declared a mistrial and sent the case to trial again. In the wake of this week’s verdict, a senior US law officer hailed the finding as an important milestone in American action against “financiers of terrorism.”

In an altogether more measured response, defense lawyers, saying they would appeal, added that while they respected the jury’s finding, they believed the verdict was unjust and un-American. “The criminalization of legitimate charitable giving is not an attack just on the American Muslim community; it is an attack on every American who believes in the moral duty to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and heal the sick.”

This verdict once again demonstrates America’s inability to understand any perspective but its own. Hamas grew from links with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at a time when the PLO leadership was in exile in Tunis and the Fatah administration in the occupied territories had become a byword for corruption and passivity. Unlike Islamic Jihad, whose aim was nothing but militancy, Hamas began as a humanitarian organization, operating schools, hospitals and welfare programs. The Israelis thought it would become a useful counter to the sway of the PLO. Yet keeping people alive, healthy and educated during the Israeli occupation was in itself a form of resistance. Militant resistance came later and so too did a political presence. The US administration insists on ignoring that in January 2006, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Parliament in the sort of free and fair democratic elections that Bush said he wanted for all the Middle East.

Blinkered by the 1995 proscription of Hamas, Americans cannot see it as a legitimate organization and internationally, not just in the Muslim world, Hamas is recognized as such. In its politics, its charity and to some outsiders, its dogged militant resistance to superior Israeli forces, Hamas presents itself not as part of the problem, but as a part of the solution. The Holy Land Foundation prosecutions, however technically correct, represent a dying US administration’s continued conflict with reality. By denying the facts and insisting on his own ill-informed worldview, Bush never had a chance of contributing to a Palestinian settlement.

Sean Penn on Hugo Chavez and Venezuela and the American painting of a “dictator”:

More here.

Clearly it’s racist to challenge Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine:

Leeds University Union agreed last week, by a vote of 12 to 11, to send a motion to referendum which will label anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and silence pro-Palestinian groups on campus.

The Zionist lobby stoops even further to silence legitimate criticism of the Jewish state.

A stunning visual representation of the power of the blogosphere in the Islamic Republic of Iran:

Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.

MJ Rosenberg, of the Israel Policy Forum think tank, told a conference in New York this week:

The American Jewish community is not a progressive force in the country… we are a regressive force on any issue that touches on Israel/Palestine… Barack Obama would put through a peace deal tomorrow if it wasn’t for the American Jewish community.

Why? The militant Zionism, anti-Arab sentiment, radical militarism and fear of the Israel lobby and its backers.

My following talk was presented today to a full room at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre:

Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society
Luncheon Series, 25 November 2008

Antony Loewenstein

Internet censorship is something that only happens in non-democratic states. Regimes that want to crush free speech routinely employ automated and human-directed methods to silence dissent and politically uncomfortable material. Jails are filled across the world with bloggers and dissidents who challenge authoritarian rule. These voices are rarely heard in our media, especially if they are critical of Western foreign policy dictates.

If only all this were true.

The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, is currently proposing the imposition of a mandatory filtering process to “protect Australian families and kids from some material that is currently on the net”, namely child pornography and ultra-violent sites.

It may sound benign enough, but the country’s leading internet service providers, free speech lobbyists and independent parliamentarians have all responded with outrage that such a proposal might be implemented. Aside from the question of current technology being incapable of monitoring the long list of websites that could allegedly breach Australian law – around 10,000, according to the government – there is the freedom of speech angle.

A number of politicians have advocated blocking online gaming sites, general pornography sites, euthanasia sites and pro-anorexia sites. What next?

It is not hard to imagine a push to block sites that supposedly “support” terrorism. Take Hamas, the democratically elected party in Palestine and yet regarded as a terrorist group by much of the West. For many individuals around the world, myself included, Hamas is not a terrorist entity and should be engaged. But will over-zealous politicians make it illegal to view the organisation’s websites?

The militant Shia political group Hizbollah may find similar problems in years to come, as could Islamist organizations that challenge American foreign policy. These are political freedoms extinguished under the guise of protecting society from terrorism.

Despite these ominous possibilities, Australia is not one of the world’s worst internet freedom abusers. For my book, The Blogging Revolution, I travelled in 2007 to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China to examine the role of the web in repressive states and the involvement of Western multinationals in assisting censorship. Most importantly, I wanted to challenge the thesis that the introduction of the web automatically brings Western-inspired, democratic ideals to a society. This is, of course, deluded fantasy and wishful thinking propagated by conservative think-tanks in the US.

I spoke in these nations with writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians, citizens, men and women, activists, conservatives and liberals. How did they view their relationship with the ruling elite? How representative were their voices in the society and how possible was it for minorities to be heard? What was their attitude towards the Western powers, especially America?

In Egypt, for example, the country receives the second highest amount of US foreign aid annually after Israel – money that is predominantly spent on “security” to monitor and subdue the rising Muslim Brotherhood political insurgency – and many bloggers told me they resented this money being given to repress them.

President Hosni Mubarak is highly unpopular yet remains on the White House Christmas list. This is unlikely to change under President Barack Obama. Simply put, true democracy in the Middle East would likely see the election of Islamist parties in virtually every country, hostile to the US and Israel. For this reason alone, the maintenance of the status-quo – dictatorships that provide the West with stability and energy reserves – will continue. Blogger anger towards this Faustian bargain was palpable.

September 11 should have been the perfect opportunity for the Western media to hear the grievances of the Muslim world. With notable exceptions, indigenous voices were excluded then and still remain largely absent from the pages of the world’s leading papers. The underlying belief, rarely acknowledged but undoubtedly true, is that many Western editors only want to hear foreign news reported through a Western lens. Underlying racism? Yes. Unless a place or event is seen and heard by a Western reporter it isn’t legitimate and therefore unprovable. When was the last time we read regular reports from on-the-ground bloggers in war zones or difficult to reach areas, rather than the occasional dispatch from a visiting journalist? It happens all-too-infrequently.

The general consensus across the globe was that political and military meddling by Washington and London was making the job of real democrats much more difficult. Democracy was a term defined differently in every nation, but virtually nobody shunned the idea of more freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press.

As one blogger told me in Tehran: “Most of the people I know are in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution.” I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.

I was reminded of a comment from leading Middle East journalist Robert Fisk who told Australian television in 2005:

“The Arab world…would love some of this shiny beautiful democracy which we possess and enjoy. They would love some of it. They would like some freedom. But many of them would like freedom from us – from our armies, from our influence. And that’s the problem, you see. What Arabs want is justice as much as democracy.”

And we don’t want to give it to them.

In every nation I visited, however, bloggers were starting to unpack issues that remained largely hidden from public view. Women in Egypt were campaigning against the tradition of female genital mutilation. Activists in Cuba were highlighting the repressive nature of the Castro regime and the counter-productive policies of the US administration towards them. Opposition figures in Damascus were blogging about state-imposed web filtering. Saudi Arabian women, blocked from driving or working in the US-backed dictatorship, were using the web to express a desire for greater human rights. Iranian hip-hops were distributing their banned beats via file sharing software. Chinese dissidents were protesting the role of Western multinationals, such as Google, Cisco, Yahoo and Microsoft, in the dubious role of assisting state censorship.

Blogging is not in itself revolutionary, but the act of self-expression online can be. Although the vast majority of bloggers in non-democratic nations are not dissecting politics – due to disinterest or fear of being caught – I was fascinated to hear why certain people courageously risked their scalps to challenge the iron-will of dictators. Like dissidents in the former Soviet Union – who only had limited resources and reached a fraction of the people bloggers can affect – online activists find the medium intoxicating because of its reach and global impact.

Many bloggers I met were conscious of a local and international audience. They wanted their own regime to feel pressure and change policies but also generate noise around the world. It was a realisation that outside influence can, if used judiciously and respectfully, be invaluable in supporting democratic movements in repressive regimes. For example, many bloggers in Saudi Arabia, desperate to convince their own citizens of the benefits of a moderate, political Islam, are using the web to slowly pressure the fundamentalist state to not fear democratic elections and a free press. It’s an uphill struggle, not helped by a Western world determined to keep the oil pumping.

Barely a week goes by when the media is not filled with stories of bloggers being imprisoned by unsavoury regimes. Take the Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt, who recently received over 20 years for possession of a banned video and having a blog to express his concerns about the increasing difficulty of Burmese people in voicing their opinions since the massive protests in 2007. The regime, in a desperate move to stop images and news of abuse leaking to the world, regularly shuts down the entire web system for days on end, effectively cutting off the country from the outside world. This is only possible in places where the internet isn’t central to the running of an economy, like China. Instead, the powers in Beijing have instituted the Golden Shield to filter out unwanted material.

With the collusion of Western companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others in China’s Great Firewall, the role of these multinationals is largely ignored in the Western media. In my book I examine the various excuses, justifications and defences offered by them when explaining their actions in the quasi-Communist state. The real reason is clearly the fact that there around now over 250 million web users and growing at six million every month. Such potential profits make ethical considerations seem quaint in boardrooms across the world.

However, the recent launch of the Global Network Initiative – a code of conduct for corporations on privacy and free speech created by a coalition of human rights groups, media development, research organizations, internet and communications companies such as Google to ensure that companies acknowledge their “responsibility to respect and protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users” – will be a test of necessary transparency. It is no longer acceptable for web companies to claim they are merely complying with laws in a particular country. International laws and norms must be applied, with the pressure from the US Congress, if necessary.

Recently in Melbourne, Australia, a number of individuals gathered to consider a proposal to design an ethical labelling system for media distribution. Ellie Rennie, research fellow at Melbourne’s Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, said the following:

“If you think of Fair Trade coffee for example, we know that behind Fair Trade coffee there’s a very elaborate and trustworthy system of workers’ rights, of ethical farming. So this is similar, in that we need the label on that media in order to determine what kind of media we might be using in the same way that we buy Fair Trade coffee, because we believe in what it stands for.”

Could such standards be applied to web companies operating in authoritarian regimes? While we all rely on Google and related companies, how often do we consider their actions in non-Western nations? And as importantly, is the knowledge they are gaining in such lands likely to be implemented against us some time in the near future?

Aside from the issue of oppressive censorship, my work acknowledges that blogging culture cannot be seen to represent societies as a whole. In the main, they are middle class men and women with access to information and technology far above the average citizen.

One of the dangers with my kind of work is the presumption that repression only occurs in authoritarian states. Increasingly, Western governments are attempting to monitor and filter information on the internet. Politicians in Britain recently announced plans to give security agencies and police unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security.

In Argentina since 2006 over 100 people have successfully secured temporary restraining orders that direct Google and Yahoo Argentina to erase the results of search queries. Judges, public officials, models, actors and world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona have used the law to silence criticism.

US Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman this year successfully pressured YouTube owners Google to remove videos from “Islamist terrorist organizations”.

A recent article in the Economist magazine attempted to explain the fall of independent blogging. The medium, the magazine stated, “has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death”:

“Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers.”

Alas, this thesis may be partly true in the West but utterly inaccurate for the rest of the world. Heralding the death of blogging is both premature and ignores the vast importance of online media in developing nations.

US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that “communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. In other words, it’s only now becoming possible to see and hear online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.

Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. Its culture is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are proudly vague. While many want the right to be critical of the media and political dysfunction, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.

Slow Blogging is coming to a computer near you.

My following talk was presented today to a full room at Harvard University:

Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government/Centre for Middle Eastern Studies
ME Forum, 24 November 2008

The Shifting Sands of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: An Australian Perspective

Antony Loewenstein

Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, speaking in March this year at a United Israel Appeal fund-raiser in Melbourne, said he was “a friend of Israel” and referred to its creation in 1948 as “Australian Labor government handiwork.”

In the same month, in an unprecedented move in the country’s history, Rudd praised Israel’s democratic achievements as federal parliament commemorated Israel’s 60th anniversary and highlighted the need for an independent and economically viable Palestinian state.

The majority of parliamentarians supported the motion, but one Labor backbencher dissented. Julia Irwin could not “congratulate a nation which commits human rights abuses each day and shows blatant disregard for the UN.”

On the same day, a large advertisement appeared in the only national newspaper, signed by hundreds of Jews, Palestinians, unionists and concerned citizens, myself included, protesting the government’s obsequiousness towards the Jewish state. “Australia and Australians should not give the Israeli people and its leaders the impression that Australia supports them in their dispossession of the Palestinian people,” the Not In Our Name ad read.

For my relatively minor involvement in the protest, the leading Jewish newspaper in the country, the Australian Jewish News, labelled me the “enfant terrible of the Australian Jewish community…He would be well advised to leave the business of creating an alternative Jewish voice to those who at least support the existence of Israel as a viable Jewish state.”

Like many other Western countries, Australia’s Zionist establishment tolerates little dissent from uncritical support of the Jewish state. With around 100,000 Jews (and more than 300,000 Muslims out of a population of 21 million), there has long been bi-partisan agreement that Australia’s foreign policy should be directed to following Washington’s lead. Australia even wholeheartedly backed Israel’s disastrous 2006 war against Lebanon.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, former Prime Minister John Howard directed Australia to abstain in the UN General Assembly against resolutions that opposed illegal colonies in the West Bank and the application of the Geneva Convention in the Palestinian territories. We joined, alongside the US and Israel, the client states of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.

Prime Minister Rudd recently reversed this decision and supported the resolutions pressuring Israel to abide by international law. The Zionist establishment reacted with concern. It was a sorry sight to watch prominent Jews argue that the Jewish state should not apply the Geneva Convention in occupied territory. Israel’s “security” needs, so we were told, allowed Israel to behave as a rogue state.

Shamefully, it was reminiscent of leading American Zionist groups who remained silent during the Bush years as evidence mounted that authorities were committing torture in their name. Were they worried that critics would turn their gaze towards the abusive behaviour of Israel towards captured Palestinians?

Australia’s influence in world affairs is miniscule compared to the European powers, but Israel, despite literally being on the other side of the world, remains central to local media coverage and Jewish and Arab concerns. The Palestinian Diaspora is largely disorganised and politically impotent. The Jewish community – principally comprised of Holocaust survivors and their descendents – unhealthily affect public debate, attempting to neuter critical thinking.

Their success is decreasing, however, as evidenced by the best-seller status of my book, My Israel Question – despite attempts by the Zionist lobby to ban it and smear my publisher and me – and the ongoing profile of Independent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV), an initiative I co-founded in 2007 to empower Jews to challenge the dominant Zionist narrative. Around 500 Jews signed in support.

I compare our actions to an insurgency against an undoubtedly stronger opponent, but one whose positions are increasingly indefensible. I sense that many Jews, especially younger ones, are deeply uncomfortable about Israel’s ever-deepening occupation of Palestinian land but remain unsure how to express those sentiments. Recent studies in America bear this theory out, showing a much weaker connection by young Jews towards the Jewish state.

Throughout the months-long coverage of the IAJV launch in 2007, the Jewish press virtually ignored any discussion of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, preferring to quote various Zionist spokespeople who mouthed the usual platitudes about a “diverse” community that “welcomed debate” and “where disagreement is king – there are no fatwas.”

The reality, of course, was far different. One letter writer to the Australian Jewish News argued: “I have a sneaking suspicion that many Jews have left the Jewish community because they are not prepared to submit to the unelected ‘mainstream.’” Some Jews recognised that they had a primary moral responsibility not to remain silent about Israeli crimes committed in their name and on which they may have some direct effect.

Soon after the recent Australian visit of Sara Roy to Australia, the country’s leading Zionist lobby, AIJAC, wrote that, by detailing Israel’s shocking human rights record in the occupied territories, she expressed “ludicrous conspiracy theories, one-sided analysis and seeming disregard for the truth.” Roy had told a radio program that, “the occupation really is about denying people their dignity. It’s about humiliation and dehumanisation.” “Actually”, AIJAC countered, “it’s about security and accepting the Jewish right to self-determination, nothing more, and could have been over long ago had the Palestinians been willing to make peace, but I guess that’s not the paradigm Dr. Roy is interested in.”

The occupation isn’t an occupation. War is peace. George Orwell’s Doublespeak was pleased. It’s surely a sign of success that the establishment Jewish community is forced to defend an occupation that is condemned by the vast majority of the world. The national president of the Zionist Organisation of America, Morton Klein, wrote before the US presidential election that, “it is simply a flat-earth statement to describe Judea, Samaria and Gaza as occupied.” So who is really blocking the road to peace?

Away from parochial politics, however, lies the reality of the conflict on the ground in the Middle East. The facts remain startling. A report released in July by a group partly funded by the European Union found that Jews live longer and enjoy lower infant mortality and poverty rates in Israel than Arab citizens. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights released evidence in late October that Israel had already killed 68 children in Gaza this year. This report was largely ignored by the Western media, despite it claiming that Israeli forces “deliberately target unarmed civilians, including children, as part of their policy of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian civilian population.”

On Israel’s 60th anniversary, Yossi Alpher, senior advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Camp David summit, wrote that the Israelis “have nothing to be ashamed of and everything to be proud of.” He acknowledged the disastrous settlement movement but divorced the ongoing existence of the Jewish state with the colonial project in the West Bank. They are in fact inseparable after decades and Israel is increasingly known globally as a brutal oppressor. A shameful Jewish legacy into the 21st century.

I’ve written and researched the Israel/Palestine conflict issue for years and yet remain surprised with the lack of information reported by the Western media. Who knew that Switzerland in mid-November accused Israel of wantonly destroying Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and near Ramallah in violation of the Geneva Conventions’ rules on military occupation? Or that Israel’s transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, a former IDF chief of staff and defence minister, recently suggested the return of “targeted killings” for democratically elected leaders of Hamas? How about a report in Haaretz that found Defence Minister Ehud Barak has approved dozens of construction projects in the West Bank contradicting Israel’s supposed commitment to the Road Map? Or that the chairman of Hebrew University’s Arab student body was apprehended by university personnel after he refused to shake the hand of visiting President Shimon Peres after calling it a “murderer of children”? Or that the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, again said recently that his group was willing to accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders?

All of these facts are shocking yet uncontroversial; they are daily life in the Jewish state. A haze of misinformation, outright lies and Holocaust guilt cloud this issue the world over. The occupiers are the eternal victims. Critics tell me that the Palestinians deserve their fate, led by hateful leaders.

A recent leaked Red Cross report found that Israel’s siege on Gaza was leading to a steady increase in chronic malnutrition. “Survival levels” are now the standard phrase used to describe the desperate situation, an environment only permissible with the collusion of the world powers. The World Bank recently argued that the Palestinian economy has “incredible potential” if Israel eases its stranglehold.

It was therefore ironic to read former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent comments, in the light of Barack Obama’s win, that he suddenly realised the severe limitations of foreign intervention in the conflict. Here was a man who actively supported the 2006 Lebanon war and Israel’s disastrous policies for years and now wanted to talk about consensus politics. On the Arab street, after his enthusiastic backing of the Iraq war, Blair is easily dismissed as simply wanting to manage the occupation, rather than ending it.

British journalist Jonathan Cook, one of the finest chroniclers of the conflict, writes from Nazareth and has attempted to explain the real reasons behind the Israeli suffocation of Hamas. He wrote last week:

“…According to the daily Jerusalem Post, Israeli policymakers have sought to reinforce the impression that ‘it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas’. On this thinking, collective punishment is warranted because there are no true civilians in Gaza. Israel is at war with every single man, woman and child.”

It is a view echoed by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass. She rightly chastises Hamas for its human rights abuses but wonders if Israeli policy towards the group is deliberately designed to bolster support, therefore justifying future military action to destroy them. Unlike virtually every other Israeli paper, Haaretz editorially supports the concept of engaging the Islamists.

I’ve long argued that Israel’s most vocal supporters imagine an Israel that doesn’t exist and never has. It’s a Zionism in their minds; noble, inspiring and humanist. Uncomfortable facts can be dismissed. Human rights abuses placed in context and defended. Anybody who challenges Zionism’s core tenets are terrorists. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.

Perhaps it requires a latter-day prophet such as former Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency, Avraham Burg, to challenge these delusions. In his latest book, The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes, he writes that Judaism has to get past its obsessive cheapening of the Holocaust to mature as a religion. Burg argues that the everyday use of the word Shoah in Israeli life has left Israel “a nation of victims.” The Jewish state must abandon its “Judaism of the ghetto” and embrace a “universal Judaism.”

It’s a provocative diagnosis by a religious Jew. As an atheist Jew myself, I’m drawn to some of Burg’s ideas because they acknowledge the damage the physical and mental occupation is doing to both Arabs and Jews. Therefore debate must go beyond “what is good for the Jews?” towards “what is good for the peoples of the region?” Arguably traditional Zionism is incapable of acknowledging the difference.

I met a group of influential left-oriented Jews in Melbourne last year. They wanted to engage with me and discuss privately my ideas. It was a depressing affair, however, as one after the other detailed their “pain” and “trauma” over the occupation, expressed dedication to a two-state solution and pledged to work towards its implementation. Publicly, with a few notable exceptions, they refused to condemn Israel’s gross violations of human rights. It was simply a bridge too far. Talking passionately amongst themselves may have made them feel good but the situation in the Middle East requires more than hand-wringing. A fear of societal exclusion held these people back while the Palestinians suffered in silence.

Militant Palestinians are only part of the problem. Radical Jews are the cancer that Israel refuses to destroy (despite Ehud Barak recently calling these settlers “cancerous growths”). The aim of these extremists is to establish a Taliban-style, rabbinical state to replace the current “secular” Israel. It may seem like a pipedream to most — not least the vast majority of Israelis who allegedly oppose the occupation project — but the attempt to uproot any major settlement blocs will incur a vicious response. A civil war between the state and radical Zionists is not unlikely in the years to come.

The world is starting to finally acknowledge the danger. The New York Times editorialised in early November that “law-breaking settlers” must be stopped. The director of Israel’s domestic security service warned that Jewish extremists could kill Israeli leaders who attempt peace with the Palestinians. Settlers routinely desecrate Muslim graveyards in the West Bank. For the Jerusalem Post, though, it is “Palestinian intransigence” that hinders peace in the West Bank, not the presence of the settlers on illegally held land. Interestingly, a number of settlers recently told the New York Times that they believed in a two-state solution and many of their friends would leave the colonies with proper compensation.

Yossi Alpher, former advisor to Ehud Barak, recently commented that, “Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination continues to symbolize the rise of the violent messianic political right in Israel. They are still among us. They still threaten everything that is dear to rational, peace-minded Israelis. Here is one area where Rabin’s successors have failed miserably.”

The September pipe bombing by Jewish radicals of Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell’s home in Jerusalem – a long-time critic of the settler movement – signalled a profound shift in the struggle against Israel’s internal enemies, a point powerfully made by leading peace activist Uri Avnery. “Israeli fascism is alive and kicking”, Avnery warned. “It is growing in the flowerbed that produced the various religious-nationalist underground groups of the past.” And yet the vast majority of the international Jewish Diaspora is tellingly silent on these issues, preferring to protest against Hamas “terrorism” and Iranian “provocation”.

Sternhell, even more determined to warn the world against the Jewish state’s threats, has argued since the attack against him and his family that “If Israeli society is unable to muster the courage necessary to put an end to the settlements, the settlements will put an end to the state of the Jews and will turn it into a bi-national state”.

As a believer in this solution, I don’t fear Sternhell’s thesis, but settler violence undoubtedly challenges the (long-discredited) claim that Israel is a Jewish democracy. The departing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently declared, on the 13th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder, that unless the Jewish state returns occupied land, “we could lose support for a two-state solution.” Instead, he imagined a “Zionism that is practical, realistic, responsible and courageous.” Wise words, but after a lifetime of enabling the settler movement through direct action, they are devoid of meaning.

The election of Barack Obama opens a faint possibility of real change, not just the rhetorical kind. Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy echoed this sentiment, writing in early November that he hoped the new President would not be a yes-man for the status-quo in the region:

“When we say that someone is a ‘friend of Israel’ we mean a friend of the occupation, a believer in Israel’s self-armament, a fan of its language of strength and a supporter of all its regional delusions. When we say someone is a ‘friend of Israel’ we mean someone who will give Israel a carte blanche for any violent adventure it desires, for rejecting peace and for building in the territories.”

America’s position as a global super-power is slipping. It maintains an enviable ability to shape events across the globe, but the rise of the rest is something that should worry the Jewish state. China and India will never view Israel the same as Washington. The resurgence of Arab resistance – most potently displayed by the Hizbollah struggle against Israel in 2006 – signals a lessening fear of Israel’s military machine. Obama may even pressure the incoming Israeli government – currently looking like Likud’s Bibi Netanyahu, whose election, Gideon Levy wrote last weekend, would prove once and for all that, “an Israel that votes Likud does not want peace – no ifs, ands or buts” – to cease settlement construction and negotiate with a Hamas-Fatah leadership. We can live in hope.

I fear, however, that the dye has been cast. The occupation, in some form, will never disappear. How does a state remove nearly half a million settlers? The long-term plan of Zionism was to establish irreversible facts on the ground. On this definition, the ideology has been a raging success. The rights of the Palestinians were always secondary and remain so. Israel has mastered never-ending and never-progressing negotiations. Talks for the sake of talks, as colonies expand. The fact that the Arab League’s peace initiative has been largely ignored suggests a country that has deliberately chosen the path of confrontation. Peace is too difficult, too cumbersome, too problematic and too painful.  A fortified ghetto appears to be Israel’s future. History has a cruel way of repeating itself.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the incendiary book The Israel Lobby, recently asked leading American Jewish blogger Phil Weiss that, despite polls consistently finding US citizens overwhelmingly supportive of the Jewish state, “do most Americans favour the ‘special relationship,’ where we unconditionally give Israel abundant material aid and firm diplomatic backing?” Furthermore, both men argue, most Americans “do not believe that the US should favour Israel over the Palestinians, even if they identify more with Israel than the Palestinians.”

Any resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict will only appear with major external pressure. It is difficult to see this happening any time soon.