Antony Loewenstein

Why Christopher Hitchens, one of the key slobberers over the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and its war in Iraq, still thinks he should be taken seriously over American foreign policy.

Commentators who crave closeness to power aren’t journalists; they’re stenographers.

With foreign observers starting to enter Gaza, it is undeniably clear that Israel committed war crimes over the last three weeks (including the bombing of nearly 70 schools).

Plus this:

Doctors operating the only brain-scanning machine at an Egyptian hospital near Gaza have been almost overwhelmed by the number of Palestinian children arriving with bullet wounds to the head.

And this:

Amnesty International delegates visiting the Gaza Strip found indisputable evidence of widespread use of white phosphorus in densely populated residential areas in Gaza City and in the north.

“Yesterday, we saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army,” said Christopher Cobb-Smith, a weapons expert who is in Gaza as part of a four-person Amnesty International fact-finding team.

“White phosphorus is a weapon intended to provide a smokescreen for troop movements on the battlefield,” said Cobb-Smith. “It is highly incendiary, air burst and its spread effect is such that it that should never be used on civilian areas”.

“Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza’s densely populated residential neighbourhoods is inherently indiscriminate. Its repeated use in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Should I be expecting a visit soon?

The Immigrant Absorption Ministry announced on Sunday it was setting up an “army of bloggers,” to be made up of Israelis who speak a second language, to represent Israel in “anti-Zionist blogs” in English, French, Spanish and German…

During the war, we looked for a way to contribute to the effort,” the ministry’s director general, Erez Halfon, told Haaretz. “We turned to this enormous reservoir of more than a million people with a second mother tongue.” Other languages in which bloggers are sought include Russian and Portuguese.

Halfon said volunteers who send the Absorption Ministry their contact details by e-mail, at media@moia.gov.il, will be registered according to language, and then passed on to the Foreign Ministry’s media department, whose personnel will direct the volunteers to Web sites deemed “problematic.”

Trolls to defend Israeli war crimes are most welcome (to join the IDF).

The Secretary General of the Foundation for Moroccan Jewish Heritage, Simon Lévy, has denounced the Israeli aggression on Gaza, and called on the international community to intervene to solve the conflict.

“It is horrible and this is not the way I see Judaism,” Levy said, voicing hope to establish peace and see a halt of the massacre against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

I spoke at the Gaza rally in Sydney yesterday.

My fellow Independent Australian Jewish Voices co-founder, Peter Slezak, was invited to address the Melbourne protest.

His speech was an eloquent expression of Jewish dissent against Israeli crimes:

We have a responsibility to turn our moral concern into meaningful action, because it is here, in the West, that the fate of Palestine is decided. We must find ways to counter the barrage of deceit that prevents people from understanding what is going on and reacting to it as human beings.

The assault on Gaza is not a war, but a cowardly act of terrorism.

One day after the “truce” between Israel and Hamas, I was interviewed this morning on Sky News TV about the carnage in Gaza:

[display_podcast]

My recent book, The Blogging Revolution, continues to extend its reach.

The Prospects of Cyberocracy, a post by US-based academic Patrick Meier – a Harvard-based Fellow who works on “conflict early warning and crisis mapping” – explains the ways in which the internet can impact democracy-promotion around the world.

Meier is using my book, amongst others, at a course in Digital Democracy at Tufts University this year. He writes:

In 1992, David Ronfeldt wrote that a “precise definition of cyberocracy was not possible at present.” In a general sense, then, he identified two ways in which cyberocracy may manifest itself:

1. Narrowly, as a form of organization that supplants traditional forms of bureaucracy and technocracy;
2. Broadly, as a form of government that may redefine relations between state and soceity, and between the public sector and the private sector.

How things have changed.

Some Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip were wounded by a new type of weapon that even doctors with previous experience in war zones do not recognize, according to Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist who worked at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital for 11 days, during Operation Cast Lead…

The unknown weapon appears to mainly affect the body’s lower part, he said. It severs the legs, leaving burns around the stump, small punctures in the skin and internal bleeding.

The following statement is released today by the recently-formed Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism:

Dear Prime Minister,

We are part of an increasing number of people around the world of Jewish descent who are sickened by the coldly calculated massacre of the Palestinians of Gaza and who utterly repudiate Israel’s claim that it acts in the name of Jews the world over. Like an increasing number of people around the world of Jewish and non-Jewish descent we are also sickened by the indifference of Western governments, including your government, to the death, maiming, terror and trauma, being inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza, including on a disproportionate number of children, in what now resembles a   vast outdoor prison or policed ghetto. The apparent indifference of your government to the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians lends support to Israel’s crimes against humanity.

We know, as a scholar, you meditate on the long and troubled history of humanity. We trust you do not wish Israel/Palestine to be to your prime ministership what East Timor has  become to Gough Whitlam’s, a terrible blot on an otherwise positive record, an instance of putting realpolitik above morality in international affairs. If that is the case, then we urge you to take a stand now, on behalf of the Australian people, against the wanton destruction of the Palestinians and their way of life.

As believers in Gandhian non-violent protest, we call your attention to the Mahatma’s pleas on behalf of the Palestinians in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the Zionist intention in British-Mandated Palestine to dispossess and drive out the Palestinians was becoming ever clearer. In a 1938 essay “Zionism and Anti-Semitism”, Gandhi passionately argues that Palestine “belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.”

Recall that the great Australian Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born Governor General and a former Chief Justice of the High Court, predicted in essays in The Hebrew Standard in the early 1940s what now has occurred, that the Zionist plans to take over Palestine while dispossessing and marginalizing the Palestinians would be a disaster for international law. Isaacs pointed out that the Zionist campaign to make Palestine a Jewish State was contrary to the Balfour Declaration, which called for a National Home for Jews in Palestine. If Zionism succeeded in creating such a Jewish State, its injustice would, he felt, antagonize the Arab population in Palestine and would exasperate the whole Muslim world. To create a Jewish State, he noted, would necessarily mean the domination of a single nationality over the other nationalities; a Christian or Muslim could not become a full citizen of the new state. Why not, he suggested, make citizenship Palestinian, that is, neither Arab nor Jewish? Isaacs regarded the Zionist plan for a Jewish State as a giant historical step backwards, away from a modern democratic notion of a national unit formed by various nationalities. Instead, Isaacs proposed what, given the recent history of South Africa, we would recognise as a rainbow nation: a vision of Palestine where Jew, Muslim and Christian alike would have equal rights.

Against the Zionist insistence that Jewish identity was tied to political and military possession of a particular land, Isaacs argued that Judaism is “written in the hearts of the Jewish people and is independent of Palestine or any locality”. (One of us, John Docker, has written in his 2001 book 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora on Isaacs’s profound and moving reflections in The Hebrew Standard.) One of the great political theorists of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, lamented in her 1944 essay “Zionism reconsidered” that the Zionist program of a state for Jews alone had replaced the possibility of a “binational Palestine state” which might have come about as the result of a working agreement with “Arabs and other Mediterranean peoples”. For surely only folly, she argued, “could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of its neighbours”. That folly continues and we might well ask along with Hannah Arendt in that same essay, what program does an aggressively nationalistic movement such as Zionism “offer for a solution of the Arab-Jewish conflict?” None at all as the cycle of vicious aggression towards the Palestinians makes clear. New and imaginative solutions based on a non-racist state in Israel/Palestine need to be found urgently.

Early in 2008, on 13 February, in your historic and moving speech apologizing to the stolen generations of the Indigenous people of Australia, some of whom were present in the Australian parliament, you clasped hands and shared tears: please extend the same sympathy and empathy to the Indigenous people of Palestine. Since 1948 the Indigenous Palestinians of historic Palestine have faced having their lives, cities, villages, mosques, fields, olive groves, health, dignity, freedom of movement and rights under international law, unlawfully transgressed and stolen from them. Please reach out to them, please extend your sympathy to the beleaguered Palestinian people. Please listen to the groundswell of opinion that is occurring across the world in relation to Israeli brutality to the Palestinians, amongst Jews and non-Jews alike: enough is enough.

We urge you to bring to public attention, and to support, UN Resolution 194 which declares the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees – some 700,000 – expelled from Palestine in 1948 to return to their homes. We ask you to reflect on the significance of a conjunction of dates: on 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was declared, Article 13/2 making it clear that, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country.” Resolution 194 was declared on the following day, 11 December 1948. The right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes had been demanded by the assassinated UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte (see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pp.146, 188). Then as now, Israel disdainfully sneered at the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, and international law.

By publicly supporting the unconditional right of the Palestinians to return to their homeland, you would go a long way in restoring the human rights reputation of Australia in relation to refugees. By doing so, you will grant to Australia an independent foreign policy and our own political and ethical stance, rather than continuing the embarrassing, ludicrous and immoral subservience pursued by the previous government towards the United States of America.

Please, Prime Minister, do everything you can to avert the destruction of the Palestinians.

John Docker

Ned Curthoys

Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism

19 January 2009

The war in Gaza on Sky News television

Why aren’t the true words and feelings of Taghreed El-Khodary,  the New York Times stringer in Gaza, appearing in the pages of the paper?

(Instead, the paper prefers to mock critics of its Middle East coverage. No wonder it’s financially screwed.)

John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby, writes in The American Conservative:

The Gaza offensive has succeeded in punishing the Palestinians but not in making Israel more secure.