Antony Loewenstein

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been deeply weakened by his complicity with Israel and the Americans over the last years. The result for his people? Nothing.

But his comments on Tuesday – probably as a way to defend himself from siding with Israel over his fellow Palestinians, Hamas – were necessarily strong:

We will do all we can to prove Israel committed crimes that would make your skin crawl,” Abbas said, referring to the Geneva Conventions. “We want the world to give us justice for once.

“Israel does not want peace, otherwise it would not have done this. We need to understand this and tell it to those coming from Europe and America. Israel wants to waste time to strengthen facts on the ground with settlements and the wall.”

Hamas remains strong, albeit militarily weakened by the Israeli onslaught (an interview with the group’s Deputy Chairman, published in The Hindu, reflects this attitude.)

Meanwhile in Israel itself, war criminals are being promoted not prosecuted:

Professors at Tel Aviv University are protesting a decision to appoint Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch as a lecturer for the Faculty of Law.

The objections come in the wake of a recent story published in Haaretz about Sharvit-Baruch, who heads the Israel Defense Forces international law division.

The report said that under Sharvit-Baruch’s command, IDF legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians, including the bombardment of the Gaza police course closing ceremony.

Sharvit-Baruch is planning on retiring from the army in the coming months and is scheduled to teach at the university’s law department next semester.

While Gerry Adams, the former Irish “terrorist”, calls for engagement with Hamas, many Arab bloggers have started a campaign to cease using the word “Israel” and instead refer to the Jewish state as “Israhell“.

How will the next Israeli government view the Obama administration, more likely to pressure the Jewish state over its settlement addiction?

Will they go the route of former prime minister Menachem Begin, who more than 25 years ago lashed out at the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, telling him Israel was not a banana republic and that Israel would make do with bread and margarine if necessary, but would not accept dictates?

The simple reality, articulated by Haaretz in an editorial, is that, “the right-wing parties that support settlement expansion jeopardize Israel’s international standing as well as its security, both of which are dependent on American support.

Human rights were violated on both sides of the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas.

United Nations Humanitarian Affairs Chief John Holmes blasted Hamas Tuesday for its “cynical” use of civilian facilities during recent hostilities in the Gaza Strip.

“The reckless and cynical use of civilian installations by Hamas and indiscriminate firing of rockets against civilian populations are clear violations of international humanitarian law,” Holmes told the UN Security Council.

And:

Apart from white phosphorus, the Israeli army used a variety of other weapons in densely populated civilian areas of Gaza in the three-week conflict that began on 27 December.

Flechettes are 4cm long metal darts that are sharply pointed at the front, with four fins at the rear. Between 5,000 and 8,000 are packed into 120mm shells which are generally fired from tanks. The shells explode in the air and scatter the flechettes in a conical pattern over an area about 300m wide and 100m long.

Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman MK Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing fascist likely to increase support in upcoming Israeli elections, lies through his teeth:

There is no connection between settlers and the conflict through which we have been living for so many years.

Just some harmless, racist fun by Israeli soldiers in Gaza:

Residents of the Zeitun neighborhood who returned to their homes once the fighting in the region was over discovered that their walls had been marked with slogans such as “Die you all,” Make war not peace,” “Death to Arabs,” “Arabs must die,” and “One down, 999,999 to go.”

A Time to Speak Out, a recently released book about the rise of Jewish dissent, in which I have a chapter, is reviewed by Interface magazine, “an open-access, multilingual journal of social movement research by and for activists and academics”:

This article explores the strengths and limitations of movement intellectuals’ theorisation of their movement and its terrain of activism. It looks at four published collections of Jewish writers critical of Israel and Zionism and asks how these books represent and defend a developing diaspora Jewish Israel-critical movement, and whether they manage to effectively theorise its terrain of activism. I argue that although these books offer some important purchase on the issues surrounding Israel/Palestine, through promoting the subjectivity of Jewish activists, and by being constrained by what is acceptable among mainstream Jewish thought, they efface the voice and presence of Palestinians, producing a partial understanding of the issue and the movement. I suggest that this may be due to the particular phase of this movement getting to know itself and its terrain of activism, which I characterise as its ‘mirror stage’.

Robert Baer, a former top Central Intelligence Agency operative, offers some advice to the hapless Israelis and Americans:

Hamas is an idea. Hamas is not an organisation. Hamas is an idea, and unless the Israelis go in and force 1.5 million people into Egypt, they will never subdue Gaza. They can go in and they can slaughter the leadership and put 10,000 people in jail, and Hamas will come out stronger. The losers in this will be Fatah.

Modern Russia, in all its lawlessness:

Alexander Lebedev, the Russian billionaire who co-owns [newspaper] Novaya Gazeta, says the situation is so dreadful that the paper’s staff should now carry guns. Lebedev, the new proprietor of the Evening Standard, also suggested journalists should be taught how to shoot. The authorities are unlikely to grant his request, however…

What matters is that Russia is now a gangster state – formally a democracy but in reality nothing of the kind – where the murder of Kremlin critics can take place with impunity. Either the state is directly responsible for killing its enemies, or it condones the actions of shadowy external forces..

The following article, by Josephine Tovey, appears today in the Sydney Morning Herald online:

A conference on justice for Palestine due to be held tomorrow at State Parliament has been called off after several high-profile speakers withdrew from the event, citing revelations the convener had made anti-Semitic remarks.

Maqsood Alshams, who had organised the conference ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’, made a series of derogatory remarks about Jewish people in several private emails, the Herald revealed on Wednesday.

Two of the conferences key speakers, Antony Loewenstein and Peter Manning, withdrew in a joint email to the convenor at lunchtime today [Wednesday].

“As a Jew who condemns anti-Semitism I thought it would be inappropriate to engage in a debate in that kind of environment,” said Mr Loewenstein, a blogger and author of My Israel Question. “That does not change the fact that I still feel very strongly about the situation in Gaza.”

Professor Manning, who lectures in Journalism at UTS and is a critic of anti-Arab media bias, also said he felt the conference was no longer an appropriate forum for the issue.

“I don’t want to confuse the Palestinian issues that I care about with any form of racism or anti-Semitism,” said Professor Manning.

Mr Maqsood, a Bangladesh-born asylum seeker and founder of the small lobby group Asia Pacific Human Rights Institute, apologised for the emails on Tuesday and said he had been “intoxicated and angry” when he wrote them.

He was not available for comment tonight [Wednesday], but had notified people via email during the afternoon that the event had been cancelled.

The director of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies Vic Alhadeff, who condemned Mr Maqsood’s comments on Tuesday, said he was vindicated by the decision.

“Our community felt from the outset that if the conference went ahead, it would have been irredeemably tainted with bias, given the lack of balance and the anti-Semitic comments made by the principal organiser,” he said in a statement.

Government efforts to prevent the radicalisation of British Muslims have been set back by Israel’s assault on Gaza, the security and counter-terrorism minister, Lord West of Spithead, announced yesterday.

In an outspoken assessment of the terror risk facing Britain, Gordon Brown’s security adviser was scathing about the assertion, made by Tony Blair when prime minister, that foreign policy did not alter the UK’s risk of a terror attack.

“We never used to accept that our foreign policy ever had any effect on terrorism,” he said. “Well, that was clearly bollocks.”

He added: “They [the Blair administration] were very unwilling to have any debate about how our foreign policy impacted on radicalisation.”

War criminals, you have a future…in the entertainment business, convincing punters that your previous acts of endorsing mass killing was actually just a little bit of harmless fun:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has signed with the William Morris Agency, which describes itself as a “diversified talent and literary agency,” with “clients in all segments of the entertainment industry.” While “most other members of the Bush administration, save Karl Rove, might have trouble finding such a wide-ranging deal, Rice found a strong market among talent agencies,” according to Hollywood Reporter. The agency will represent Rice on deals involving “books, lecture appearances, philanthropic initiatives, as well as media, sports and communications.” The agency’s Wayne Kabak praised Rice’s “well-rounded resume in policy, politics and music, her interest in sports and other areas.” He explained, “We’re here to help her create and enhance an agenda that is very important to her in her post-government career.” Rice is reportedly not interested in pundit appearances, but in classical music, “efforts to get disadvantaged children college educations and initiatives to help U.S. children become global citizens.”