Antony Loewenstein

The calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel are growing by the day.

But is it the right way forward?

Noam Chomsky argued in 2003 that it is not:

The academic boycott of Israel is wrong, says linguistics professor and political dissident Noam Chomsky. Academics angered by the failure to resolve the Palestine issue should instead focus on their own national governments in supporting oppression.

Professor Chomsky, a long-term critic of US military aid to Israel, reveals in an email to The THES his objections to the dismissal of two Israeli scholars from the editorial board of translation journals owned by University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology professor Mona Baker.

“I think the action is wrong in principle,” he says. “I understand and appreciate the motives of those who initiated and support the academic boycott, some of them old and very close friends.”

Nevertheless, he says, the effects of the boycott run counter to the intentions of those pursuing these means.

Professor Chomsky believes there are many alternatives for western academics seeking to voice opposition to Israeli policy. “Academics in the West are uniquely privileged. Unlike their counterparts in much of the world, they have innumerable ways to oppose crimes and atrocities, without fear of repression or worse,” he says.

Professor Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a prime mover behind last May’s petition to the US to stop sending military aid to Israel, and he has campaigned for American universities to disinvest from companies doing business in Israel.

Critics could concentrate on cases where their actions can make the most significant difference, such as “crimes and atrocities to which their own state makes a crucial contribution,” he says. “That is very definitely true in (the case of Israel), particularly in the US but also among its allies.”

The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram quoted Hamas’ political leader Khaled Meshal on Tuesday as saying his Islamist group was surprised by the force Israel recently used against it in the Gaza Strip.

Meshal, who was speaking at an Arab conference on Gaza in the Qatari capital Doha, reportedly told a closed forum that Hamas had believed that Israel’s 22-day campaign against it would last no longer than three days. The offensive ended Sunday, after Israel and Hamas separately declared a cease-fire.

“We didn’t expect the crimes that were committed against our citizens, the residents of Gaza,” Al-Ahram quoted the Damascus-based Meshal as saying.

Approximately 500 Hamas militants were killed in the operation, Israeli estimates state, and hundreds more were wounded.

This statement is similar to the ones made by Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah after the 2006 Lebanon war.

Part 1:

A heated confrontation erupted Tuesday morning between an Arab and a right-wing Knesset member before the start of a Supreme Court hearing on an appeal filed by two Arab parties against the decision to bar them from running in the upcoming elections.

MK Talab El-Sana (United Arab List-Ta’al) called out towards Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman, “Get the hell out of here.” Lieberman replied, “You’re a terrorist representing terrorists. We’ll deal with you like with any other terrorist, like we dealt with Hamas.”

Part 2:

With Barack Obama now President of the United States, a necessary trip down memory lane:

Number of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African men detained in the U.S. in the eight weeks after 9/11: 1,182

Number of them ever charged with a terrorism-related crime: 0

Number charged with an immigration violation: 762

Estimated number of U.S. intelligence reports on Iraq that were based on information from a single defector: 100

Number of times the defector had ever been interviewed by U.S. intelligence agents: 0

Number of books by Henry Kissinger found in Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz’s mansion: 2

Number by then–New York Times reporter Judith Miller: 1

Halewistan is an intriguing new blog by a “perennial student, Canadian national and global citizen.”

The name?

/ ha / le / wi /

from the semitic root of the author’s name, meaning join, connect for mutual benefit; alternatively, a wanderer, a consecrated person, ‘adherent, client, devotee (of god)’

/ stan /

from Persian -stan “country,” from Indo-Iranian stanam “place,” lit. “where one stands,” from Proto-Indo European sta-no-, from base sta- “to stand”

hence,

halewistan | هَلِويستان | הלויסטן:

A recent post details his vision for the Israel/Palestine conflict:

…The two-state solution no longer seems particularly adaptive for our current day and age. Not on the issue of the region’s shifting demographics, nor on its resource scarcity (namely, water, so often overlooked), nor with regard to ‘imagining’ an identity politics fitted to the 21st, as opposed to 19th, century.

Israel-Palestine, despite the endlessly ironic tragedy of the current situation, holds promise–perhaps the world’s best promise–for demonstrating how a new sociopolitical system can be consciously imagined, cultivated and employed.

The region must become a permanent international protectorate.

Absurd–i know. But no more absurd than a flourishing nuclear ‘ethno-Jewish democracy’ living ’side by side in peace’ with a demilitarized Palestinian Bantustan. Please.  No more absurd than perhaps the holiest place in the world devolving into a wasps’ nest of low-grade ethnoreligious civil-war, which is precisely what a Middle Eastern South Africa would look like.

The UN gave birth to this mess (not least out of western guilt for the Holocaust); now it’s a global tinderbox. Time has come to take collective responsibility–to take the potential, nay the necessity, for a powerful set of global institutions seriously, and turn Israel-Palestine into an internationally-administered, shining beacon of hope for the world. No, really. Call me crazy, but i mean it.

A family returns to the ruins of Gaza and finds this:

He returned yesterday to find the houses ransacked and scarcely habitable, with furnishing and electrical appliances tossed out of the window, gaping holes in the wall made for firing positions, furniture smashed, clothes piled on the floor, pages of family Korans torn out and remains of soldiers’ rations littered in many rooms.

Stars of David and graffiti in Hebrew and English proclaiming “Arabs need 2 die”, “no Arabs in the State of Israel” and “One down and 999,999 to go” had been scrawled on walls. A drawing of a gravestone bore the inscription “Arabs 1948 to 2009″.

Israel is being accused of using white phosphorus on civilian areas in Gaza.

The following photographs come from a normally reliable source and were taken at the UNRWA School in Beit Lahia in Gaza:

To get a visual feeling of what it means for a school – sheltering civilians – to be subjected to Israeli white phosphorous bombs … rain of inextinguishable fire balls falling from the sky in all directions, deliberately designed to cause maximum death and destruction.

No wonder it is illegal to use white phosphorous as a weapon of war, particularly in civilian settings, let alone a UN shelter!

In this criminal attack two children were killed, their mother lost her legs, and dozens of children and women were injured – some from inhaling the phosphorous smoke, the effects of which will only be revealed with time.

Can movements like The Swarthmore Campaign end the apartheid in Israel?

The massacre in Gaza has prompted many people to actively boycott Israeli products. The effects of the consumer boycott are already being felt by Israeli farmers who are now complaining that their produce is rotting in warehouses because of canceled orders. And in London, activists shut down Ahava, an Israeli owned cosmetics shop that manufactures their product in an illegal settlement. While the boycott actions progress, a new front of action is being opened by activists at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania: an Alumni based Divestment from Israel campaign.

The Israeli government is stepping up efforts to suppress dissent and crush resistance in the streets. Police have been videotaping the demonstrations and subsequently arresting protesters in large numbers.

According to Israeli police reports, at least 763 Israeli citizens, the majority of them Palestinian and 244 under 18 years old, have been arrested, imprisoned or detained for participating in such demonstrations. Most have been held and then released, but at least 30 of those arrested over the past three weeks are still being held in prison.

Ameer Makhoul, director of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations in Haifa, tells IPS that these demonstrations “are part of the uprising here inside the Green Line, to share responsibility and to share the challenge with the people in the Gaza strip.”

As an organiser of many of these solidarity demonstrations inside Israel, Makhoul himself was arrested by the Shin Bet (the Israeli secret service). “They called me, came to my home and held me for four hours,” he tells IPS. “They accused me of being a terrorist and supporting terror. They said that they are watching me and monitoring me.” Israel, he said, “has become a terror state.”

A humane Jewish voice in Israel cries out for Barack Obama to “take away the pain in my stomach“:

The following letter was sent to the New York Times on January 13 by Charles D. Smith, professor of Middle East History at the University of Arizona:

Mark Landerler’s discussion of differing opinions among US Mideast experts vying for key positions in the Obama administration (“From US Experts on Mideast, There’s No Shortage of Advice” 1/13) aptly summarizes most of their differences but misses a key point.

The heart of the debate, in his terms, is not simply about embracing Israel too closely or becoming too deeply engaged in peace talks as did Bill Clinton. The real heart of the debate is whether any administration is willing to differ openly with Israel, and here Bill Clinton shares as much responsibility for misrepresenting issues as does Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is prominently mentioned for a key Mideast post.

Ross and Clinton blamed Yasser Arafat for the failure of the Camp David 2000 talks to American audiences when they knew their accusations were false. Ross admitted to a French journalist [Charles Enderlin] that both sides shared blame and that Israel’s expansion of settlements during the Oslo Process seriously harmed peace prospects. But to Americans Ross has consistently blamed Arafat and, by implication, Palestinians generally as being opposed to peace, charges that have had serious ramifications for public opinion; the last indexed reference to Israeli settlements in his book THE MISSING PEACE is for the year 1993, the year the Oslo Process began!

Given such misrepresentations, appointing Ross to any position in the Obama administration will call into question the integrity of the approach undertaken given his record as a friend of Israel and his refusal to say to Americans what he was willing to say in print to Europeans.

Saudi Arabian King Abdullah warned on Monday that a 2002 Arab initiative offering peace with Israel would not remain on the table forever.

Israel must understand that the choice between war and peace would not always stay open, Abdullah told delegates in Kuwait City at a summit focused on boosting economic growth and development in the Arab world.

And now Israel wants to control the reconstruction in Gaza, after spending billions destroying the vast majority of its infrastructure.

How to respond to such Orwellian realities?

I agree with Ali Abunimah, founder of Electronic Intifada, who explains why “Israel won’t survive“:

If there was ever a moment when the peoples of the region would accept Israel as a Zionist state in their midst, that has passed forever.

Israel was founded as a “Jewish state” through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish majority Arab population. It has been maintained in existence only through Western support and constant use of violence to prevent the surviving indigenous population from exercising political rights within the country, or returning from forced exile.