At the outset of the struggle against the war in Vietnam, a journalist asked a protester demonstrating outside the White House if he really believed he had the power to change America, which overwhelmingly backed the war. “I’m not sure at all if I’ll succeed in changing America,” the man said. “I’m here so that America, the one that supports the war, will not change me.” Which party would such a man vote for tomorrow [in Israel]?
Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Assaf Kfoury on January 31 for the Beirut daily as-Safir, on why the relationship between Israel and the US is what it is:
By now Israel is virtually an offshore US military base and intelligence centre…
Israel is also a valued high-tech centre, as illustrated by the increase of investment in Israel by leading US high-tech firms: Intel, Microsoft, etc. In military industry, relations are so intimate that one of the leading Israeli military producers, Rafael, plans to move most of its development and manufacturing operations to the US – to provide the arms more efficiently to the IDF. And Israel performs many other services to state and corporate power.
In contrast, Palestinians offer nothing to US power centres. They are weak, impoverished, and defenceless. Accordingly, they have no rights, by elementary principles of statecraft. In fact they have negative rights, since their plight stirs up “the Arab street.” Enhancing Israeli power at the expense of Palestinians therefore makes sense.
Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle on the tendency of newspaper websites to be filled with vitriol against the media elite:
There’s a genuine and justifiable annoyance at the sheer whining narcissism of columnists, including me. Some readers always thought we were a pack of self-obsessed wankers. Now they have both the confidence and the platform to tell us what they think. And seeing their words ‘published’ on the internet, next to lots of other comments, seems to legitimise what they say and spur them on.
Just another shocking act by a friendly US ally (and dictatorship):
A German-Egyptian activist has been detained north of Cairo during a rally in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Philip Rizk has been an outspoken activist on Palestinian issues and lived in Gaza for two years.
He previously worked on aid projects with Canon Andrew White, special envoy to the Middle East for the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Eyewitnesses said he was bundled into a white van with no licence plates, which then sped off.
The German embassy has been informed of his detention and is trying to locate him.
His family say they have been tipped off that he is now being held by Egyptian secret police at an undisclosed location.
Over the weekend a delegation of lawyers and activists filed charges with the public prosecutor’s office, relating to his kidnapping by three state security officers.
Mr Rizk writes a popular blog, “Tabula Gaza“, and has just completed a short documentary about non-violent protest against Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.
It is not known why he would be of special interest, though in past weeks a number of bloggers and activists from the Muslim Brotherhood – who campaigned for the re-opening of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza – have been formally charged with “forming a criminal group belonging to Hamas”.
One of those arrested was Gamal Abdel Salam, who heads the Egyptian Doctors’ Syndicate Relief Committee, which organised a number of convoys to the Gaza Strip.
Most weeks the Australian Jewish News is filled with letters written by paranoid, ignorant Jews who seem to love the idea of living in a ghetto, a world where Israel is the eternal victim fighting for its life against irrational, hate-filled Muslims. It’s amusing to watch.
Well, here we go again: another two academics of Jewish heritage only too ready, willing and able to criticise Israel, this time calling for an end to Zionism and the existence of Israel as a Jewish state (AJN 30/01).
Another two academics, whose Jewishness I suspect is only of any importance when it comes to criticising Israel, again claiming to represent significant Jewish opinion but really only demonstrating the hypocrisy of this irrelevant band of self-hating Jews.
John Docker and Ned Curthoys decry the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, yet seem to have no problem with the nearly two dozen Islamic states that repress human rights and social expression.
They inaccurately disparage Israel’s creation as a form of settler colonisation that demands dismantling, yet have no problem living in a country that was created precisely this way, along with just about every other country on this globe.
If they are serious about the rights of indigenous peoples, they would be advocating for a total return of Australia to the Aborigines. They would also be advocating for the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have lived in the Middle East for centuries, many of whom were expelled from Arab lands.
The AJN has a duty to report on their activities, and Docker and Curthoys may derive some sense of self-importance from this stunt, but they should know that their time in the limelight will be fleeting and that history will record both them and Antony Lowenstein’s Independent Australian Jewish Voices as nothing more than an insignificant blip in Jewish history.
ALAN FREEDMAN
St Kilda East, Vic
It is worth, I think, saying it straight out: Zionism is not Judaism. When Peter Slezak and Antony Loewenstein were major speakers -– and they both spoke brilliantly -– at the demonstration on Sunday, January 18, in Melbourne and Sydney respectively, against the bombing of Gaza, they were not compromising their Jewish identity. In fact, they were expressing the best part of it.
The text of what both Slezak and Loewenstein said can be found by going to the Independent Australian Jewish Voices website. I would suggest that your paper print at least one of them. It is, after all, The Australian Jewish News, not The Australian Zionist News.
STEPHEN LANGFORD
Paddington, NSW
Loewenstein’s article in The Australian Financial Review (31/01) is nothing more than a continuation of his “self-hating Jew” approach to life.
To quote French sources as fact is not only wrong, but questionable. Were the French protecting its citizens when they killed innocent civilians in Africa and other arenas of war? Where was their morality there?
The use of white phosphorous is not considered illegal in warfare, as attested to by its use in Iraq and other theatres of war. Israel used every precaution available to it, including leaflet drops and phone calls to householders well in advance to vacate populated areas under attack. Hamas, unfortunately, as proven by its own cowardly leaders, had no such morality and used its own population as human shields.
To cry foul is akin to a person who killed his own family and cries for mercy as he is an orphan.
Israel only did what any responsible government would and should do. After eight relentless years of attack on its citizens, it responded to a murderous enemy that was in fact put into power by the same people now crying for world sympathy.
No Mr Loewenstein, Israel is not guilty of anything other than protecting its own.
TED KIRSH
Melbourne, Vic
The Australian Financial Review has over the last weeks given its pages to discussing Israel’s war crimes in Gaza (the background here). Today the paper publishes my following letter:
Robert Goot (“Israel faces kangaroo court“, Legal Affairs, February 6) writes that Israeli actions are always legal and defensible and believes there is nothing to investigate after its actions in Gaza. The Jewish state’s conflict caused unprecedented carnage, but Goot claims Hamas is solely to blame for the destruction.
It is a view challenged by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, Oxfam and Care. “The suspected war crimes make for a very long list,” says Jessica Montell, head of the leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
Goot argues that Israel’s use of white phosphorous was legal because the country isn’t signed up to the relevant international protocols. Israel is conducting its own investigations to determine whether the chemical was used on civilian areas, as claimed by countless human rights groups.
The International Criminal Court is examining the case for Palestinian jurisdiction over alleged Israeli crimes in Gaza.
Indeed, universal jurisdiction is becoming an increasingly common way to determine possible abuses. It is the very serious nature of the allegations that warrants a thorough investigation to bring any individuals to trial.
Antony Loewenstein
Petersham NSW
A Jewish couple makes aliyah to Israel and find a society that is “losing its soul“:
More than in decades past, the Israel I recently visited is a mixture of despair and arrogance. There is a great deal of pride over the Gaza campaign. When I pointed out that was nothing to be proud of since it was like the Pittsburg Steelers playing against a High School team. Most Israelis felt that while true, “those people” deserved it. The despair comes from a terrible realization that there is no real “just” solution to this conflict. It’s a zero sum problem, us or them, and there is a groundswell of support for a “move’em on out” permanent solution for the Palestinians. With respect to Gaza the solution I heard most frequently was to lock the gates and let them wither away from starvation or bust the gates at Rafah and move to Egypt if they want to eat.
What happens when a delegation of American lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild conducts a fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip?
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, February 8:
Lieberman and his soldiers are borne on the tides of hatred for Arabs, hatred of democracy and the rule of law, and the stink of nationalism, racism and bloodthirstiness. These have turned, horrifically, into the hottest electoral assets on the market. Like all others of his political ilk, he cynically fans these base urges, particularly among the weaker classes, the rejected, the poor and the immigrants. But not just there. Many young people, among them brainwashed soldiers, will give him their vote, and no one ostracizes them. He chose an easy, relatively weak target, Israel’s Arabs, and sets his supporters on them. But his doctrine has seeped in much deeper than that.
Lieberman is the voice of the mob, and the mob craves hatred, vengeance and bloodshed. A useless war in which hundreds of children were killed was received here sympathetically, if not happily. The parties from the right and center have tried to disqualify the Arab parties; these lists are also excluded ahead of time in every political calculation. And Arab students cannot rent an apartment.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls for a full investigation into the state’s abuses in Gaza:
The extent of the harm to the Gaza civilian population from the recent operation is unprecedented. Whole families were wiped out. Children were killed before their parents’ eyes. Some people watched as their loved ones bled to death. The extensive harm to the civilian population is not, in and of itself, proof of violations of the laws of war. However, it requires Israel to conduct an independent and credible investigation, rather than relying solely on operational debriefings. Such an investigation is mandated by law. It is also in Israel’s best interest, says B’Tselem, as the Israeli public has a right to know what was done in its name in the Gaza Strip.
Based on the initial information, the investigation must examine the following questions, among others:
Wikileaks hits the jackpot again:
Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.
The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress’s analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.
Channel 4‘s Lindsey Hilsum reflects on the changes in Iran 10 years after she first visited the country:
…The scenes the government exhibits to foreign journalists – revolutionary parades, meetings of fervent women in black – represent an Iran created to prove a myth.
Most Iranians go nowhere near Friday prayers or the gatherings the international media are encouraged to film. They keep their heads down, avoid all this revolutionary religiosity and try to make a living.
Seventy per cent of Iranians were born after the Revolution. They want jobs and fashion and sex, just like young people everywhere.
