Antony Loewenstein

The Jane Harman case – involving phone-taps, the Zionist lobby, AIPAC and national security – has caused a storm in the US.

The Jewish Forward newspaper has an interesting observation about how Zionist fanatics are viewed:

“We know that we are closely watched, that people might be listening to our phone calls. This is our working premise,” said a former senior Israeli official who was based in Washington in recent years. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said he believed that suspicion toward Israel was prevalent in the military and intelligence establishments but was not common at the political and diplomatic levels.

The aim of splitting Jewish support for Israel is that the political elite start realising that many Jews do not support Israeli racism. And want the US to pursue more balanced policies.

It’s happening, slowly but surely.

The weekly Haaretz published statement by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom:

The President of Iran,

To the basest instincts.

The war in Afghanistan is a disaster. And a war crime. Just like Vietnam and Iraq. Some soldiers seem to know that:

Remember. The Jewish Holocaust is the worst genocide. Ever:

Yad Vashem has fired an instructor who compared the trauma of Jewish Holocaust survivors with the trauma experienced by the Palestinian people in Israel’s War of Independence.

Aluf Benn asks a key question in Haaretz and one that should resonate around the world. If Israel is truly heading towards a military confrontation with Iran, how can we stop the madness?

If the Iranian nuclear program is the train to Auschwitz, what will the Israelis and the Jews do if an operation to foil the program fails and Iran gets the bomb? What should young people think as they weigh their future? If the analogy to the Holocaust is accepted as simple, the answer is clear: They should find refuge for themselves elsewhere. Most of those saved from the Holocaust left Europe in time, before the Nazi conquest, particularly for the United States and the Land of Israel. If Israel is indeed facing a Holocaust, then Netanyahu should ask Barack Obama for immigration visas for 6 million Israelis, not just for the go-ahead to attack Iran.

Global progress, step by step:

Scotland today joined Ireland and South Africa when the Scottish Trade Union Congress, representing every Scottish trade union, voted overwhelmingly to commit to boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

This is the third example of a national trade union federation committing to BDS and is a clear indication that, while Israel can kill Palestinians with impunity and Western support, it has lost the battle for world public opinion. It is now seen to be a state born out of ethnic cleansing and still expanding through the violent dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Speaker after speaker expressed intense anger at Israel’s butchery of 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza over the New Year, as well as the much longer history of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The vote followed a visit to Israel/Palestine by an STUC Delegation in March which heard from a wide range of trade union and other bodies and returned with a unanimous recommendation that the parent body adopt BDS.

Palestinians don’t have a state. Why?

There is a deeper structural and philosophical reason why the Palestinians remain stateless—a reason more profound than the political narrative would indicate. It is best explained by associate Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel, in his brilliant essay, “The Power of Statelessness: the Withering Appeal of Governing” (Policy Review April/May 2009). In it, Grygiel does not discuss the Palestinians in particular, but rather the attitude of stateless people in general.

Statehood is no longer a goal, he writes. Many stateless groups “do not aspire to have a state,” for they are more capable of achieving their objectives without one. Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power.

Yes, the millions of Palestinians in Palestine itself and in the Diaspora actively work against forming a state. This kind of theory – used to justify simplistic and racist nonsense – is more about allowing Israel to continue its brutal policies because the Palestinians are supposedly happy to remain stateless.

And it lets Israel off the hook for its ongoing tactics of splitting the Palestinian population.

Michael Brull, a blogger with Independent Australian Jewish Voices, continues his increasingly public and necessary battles with Zionist apologists.

First up, former head of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, David Knoll, who has a piece in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, showing his supposed concern about racism. Except, as Brull notes:

Look Mr Knoll. You and the Jewish Board of Deputies couldn’t care less about racism. You care about anti-Semitism, and the reason you care about anti-Semitism is because you’re Jewish. There is nothing principled in your views. If you called for (say) banning Benny Morris’s writings, we might take you seriously. But apparently the Jewish establishment has come out in favour of ethnic cleansing. Bren Carlill, for example, of AIJAC, has also defended the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948:

Yes, Jewish fighters were directly responsible for creating a significant minority of the Palestinian refugees, but this is perfectly understandable. The Jews were fighting to survive, and the Palestinian villagers were engaged in the war to kill the Jews.

You see? I mean, put aside the euphemisms (“creating a significant minority of the Palestinian refugees”). Carlill actually thinks expelling Palestinians was “perfectly understandable”. This has passed completely unnoticed. Because anti-Palestinian racism is considered so ordinary and unremarkable in organisations like AIJAC and JBD that they can support figures like Carlill and Morris, whilst calling for a united front against racism. It would seem inconsistent to them if they thought Palestinians were human.

As we’re seeing at the Durban II conference, Zionist groups are desperate to “campaign” for Darfur because it may, just may, distract enough people from looking at Israeli crimes in Palestine. Honest debate about racism is more important than ever.

Next, Brull pulls apart the Zionist lobbyist, Bren Carlill, from AIJAC (who I debated last year on Australian TV):

Vulgar apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians often come up with the same arguments, over and over again. This is not necessarily because they are asked, or trained to do so. It is because the facts are against them. There is an overwhelming corpus of human rights reports, scholarly literature and so on, documenting Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, its racist discrimination against the Palestinians within the Green line and so on.

How can defenders of the Holy State deal with such unpleasant issues? Plainly, an honest look into the evidence would work against them. So instead, there are a few tried and tested counter-ploys chauvinist Zionists engage in, to avoid discussion of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Of course, proving that AIJAC are fanatical Zionists isn’t that difficult.

And less people are listening to them.

Sometimes parody is all we have left. How’s this for a headline?

Rove claims prosecuting torture memo authors will turn Obama admin “into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses“

That would be the Latin American nations run by US-backed thugs under Reagan in the 1980s, would it Rove?

The Bush administration kept America safe since 9/11…by using torture? The ability of conservative, Republican fanatics to continually defend torture because terror suspects looked, er, suspect, is absurd.

And people wonder why America’s reputation has taken such a dive:

As more information appears about the Bush administration’s use of torture, there is still much to learn about the role of Australia in this sordid process:

The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn’t talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.

What do Australian bloggers think of the Durban II conference in Geneva?