Antony Loewenstein

The revolution appears to have arrived (so long as you don’t mind being a corporate whore):

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Comparing Job Numbers in America
Lawyers 555,770
Bloggers 452,000
Bartenders 498,090
Computer Programmers 394,710
CEOs 299,160
Firefighters 289,710

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Amira Hass, of Haaretz, writes on Bitterlemons about the profound separation between West Bank and Gaza and Israel’s effective plan to make a unified Palestinian entity virtually impossible:

The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel’s military superiority…

Israel put a halt to this freedom of movement on the eve of the first Gulf war. Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation: not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories and between Gazans and West Bankers/Jerusalemites. Jews live in this same piece of land within a superior and separate system of privileges, laws, services, physical infrastructure and freedom of movement.

One day, when the archives are opened, we’ll know just how calculated and planned this process was. Meanwhile, we cannot ignore the fact that it commenced at a time when the Cold War and South African apartheid were ending and the international community assessed that conditions were ripe for an Israeli-Palestinian two-state agreement based on the June 4, 1967 lines.

I spend an awful lot of time on this site criticising Israel, so here’s some rare good news that deserves praise: info about an Israeli film regarding gay life in the Orthodox community:

When Chaim Elbaum stood up to field questions last night, he said that Kehilat Yedidya, is the first Israeli Orthodox community to ask him to come to screen and speak about his short film And Thou Shalt Love , and about his personal decision to accept his homosexuality while insisting on remaining an observant and believing Jew.

There is no doubt that the Orthodox Jewish community is largely intolerant of homosexuality, like many religions. But it’s hard to imagine another nation in the Middle East even openly debating these issues (except maybe Beirut in Lebanon. Maybe.)

Let’s hope Obama treats this Israeli attempt to indefinitely postpone any negotiations with the Palestinians with the contempt it deserves. If not, a third intifada is far from unlikely:

The new Israeli government will not move ahead on the core issues of peace talks with the Palestinians until it sees progress in U.S. efforts to stop Iran’s suspected pursuit of a nuclear weapon and limit Tehran’s rising influence in the region, according to top government officials familiar with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s developing policy on the issue.

“It’s a crucial condition if we want to move forward,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon, a member of the Israeli parliament and former ambassador to the United States. “If we want to have a real political process with the Palestinians, then you can’t have the Iranians undermining and sabotaging.”

The emerging Israeli position, a significant change from that of previous governments, presents a challenge for President Obama, who has made quick progress on Palestinian statehood a key foreign policy goal. Obama is also trying to begin engagement with Iran as part of a broad effort to slow its nuclear program and curtail its growing strength in the Middle East.

U.S. officials are wary of linking the two issues and, if anything, would like to do the reverse of what Israel has proposed, by using progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks to curb Iranian influence, which is wielded in the region through anti-Israeli organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Who actually runs Washington again?

The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.

This comes after years of Lieberman warning about the growing Iranian threat. Now, he has dropped Tehran to number two, with Iraq coming third.

Let the usual suspects bleat, but this is certainly good news. It’s called acknowledging Middle East realities:

The former Labour minister Clare Short has been embroiled in a row after inviting senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal to address MPs in Parliament.

Ms Short faced strong criticism from both the British and Israeli governments for her part in organising tonight’s question-and-answer session between Mr Meshal and a backbench committee of MPs.

Mr Meshal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, is based in Damascus and is considered by many to be the No 1 decision maker in the Islamic fundamentalist organisation. He was the target of a bungled Israeli assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997.

He is set to speak to the committee via a video link. The session was arranged when Ms Short and a group of MPs met the senior Palestinian hardliner during a visit to the Syrian capital.

My latest column for New Matilda is about the relationship between Israel and Iran and the prospects for war:

The Israel lobby want to bomb Iran, but calmer heads can see plenty of reasons not to. This time the lobby may not get what it wants, writes Antony Loewenstein

Roger Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times, recently urged Obama to read Trita Parsi’s superb work Treacherous Alliance — The secret dealings of Israel, Iran and the US. Early in it, Parsi places in context the current fear-mongering over Iran’s supposed desire to obliterate Israel:

“Though the Iranian revolution was a major setback for Israel, it didn’t stop the Jewish state from supporting Iran and seeking to improve its relations with the Khomeini government as a counter to Israel’s Arab enemies. Ironically, when Iranian leaders called for Israel’s destruction in the 1980s, Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in Washington lobbied the United States not to pay attention to Iranian rhetoric.”

So what changed? The end of the Cold War and the event of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Parsi explains that, “strategic considerations that had put Iran and Israel on the same geopolitical side in the latter part of the 20th century evaporated. Soon enough, absent any common foes, Israel and Iran found themselves in a rivalry to redefine the regional order after the decimation of Iraq’s military.”

Parsi painstakingly reveals the process by which the Jewish state convinced much of the West that Tehran’s mullahs were irrational and prone to suicidal tendencies, despite the long-standing pragmatic decisions pursued by the Islamic Republic.

On that score, nothing has changed in nearly 20 years.

“Israel stands ready to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites” the London Times claimed last weekend. The story used largely anonymous Israeli sources and the message was clear: if America doesn’t join us, we will hit Iran anyway. An article in Ha’aretz is already talking about a “timetable” for military action. Sometime in 2010 is the new deadline (which in the past has been 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009).

The recent sentence of Iranian/American journalist Roxana Saberi for spying has added complications to the Obama Administration’s slight but significant overtures towards Tehran. However, many key players in America, Israel and Iran have too much invested in warming relations between the Jewish and Islamic states. From the other direction, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made similarly positive noises.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warned Israel last week that any military action would not stop Iran’s nuclear activities and would merely embolden the mullahs to accelerate whatever program it has. Of course, Israel would never consider an attack without first asking for Washington’s permission, and a key Washington insider has claimed that an Israeli attack on Iran is highly unlikely as long as the Americans are in Iraq.

An intriguing angle to the growing diplomatic proceedings was a quote that recently appeared in Israel’s biggest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot. The US Administration is allegedly talking about assisting in the dismantling of the Iranian nuclear “threat” in return for the evacuation of West Bank settlements. A conversation reportedly took place recently between the White House Chief of Staff and Obama confidante, Rahm Emmanuel, and a senior Jewish leader in Washington. Emmanuel is reported to have said: “Over the next four years there will be a permanent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states and we don’t particularly care who will be the prime minister.”

Obama is apparently not playing by the same rulebook as George W Bush.

The idea that America can impose a settlement is fanciful, presuming that’s what Washington truly wants to do. Intense pressure can undoubtedly be applied to the Jewish state to evacuate the thousands of illegal colonies in the West Bank, but the new Benjamin Netanyahu Government is already baulking at entering into discussions with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, in Gaza they’re still suffering.

Thankfully, Obama’s main regional envoy, George Mitchell, has rejected their wish for the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state before negotiations even begin. The fact that Israel’s borders have never been set due to ever-expanding settlement should have made the wish moot. Furthermore, why should the Palestinians have to support the concept of a racially exclusionary nation that actively discriminates against Arabs and Palestinians?

Besides, as a US official said in response: “nations don’t recognise other nations as anything in particular. How a nation state defines itself is the business only of the country itself”. Netanyahu’s ploy is simply to buy time, something the Jewish Diaspora is seemingly willing to allow him to do.

The Australian Jewish establishment remains incapable of engaging with the issues maturely, preferring to offer slogans and Israeli Government talking points. Witness the example of Melbourne University academic Dvir Abramovich expressing in this week’s Australian Jewish News that after the recent visit of Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper, Jews here were upset because of “the fibre of deep connection, loyalty and commitment to Israel means that any attack upon it resonates as if it were an attack on our sons, daughters and brothers.”

Yes, Abramovich’s feelings are hurt, which is clearly far more important than addressing the issues Halper raised, namely the apartheid system in the West Bank. Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf on his blog outlines the direction in which his country is heading, where the occupation and Arabs are invisible and examples of Jewish racism are a daily occurrence.

While the Australian Jewish establishment weeps over a country they infantilise, Ha’aretz has reported that Obama intends to push Israel to open negotiations with both the Palestinians and Syrians in an attempt to “restrain Tehran’s influence and contribute to the diplomatic effort to block Iran’s nuclearisation”. While the prospect of possible negotiations is obviously a good sign, we have been down similar paths before. Talks for the sake of talks. Negotiations that lead nowhere while colonies expand. And there is little chance that the divided Palestinian leadership will be prepared to demilitarise their territory in line with such talks.

Tragically, some of the loudest Jewish voices in Israel and America are almost begging for a military strike against Iran. David Samuels, a contributing editor at Harper’s, writes on Slate about a “rational argument” for an attack. “Who can really argue with the idea of trading the Iranian nuclear bomb for a Palestinian state?”, he asks. This is a curious way to frame the question. The “logic” that he presents for such a strike is that , apparently, “Israel would buy itself another 40 years as the only nuclear-armed country in the Middle East.”

The fact that Samuels can write such irrational and racist tripe without once mentioning the word “occupation” shows that he believes the status quo of Israel as a coloniser of Palestinian land is acceptable. It is, as Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf blogs, symptomatic of the current Israeli mainstream:

“…Many people don’t think there is such a thing as ‘the occupation…Unlike the years before Oslo, almost nobody visits the West Bank anymore, and Palestinians don’t enter Israel. For most Israelis, the Palestinian problem is an abstract concept, almost imaginary. The drive from some Tel Aviv suburbs to the nearest Palestinian city takes about 10 minutes, but these are two separate worlds.”

Nobody can deny the vile anti-Semitism that exists within certain sections of the Iranian political elite (described yet again in a recent New Yorker feature by Jon Lee Anderson), but none of this has anything to do with the current standoff between the West and Tehran. This is all about power politics in the Middle East and who has the right to be top dog.

Ultimately no state has the right to act illegally or aggressively, something the Jewish nation has become particularly good at (as has Iran, at times). The current circus around the Durban II conference in Geneva, with Iran being placed at the centre of world evil, is merely continuing the charade.

A nuclear-free Middle East should be the goal of any negotiations, an outcome curiously absent from virtually all of the current debate.

The Republican hack blog Powerline writes:

Many liberals don’t just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail.

Yes, that’s right. Even considering prosecuting individuals in the Bush administration who advocated and supported torture is a witch-hunt against “conservatives”. By the way, these are the kind of fanatics who remain the strongest public supporters of Israel. With friends like these…

The fact that “conservatives” can sit with a straight face and still support the concept of water-boarding, sleep deprivation etc, shows how utterly removed from reality they are. I look forward to the next time an “enemy” of the US conducts experiments on US soldiers in the name of national security and “conservatives” line up to support it.

What, they won’t?

The UN’s anti-racism conference continues in Geneva but it’s hard to see how this event will achieve anything other than an even greater split between the West and the rest.

The Australian media has covered the event in a fairly predictable way (and only the public, through letter writing, has allowed the debate to flourish).

For mainstream Jewish groups, their suffering is all that matters, their pain, their issues, their oppression. The Palestinians may be under Israeli occupation, largely supported by the Jewish Diaspora, but Arabs should really just stop whinging about it.

Here’s the latest.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who allegedly excised the worst form of Holocaust denial from his speech, has been barred from speaking at a Swiss University due to Zionist pressure. Frankly, the man should be allowed to speak, so he can be challenged strongly, not least encouraged to read some history books about World War II. Let’s not forget, though, that Iran is far more pragmatic than her critics ever want to admit.

A number of pro-Ahmadinejad bloggers praised his speech, however:

Madreseh Ma (”Our School”) says [fa] that the Durban conference became Ahmadinejad’s conference. “What Ahmadinejad did can not be wiped off history’s memory. Now the West is afraid of Iran participating in any conference on racism.”

Paberhnegan (”Bare Foot People”) writes [fa] that Ahmadinejad’s performance in Geneva mad the Iranian people rejoiced. “He does not need to do any publicity for his electoral campaign. What he does is the best publicity.”

Israeli bloggers were less supportive.

The Israeli press is reporting that the Foreign Ministry is pleased with the shambles of Durban (thanks in no small part to Ahmadinejad).

A progressive pro-Israel lobbyist in the US, MJ Rosenberg, seems to have missed the point of the Iranian leader’s speech. The fact that many Western diplomats walked out of his speech didn’t mean the world regarded him as a “boob”. In fact, the vast majority of the delegates sat in their seats and didn’t move an inch. Ahmadinejad is seen as a hero to many precisely because so many in the West refuse to even hear him speak. Short-term grabs for TV are not a substitute for robust policy towards the Islamic Republic.

It’s also interesting to note that the Orthodox anti-Zionists Neturei Karta protested in Jerusalem yesterday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and claimed “Zionists cynically abuse the Holocaust for their own purposes”. It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. Although Darfur has become the issue du jour for many Zionist fanatics (not because they care about the people there but because it takes the spotlight away from Palestine), too many Jews continue to rant and rave about the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust while at the same denying or ignoring the crimes being committed by Israel in Palestine. Witness a piece in today’s Melbourne Age on this very point. This shows a very selective concern for human rights.

The purpose of Durban remains essential, namely finding ways to address genuine human rights issues across the globe. Israel should not be protected from criticism or abuse. It’s a normal country, like any other. This is not 1939 Berlin. We are constantly told by Zionists that Israel is a strong and robust democracy…yet the world’s leading body, the UN, is apparently not allowed to even talk about abuses in Palestine.

Nobody in their right mind would suggest that Libya, Iran or Cuba should lecture the world on human rights, but neither should the US, Britain or Israel. Everybody’s hands are dirty.

At least most of the world can understand the reasons the West is in the dock; its ongoing support for dictatorships and occupations everywhere.

Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine – with no end in sight – is a legitimate subject of mature discussion. Who’s afraid of that?

Murdoch’s Australian editorialises today on the Durban II conference and predictably focuses on the rantings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (rather than even acknowledging the issue of Palestinian suffering):

A fascinating collection of letters in today’s Melbourne Age newspaper, proving once again that debate about Israel/Palestine is far more robust in the public than the mainstream media usually allows:

The most frustrating thing about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s address to the UN anti-racism conference (The Age, 21/4) — aside from his flagrant anti-Semitism — is the truth in his claim that Zionism is a racist, apartheid ideology. When critics of Israel quite rightly denounce the horrendous treatment of Palestinians, but lump it together with a vile racism of their own, not only does it reek of hypocrisy, but it lets Israel and America conveniently off the hook.

If we genuinely want an end to all racism, first we have to reject the equation that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.

Then we must draw parallels between historical examples of the Nazi Holocaust or apartheid South Africa and the reality that Palestinians face every day.

Only then can the most hopeful solution — one free, democratic and secular state for all the people of the Palestinian territory whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian — start to be realised.

Andrew Gilbert, Kingsbury

Role reversal is a farce

A notorious anti-Semite and misogynist was a speaker at a UN conference on racism. Is it not time for the world to acknowledge that the UN Human Rights Commission conference actually promotes racism and misogyny? How can any country whose leaders genuinely believe in human rights attend such a farce?

How can any human rights organisation be taken seriously when it takes part in a circus where Elie Wiesel stands outside as a protester and Ahmadinejad is a speaker?

Elise Margow, Caulfield South

Courage and opportunity

WITH the hysteria over President Ahmadinejad’s speech, we may overlook one thing. As a people suffering daily the effects of Israel’s occupation of their land, and quite undeniably racist treatment at the hands of Jewish settlers supported by Israel’s Government and military, the Palestinians cannot attend this conference because they have no state. So it is incumbent on supporters of Palestinians’ rights to make representations to the UN for them, and Ahmadinejad has had the courage to do so.

It must also be noted that the representatives of European states who walked out of the room had intended to do so, perhaps to shield their ears from some uncomfortable truths; truths that the rest of the delegates subsequently heard and even applauded. It is a small consolation to those of us disgusted by Australia’s boycott of the conference that it thereby lost the opportunity to join in this mock protest.

If this is to be a meaningful conference, why on earth can we not mention Israel, whose new Government quite openly espouses racial discrimination and apartheid and seeks to prevent the Palestinians from having their own state on their own land?

David Macilwain, Sandy Creek

Durban revisited

IT WAS fitting that John Langmore’s piece (Comment & Debate, 21/4) came on the day that dozens of Western diplomats were compelled to walk out of the opening session of the UN racism conference, following the anti-Semitic screed of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Only in an Orwellian universe could a conference purportedly designed to end racism begin with a statement endorsing its full potential.

By boycotting the meetings, Australia joins a list of other nations that learned the sad lesson of Durban: the skill with which well-meaning and vital initiatives are hijacked for political purposes. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s surprise and dismay that Ahmadinejad’s comments did just this reveal a level of naivety that speaks ill of the UN’s leader.

One wonders just how many diplomats forced to lend legitimacy to the Iranian rant by their presence and compelled to flee the chamber would gladly have “lost” this opportunity, along with Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the other nations that wisely refused to be drawn a second time into this charade.

Joel Eigen, Melbourne

I generally agree with the comments by Muzzlewatch about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in Geneva. Much of the talk was actually historically accurate and presented uncomfortable truths for the West and Israel in particular, but his Holocaust denial, aggression and defending of human rights was all a sick joke when one knows the reality in Iran itself.

My enemy’s enemy is not my friend.

However, do we seriously need this?

A day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vicious anti-Israel speech at the UN racism conference in Geneva, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin warned of the dangers he posed in a letter to world parliamentarians, calling Ahmadinejad the second Adolph Hitler.

“This morning, in contrast to Remembrance Days of past years, we, the citizens of Israel, Jews all around the world and every man of conscience faced a new reality that we believed would never reoccur. A reality we had thought was no longer possible in a world that had experienced the horrors of the Second World War,” read the letter.

“73 years after the Berlin Olympics, yesterday the world witnessed the return of Adolf Hitler,” it continued. “This time he has a beard and speaks Persian. But the words are the same words and the aspirations are the same aspirations and the determination to find the weapons to achieve those aspirations is the same menacing determination. Unfortunately, just as at that shameful Olympic event, the world has again given him a platform.”

When will the Zionists let Hitler stay dead? Arafat was Hitler. Bin Laden was Hitler. Hamas and Hizbollah are Nazis. Now Ahmadinejad is Hitler.

Israel has cried wolf far too many times.

Mondoweiss has it right:

Should Israel be the only country discussed in an international anti-racism conference? No. (And this was never the case anyway.) Should Israel definitely be discussed in an international anti-racism conference? Yes!