Antony Loewenstein

A new book about Albert Einstein explains his opposition to a Jewish state in the Middle East:

In reality, while Einstein was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, he repeatedly warned that a “narrow nationalism” may arise if a Jewish-only state was founded and peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians was not achieved. Instead, Einstein advocated Cultural Zionism — the creation of Jewish cultural and educational centers within a bi-national state with equal rights for both Arabs and Jews.

When Einstein was offered the Israeli presidency, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion stated, “I’ve had to offer him the post because it was impossible not to, but if he accepts we are in for trouble.” In a letter written in the same year, Einstein compared the Zionists’ project with that of the Pilgrims, noting, “how tyrannical, intolerant and aggressive [they] became after a short while.” And in Einstein’s last media interview, which ran in the New York Post a month before his death, he stated “We had great hopes for Israel at first. We thought it might be better than other nations, but it is no better.”

Amira Hass in Haaretz:

Israel forbids books, clothing and musical instruments to be brought into Gaza Strip.

One more example of how the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel is gathering steam, mostly far away from the mainstream media.

The Edinburgh Film Festival, after pressure from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) and film-maker Ken Loach, has decided against accepting money from the Israeli Embassy.

Loach’s statement was strong:

I’m sure many film makers will be as horrified as I am to learn that the Edinburgh International Film Festival is accepting money from Israel. The massacres and state terrorism in Gaza make this money unacceptable. With regret, I must urge all who might consider visiting the festival to show their support for the Palestinian nation, and stay away.

The SPSC released the following statement on Friday:

Ginnie Atkinson, Managing Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) has confirmed that EIFF will not be taking Israeli Embassy money to help fund the 2009 film festival. Atkinson was unwilling to admit EIFF was influenced by Scottish PSC, or by the protest emails the EIFF has received since Tuesday, and said that the decision was “a natural conclusion to having realised that we had made a mistake in the first place”. Their decision follows the Scottish PSC call earlier today for a protest outside the Filmhouse in Edinburgh where the EIFF is based. Mention of the Israeli Embassy on the EIFF’s ‘Honour Board’ was removed after Atkinson and the EIFF admitted that “it was a mistake to accept the £300 from the Israeli Embassy”.

This is the kind of non-violent protest that is starting to have an effect.

Al-Jazeera English on the Palestinian day of mourning, May 15, reported from a devastated Gaza:

Palestinian MP Haneen Zoabi tells the Age why a Jewish state is utterly incompatible with democracy:

I do not accept Zionism. How could I support a movement that, by design, excludes me? My struggle is for a state that governs for all of its citizens, not one that discriminates against people because they are not Jewish. I am against the definition of Israel as a Jewish state because that, by definition, is a denial of me, who was born in this country and yet is not accepted by it. Where does the state celebrate Palestinian culture? What national symbols recognise Palestinian identity? We are indigenous to this land, yet we are not welcome in it.

Haaretz journalist Reuven Pedatzur cuts through the spin:

The continual harping on the Iranian threat stems from domestic Israeli politics and a desire to increase investment in the security realm…

Dan Diker, the foreign policy analyst at the neo-conservative Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, outlines his perspective on the upcoming meeting between Barack Obama and Benyamin Netanyahu:

One of the difficult differences between Netanyahu and Obama concerns their fundamentally different views over the linkage of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to the containment of Iran’s nuclear charged race to destroy Israel and achieve regional dominance. Netanyahu rejects linking the Palestinian issue to Iran. His view is that Iran is a nuclear existential threat to Israel and Arab states via terror proxies and must be stopped now at all costs. Period. The Palestinian conflict predated Iran’s ascension and has not been resolved over the past 61 years; it will likely continue to be a major problem even after the Iranian regime is contained or neutralized.

Obama and his advisors simply don’t see it that way. They are convinced that making great strides towards establishing a Palestinian state will help coalesce the Arab world against Iran. Arab leaders have been whispering in Obama’s ear since his first day in office that Iran is undermining Arab regimes by exploiting the Palestinian issue via Hezbollah and Hamas to inflame the Arab street. This is a silly argument. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist servant groups are ideologically and religiously motivated, they are not driven by Palestinian or other grievances. Besides, Iranian-backed Hamas has been subverting the US and Israeli backed Palestinian Authority first in Gaza and now in the West Bank; it will never allow a US-backed Palestinian state to arise.

Netanyahu and Obama can find a way to square the circle on this issue. I understand from a trusted friend who attended a small closed door dinner with Rahm Emanuel at last Week’s AIPAC conference that Obama’s close confidant was misquoted on the Palestinian-Iran linkage issue. The source said Emanuel specifically did not make Israeli Palestinian peace progress a precondition of US-Israel cooperation on Iran but merely suggested that it would make coalition-building far easier.

I expect the storm clouds to pass and to see at least partly sunny diplomatic weather in Washington next week.

The Zionist message? Don’t even think of progressing any movement on peace with the Palestinians until Iran is bombed to smithereens.

One can only despair over this.

The global controversy over the play Seven Jewish Children – played out in Australia as well by a handful of paranoid Jews who see anti-Semitism under their dinner tables – now has a Palestinian brother. Mondoweiss reports:

Tell her that Dr. Salman [Abu Sitta, chronicler of erased Palestine] warns the Jewish people:

“. . . the history of Jews will ultimately be marked indelibly, and above all other historical events, by what they have done in Palestine.”

Palestinian MP Haneen Zoabi (interviewed on Radio National Breakfast on Friday) spoke to ABC Radio PM last night. This took place before a well-attended event at New South Wales Parliament House last night to commemorate 61 years since the Nakba of Palestinian dispossession. Zoabi was the key speaker, in front of parliamentarians and members of the community:

MARK COLVIN: So how will Palestinians react as the new relationship between the US and the Obama administration coalesces?

Hanin Zoabi is the first woman elected to the Israeli Parliament on an Arab ticket.

She’s visiting Australia as a guest of the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine.

I asked Hanin Zoabi about the apparent change in emphasis of American Middle East diplomacy.

HANIN ZOABI: We must not exaggerate the changes in the American, the USA policies, after all Obama administrative said they are committed, the USA committed, to a two state solution, which really indicates nothing for the Palestinians because we have been talking about a two state solution since Oslo and since Oslo the previous 13 years odd, Israel was negotiating from one hand and expanding settlements from the other hand. The settlements have been expanded three times since Oslo.

MARK COLVIN: But Joseph Biden made this speech where he said the settlements must stop and you must pull back from existing settlements.

HANIN ZOABI: Unless you say that you are freezing your support to Israel if Israel didn’t, not just stop expanding settlements, but she must also commit itself to dismantling the existing settlements.

MARK COLVIN: Yes, but don’t you see that as a change of emphasis at least from the United States?

HANIN ZOABI: There is a change, I think there is a change that the USA has reached the conclusion that its policy during the last six year seven year, during the administrative…

MARK COLVIN: The Bush administration.

HANIN ZOABI: The Bush administration was not an official policy and she needs now to reconsider its policy but she cannot. She has restrictions to the extent she can’t push Israel. She is at the end committed to support Israel, without putting pressure on Israel to really reach a just peace.

This will not shift. I think that we will witness a change in the Iraqi issue, in the Iranian issue and maybe in the Lebanese issue but not much on the Palestinian issue.

MARK COLVIN: And what about…?

HANIN ZOABI: That shift will be in the region but the Palestinian issue will not gain such a change.

MARK COLVIN: And what about the fact that there is a really hardline administration in Israel and that Avigdor Lieberman is the hardest line of all? He’s the foreign minister.

HANIN ZOABI: As a Palestinian I would say that Lieberman reflects in a more honest way the policy of Israel. So while the Kadima government, the previous government, said I am committed, she said that they are committed to negotiation but the Palestinian has, loses more from negotiation without results than from a clear policy of Israel saying that she even is not committed to a negotiation.

Me as a Palestinian, I see that the only winner from these negotiations is Israel because what Tzipi Livni, the previous candidate for government, said that this negotiation with Ramallah, with Abu Mazen, enables Israel to continue its policy in Gaza Strip, continue assassinations and continue building settlements.

So Israel used this negotiation in order to support her policies on the ground and in order to put new facts on the ground and to create this new reality, which make it so, so difficult for a sovereign Palestinian country.

At the end, when Obama says two countries, he must say a sovereign country Palestinian country and he must say at the same time that these settlements and the existing settlements, not just stopping the expanding of the settlements, and this massive building in Jerusalem is blocking a sovereign Palestinian country.

MARK COLVIN: We know that the two-state solution is your goal; but how do you get there?

HANIN ZOABI: I get there first of all it is part of my solution because when I said two state solution, I don’t agree with Israel as a Jewish state. I don’t mean that Israel should be a state for the Jewish because I am Palestinian, one of 1.2-million Palestinians in Israel and by saying Israel is a Jewish state, what I say, I say that I exclude myself from the definition of the state and I say that I have no right in Palestine as my homeland. I live in Nazareth, I didn’t immigrate to Israel, Israel decided to emigrate to me.

MARK COLVIN: This refers to Netanyahu’s demand that Israel be seen as a Jewish state.

HANIN ZOABI: Yeah but he is not alone in this. I think since Sharon this was a new emphasis, not a new demand, but a new emphasis for the whole Arab world and for the Palestinian to address them to demand them to admit, recognise Israel as a Jewish state and I think and the reality indicates that Jewish state is racist, discriminative definition. Because then you legitimise discriminating against me in order to give my land to the Jewish and new immigrants.

MARK COLVIN: So you want to go back to 1948, you want to abolish the Israeli state altogether?

HANIN ZOABI: No, no, no, no, no. I think that a just peace must recognise Nakba and the outcome of Nakbah in 1948,

MARK COLVIN: What is Nakbah?

HANIN ZOABI: It is the Arabic word…

MARK COLVIN: It means catastrophe.

HANIN ZOABI: Catastrophe exactly.

MARK COLVIN: And that’s how you see 1948?

HANIN ZOABI: Of course it’s a catastrophe.

MARK COLVIN: The establishment of a Jewish state.

HANIN ZOABI: The establishment of the Israeli state as it was. It could be we could reach a coexistence, an equal coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis in the same country, without expelling Palestinians.

MARK COLVIN: Could you?

HANIN ZOABI: Without expelling Palestinians. Now you cannot deny history; history and the rights of indigenous people. Israel will not have a secure and just peace without recognising. If Israel is committed to talk about a just peace well, let’s talk about refugees, let’s have Israel recognise the right of refugees to return back to their homes.

MARK COLVIN: Hanin Zoabi – the first woman elected to the Israeli Parliament on an Arab ticket.

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, which you can hear in full at our website from later this evening.

Aussie journo and blogger mate Reuben Brand, currently in Pakistan, picks up on a story that amuses…and disturbs:

“The Explorers Program” is an affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America, a one time fun, educational program for childern. But learning how to tie knots and earn first aid badges are a thing of the past, as new millitant training camps are now all the rage. The Explorers Program are training thousands of their young members, some as young as 13 years old,  in counter terrorism tactics and illegal immigrant border control.

Bernard Avishai on the troubled Israeli soul:

…In the early 1960s, Israeli elites saw the Jewish state so much as a pioneering adventure–the culture of Hebrew labor, the dignity of self-defense–that they tended to bury talk of the Holocaust, which seemed to them a symbol of Diaspora Jewry’s woeful path. Ben-Gurion staged the Eichmann trial just to correct what he took to be Zionism’s aloofness from the suffering of Holocaust survivors. Foreign dignitaries, meanwhile, were taken to the kibbutz, or the Hebrew University. Today, guests are whisked off so quickly to Yad Vashem that they cannot tell the difference between its gloom and their jet-lag. Their speeches must include a syllogism in which the “Holocaust” forms the first part and “the Jewish state” the second. They cannot just express their fellow-feeling. They will be graded for levels of sincerity, from “cold” to “understanding.” Mention Iran and you get extra credit.

Torture is back in the news. My friend, Mike Otterman, author of American Torture, talks on a leading Dutch current affairs program about the issue: