Antony Loewenstein

Noam Chomsky reminds us that the US has long abused citizens. The message? Don’t be so shocked about the “war on terror”:

Over the past 60 years, victims worldwide have endured the CIA’s “torture paradigm,” developed at a cost that reached $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy in his book A Question of Torture. He shows how torture methods the CIA developed from the 1950s surfaced with little change in the infamous photos at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. There is no hyperbole in the title of Jennifer Harbury’s penetrating study of the U.S. torture record: Truth, Torture, and the American Way. So it is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang’s descent into the global sewers lament that “in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way.”

None of this is to say that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did not introduce important innovations. In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their own government-established torture chambers. As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: “What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.”

The London Independent reports that Israel ain’t serious about peace and will continue this charade for as long as possible:

The Israeli Defence Minister yesterday issued one of the government’s bluntest warnings against linkage between its stance on a two-state solution with the Palestinians and efforts to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power.

In what also appeared to be a defence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not committing himself to a Palestinian state, Ehud Barak declared: “These… words will not cause Iran to stop its centrifuges.”

The Labour leader added: “Israel has already said in the past ‘two states for two peoples’ and this didn’t cause the Palestinians to fall into our arms and reach all the tough decisions that are required.”

Just the usual bluster and lies.

But this titbit is interesting:

Benny Begin, a minister in Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party, will this week attend a prize giving for Noam Arnon, the leader of the notably hardline Hebron settlers for his achievements in “putting Zionism into action”.

Here’s a recent report about fundamentalist Zionist settlers in Hebron.

Next time you’re thinking about drinking at Starbucks, don’t:

MJ Rosenberg reminds us why the world should be highly skeptical of the Israeli government. History is a guide:

You want to know what Prime Minister Netanyahu is up to? Here it is, from the New York Times on June 27, 1992. The Likud prime minister then was Yitzhak Shamir who had just been defeated by Yitzhak Rabin.

“Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was quoted in a published interview today as saying he wanted to drag out peace talks with the Palestinians for a decade while vastly increasing the number of Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories.

“Had he held on to his office instead of being defeated this week in Israel’s national election, Mr. Shamir reportedly said, ‘ I would have conducted negotiations on autonomy for 10 years and in the meantime we would have reached half a million people” in the West Bank.’ “

Shamir, of course, is one of Netanyahu’s heroes and mentors. Sixteen years later, he has the same strategy Shamir did. He says he will negotiate but he will not commit himself to Palestinian statehood.

The only questions are (1) why would the Palestinians negotiate on that basis and (2) why would an American President press them to participate in such a charade.

The answers. They won’t. And he won’t.

I wish I shared his optimism.

An interesting letter in today’s Melbourne Age about Monday’s staging of Seven Jewish Children:

The saga over the play Seven Jewish Children again highlights the poor quality of debate on issues of anti-Semitism and the Middle East. After several days of intensive media scrutiny, and the usual acrimony between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups, I am still unclear about the content of the play and the reason it is criticised.

In part, this may represent a failure of the detractors to adequately make their case. I understand that anti-Semitism can manifest in subtle and insidious forms that must be confronted and condemned.

However, groups such as the Australian Union of Jewish Students do themselves and the Jewish community a disservice by failing to properly unpack the issues. It is clear that activists on both sides are happy to revert to dumb symbolic acts of partisanship, waving Israeli flags and Palestinian headscarves in each other’s faces, rather than putting their case to the public.

In this intellectual vacuum, everyone gets to huff and puff, media proprietors make a killing, and no one learns a thing.

Eli Court, Richmond

Israel’s method of war is brutal, indiscriminate and criminal. Hardly a model for anybody.

Unless, of course, you’re a rogue state such as Sri Lanka and you need some weapons for your own “war on terror”.

Israel will sell arms to pretty much any dictatorship, no matter how barbaric.

Let’s not forget that Israel was one of South Africa’s most reliable allies during its dark apartheid years.

It’s not hard to see why.

(Thanks to Lebanese Chess for the tip.)

And the idea of so-called Jewish majority in Israel fades away:

Jerusalem will lose its Jewish majority by 2035, when the number of Jews and Arabs in the city will reach parity, the director general of the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies said yesterday.

Australia’s major Zionist lobby AIJAC in today’s Crikey:

Netanyahu is putting the building blocks in place so a viable Palestinian state can one day emerge. When it finally does, history will likely judge Netanyahu’s second term as a key part of that journey.

Clearly telling the truth isn’t a prerequisite for working at AIJAC.

George Friedman writes in Strafor about the skewed worldview of the Israelis:

There are many in Israel, particularly among Netanyahu’s supporters, who believe Israel is a great power. It isn’t. It is a nation that is strong partly because it lives in a pretty weak neighborhood, and partly because it has very strong friends. Many Israelis don’t want to be told that, and Netanyahu came to office playing on the sense of Israeli national power.

After the anger over the Melbourne reading last night of the play Seven Jewish Children, the most absurd comment came on ABC TV Lateline from Danny Lamm of the Zionist Council of Victoria:

It’s the entire opposite of the truth. It’s Goebbels returning in 2009.

Australia is 1933 Germany? I guess using the Nazis to make your point is only unacceptable if done by anti-Zionists and critics of Israel.

Tony Karon, writing in Rootless Cosmopolitan, challenges the delusions of Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief American stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg:

Netanyahu, and Goldberg, are products of an apocalyptic Jewish nationalism whose toxic effects are brilliantly critiqued by Avraham Burg who calls it “a fearful Judaism, a paranoid Zionism”. Burg makes clear in his book that evoking a constant fear of recurrent Holocausts has been an organizing principle of modern Israel, maintaining cohesion and support from Jewish communities abroad by making the specter of annihilation its daily bread. But as the majority of the world’s Jews live in relative safety (outside of Israel, and even within), that starts to become increasingly absurd. Young American Jews don’t feel that their gentile peers are about to turn on them and build a new Auschwitz, which is why identification with Israel is on the wane among young American Jews. Because survival-in-the-face-of-annihilation is the only narrative on offer from the Zionists, and as Burg asks, for what moral purpose have we survived? That’s not a question the likes of Netanyahu and Goldberg can answer.

What would happen if more Jews actually wanted to know about Palestinian history and understand its trauma?

Somewhere outside Tel Aviv yesterday two busloads of Israelis were taken on a tour of their history. It is a history many of them will have heard a version of before, but few will have heard the one presented to them on this trip through long-destroyed indigenous Palestinian villages in the greater Tel Aviv area.

The tour was organised by Zochrot, an Israeli non-governmental organisation whose mission is to teach Israeli Jews about the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, when about 800,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes and lands in 1948, never to be allowed to return. Organisers take Israelis the length and breadth of the country, mapping Palestinian villages destroyed by Israeli paramilitary units in the aftermath of 1948, planting signs in the appropriate places and advocating the right of return of Palestinian refugees.