Antony Loewenstein

My friend Austin Mackell, a Sydney-based journalist, was recently in Iran at the height of the political turmoil. Amusingly, he was interviewed by CBS and Fox News  (the host seems utterly shocked by pretty much everything Mackell has to say):

My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

Antony Loewenstein writes from New York:

During this year’s Gaza war, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was incapable of condemning Israeli brutality against the Palestinians. Her upcoming visit to Israel (and a few spare minutes with the Palestinian Authority) has caused loud protests across the country.

A petition that I signed asked that, “Every parliamentarian ought to think seriously about the moral implications of Australia normalising relations with a state that is still under investigation for war crimes committed during Israel’s Cast Lead operation.” The Australian smeared critics of the propaganda trip as “Israel’s enemies”.

A new study, released last week by Roy Morgan polling, suggests that the Australian government, Murdoch press and Zionist leaders are profoundly out of step with public opinion over the Israel/Palestine conflict. Israel’s own extreme actions are killing its image and chances of long-terms survival.

Commissioned by the Sydney-based Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine (CJPP) and Adelaide’s Australian Friends of Palestine (AFOPA) organisations, the figures reveal public scepticism towards Israeli claims.

When the 636 Australians aged 18 years and over were asked whether they knew about January’s Gaza war, 38 percent said they knew “a lot” or “a fair amount” about the crisis and 61 percent said they did not know much at all or “nothing”. Of those 38 percent informed respondents, a far bigger percentage expressed sympathy for the Palestinians (44.5 percent) over the Israelis (29.5 percent).

When asked which side of the conflict they supported more, 28 percent sided with the Palestinians, 25 percent with neither and 24.5 percent with the Israelis. Twenty-three percent were unsure.

Journalist and academic Peter Manning, the CJPP Convenor, says that, “the national poll shows the federal Labor Government is out of step with public opinion when it cuddles up to Israel. Julia Gillard’s current delegation to Israel is out of step not only with President Obama’s policies but with what Australians think.”

In relation to Gaza – where Jimmy Carter said this week that the Palestinians there were being treated “like animals” thanks to the Israeli and Western-led blockade – Manning is even harsher:

“Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was well out of step with public opinion when she expressed sympathy [in January] for the few Israelis who died from rocket attacks rather than the 1400 Palestinians being slaughtered by Israeli gunfire on schools, hospitals and residential buildings.”

These results shouldn’t be surprising. Consistent polling in the US shows that American Jews are fundamentally opposed to the neo-conservative worldview and believe in engagement with the Palestinians. A 2007 study by the American Jewish Committee found decent support for a Palestinian state and even a majority of American Democrats polled in January this year questioned the necessity of invading Gaza.

Even more ominously for Israel’s supporters, a new study by The Israel Report finds only 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September. Other results from the study are equally startling; a minority of respondents believe the Israelis are serious about reaching an agreement with the Palestinians.

This is significant and represents the gradual decline of support for Israel in the West. Many Americans I am meeting here in New York confirm the polling; Israel is heading towards permanent apartheid. The “special relationship” between Israel and America is being challenged like never before.

The Australian government is still waiting for the press release from the White House.

Antony Loewenstein is a journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

Iran continues to bubble and boil:

More here and an Israeli view.

My following article appears in leading Israeli daily Haaretz:

During this year’s AIPAC conference in Washington, Executive Director Howard Kohr warned the 7,000-plus crowd that the global movement to “delegitimize Israel” was gathering steam.

“These voices are laying the predicate for an abandonment,” he said. His sentiments were almost apocalyptic: “The stakes in that battle are nothing less than the survival of Israel, linked inexorably to the relationship between Israel and the United States. In this battle we are the firewall, the last rampart.”

The age of Barack Obama has unleashed a global wave of Jewish unease over Israel’s future and the Diaspora’s relationship to the self-described Jewish state. It’s a debate that is long overdue.

Zionist organizations in Australia campaigned loudly in May against the allegedly “anti-Semitic” play Seven Jewish Children, a ten-minute think-piece written by an English playwright accusing Jews of complicity in violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

A Jewish columnist for The New York Times, Roger Cohen, argued in June that the key word among Palestinians now is “humiliation.”

“It’s not good for the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Jewish soul,” he wrote. The Jewish Week editor chastised him for such views – for “the anger, blame and one-sidedness of his argument” – and wondered “whose heart has grown brutal?”

An upcoming academic conference at York University in Toronto exploring the “one-state, bi-national solution” to the conflict was slammed last week by Gerald M. Steinberg, chair of the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University, for fueling “the vicious warfare and mass terror” against Israelis and Palestinians.

The decades-old ability of Zionist groups to manage the public narrative of Israeli victimhood is breaking down. Damning critics has therefore become a key method of control.

But, writes Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, a leading Jewish-American blogger, “whereas these smear tactics once inspired fear in many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work.”

He may be overly optimistic, but alternative Jewish voices are rising who are less concerned with being accused of “self-hatred” or treachery. They see it as their duty to damn what is wrong and not simply support Israeli government policies.

A thinking, more enlightened Judaism is emerging, a necessity in the face of apartheid realities. The cause is human rights, not Zionist exclusion.

Obama’s recent speech in Cairo reflected the new Jewish consciousness. American Jews were certainly an intended audience because if it this group that must challenge their conservative spokespeople to undo years of following Likudnik thinking. As a candidate in 2008, the then Illinois senator said that, “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel.”

Many Jews in the Diaspora have never imagined anything else; it’s been an imagined Israel in their minds for decades. Lawless behavior in the occupied territories is ignored through willful ignorance. Tellingly, the most reliable information about these truths in the West is found online, through blogs and activist Web sites, and not generally in the mainstream media. The gate-keepers are clinging on to the Exodus myths for dear life.

Defining a humane Judaism in the 21st century means condemning the brutal military occupation in the West Bank and resisting the ongoing siege of Gaza.

Jewish-American blogger Phil Weiss, who recently returned from the Strip, quoted a young Gazan saying in dismay: “We are being experimented on.”

The Palestinian narrative is routinely ignored or dismissed in the U.S. and beyond. This must change quickly for any chance of peace to break out in the Middle East. However, peace without justice is guaranteed to fail.

After Obama’s speech in Cairo, where which he almost acknowledged the Palestinian “Nakba” without mentioning it by name, most major Jewish-American groups reacted with caution.

The Anti-Defamation League said it was “disappointed that the President found the need to balance the suffering of the Jewish people in a genocide to the suffering of the Palestinian people resulting from Arab wars.”

This was code for “Nakba”-denial, as pernicious as Holocaust revisionism.

But the liberal J Street lobby, still clinging to the delusion of a viable two-state solution and a “democratic, Jewish homeland,” praised Obama’s “active diplomacy” and claimed that the “overwhelming majority of American Jews” supported an end to the West Bank colonies.

Consistent polls suggest they are right, but the devil is in the detail. Is there real will to back the necessary steps, namely the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank?

Co-author of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt, said recently that he couldn’t understand why more American Jews didn’t realize the cliff Israel was running toward. Did they not see that repression in the occupied territories had defined Israel in the eyes of the world; Perhaps apartheid didn’t bother them. Out of sight and out of mind. Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech at Bar-Ilan University suggested he wasn’t too fussed, either.

I recently attended the Salute to Israel parade in New York; picture 100,000 American Jews marching to celebrate the state, waving flags in praise of the IDF. It was a thoroughly depressing affair. Palestinians didn’t exist; they were invisible. The world’s biggest public display of pro-Israel feeling had no room for 20 percent of the Israeli population (let alone the millions in the West Bank and Gaza.)

These events are actually a sign of desperate projection, not strength. Mainstream Zionism wants to completely shield Jews from the uncomfortable facts of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-determination. Jews were a proud people, a clever people and a victimized people. There was no time to indulge in frivolous Arab trivialities.

But facts have an uncomfortable way of seeping back into view. Colonel Itai Virob, an IDF brigade commander in the West Bank, recently told an Israeli court that, “a slap, sometimes a punch to the scruff of the neck or the chest, sometimes a knee jab or strangulation to calm somebody [a Palestinian] down is reasonable.”

Where is the Jewish outrage over this?

Antony Loewenstein is a New York-based journalist and author of My Israel Question.

Jordanian blogger Hareega on the situation in Iran:

Let Iranians vote for whoever they want to, and if they’re taking the streets and are going bring down Ahmadinajhad let them do it themselves.

A Zionist path to endless war with the Palestinians.

Thank you, Jerusalem Post blogger.

How has the Huffington Post been reporting the rapidly shifting changes in Iran? Blogs, YouTube, Twitter, sources, tips and a lot of caffeine:

Totally freezing colonies in the West Bank is doable. The political will simply isn’t there:

The report in Haaretz on Tuesday whereby the U.S. administration has become convinced that it would be impossible to freeze West Bank settlement construction altogether came as a shock to Israeli peace activists.

Two panels of judges who reviewed the petitions ruled that there was no legal reason to prevent the freezing of the construction and that the policy formulated by the government had only to do with financial considerations, which were up to the sole discretion of the government, and not the legal system.

Interview on ABC Radio’s World Today on British blogger forced to reveal his identity

I was interviewed before on ABC Radio’s World Today program:

PETER CAVE: To some people the appeal of the internet is getting information out in the public domain without revealing where it’s come from.

But that could change after a court in the United Kingdom ruled that bloggers have no right to anonymity.

A policeman who blogged about his life on the force has lost his attempt to stop The Times newspaper from outing him.

He’s since been disciplined and the blog’s been taken down but observers say the case’s implications are far more widespread than that.

Meredith Griffiths reports.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: The Night Jack blog in the United Kingdom gave a behind-the-scenes look at frontline policing as an unnamed officer chronicled his working life in an unnamed town.

The site sometimes got up to a half a million hits a week from people wanting to read anecdotes about local criminals and descriptions of the officer’s struggle with the police bureaucracy.

In April the blogger even won the Orwell Prize for political writing. But it’s all stopped.

The Times newspaper has exposed the blogger as Detective Constable Richard Horton.

He’s received a written warning from the police force and the blog has been taken offline.

Detective Constable Horton tried to stop the newspaper outing him. He sought an injunction in the High Court but the Judge ruled that his right to privacy was outweighed by the public interest in revealing who was behind the blog.

Such issues haven’t really been tested in Australia but media and technology lawyer Peter Leonard from Gilbert and Tobin says he expects courts here would deliver a similar verdict

PETER LEONARD: I think people sometimes assume that a right to anonymity is an absolute right of privacy but they’re actually two quite different things. A right to anonymity means that you can publish something without saying who you are. But that doesn’t carry with it a right of privacy that’s enforceable against court process and against a subpoena by a law enforcement agency.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Detective Constable Horton’s lawyers argued that his name should remain secret because the account of his daily work was in the public interest.

In that way his blog was part of a growing trend in the UK, but lawyer Peter Leonard says that’s not really being reflected in Australia.

PETER LEONARD: Certainly the Federal Government has said that it’s encouraging whistleblower activity in appropriate areas and there are moves to change the law. However I think that in Australia it is still very much the exception for anyone working in the public service to be publishing comment on their activity, whether anonymous or not.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Political blogger and journalist Antony Loewenstein says Australia hasn’t yet developed a culture where bloggers give the inside story or get the big scoops. But he reckons that’s where it’s going.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: I think in Australia it’s inevitable that there’s going to be an explosion in fact of anonymous blogging and anonymous writing in general because there’s at least a sizeable minority of people in society who are concerned, including myself, of the decrease in investigative journalism by the mainstream press for financial reasons and other reasons.

So therefore, it’s vital that information gets out there and gets released and gets discussed and disseminated, and if that has to be done by anonymous blogging or anonymous sources, I’ve got no issue with that. My only concern is that people are protected for spurious reasons. The problem often is that journalists in the West often give individuals anonymity for no particular reason and that to me is a concern. There needs to be a very, very convincing reason why someone is quoted without giving their name.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Antony Loewenstein says bloggers must be held accountable

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: The lawyers of Richard Horton obviously made quite a compelling case because in his instance it seems pretty likely that some information getting out there ruins his chances of publishing what he wants to publish. But at the same time the judgement of that was solely his, only his. And if you worked for a media organisation and you’ve edited et cetera, et cetera, done some kind of checks and balances, I guess that’s my only concern about this. I’m not criticising him per se, I’m just more aligned to the reality that transparency is important.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Still he has some sympathy for Detective Constable Horton

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: My fear is that the political and legal establishment will want to try and curtail people like this gentleman because they worry about the so-called lack of accountability rather than – in other words, what he’s trying to release is going to come secondary to outing someone like that. In other words, they want to protect their arses as opposed to outing the information and that to me is always dangerous.

MEREDITH GRIFFITHS: Antony Loewenstein says, despite his concerns about transparency and accountability, in most cases he’d still rather see information make it into the public domain.

PETER CAVE: Meredith Griffiths reporting.

The documentary A Case for Israel looks like a sad case of desperation. Netanyahu, Barak, Glick, Dershowitz, Sharansky. The same voices, no mention of the occupation and demonisation of the Palestinians. This kind of propaganda simply no longer works:

Former US president Jimmy Carter on Tuesday met Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in the Gaza Strip, where he called for a lifting of Israel’s blockade, saying Palestinians are being treated “like animals.”