Antony Loewenstein

Naomi Klein, a new leader in the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, is determined to get traction.

Her recent, eloquent speech in Ramallah on the subject deserves wide support:

So one of the things that we are doing here with BDS is we’re creating another pressure in the Israeli economy that actually does want peace. We are challenging the idea of normalization because when a film that you really want to see isn’t playing in the Jerusalem film festival; when a conference you wanted to go to isn’t going to happen in Tel Aviv because people have decided that they are not going to have it there – that challenges such a central part of Israeli identity. On the other hand, you are going to have more and more companies that are going to go to [the] Israel[i] [government] – and this is what happened in the South African context – and they are going to say what the South African businesses said [...] finally in the late 1980s: “Look! You’ve got to make this stop.” That’s what they said to the De Klerk government. “We can’t take it anymore. We can’t take this BDS campaign. It’s starting to hurt our bottom line.”

Who says America’s Zionist lobby isn’t afraid of the new kid on the block, J Street?

Richard Silverstein reports.

Independent Australian Jewish Voices opinion editor Sara Dowse writes about the ways in which activists are increasingly intolerant of Zionists trying to white-wash Israeli crimes through artistic sponsorship.

Hello Melbourne International Film Festival.

Maghazi, Gaza, 25 July 2009:

From TamilNet:

Prof Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, said Thursday during a United Nations forum on Responsibility to Protect (R2P), that what happened in Sri Lanka was a major Rwanda-like atrocity, in a different scale, where the West didn’t care. “There was plenty of early warning. This [conflict] has been going on for years and decades. Plenty of things could have been done [to prevent it]. But there was not enough interest.” Chomsky was responding to a question that referred to Jan Egeland, former head of UN’s Humanitarian Affairs’ earlier statement that R2P was a failure in Sri Lanka, where Inner City Press (ICP) noted that nearly 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed.

Why oh why are the illegal settlements in the West Bank demonised so much in Israel and the West?

A Zionist wonders:

One of the unwritten laws of war is that the winning side is allowed to do as it pleases after the cessation of hostilities. This law is even more relevant when the victor turns out to be the side that didn’t initiate the war, or didn’t want the war to occur in the first place.

So this is acceptable?

I recently accompanied Israeli peace group Ta’ayush into the West Bank. My friend and colleague Joseph Dana, an American Jew who moved here a number of years ago, weekly documents the actions and films the proceedings. Here’s his report:

Yesterday, members of Ta’ayush set out to have a picnic at an illegal outpost built on Palestinian land next to the settlement of Susya in the southern West Bank. Susya is divided into three places; Palestinian Susya, Jewish settlement Susya and archeological site Susya. Often, the first construction of an illegal outpost is a synagogue which the IDF is less willing to destroy. About one year ago settlers from Susya built a synagogue on the privately owned land of a local Palestinian. The area is known as Flag Hill (Givat HaDegal). Within weeks, the settlers had laid a foundation for one house and sure enough today a house now stands on Flag Hill. The IDF actively protects the house despite there being no full time inhabitants.

We encountered problems before we even arrived at the outpost. A minibus of Ta’ayush activists was stopped at the main checkpoint separating Jerusalem and the southern West Bank. Soldiers asked for our ID cards and without a stated reason held us at the checkpoint for over an hour. Presumably, they were requesting an order from a high commander that would bar us entry to the West Bank, efficiently denying us freedom of movement because we were engaged in left wing actions. This order never came. The commander at the checkpoint wrote down our names and ID numbers while informing us that we were not allowed to enter the south West Bank and if we were found to be in a “military area” we would be detained for 48 hours. This, of course, was a lie as he had no authority to issue such a statement and it was not put in writing. He was trying to frighten us which he failed to achieve. We entered through another checkpoint and eventually made our way to the picnic.

Ta’ayush has been monitoring the expansion of Flag Hill and yesterday decided to have a peaceful picnic in protest of the Army’s active participation in maintaining this outpost. We were a group of Jewish Israelis invited by the Palestinian land owner to have a picnic on his land. We thought, by all accounts, we had every right to be there. As we walked up the hill to the outpost, five or six IDF soldiers came to greet us. Without an order from a commander, they could do nothing so we continued and set up our picnic complete with hummus, watermelon and homemade pita from the land owner. A commander arrived within minutes and pronounced the area a closed military zone ordering us to leave within five minutes or face arrest. We continued to enjoy the picnic as the Army began arresting people, going after Ezra Nawi first.

The IDF arrested three people and removed the rest of us, over 20 people, from the hilltop. We returned to the land owner’s home and waited for word from those arrested. They were driven to a checkpoint about 15 minutes away from Susya and simply dropped off. One of those arrested told me that he was saying to the soldiers, “you are showing me that you broke the law and not me. If I did something wrong arrest me! Take me to a judge. But you are unwilling because I did nothing wrong and you did.”

Breaking the Silence testimonies from soldiers who served in the recent Gaza war. Devastating:

Khan Younis, Gaza, 24 July 2009:

The New York Times reports on the changes in Hamas:

Seven months after Israel started a fierce three-week military campaign here to stop rockets from being fired on its southern communities, Hamas has suspended its use of rockets and shifted focus to winning support at home and abroad through cultural initiatives and public relations.

The aim is to build what leaders here call a “culture of resistance,” the topic of a recent two-day conference. In recent days, a play has been staged, a movie premiered, an art exhibit mounted, a book of poems published and a television series begun, most of it state-sponsored and all focused on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. There are plans for a documentary competition.

“Armed resistance is still important and legitimate, but we have a new emphasis on cultural resistance,” noted Ayman Taha, a Hamas leader and former fighter. “The current situation required a stoppage of rockets. After the war, the fighters needed a break and the people needed a break.”

Just another example of an Israel critic being smeared as anti-Semitic, this time in the UK against author Ben White:

I have come to know this latter strategy quite well. Based on short extracts, or even a single sentence, from two out of the 100 plus articles I’ve published, I have been accused of ‘understanding anti-semitism’ and ‘defending’ Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial.

I know how he feels.

The persecution in Israel of the feminist peace group New Profile is a worrying sign of that country’s fear of robust debate. Are they seriously afraid of a few women criticising the state? Clearly, yes.

Rela Mazali of New Profile gave a speech on May 14 in a Tel Aviv University public forum titled:”Freedom of Speech – Between Theory and Practice: On the limits of free speech in light of the recent detainment and interrogation of nine New Profile activists.”

It’s a powerful piece of work, cleverly outlining the troubles in the Jewish state. These are views that I’m hearing in Israel; fear of Arabs, fear of terrorism, fear of Iran and fear of Obama:

They, I, we, the New Profile movement, are suspected – according to the police and the Attorney General – of the offense of “incitement”. This criminal offense has yet to be enforced in the state of Israel. It has never yet led, to date, to indictments or trial in an Israeli court, for the law that prohibits it is viewed as problematic and overly vague. The authorities, however, have not stopped at pulling this questionable offense out of the law books; for good measure we are also suspected of counseling young men and women to lie to the military towards procuring exemptions from service.

The powers that be are spreading a broad and intentionally ill-defined dragnet; it’s not hard to imagine it snagging something – some word or sentence torn out of its careful context, as already experienced by some of those interrogated.

New Profile is an open, feminist movement of resistance, very rich in words, formulations, challenging viewpoints, unconventional civil-critical thinking and strong public declarations. Of course we’re being criminalized for verbal offenses – what else? For alleged incitement. For alleged lies. Verbal offenses nevertheless punishable by serious sentences.

But the preposterous suspicions we are being framed for are not the real motive for the Attorney General’s instructions or the army’s concerted pressure or the police’s hyperbolic production. All of these were motivated not by lies but rather by the truth we speak; the truth that we’ve been speaking over every available channel for more than a decade, the truth that we are a state trapped in militarized patterns of action, a society addicted to militarized mindsets and the use of force.