Antony Loewenstein

Gaza, 23 July 2009:

Showing solidarity with Gaza and Hamas in a very distinct way:

Representatives of the anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta sect paid a brief visit on Thursday to militantly anti-Israel Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip.

The group arrived in Gaza Wednesday night, marking the first time envoys from the tiny ultra-Orthodox sect have come to Gaza since Hamas seized control in June 2007.

The sect denounces Israel’s existence and traditionally embraces its enemies – including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Neturei Karta members famously hugged at a Holocaust denial conference in December 2006.

Four sect representatives from the U.S. sat down with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Thursday, after crossing into the territory through Egypt the night before with dozens of other pro-Palestinian activists. Israel, which maintains a strict blockade of Gaza, would not let them cross through its passages with the territory.

“We feel your suffering, we cry your cry,” said Rabbi Yisroel Weiss upon arriving Wednesday night.

“It is your land, it is occupied, illegitimately and unjustly by people who stole it, kidnapped the name of Judaism and our identity,” said Weiss, wearing the black hat, black coat and long side-curls typical of ultra-Orthodox Jews. His delegation left Thursday.

I interviewed Weiss in New York in June.

The recent visit to Israel by Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and a bunch of Murdoch columnists has clearly paid off for the Zionist lobby. Witness this piece by a Melbourne Murdoch editor, Alan Howe:

The people of Gaza are set to be the first to bomb themselves back to the Stone Age. Serves them right…

The problem for Gazans is that a survey after the Israeli action showed that almost half the population believed Hamas had won, that more than half believed acts of terror should continue, and there was a sharp rise in the number who wanted the rocket attacks to continue.

The people of Gaza have a right to keep looking over their shoulder. That’s where they are going.

Israeli-American Joseph Dana, residing in Jerusalem, asks a profound question about modern-day Israel: does violence pay and are religious, Jewish fundamentalists the acceptable face of mainstream Zionism?

The settler movement routinely uses violence against the authorities of the state with little or no ramifications. I am not referring to acts of violence against Palestinians, which is a routine aspect of settler life. Rather, I am talking about settlers using force against the IDF, the Israel Police and the Israel Border Guard. I have seen settlers punch police officers at various outposts and experience no consequences for their actions.

On the other hand, non-violent leftist Israelis are often attacked with grave force by the state authorities.

The Guardian editor has a vision for a viable, media future:

[Alan] Rusbridger also laid out his vision of what he called “mutualised news,” which he said would “take down the walls” of traditional media companies by distributing information through new means such as social networking site Twitter and by asking the public to get involved through experiments such as “crowd sourcing”, used by the Guardian to help with its investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests.

“It was a piece of conventional reporting and tapping into the resources of a crowd,” he said. “There are thousands of reporters in any crowd nowadays. There was nothing to stop people from publishing those pictures but it needed the apparatus of a mainstream news organisation for that to cut through and have impact.”

He added: “What I like about idea of mutualised news is it gets over the concept of us versus them. It is us and them. It blurs the line between journalists and reader. It is much more diverse and plural than a conventional newspaper. It gives us a huge extensive resource.”

Rusbridger denied it would be the end of conventional journalism, saying that trained journalists and the public could work together, adding it was “futile” to deny that “something interesting and exciting is going on here.”

“There are many things that mainstream media do which in collaboration with others is still really important. The ability to take a large audience and amplify things and to give more weight to what would [otherwise] be fragments. Somebody has to have the job of pulling it all together.”

First, we have an Israeli government wanting to forbid Arabs students from learning their history.

Now, religious fundamentalists of a different kind:

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state’s education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state’s history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America’s moral soul, want lessons to emphasise the part played by Christianity in the founding of the US and that religion is a civic virtue.

It’s a start, from inside Israel itself:

Yesterday’s Haaretz featured a front-page petition, signed by well-known Israeli writers, artists, entertainers, and intellectuals on the center-left side of the political spectrum, calling for an independent investigation into the IDF’s conduct of the Gaza Operation.

Here’s the petition in Hebrew.

Michael Oren, the new Israeli Ambassador to the US, tells Jeffrey Goldberg about the complex relationship between America and Israel:

Israel needs the political and economic support of American Jewry, and American Jewry increasingly needs the spiritual infusion of the Jewish state. … In recent years, we have found that a 10-day visit to the state of Israel by American Jewish youth does more for Jewish identity than seven years in Hebrew school.

Illegal, Jewish settlers in the West Bank worry about their safety.

Perhaps they should think a little harder about why some Palestinians dislike being thrown off their lands.

Many Zionists (sometimes rightly) accuse Palestinian school children of not being taught the full picture of the Middle East. How is this decision by Israel any less democratic (and Israel claims to be a democracy)?

The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister said Wednesday.

The reference to “al-naqba,” the Arabic word catastrophe, as Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation, was inserted by a dovish Israeli education minister in 2007.

The phrase remains contentious six decades later, a symptom of the continuing divisions in Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify politically with their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, some Israeli Jews accuse Israeli Arabs of disloyalty to the country.

Israel’s current government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line Likud Party, includes members who favor cracking down on Israeli Arabs by ordering loyalty oaths or even moving them out of Israel.

“No other country in the world, in its official curriculum, would treat the fact of its founding as a catastrophe,” Education Minister Gideon Saar of Likud told Israel’s parliament on Wednesday.

Israeli Arab lawmaker Hana Sweid accused the government of “naqba denial.”

A report on 80 + 1 by Californian technlogy writer (and friend) Cyrus Farivar:

Jews and Palestinians in Israel have been at each others’ throats basically since the British showed up and screwed everything up. It’s been an intractable struggle that’s been going on for the better part of a century.

The latest episode incarnation this week involves the US trying to get a Jewish-American hotel owner and “millionaire bingo magnate,” who is trying to turn his Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem into a block of apartment buildings. The U.S. government is calling for a halt to the project, saying that it represents new settlement on the internationally-recognized Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem.

Irving Moskowitz, a longtime supporter of conservative Israeli and American politics and equally long contraversial agent provacateur, pulled the same stunt about 12 years ago — and has a longstanding relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As if that weren’t weird enough, now, the Israeli foreign minister and ultra-nationalist, Avigdor Lieberman, is calling for a 1941 photograph to be circulated in Israel’s embassies around the world. The photo is of Adolf Hitler meeting with the then-grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, and presumably is meant to imply that Palestinians then and now were Nazi collaborators and perhaps have the same moral standing today as neo-Nazis.

Not surprisingly, the Agence France Presse is reporting that “[f]oreign ministry staff opposed the move.”

The following letter appeared in a recent edition of the Australian Jewish News:

Sorry Sal Salbe, but on balance, Greg Sheridan is correct (AJN 10/07). Antony Loewenstein might occasionally criticise the Iranian regime on his blog, but compared to his repeated and hysterical media condemnations of Israel he is, as Sheridan phrased it, listless.
Proof positive is his willingness to be interviewed by government-controlled Iranian media outlets to promote his views on Israel, thus serving the interests of a regime and leadership that Loewenstein ostensibly savages. That shows where his real priorities lie.
GEORGE GREENBERG
Malvern, Vic