Antony Loewenstein

Life in the West Bank is something I discuss constantly on this site and I intend to try and increase that coverage. Here’s a good piece in the Guardian today about a settler who says he wants to leave his illegal home and claims many would follow if offered compensation by Israel.

But it’s also vital to understand the mindset of the fundamentalist, Jewish settlers themselves. Who are they and what do they want? It’s actually pretty simple: no Arabs in their lives and more land.

So, in light of today’s absurd Guardian headline, “Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks“, here’s last week’s missive from One Jerusalem, a group dedicated to never dividing the holy city:

Several sources have informed One Jerusalem that the Obama Administration is planning to significantly step up the pressure on Israel by announcing a comprehensive plan for Israel and the Palestinians at the opening of the United Nations General in September.

Picture this: The anti-Israel nations of the world surrounding President Obama as he demands that Israel give up sovereignty over Jerusalem, abandon settlements, and recognize a terrorist state on the West Bank.

If this happens, Israel will be isolated from the rest of world in a very dramatic manner.

And a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu released today by Women in Green, settlers who loathe Arabs and want to expand, expand, expand:

To our Prime Minister,

Shalom u-berachah

On the eve of your trip to Europe, we wish to draw your attention to the struggle that is taking place at Shdema, that is very close to Har Homa, a neighborhood that was established in the south of Jerusalem, thanks to you, thanks to your firm stand on the Jewish people’s right to build in Eretz Israel.

The story of Shdema encapsules the problematic Eretz Israel reality. What happens in Shdema is happening in all the areas of Judea and Samaria, and is indicative of a very grave problem: the policy of surrender and concessions conducted by a single individual: Ehud Barak.

Shdema, a hill with a military camp located on the outskirts of Bethlehem, 5 kilometers from Har Homa (Jerusalem), and 8 kilometers from Tekoa, that was abandoned three years ago by the IDF, is in Israeli-controlled Area C.

The Beit Sahur municipality submitted a request to the Minister of Defense to build a park and hospital on the entire area of the camp. The request is on Ehud Barak’s desk; permission has still not been granted. This did not bother the Arabs of Beit Sahur, with the encouragement and funding of European organizations and USAID, to build an entire complex of structures and installations for various activities on the northern area of the camp, at the foot of the hill. In a report that appeared in the Jerusalem Post two weeks ago, USAID admits to have mistakenly contributed to the illegal Arab construction in Shdema. The Arabs are not satisfied with that. They want to erect a hospital on the rest of the area of Shdema.

It is interesting that the Arabs want to build specifically in Shdema, when around Shdema, the Arabs control tens of thousands of dunams in Area A, on which they can establish a hospital and whatever they wish. But no, they insist on taking over our Area C, the minuscule area in the region that belongs to Gush Etzion.

A year and a half ago we established the Committee for Jewish Shdema. Since then, every week, we conduct activities at Shdema (lectures, concerts, exhibitions, classes) to demonstrate a Jewish presence and safeguard the site. If not for the activity by the Committee for Jewish Shdema, in cooperation with the Gush Etzion Regional Council and with the support of Women in Green, the entire area of the camp would already be in the hands of the Arabs. Our natural and simple demand: that the entire Shdema hill (Area C) remain in the hands of the State of Israel and the people of Israel.

Shdema is situated at an extremely strategic location, that enables Jewish continuity between Jerusalem and eastern Gush Etzion, and provides security for those traveling on the eastern Gush Etzion road. The IDF is aware of the strategic need for Shdema, but Ehud Barak’s political considerations apparently overweigh Israel’s national and security considerations, and endanger our continued control of Shdema.

We alerted the IDF that the Arabs are building at the bottom of the hill without permits and are taking control of Area C. The subcommittee of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, that already visited Shdema twice, specifically ordered not to allow the transfer of Shdema to Arab hands. Coalition chairman and subcommittee chairman MK Ze’ev Elkin demanded that the brigade commander and the Civil Administration not allow the Arabs to continue building and using the structures. But the Arab construction continued, and still continues, despite the cessation of work orders and demolition orders, and ramified Arab activity continues at the site every day, despite the order to cease use of the structures.

In contrast, the enforcement of the “law” against the activities of the members of the Committee for Jewish Shdema continues in full severity. Except for permission to stay at the site for a few hours once or twice a week, we are not permitted to renovate the site in a serious way or to remain there on a permanent basis.

This week we were informed that the building plans that the Arabs submitted for the construction of a hospital on the entire hill were returned to them by the Civil Administration, to amend the plan, to remove from it the top of the hill, for the IDF’s operational needs. The area of the hill is minuscule, and if, Heaven forbid, it will be surrounded by Arab construction, the top, as well, will not remain in our hands…

In light of this, we wish to correct matters.

* It is inconceivable that the policy of a minority party will decide on the transferal of the people of Israel’s possessions to the Arab enemy!

* It is inconceivable that the legality or illegality of an area, activity, outpost, or structure are dependent on Ehud Barak’s signing or not signing his approval!

* It is inconceivable that basic powers pertaining to the existence of the people of Israel and the State of Israel will be exclusively in the hands of Ehud Barak!

Prime Minister, we appeal to you to apply all your national and Zionist influence so that the minority position among the people will not be decisive, but instead, the policy of the majority, whom you represent. The majority of the people voted for a policy of safeguarding Eretz Israel. The majority of the people understands that, without Eretz Israel, without the actual territory, without the earth under our feet, we are in retreat from our spiritual and strategic assets, and we will not be able to survive.

Shdema is a microcosm of what is happening throughout Eretz Israel. Restoring Shdema to Jewish hands and to full Israeli control will deliver a clear message that the people of Israel is safeguarding its homeland.

With the blessing of building, growth, and strengthening throughout Eretz Israel,

The Committee for a Jewish Shdema and Women in Green

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is a Jewish revenge fantasy, showing Jews kill, maim and torture Nazis. I saw it last night and found it pretty entertaining, if a tad overlong. Witty, brutal, childish, surreal and self-referential. Don’t read too much into it and recognise that Tarantino isn’t really making any deep points about anything, and it’s a fun ride. It didn’t really get my Jewish blood running, though (oh to kill Nazis to revenge my family’s many deaths):

The Independent’s Johann Hari has a few quibbles:

“Violence in the movies can be cool,” he [Tarantino] says. “It’s just another colour to work with. When Fred Astaire dances, it doesn’t mean anything. Violence is the same. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a colour.”

He scorns anyone who tries to see simulated violence as having meaning. With a laugh, he says: “John Woo’s violence has a very insightful view as to how the Hong Kong mind works because, with 1997 approaching and blah blah blah. I don’t think that’s why he’s doing it. He’s doing it because he gets a kick out of it.” Praising Stanley Kubrik’s direction of A Clockwork Orange, he says: “He enjoyed the violence a little too much. I’m all for that.”

What’s wrong with this vision? Why does it make me so queasy? I don’t believe works of art should be ennobling. I don’t believe the heroes should be virtuous, or that bad characters should get their comeuppance. It can show deeply violent and deeply cruel people, and tell us that – as in real life – they can be charismatic and successful and never pay a price for their cruelty. But what it should never do is tell us that human suffering itself is trivial. It should never turn pain into a punch-line….

Not long after 9/11, he said: “It didn’t affect me because there’s, like, a Hong Kong action movie… called Purple Storm and they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a skyscraper.” It’s a case-study in atrophy of moral senses: to brag you weren’t moved by the murder of two-and-half-thousand actual people, because you’d seen it in a movie.

Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan powerfully opines on American torture and slams the media and political elites for looking the other way. Welcome to US exceptionalism:

The descent of the United States – and of Americans in general – to lower standards of morality and justice than those demanded by Iranians of their regime is a sign of the polity’s moral degeneracy. Compare these two stories today. Item One:

“The charges of rape and torture have struck directly at the moral and religious authority the nation’s theocratic leaders claim. The government initially denied Mr. Karroubi’s charges, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, said a review had proved they were baseless.

“But Mr. Karroubi has refused to back down even as clerics and military leaders aligned with the government have called for his arrest. Faced with public disgust and outrage, the Parliament agreed to review his evidence. A parliamentary committee met with Mr. Karroubi on Monday. One member, Kazem Jalili, told Iranian news agencies that Mr. Karroubi had said that four people told him they had been raped.”

You will notice once again that the New York Times is able to use the word “torture” to describe torture – but only when it is committed by governments other than that of the US. The NYT under the editorial guidance of Bill Keller has, by cowardice and weakness, abetted the degeneracy that Cheney accomplished. Every time the NYT uses a different standard to judge foreign and American torture, it undermines the core moral basis of liberal democracy. And if the NYT cannot stand firm, what chance someone like Pete King? Here he is, responding to acts that included murder, rape, sexual abuse and torture conducted by the CIA under the command of George W. Bush:

“When Holder was talking about being ‘shocked’ [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys’ fingers off or something – or that they actually used the power drill,” he said. Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn’t think the Geneva Convention “applies to terrorists,” and that the line between permitted and outlawed interrogation policies in the Bush years was “a distinction without a difference.”

“Why is it OK to waterboard someone, which causes physical pain, but not threaten someone and not cause pain?” he asked, warning of a “chilling” effect on future CIA behavior.”

King is right, of course, that the difference between what Bush authorized and the new revelations is non-existent. There is no moral or legal distinction between subjecting someone to 960 hours of sleep deprivation (as Bush did to Qahtani), or slamming people against walls, of freezing them to near-death, or murdering them by stress position … and threatening to murder someone’s kids or stage a mock execution. But King then draws the inference that all of it is fine, as long as it cannot be portrayed in the tabloids as literally drilling through a detainee’s skull. (He seems unaware that this would actually kill someone, not torture them.)

But King is not alone in believing that the US should be less restrained by moral qualms than Iranians demand of their own illegitimate regime. Indeed, much of the American people, especially evangelical Christians, expect less in terms of human rights from their own government than Iranians do of theirs’. In fact, American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.

Conservative, Republican blog Powerline offers this nuanced analysis of America’s wars:

But the future of Iraq doesn’t look at all bright now that the Americans are fading from the scene.

It’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing to be done. The Iraqi government wants us out, the American government wants to get out, and the Iraqi and American people are probably in accord with their respective governments. After six and a half years, these views are understandable, if misguided.

As our presence in Iraq decreases, or presence in Afghanistan grows. Iraq is a more important country than Afghanistan in just about every sense. It is also probably a more manageable one for us, especially now that we have finally gotten our strategy and tactics right. But from what I’ve heard, the Afghans are a more pleasant, more grateful lot, so at least there’s that.

No wonder they miss George W. Bush; a man who loved bombing Muslims to freedom (not that Barack Obama is much better).

Sri Lanka has largely fallen off the media radar despite the human rights situation for Tamils in the country remaining dire.

Britain’s Channel 4 led the way this year with some fine reporting on the massacres.

Now this:

Just three months after the Sri Lankan government declared the country liberated from the Tamil Tigers, video footage has emerged apparently showing government troops summarily executing Tamils.

Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, which obtained the material, said it was filmed in January – when the international media were prevented by the Sri Lankan government from covering the conflict zone.

Australia’s role in this disgrace is long and shameful.

Sydney University has organised a forum next week, on 31 August, to highlight the “human rights emergency” for Tamils in Sri Lanka.

My latest New Matilda column is about the growing militancy in Gaza:

The recent shootout in a Gaza mosque has highlighted the way Israel’s blockade of the strip radicalises people and encourages terrorism, writes Antony Loewenstein

Gaza is facing yet another threat exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli siege: Islamic fundamentalism.

In mid August, 24 people died in a bloody gun battle between Hamas and the Jund Ansar Allah (“Soldiers of the Followers of God”) group in a Rafah mosque. The group’s leader, Abdul-Latif Moussa, reprtedly killed himself using a suicide belt and more than 100 people were injured over the course of the battle. Hamas said that it launched the crackdown on the group after Moussa announced an “Islamic emirate” in Gaza, directly challenging the elected government’s rule. Hamas accused the US-backed Fatah and Arab states of being behind the militants, supporting them as part of an attempt to destabilise the Strip.

The clash was hardly surprising. I heard during my time in Gaza that a growing number of Islamists were frustrated with attempts by Hamas to discuss engagement with the international community. For them, resistance means no compromise in the face of ongoing Israeli attacks. BBC journalist Shahdi Alkashif told me that he regularly spoke to Islamic extremists in Gaza and they were thriving under the siege. He acknowledged they were a tiny minority, but noted that a lack of political progress only adds strength to their challenge of Hamas’s current strategy. Such militants ask Gazans, why even bother trying to negotiate with Israel and Washington when resistance could achieve far more?

My fixer in Gaza, a Fatah man, knew some of the family members of another militant group in Gaza, the “Army of Islam”, which kidnapped the BBC journalist Alan Johnson in 2007. They still exist — Gaza is run and controlled by a clan and family system — so destroying whole groups militarily is next to impossible. In order to present a coherent unified, and credible face as a negotiating partner, Hamas has imposed a tight grip on the Strip and doesn’t tolerate challenges to its authority from groups like these.

But from Hamas’s point of view, this strategy hasn’t paid off yet. Barack Obama remains deaf to the Hamas overtures. Amr Hamzawy and Jeffrey Christiansen who work at the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, wrote in this week’s National newspaper that, “the US must realise that excluding Hamas cannot possibly advance the peace process beyond the status quo”.

There is little evidence (at least not in public) to indicate that Washington understands this reality and has noted the Hamas leadership’s consistent calls for a viable two-state solution. Countless Hamas figures told me the same thing in Gaza. The destruction of Israel was out, and some kind of co-existence was in, but the right to “resist” Israeli aggression was a legitimate condition to these pronouncements.

Some of the international media coverage of the shoot-out between Hamas and the allegedly al Qaeda aligned group accused Hamas of committing a “massacre”. Yet as Orly Halpern pointed out, Hamas has a democratically conferred responsibility for law and order in Gaza. That means that its response was in fact no different to the response most people anywhere else would expect their own law enforcement agencies to carry out if an armed group took on the police.

As a senior Hamas minister Ahmed Yusuf told the Washington Post, “We are a liberation movement with an Islamist hue. We are not the Taliban or al Qaeda. We like law and order”. It’s an important distinction, and acknowledges Hamas’s aims of Palestinian liberation, as opposed to carrying out a generalised campaign against the West, which characterises the aims of some other Islamist organisations.

It remains difficult — or not politically expedient — for many in the West to accept that Hamas has greatly mellowed in the recent years, as it has assumed pragmatic policies towards Israel — and been slammed as collaborators by al Qaeda for doing so. They’re certainly not on Osama Bin Laden’s Ramadan card list.

New York Jewish commentator Tony Karon wrote in the National that the Hamas action against Jund Ansar Allah “won’t harm the growing recognition in the West that Hamas is an indispensable part of any peace process.”

But Karon also made an intriguing observation:

“For some Israeli commentators, the incident was a wake-up call. One of them, Nehemiah Strassler, cautioned that by destroying Yasser Arafat, Israel had brought Hamas to power, and now by its siege of Gaza it was empowering al Qaeda: ‘That’s because on our side people don’t want to understand that when the oppression increases and there is nothing to lose, the adversary doesn’t surrender and grovel. Just the opposite. He becomes more radical … so when poverty in Gaza increases and unemployment is on the rise, al Qaeda will take control … and we will long for that terrible Hamas.’”

I investigated the growth of creeping sharia in Gaza under Hamas and found worrying signs of increasing crackdowns on women and against what it was calling “vice”. While it’s hard to gauge exactly how much this shift is a response to pressure from more extreme parties present in Gaza, any perceived threat by a more militant party against Hamas’s popularity could motivate Hamas to partially mimic its excesses.

The underlying cause of these ongoing troubles is the Israeli-directed siege. It affects everyone in Gaza, shapes their days and nights, affects what they eat, trade or consume and causes profound frustration and hatred. It is an incubator of steadily growing anger.

Extremism thrives in this kind of environment.

My following article appears in Crikey:

In 2003, Palestinian politician and human rights activist Hanan Ashrawi won the Sydney Peace Prize. The Zionist establishment reacted with outrage, accused her of extremism and pressured then New South Wales Premier Bob Carr to not present the award.

The campaign was a disaster and convinced large swathes of the Australian public that many Jews were intolerant of debate. I investigated the saga in my book, My Israel Question, and found a startling lack of awareness by Jewish leaders of how their actions were perceived by the wider public.

Six years on, little has changed.

This year, the Sydney Peace Foundation awarded its annual prize to journalist, author and documentary maker John Pilger for “enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard”. He will receive the award in November, presented by New South Wales Governor Marie Bashir. Last year Kevin Rudd did the honours for Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson.

Jewish leaders again are on the offensive. President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Robert Goot, said that, “Pilger does not promote peace, but is a polemicist, a distorter of facts and history and he promotes an extreme Palestinian narrative at the expense of Israel’s narrative and objective analysis.”

Leadership strategist Ernie Schwartz told the Australian Jewish News (AJN) this week that he would urge the Jewish establishment to present a “unified view … [and] be realistic about the fact that we’ll always come across as myopic. That’s just the way we’re going to be cast.”

But bullying organisers of the award and threatening them isn’t a perception problem; it’s how the Zionist lobby does business.

Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation Stuart Rees tells Crikey that he has received huge amounts of supportive mail from across the world in appreciation of this year’s choice. “He [Pilger] has a broad body of work that covers a wide range of countries,” Rees says, including Cambodia, Burma, Australia, America, Bangladesh, Iraq and Afghanistan. “He isn’t just about Israel/Palestine.”

Rees dismisses comments by Zionist lobbyist Colin Rubenstein that the prize is discredited and says that “we don’t think that derision is an appropriate form of commentary. When people have lost, they resort to character assassination.”

Rees says he has not yet heard of any pressure on Sydney University management to threaten funding, as happened during the Ashrawi affair, but accusatory letters have started.

The level of Zionist anger towards Pilger was displayed at last Friday’s Politics in the Pub event in Sydney. A Jewish man approached Rees after the talk and asked if the “next winner would be Hitler”.

Curiously, this week’s AJN features a letter that asks whether Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah or yours truly should win next year.

Rees argues that the reason so many Zionist leaders react as they do is because “they’re tribal. They have to repeat a certain mantra, otherwise they would be disloyal to this image.”

Former Zionist Federation of Australia president Dr Ron Weiser proved this point recently by writing, in support of illegal West Bank settlements and against Barack Obama, that the Australian Government’s position would remain blindly pro-Israel if unthinking “consensus” was maintained. Profound fear of dissent was palpable.

The question of academic freedom is central to a healthy democracy. Attempts by any lobby group to stifle it should be challenged. Witness the current moves in Israel and America against Ben Gurion University academic Neve Gordon for daring to write in the LA Times in support of a boycott against “apartheid” Israel.

President Professor Rivka Carmi condemned the article and said: “Academics who entertain such resentment toward their country are welcome to consider another professional and personal home”. In fact, academic freedom is specifically designed to allow individuals to express views without fear of retribution.

Closer to home, Associate Professor Jake Lynch, director of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS), tells Crikey that he rejects any accusations of bias against him or the centre for taking a strong stand against Israeli violations and Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamils.

He currently receives full university backing for his work, despite the steadily increasing number of complaints from the Singhalese and Jewish community to the institution, insisting on spurious grounds of “balance”.

The obligation of a peace centre, Lynch argues, is to get out the “voices of the subjugated”. The university’s former vice-chancellor, Gavin Brown, told Lynch during a 2008 visit by Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer that “you shouldn’t give the critics [looking for balance] any indication that they’re having an effect”.

Lynch called in May for an academic boycott against Israeli institutions due to their complicity in the occupation of Palestine. The university’s vice-chancellor rejected his overture, supported by many Sydney University academics, but he tells me he’s determined to find a way to pursue the action another way.

Lynch is keen to counter the perception that, “if you criticise Israel you’re anti-Semitic or anti-American if you damn America. The Pilger award should widen this debate. The aim of his British ITV documentary producers is to provide a perspective that is rarely heard; Palestinians are marginalised.”

Stuart Rees commented during last week’s Politics in the Pub that Pilger won the award because he was simply “doing his job [as a reporter]”.

Human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia are legendary and largely ignored by the Western elite. That oil is certainly tasty.

But the Kingdom is changing, slowly but surely, through a very modern medium:

“5 riyals” – less than two dollars – that’s all the money many unemployed Saudi youths have in their pockets. It’s also the title of a new song by the Saudi hip-hop group “Blak Royalty,” which launched their first official video in Jeddah a few weeks ago. In a country with unemployment estimates as high as 25%, the group spotlights the challenges that face young Saudis today. But more importantly, their mode of expression is indicative of a new wave of artistic output the kingdom.

An underground music revolution is sweeping Saudi youth culture. Despite strict laws that prohibit the playing of music in public, dozens of bands have popped up in underground venues across the country. Two years ago, there were fewer than five established bands in Jeddah. Today, there are more than 60. With a host of problems affecting young Saudis, from unemployment to restricted freedoms, music is becoming the mode of choice for expressing frustrations.

Here’s the video for “5 riyals”, a curiously Western-sounding track with distinctly Saudi overtones:

The global campaign against Nokia, after it emerged the company is assisting the Iranian regime in its monitoring program, continues:

“Nokia out of Iran!” demanded protestors gathering peacefully on Thursday outside the Nokia Flagship Store in New York City. “Iran has cracked down on nonviolent protestors with surveillance technology developed by Nokia,” observed rally co-organizer Ricky Chen, a student at Middlebury. “Until Nokia severs its partnership with the Iranian regime, we are boycotting Nokia.”

With police and several Nokia executives in suits watching from the sidewalk, the protestors chanted: “Repression we can’t condone – throw out your Nokia phone!” The event was organized in partnership with Students for Justice in Iran and with mobilizing assistance from the “Where Is My Vote?” initiative. As the rally began, the Nokia store – which features funky interior walls that change color every few minutes – ironically began to glow green, the color of solidarity with Iranian protestors.

“We want Nokia executives to know we will not be silent, and we want Iranian students to know we stand with them,” said Alaleh Solati, a student organizer at American University. “Nokia should be ashamed for helping to enable this crackdown – and Iranian students need to see that we won’t abandon them.” A “flash mob” followed the rally at New York’s Penn Station, attracting over a dozen police officers and thousands of curious commuters.

At the same time, protesters gathered outside the Nokia Store in Chiacgo. The success of all these events has activists vowing to make such protests a regular occurrence.

The following email was just sent to the Independent Australian Jewish Voices list:

Dear all,

We would like to inform you of upcoming events and relevant information about the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English Literature at the University of California in Los Angeles, nephew of Edward Said and leading Middle East intellectual, is coming to Australia for the 2009 Edward Said Memorial lecture at the University of Adelaide on 19 September: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/esml/.

He’ll also be speaking at the University of Melbourne on 16 September (http://australiansforpalestine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/saree-makdisi2-copy8.jpg) and the University of Sydney on 22 September (http://www.usyd.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2009/excavating_memory_jerusalem.shtml).

Antony Loewenstein recently visited Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and published the following dispatches:

- Gaza in Conflict, The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/loewenstein

- Hope lives in Gaza despite siege, desperation and anger, Mondoweiss:
http://mondoweiss.net/2009/07/hope-lives-in-gaza-despite-siege-desperation-and-anger.html

- Stories from Gaza, Mondoweiss:
http://mondoweiss.net/2009/07/stories-from-gaza.html

- A day in the West Bank shows ‘the soldiers are settlers in uniform. They both symbolise the occupation, Mondoweiss:
http://mondoweiss.net/2009/07/a-day-in-the-west-bank-shows-the-soldiers-are-settlers-but-in-uniform-they-both-symbolize-the-occupa.html

Please find below a small selection of important articles published in the global media:

- Neve Gordon, Boycott Israel, Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gordon20-2009aug20,0,6144555,print.story

- Gideon Levy, Tough country, Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1108791.html

For up-to-date information about the Middle East, see the website of our colleagues, Australians for Palestine: http://australiansforpalestine.com/. Our own website (http://www.iajv.org/) is also regularly updated.

Finally, a recent post by IAJV blogger Michael Brull led to him writing the following apology on our website:

I apologise to [philosopher] Raimond Gaita. I acknowledge without reservation that nothing Gaita said in the lecture to which I have referred justifies even a suspicion that Gaita is an anti-Muslim racist.

We regret this incident and apologise to Professor Raimond Gaita for any offense that has been caused.

Best wishes,

Independent Australian Jewish Voices
Peter Slezak
James Levy
Antony Loewenstein
Eran Asoulin
http://www.iajv.org/

I’ve written countless times about J Street, the “pro-Israel and pro-peace” Israel lobby. Their belief in a two-state solution is wishful thinking, in my view, but they soldier on, regardless. How this magical solution will actually happen on the ground is beyond me. A source in the US, close to some senior J Street people, told me last week that the group itself realises that unless something major happens in the next months on the “peace process”, it’s over, meaning that Israel will increasingly be regarded as a problem child globally and treated appropriately.

Here’s  J Street’s latest video, featuring some serious-looking members of the Israeli elite:

Back in July, a handbook from the Zionist group The Israel Project emerged, giving advice to poor Jews who just wanted to support their fanatical friends in the settlements. Alas, the team has had to recant:

The Israel Project says it has removed the term “ethnic cleansing” from an internal document discussing how to talk about the issue of Jewish settlements.

The provision in The Israel Project’s Global Language Dictionary had said that the “best” argument when someone brings up settlements — if changing the subject doesn’t work — is to “try accusing those who advocate removing Jewish settlements of promoting ‘a kind of ethnic cleansing to move all Jews’ from the West Bank.”

That language had caused controversy last month, when J Street called the language “incendiary and dangerous” and urged its supporters to sign a petition telling that to TIP founder and president Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi.

Mizrahi defended the use of the language at that time, saying that when Israel evacuated Gaza it “was ethnic cleansing” becaause “every Jew left Gaza, including the dead Jews,” whose graves had to be moved. But Mizrahi said she decided to remove the term because it had been misinterpreted and called the use of the term “regrettable.”

Some saw the term as an allusion to the Holocaust or other genocides, and “we never meant it that way,” said Mizrahi. But “we understand how it could be interpreted, and we have to be sensitive to that.”