Sri Lanka and Israel use terror in similar ways: the “war on terror” they’re both fighting causes nothing other than mass destruction and hatred. Some victory.
The relationship is murky and ever-deepening. This headline is revealing:
S.L. Govt. uses Israel to soften American pressure
The saga of holding Israel to account continues. Following the recent call for a campaign against apartheid Israel, played out in the media and online, comes this response by some of Australia’s best-known Jewish academics:
We write in response to the two letters published in The Australian on Monday 21 September by Anthony Loewenstein and Jake Lynch, supporting the call for a boycott of certain Israeli universities as part of a more general Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
In our view, the call for a boycott and the entire BDS concept is counterproductive, marginalises and disempowers the forces for moderation and compromise within Israel, and reinforces the position of the rejectionists on both sides.
It is simply incorrect for Loewenstein to state that Palestinians “overwhelmingly” support the BDS strategy. The Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, for example, has been careful not to adopt a position on BDS because of its potential adverse consequences for Palestinian workers.
If people want peace with justice for BOTH the Palestinians and Israelis, then positive measures based on an understanding of the narratives of both peoples are needed. These include co-operative ventures of the kind that currently exist between the Israeli and Palestinian Trade Union movements, an end to all racist incitement against Jews in Palestinian schools and media, stopping new settlements encroaching into the West Bank and the removal of the illegal hilltop settlements by the Israeli government, progressive removal of checkpoints (which is already happening), improving the freedom of movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and a return to negotiations.
The moral authority of movements like BDS is undermined by their very one-sidedness. They highlight the suffering of civilians on only one side of the conflict, to the exclusion of the suffering of civilians on the other side. This has been the approach of Lynch’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, which invariably promotes the ferociously anti-Israel views of people like Loewenstein and John Docker. Both of these commentators make no bones about their desire for Israel to cease to exist but have been conspicuously silent about the likely fate of the Jewish majority now living there if that were to happen. It is probably futile to hope that Lynch will take a more balanced approach when he organizes his Centre’s “peace research” conference for 2010.
For over 60 years international law has called for the existence of two states for two peoples. Israeli and Palestinian polling over a sustained period consistently indicates that this is also what a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want. The denial of self-determination and sovereignty to either people has no international legitimacy at all.
Inaccurate, polemical and emotive statements of the kind made by Loewenstein and Lynch merely serve to polarize people and create a climate of hate. As such, their statements are impediments to the cause of peace with justice which they purport to promote.
Associate Professor Suzanne Rutland, OAM, University of Sydney
Associate Professor Mark Baker, Monash University, Melbourne
Doctor Yoke Berry, University of Wollongong
Professor Allan Borowski, La Trobe University, Melbourne
Professor Andrew Markus, Monash University, Melbourne
Doctor Julie Kalman, The University of New South Wales
I’ve written many times before about this spurious call for “balance” between Israel and the Palestinians, as if one isn’t under occupation (a point conveniently ignored by these “experts”). The solution proposed by those above is essentially to do nothing and hope and pray that Israel will come to its senses, end the occupation and allow a Palestinian state. How’s that theory worked out for them? It’s a call to do nothing and hope for the best.
Outside pressure is the only way for Israel to recognise that its behaviour is both illegal and immoral. I care deeply for Israeli Jews in Israel but they are living like kings compared to those in the West Bank and Gaza.
If this is the best Jewish academia can do, let them come out strongly and openly to condemn Israeli occupation. But they can’t and they won’t. For them, Zionism remains a romantic ideal. Reality is too uncomfortable, especially when viewing the Holy Land from Australia. They refuse to acknowledge what Israel has become with their backing and blind support.
I reported in February the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka and its apparent attempt to white-wash or ignore completely the brutal civil war then taking place in the country.
Now, as the government continues to imprison hundreds of thousands of Tamils, those wily cultural ambassadors are back at it:
Sri Lanka will host the second Galle Film Festival from December 2-6 in the eponymous host town.
GFF is presented in association with the National Film Corporation of Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka Tourism and will open with Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundera’s “Ahasin Wetei,” which was in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival. GFF is a non-competitive festival and hence won’t include a jury.
In addition to promoting tourism and film opportunites in the country, GFF’s main focus will be on Sri Lankan and South Asian cinema with participating films including, among others, India’s “Firaaq” from actress and director Nandita Das. Further programming details are being finalized.
As part of its schedule of fundraisers, event galas and workshops, GFF will include “Shooting For Change” which will include documentaries designed to inspire social change. Also featured will be eight short films produced in August during a 10-day film camp for children, hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Sri Lanka and run by American acting coach Constance Tillotsonm with Sri Lankan directors Anoma Rajakaruna and Kasinathar Gnanadas. The 40 participating children came from post-war Sri Lanka’s different ethnic backgrounds.
This is highly suspicious. Like Israel, Sri Lanka wants to be seen as a normal country that runs film festivals and literary events, while the world forgets its blatant crimes.
We will not.
American Rabbi Brant Rosen is an outspoken defender of Palestinian rights.
Here he is in the Chicago Tribune this week on the occasion of Judaism’s holy day:
On Sunday night, the Jewish community will begin our annual Yom Kippur fast.
The physical deprivation is a crucial element of the day, but as with many faith traditions, the fasting itself isn’t really the point. Going without food and water is, rather, a device, intended to sharpen our senses and lead to reflection.
This reflection is notably, pointedly, not a personal pursuit. All through the Yom Kippur prayers, we’re called to do “cheshbon nefesh,” a moral accounting, as a community: “We have sinned,” we pray. “Forgive us.”
But though the rituals are ancient, they’re never far removed from modern life. Between our prayers, American Jews are sure also to discuss the current events that touch our community most deeply: the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, President Barack Obama’s recent meetings with the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and the United Nations’ recent Goldstone Report, in which both Israel and the Hamas government are accused of war crimes. To my great sorrow, however, many in the Jewish community have already rejected the latter out of hand.
Rather than jointly consider Israel’s acts in Gaza, carry out real cheshbon nefesh, and accept our communal responsibility, it has proven easier for many of us to employ communal defense mechanisms, and insist that in this particular case, there’s no need for reflection.
A headline in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper:
Israel is teetering toward theocracy, with the rise of the Haredim
Discussion in America about a military strike by Israel against Iran has moved from “if” to “when”.
Fox News continues the charge:
Last week America told the world that the UN Gaza report was terribly unfair to Israel and should essentially be ignored.
This week, in yet another sign of Washington’s “seriousness” over Middle East peace, we have this:
The United States called on its close ally Israel on Tuesday to conduct credible investigations into allegations of war crimes committed by its forces in Gaza, saying it would help the Middle East peace process.
Michael Posner, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, said that Hamas leaders also had a responsibility to investigate crimes and to end what he called its targeting of civilians and use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in the strip.
The UN Human Rights Council was holding a one-day debate on a recent report by Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist and former U.N. war crimes prosecutor.His panel found the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian militants committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity during their December-January war. Israel did not cooperate with the UN inquiry and has rejected the report as biased.“We encourage Israel to utilize appropriate domestic [judicial] review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations,” Posner said in a speech to the Geneva forum.“If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace,” he said.The United States joined the Council, set up three years ago, for the first time earlier this year.Posner reiterated Washington’s view that the Council paid “grossly disproportionate attention” to Israel, but said that the U.S. delegation was ready to engage in balanced debate.The UN Human Rights Council was holding a one-day debate on a recent report by Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist and former U.N. war crimes prosecutor.
His panel found the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian militants committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity during their December-January war. Israel did not cooperate with the UN inquiry and has rejected the report as biased.
“We encourage Israel to utilize appropriate domestic [judicial] review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations,” Posner said in a speech to the Geneva forum.
“If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace,” he said.
The United States joined the Council, set up three years ago, for the first time earlier this year. Posner reiterated Washington’s view that the Council paid “grossly disproportionate attention” to Israel, but said that the U.S. delegation was ready to engage in balanced debate.
Goldstone himself outlined the reasons why it’s vital the international community holds guilty parties to account:
Earlier, Goldstone said a lack of accountability for war crimes committed in the Middle East was undermining any hope for peace in the region.
“A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long,” Goldstone, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, told the UN Human Rights Council.
“The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible war crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence.”
This is mainstream American news television, a discussion about how Iran should be bombed, when it should happen, if Israel should be assisted and if Israel should assassinate Iranian leaders to bring regime change. Can you imagine the outcry if Iranian television had the same kind of program, discussing the ways in which Israeli leaders should be murdered and how Israel should be bombed? Shameful:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
A new book, Rosemarie M. Esber’s Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians, presents 1948 history as it really happened as opposed to how Zionists would like to white-wash events:
During the civil war period [early 1948], Esber writes, “Zionist Jewish military organizations forced more than 400,000 Palestinian Arab inhabitants from their homes in about 225 villages, towns and cities in Palestine.” That comprises approximately half of the total number of Palestinians made refugees during the creation of the State of Israel, as well as half of the depopulated Palestinian cities and villages, the latter largely destroyed as part of the systematic campaign to erase Palestinian society.
Israel’s official narrative has long held that the “refugee problem” was the result of a war sparked in the wake of Israel’s 14 May 1948 “declaration of independence” on the eve of the British withdrawal, and what Israel describes as an Arab invasion designed to extinguish the nascent state. The implication of this claim is that had the Arab states not invaded on 15 May, Palestinians might not have become refugees. But given the sheer scale of the expulsions prior to May 1948, the Arab intervention might more accurately be described as a long overdue and ineffectual attempt to halt a well-planned campaign of ethnic cleansing that had been proceeding unchecked for months.
Following my letter in last week’s Australian supporting the targeted boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, Labor MP Michael Danby responds:
Antony Loewenstein and Jake Lynch (The Australian, Letters blog, 22 September) criticise Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth for their opposition to the campaign for “boycott, disinvestment and sanctions” directed at Israel. But they fail to address the central issue pointed out by Mendes and Dyrenfurth – the hypocritical and one-sided nature of this campaign.
Sudan has killed at least 400,000 civilians in its genocidal war in Darfur. Russia killed about 40,000 people in its two brutal wars against Chechnya. Millions of people are suffering under dictatorships in Burma, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria and others. Protesters are being shot down in the streets in Tibet, East Turkistan and Iran.
Are Loewenstein and Lynch calling for academic, cultural or communications boycotts against these countries? No, they’re not. Only Israel is so uniquely evil that it merits such treatment. The Israel-Palestinian conflict, which over the past 20 years has caused approximately 8,000 deaths (a third of them Israelis), is apparently worse than Darfur and Chechnya, worse indeed than anything else in the world.
Loewenstein and Lynch’s attack on the Australian columnists do serve a useful purpose in drawing out their real purposes. Firstly the perversity of the Director of Sydney University’s “Peace” Institute, which backs boycotts of Israeli academics rather than enhancing peace between the parties, could now not be starker.
Loewenstein’s support for the elimination of Israel coded as support for a one state solution shows that he was trying to sucker the few hundred who signed his Independent Jewish Voices “two state declaration”. Either way no serious Australian policy maker takes seriously ideas of boycotting Israeli academics and universities.
Michael Danby MHR is Federal Member for Melbourne Ports
My original piece addresses many of the issues inherent in this letter. Always remember the first rule of dogmatic Zionism: change the subject, never talk about the occupation and ignore the gross human rights abuses in the occupied territories.
UPDATE: Here’s Jake Lynch’s response:
I picture apologists for Israel’s serial breaches of international law, like Michael Danby, huddling together in an overheated room somewhere, getting terribly excited when they feel they’ve hit upon a particularly convincing argument, and sallying forth into the real world, certain it’s going to prove persuasive, only to stumble over the one obvious point they forgot.
I’ll let him down gently, then. He may be amazed to learn that, when I was going around, persuading people to boycott South Africa in the 1980s, I was not wholly oblivious to the human rights abuses being endured by the people of Iraq, El Salvador and many others.
In the words of Naomi Klein, boycott is not a dogma: it’s a tactic. The reason for trying it on Israel is that it might work, which is why Danby and his ilk are getting so uptight about it.
Israel presently enjoys impunity for its crimes, which incentivises repetition. End the impunity through BDS and it becomes clear that carrying on the brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory is not in Israel’s interests. That would be a first.
Jewish Israeli academic Neve Gordon – who recently called for an academic boycott of Israel due to “apartheid” in the Palestinian territories – writes:
A simple Google search with the words “Palestinian violence” yields over 86,000 pages, while a search with the words “Palestinian civil disobedience” generates only 47 pages.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights release a statement:
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the Israeli government’s decision to allow Jewish settler groups to enter the yards of the al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. PCHR further condemns the use of excessive force by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) against Palestinian civilians who attempted to prevent the provocative entry of settlers into the Mosque. PCHR reminds of similar incidents that took place 9 years ago when the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, entered the yards of the al-Aqsa Mosque. This incident sparked the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Mosque, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed or wounded. PCHR calls upon the international community to immediately intervene and pressurize Israeli occupation authorities to stop all settlement activities in occupied Jerusalem.
According to investigations conducted by PCHR, at approximately 07:30 on Sunday, 27 September 2009, at least 40 Israeli settlers, escorted by Israeli Police and Border Guards, attempted to break into the yards of al-Aqsa Mosque through the al-Maghariba Gate. A number of Palestinian civilians who were present in the mosque were able to prevent the settlers from entering. Soon after, the Israeli police and border guards violently broke into the yards of the Mosque firing rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas canisters and sound bombs at Palestinian civilians. They also violently beat a number of civilians. As a result, 3 Palestinian civilians were wounded by rubber-coated metal bullets.
During my recent visit to Israel and the West Bank I spent time with the wonderful Israeli group Ta’ayush as they protected Palestinian farmers from violent Jewish settlers and complicit IDF soldiers.
Here’s a story, via Ta’ayush member Joseph Dana:
September 22, 2009. Jerusalem District Court. Amiel and Eli
It’s become a little too familiar, the Jerusalem Magistrates Court. I’ve been here several times in recent months because of Ezra Nawi’s ongoing trial; and today I’m here because Amiel and Eli have been charged with disorderly behavior and (in Eli’s case) hindering a policeman in carrying out his duty. Originally, the police wanted to charge them with “endangering human life on a public road”—a serious offense carrying a penalty of up to twenty years in jail, put on the books in order to punish Palestinian stone-throwers during the first Intifada—but the prosecution eventually decided on less severe charges.
Here’s what happened. On October 8, 2006 Ta’ayush organized a demonstration march near the Al-Khadr check-point, south of Jerusalem, to protest against the slow starvation of the Palestinian population caught between the Security Barrier and Highway 60, the main north-south highway in the southern West Bank. Since the Security Barrier has been built deep inside Palestinian territory, far to the east of the highway, and since the whole of the territory between the Barrier and the highway is clearly slated for Israeli annexation, the Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and viniculturists still living there, a population of perhaps 20,000, are trapped: they no longer have access to medical clinics, offices, schools, and, above all, to their traditional markets. Lots of grapes are grown in this enclave; once they were marketed in Gaza, Jerusalem, Israel, Jordan, and the northern West Bank; now, because of the Barrier and the army roadblocks, and because grapes have a very short shelf-life after picking, they mostly rot on the vine or in storage. Al-Khadr itself is east of the Barrier, cut off from its own vineyards to the west of it which produce 11,000 tons of grapes each year. Amiel’s idea was to march along the highway with large cartons of grapes, to distribute them (together with an explanatory flyer) to passing drivers and, when the police arrived and tried to put an end to this subversive effort, to dump the grapes on the ground in protest—also to make sure that the media, local and international, captured this moment on film. A similar tactic has been used quite effectively in public protests by French farmers and just might work, whatever “working” means, in Palestine as well.
A recent history of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told in photographs.
(Courtesy of the effective compilation skills of Tony Karon.)
The often perceptive Shraga Elam:
It is noteworthy that notwithstanding the real aims of Iran’s policy, they certainly help Israel to remove the Palestinian issue from the international agenda…Thus the Iranian leadership has once harmed again Palestinian interests.
On the other hand Iran’s rulers now have an opportunity to make several important demands in return for abandoning their nuclear ambitions. They may thereby achieve important objectives not only for their own country, but also for the Palestinians.
Al-Jazeera English ran a documentary series in June about Israel’s far-right parties, groups indulged by the Jewish state:
As the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel gathers pace, the inevitable Zionist backlash is growing.
Here’s the Forward editorial this week:
Time was when a boycott demanded personal sacrifice as an expression of protest. That’s how the name first was coined, when Irish tenant farmers and tradesmen in the late-19th century refused to deal with the agent of an absentee landlord named Charles Boycott. And that’s how it has continued in the popular imagination: blacks in Montgomery, Ala., walking miles and miles to avoid the segregated city buses; consumers forgoing lettuce and grapes in solidarity with ill-treated farm workers.
The boycotted faced economic consequences, and so did the boycotter, sacrificing something important in service of a higher goal.
But the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel will have none of that. Despite its well-honed and increasingly effective rhetoric, its adherents seem uninterested in performing any personal sacrifice, or even measuring their “success” by hard numbers. They are most intent on sullying Israel’s name and bullying anyone who might suggest another path toward peace in the troubled region.
And Bradley Burston in Haaretz:
To the BDS people and their spiritual kin in Toronto, let me say just this: When you criticize Israel, for God’s sake – if only for the Palestinians’ sake – tell the truth. The whole truth. Not just your carefully composed cardboard cutout, the cartoon of the Jewish villain and the Arab martyr. And not from a distance.
Come here. Do the work. Take the risks. Put your slogans and your posters and your buttons and signs and t-shirts and open letters to the test. Put your life where your sloganeering is.
You despise Israel, we get that. You dismiss the capacity of Israelis for good faith and humanism. We get that too. But if you talk struggle in Toronto and San Francisco and Irvine, it’s no more than talk, and wasted breath at that. You can boycott away, all you like. In the end, you’re only drumming up more business for Israel.
If only such passionate words were used to try and end the occupation, rather than simply attacking those using non-violent tactics to do so. Peace won’t suddenly appear by hoping for the Obama administration or the Israeli people. The latter have had decades and the results speak for themselves.
Iranian Ibrahim Sharifi protested during the recent post-election uprising. His story, told here in yesterday’s New York Times, is devastating:
Mr. Sharifi was one of five brothers raised in north Tehran in a middle class family that was religious but not fanatically so. His father, a retired military officer, was a supporter of the 1979 revolution and participated in the rallies against the shah. His mother wore the traditional head-to-toe chador.
At Open University in Tehran, Mr. Sharifi studied computer engineering, and Italian at the Italian Consulate, the latter in hopes of studying medicine in Italy.
Not overtly political, he said he wanted more democracy and freedom, but gradually and peacefully. “I always told my father that even the 1979 revolution was a mistake, and that my generation did not want one,” he said.
He says everyone in his family favored the reform movement and were shocked when Mr. Ahmadinejad announced that he had won in a landslide victory, an outcome that has been denounced as a fraud.
Mr. Sharifi was outraged, and the only one in his family who began participating in rallies every day. He was on his way back home the afternoon of June 22 when he was grabbed by two men. “I had taken part in every single protest, so I saw this coming,” he said.
He said he was handcuffed, blindfolded and, as he later learned, taken to the notorious Kahrizak detention center in southwestern Tehran, where even the government concedes that several detainees were killed.
He said he remained handcuffed and blindfolded for four days in a cramped cell with about 30 other prisoners.
They were beaten senseless the first day, he said, and periodically after that over the next four days. Urine and blood covered the floor.
By the fourth day he was beginning to lose hope of getting out alive. He had trouble closing his mouth and he said he began vomiting blood.
“I told the guard that he should go ahead and just kill me if he wanted to,” he said, breaking into tears. “Then he called another guard and said ‘Take this bastard and impregnate him.’ ”
They took him out of the cell to another room where they pushed him against a wall that had handcuffs and two metal hooks to keep his legs open. The guard pulled down his underwear, he said, and began raping him.
“He laughed mockingly as he was doing it and said that I could not even defend myself so how did I think that I could stage a revolution.
“They wanted to horrify and intimidate me,” he said, weeping.
At that point, Mr. Sharifi said, he passed out. The next thing he remembered was opening his eyes and realizing he was in a hospital with one hand cuffed to his bed. Another young man was screaming hysterically on a bed next to him.
He said he heard a doctor tell someone, “Dump him or you’ll have the same problem as the other ones,” meaning that he would die in custody. Two days later, he said, they put him in a car, took him to a highway in Tehran and left him there, blindfolded.
This is how Israel and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority do business (the latter having virtually no power as the compliant partner):
Tensions are mounting between Israel and the Palestinian Authority following Ramallah’s call on the International Court at The Hague to examine claims of “war crimes” that the IDF allegedly committed during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. The issue is already weighing in on the relations between the leadership of Israel’s defense and security establishment with their counterparts in the West Bank, and is part of a growing list of Israeli complaints about the behavior of PA officials.
Meanwhile, Israel has warned the Palestinian Authority that it would condition permission for a second cellular telephone provider to operate in the West Bank – an economic issue of critical importance to the PA leadership – on the Palestinians withdrawing their request at the International Court.
