Antony Loewenstein

I spent time in Gaza with Palestinian hip-hoppers Darg Team, an energetic group desperate to rap their stories to the world.

The art is only growing:

In a backstreet open-air cafe in Gaza late at night, Khaled Harara from the Black Unit Band starts to talk about rap.

A phone call interrupts him. “Oh my god, it’s my dad, he will kill me because I’m not home yet.” Not quite the tough image one conjures of rappers.

After assuring his father he’s giving an interview, he’s ok to stay.

But that interruption brings up something he wants people to understand better: rap doesn’t have to be what the corporate market makes it to be. “We are trying to show people that hip-hop can be good; it doesn’t have to be about sex and drugs. We are returning rap to its old roots, talking about real issues.”

His friend Ayman Mughames from Palestinian Rapperz joins him.

“When we started in 2002, our message was to show the real life in Palestine and especially in Gaza,” Mughames says. “We talk about cases, things that must be talked about: the Israeli occupation, the siege on Gaza, the Israeli wars on Gaza, Palestinian unity.”

“Rapping is our way of resisting. We need people to resist not only by weapons, but by words too.”

What was once on the fringes is now gaining serious momentum:

British union leaders were locked in talks last night over whether to recommend to their delegates a boycott of all consumer goods produced in Israel.

Members of the TUC have condemned Israel’s military strikes on Gaza in January, which left 1,450 Palestinians dead and about 5,000 injured, and are due to vote on a motion today.

It would mark the first time that the trade union movement has boycotted goods since the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Meanwhile, Zionist groups and Israel prefer to spend their time defending the glorious Gaza war.

History is turning:

This weekend at the eighth annual US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation national organizers’ conference held in Chicago, delegates from the approximately 300 member groups that make up the US Campaign voted in favor of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The vote came on the heels of a presentation by Omar Barghouti and myself on behalf of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the US Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

The proposal that “the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation should endorse the principle of cultural and academic boycotts” passed by a landslide with one abstention and not a single objection. The quasi-unanimous vote, and the deep collective breath of relief that followed, will go down in history as the moment US-based Palestine solidarity activists overcame tactical differences that had long hindered us, to finally come together to confront Israeli apartheid.

I’ve written about a talk I presented a few days ago at Sydney University on this very subject, the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Independent Australian Jewish Voices blogger Michael Brull was there:

Yesterday [Tuesday], I attended a talk by Antony Loewenstein and John Docker, chaired by Jake Lynch. It was a presentation in favour of boycotting Israel. It was a 2 hour talk, and halfway through perhaps 20 [Jewish] people poured in, perhaps more, who were overwhelmingly hostile to what was being said, who aggressively asked hostile questions, who used the opportunity to give lengthy talks reciting Israeli government talking points (one young man even spoke in favour of Israel’s “achievements” in Gaza). [Jewish academic] Suzanne Rutland gave a 5 minute presentation against the boycott, a young man spoke against the boycott, because of his experience of activism in Israel. The striking thing about the interlocutors is their complete absence of any concern for Palestinian rights being violated. I might say there was a partial exception – Rutland spoke against the boycott, but without giving any recognition of Palestinian suffering, she explained that she opposed settlements: not to explain their illegitimacy, but to show how credible her position should be considered.

The Melbourne Age reports on an important visitor to our shores (who I will be introducing in Sydney next week):

No wonder Israel and the Palestinian Authority are backing Sri Lanka. This British eyewitness, who worked in the hospitals during the recent war helping the countless victims of government attack, talks about hell on earth. Israel and Sri Lanka share one key tactic: keep any independent media out of the conflict zone and humiliate and exterminate civilians:

Her laboratory training had not prepared her for anything like this, but she learned as she went along. As the fighting intensified, they were treating as many as 500 people every day in two rooms. “They had a shortage of medicine but they had to somehow save the people. The last two weeks or so there was a shortage of everything.”

With replacement blood running out, she had to filter what she could from the patients through a cloth before feeding it back into their veins. When the anaesthetics ran short, they diluted them with distilled water. “I watched when there was a six-year-old boy,” she said. “They had to take off the leg and also the arm, but they didn’t have proper equipment, they just had a knife that the butchers use to cut the meat, and we have to use that to take off his leg and arm. He cried and cried.”

Following the legitimate outrage over the Toronto International Film Festival presenting Tel Aviv as a model of cultural and ethnic harmony (hello occupation down the road), the key issues are being raised day after day in the media, a positive thing:

Natalie Portman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lisa Kudrow and Jerry Seinfeld were among dozens of film professionals who issued a statement this week defending the Toronto Film Festival’s decision to spotlight Tel Aviv.

“We don’t need another blacklist,” read the letter they signed onto, referring to calls by filmmaker John Greyson to boycott the festival due to a series of Israeli films being screened in its City to City program.

The boycott calls gathered steam when a letter backing Greyson was signed by a group of entertainers, including Jane Fonda and Danny Glover.

“We applaud the Toronto International Film Festival for including the Israeli film community in the Festival’s City to City program,” stated the letter signed by some 100 prominent entertainers. “The visiting filmmakers represent a dynamic national cinema, the best of Israel’s open, uncensored artistic expression. Anyone who has actually seen recent Israeli cinema, movies that are political and personal, comic and tragic, often critical, knows they are in no way a propaganda arm for any government policy. Those who refuse to see these films for themselves or prevent them from being seen by others are violating a cherished right shared by Canada and all democratic countries.”

According to The Canadian Press, Greyson, Elle Flanders and Palestinian-Israeli director Elia Sulieman held a press conference to refute charges they were blacklisting City to City and its participants.

“Our campaign was meant to begin the dialogue that TIFF missed out on – one that refuses the Israeli government’s attempt to shift attention away from the conflict that it maintains and worsens daily,” said Flanders.

It’s clear that J Street is seriously upsetting the Zionist establishment. Jewish Diaspora leaders who publicly criticise Israeli government policy are both necessary and morally important. Last night during a talk at Sydney University I challenged a senior Jewish lecturer who expressed pain about the West Bank settlements to actually try and do something about them rather than remaining silent within her community. She looked at me blankly. Me, she seemed to be saying, little old me, oh no, I’d much rather talk around the nice things about Judaism and Israel and not engage with the less savoury sides of the occupation.

Shmuley Boteach, author of The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger, writes in the Jerusalem Post (the place every good pro-settler activist goes to die) that J Street is destroying Judaism and Zionism, complicit in the death of Jews and the Devil in disguise (or something like that):

The truth, of course, is that many people, myself included, who support the organizations that J Street seeks to demonize – AIPAC, the ADL, the ZOA, and others – do so not because we fear imminent mass extinction but because we seek to prevent the cold-blooded murder of even one Jew. In the year 2009 there is no reason that we should have to put up with any anti-Semitic or anti-Israel prejudice. Israel shouldn’t have to tolerate any bombs going off in its midst, even if they kill “only” a handful of Jews. And we support Israel not because it’s the final bunker when the skinheads finally conquer Miami but because, like all proud Americans, we love freedom and democracy and we’re thrilled that the Jewish state is the bastion of those precious values in a region that utterly repudiates them. Ben-Ami’s caricature of leaders of major Jewish organizations – heroes like Malcolm Hoenlein, Howard Kohr, and Morton Klein – as mistrustful cranks who seek to hijack American foreign policy is deeply troubling, as is his contention that Jews who believe in a tough military posture, after all the terror Israel has experienced, are paranoid brutes.

And how’s that “tough military posture” going for you, Israel?

This Haaretz headline speaks for itself:

Israeli Minister to Swedish Jews: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

I guess that settles the matter then.

The UN report on Israeli massacres in Gaza has received the predictable Israeli response. Victimhood, victimhood and victimhood. Over 1400 Palestinian civilians were murdered but we’re supposed to feel deep empathy for the Israelis. Nice try.

Perhaps the most priceless comments were from President Shimon Peres:

The report in practice grants legitimacy to terrorism, premeditated shooting and killing while ignoring the duty and the right of a state to defend itself, something which is explicitly stated in the UN charter. The Hamas terror organization is the one that launched the war, and it also committed other horrific crimes. Hamas has employed terrorism for years against Israeli children. It has detonated explosive devices in the heart of Israeli cities, harmed civilians, launched over 12,000 missiles and mortar shells aimed at innocent civilians with one clear goal in mind – to kill.

Israel evacuated its soldiers and citizens from Gaza, opened its crossings, and aided in the rehabilitation of the Strip. After the Israeli evacuation, Gaza was overrun by force by a murderous, illegitimate terrorist organization – Hamas – which launched a mutiny against the legitimate Palestinian Authority.

Instead of building Gaza and worrying about the welfare of its residents, Hamas built offensive tunnels against Israel and brutally used Palestinian children and civilians in order to conceal terrorists and hide weapons.

What’s amusing about this rant is the degree to which Zionist leaders must try and defend themselves in the face of such overwhelming evidence. Israel’s moral legitimacy is further eroded in the court of public opinion and this is something we should only encourage. Israel will not be treated as a normal country as long as she behaves with impunity.

When will Israel and her supporters actually stop and reflect on the carnage they created in Gaza? The lives lost. Here is one of the testimonies given to the UN for its report:

On the night of January 4, 2008, Iyad al-Samoni stayed with his wife, five children and 40 other members of his extended family in one a relative’s house. Around 1am, sounds were heard coming from the roof, and some four hours later, Israeli soldiers came down the steps, knocked on the door and entered the house.

The soldiers asked if there were Hamas operatives in the house. The family members said there weren’t. Then the soldiers separated the men, from the women, children and elderly. The men were handcuffed, blindfolded and sent to a separate room, and were only allowed to leave to the toilet after one of them could no longer hold his bladder and urinated in the room. The soldiers settled in the house.

The next morning, the family members left the house and started marching westward on Salah a-Din Street which leads to Gaza City. The soldiers ordered them to walk straight ahead on not stray from their path. The men were still handcuffed and the soldiers threatened gunshots if they tried to remove the shackles. While marching on Salah a-Din Street the, a single soldier or a number of soldiers station on the street’s rooftops opened fire at the family. Iyad was hit in his legs and fell to the ground. His relative, Muhammad Assad al-Samoni tried to assist him, but one of the soldiers ordered him to continue marching. After noticing that the laser beam from the soldier’s weapon was aimed at him, Muhammad decided not to insist. The soldier also fired warning shots at Muhammad’s father, who tried to approach Iyad, and did not heed the family’s calls to evacuate the injured Iyad. And so, the family was forced to abandon Iyad and keep marching towards Gaza City. Only three days later did rescue services get permission from the IDF to evacuate the body of al-Samoni, who was left handcuffed in the street and bled to death.

The war in Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster. It deeply shames me as an Australian that we have trooops in the country contributing to the carnage. Pull out now.

The Guardian published on the weekend a moving essay about the effects of last week’s NATO missile attack in Kunduz. The stories of civilian suffering is all-too-rarely examined:

Jamaludin, a 45-year-old farmer, had been praying in the mosque when he heard the sound of a tractor. “I went home and found that three of my brothers and my nephew had left with my tractor,” he said. “I called my brother to ask him where they had gone. He said the Taliban had asked him to bring the tractor and help them pull a tanker.” Jamaluddin was alarmed. “I asked him what tanker? It wasn’t our business, let the Taliban bring their own tractors. I called him back an hour later. He said they couldn’t get the trucks out and the Taiban wouldn’t let him leave, so I went back to sleep.”

Realising the tankers were stuck, the Taliban decided to siphon off the fuel and asked people to come and help themselves to the ghanima, the spoils of war. There would be free fuel for everyone.

Assadullah, a thin 19-year-old with a wisp of black hair falling on his forehead, got a call from a friend who said the Taliban were distributing free fuel.

“I took two fuel cans with me, I called my brother and a friend and we went. There was a full moon and we could see very clearly. There were a lot of people already there. They were pushing and shoving, trying to reach the tap to fill their jerry cans. We are poor people, and we all wanted to get some fuel for the winter.

“I filled my cans and moved away while my brother was pushing to fill his. I walked for a hundred, maybe two hundred metres.”

It was about 1am on Friday that the aircraft attacked and incinerated the stolen fuel tankers. “There was a big light in the sky and then an explosion,” Assadullah said. “I fell on my face. When I came to, there was thick smoke and I couldn’t see anything. I called, I shouted for my brother but he didn’t answer. I couldn’t see him. There was fire everywhere and silence and bodies were burning.”

American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein has just been screened in the US for the first time:

The film-makers have given me a preview screening of the film. It’s a powerful work, revealing the history of Finkelstein himself and his leading critics. In many ways, I feel deep sympathy for Finkelstein, a man who remains determined to outline Israel’s outrageous behaviour towards the Palestinians.

The documentary isn’t entirely positive towards Finkelstein, allowing people such as Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz the opportunity to challenge his findings. But overall, Finkelstein is the key figure, a man with a tortured past and trauma (and seemingly unhappy present) who has spent much of his life with a cause that is very personal. The Jewish response to criticisms of Israel are predictable; defensive, blind and anti-intellectual. He is therefore having the right effect. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon rightly regard him as a hero; the people who matter.

The film’s press release says the following:

American Radical is the probing documentary portrait of American academic and activist Norman Finkelstein. A devoted son of holocaust survivors, ardent critic of Israeli and US Mid-East policies and author of six provocative books-including The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein has been at the center of many intractable controversies. Called a lunatic and a self-hating Jew by some and an inspirational, street-fighting revolutionary by others, Finkelstein is a deeply polarizing figure whose struggles arise from core questions about freedom, identity and nationhood. The film provides an intimate portrait of the man behind the controversy, giving voice to both his many critics and his supporters, while following him around the globe as he labors to change peoples’ minds.

This is a film that shines because it dares to articulate the key issues within the Jewish Diaspora: who speaks for us and who is allowed to dissent without facing a barrage of hate and slander? Sadly, Finkelstein’s story suggests that the Jewish community is insufficiently mature to understand that dissent is the highest form of humanity.

American Radical should be watched by people who care about the Middle East and a warning to those who want to speak out; you will be hounded simply for telling the truth about apartheid in Palestine. Too many Jews prefer to remain loyal to their ethnic group and ignore the human rights abuses being committed in their name.

An important editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review on the need for journalists to report fairly and deeply into wars fought in our name:

General William Tecumseh Sherman, like a number of military leaders through history, despised journalists. Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press, noted in a recent speech that a reporter once appealed to Sherman in the name of truth, but didn’t get far. “We don’t want the truth told about things here,” Sherman replied. “That’s what we don’t want. Truth? No sir!”

Sorry, General, but yes we do. When a democracy goes to war, its citizens need to know how it is going and what is being done in their name. They have a right to as close an approximation of truth as journalists can deliver, given the limitations. The right to bear witness is part of what you fight for.

We have two wars on now, and not enough truth. The chief impediment is the media’s own situation—the vicious advertising recession and the economic upheaval. Going to war is costly and many newsrooms can’t do it anymore. Time magazine, for example, is the latest to shutter its office in Iraq.

But diminishing resources is not the only problem. The military has changed too. The quality of the military-journalist relationship in Iraq got better around 2006 under the command of General David Petraeus, who wanted officers talking to the press, partly as a way to explain his approach to counterinsurgency. But the window has closed.