Antony Loewenstein

A large, public debate held this week at Melbourne Monash’s University:

That the West should engage with Hamas: a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict?

The Israeli Prime Minister’s spokesman, Mark Regev, an Australian, tells a leading Australian newspaper that he is upbeat about the prospects of Middle East peace.

It is a serious article.

B’Tselem and Hamoked – Center for the Defence of the Individual release a report this week that shows the real burden of the Israeli occupation:

Under international law, a state may detain a resident of occupied territory without trial to prevent danger only in extremely exceptional cases. Israel, however, holds hundreds of Palestinians for months and years under administrative orders, without prosecuting them. By doing so, it denies them rights to which ordinary detainees in criminal proceedings are entitled: they do not know why they are detained, when they will go free and what evidence exists against them, and are not given an opportunity to refute this evidence.

As with many patterns of its activity in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, Israel cites what it defines as “security needs” to explain its policy of detention without trial. Yet these needs, assuming they indeed exist in every case of administrative detention, cannot justify such grave infringement of human rights, in breach of international humanitarian law.

I’m in Aceh, Indonesia, a strongly Muslim area with strict views on gender, politics and religion (ie. here). I’ll be conducting a number of public events and media interviews during my time here, engaging with local Indonesians on issues related to sharia law, the Middle East conflict, gender and resistance to Islamisation. I’ve already been amazed with the number of young girls, in their final year at school, telling me how they love The Simpsons, believe Aceh should be independent (along with West Papua) and why they adore Palestine.

Much more in the coming days and weeks.

A recent piece in Israeli paper Ma’ariv by Avshalom Vilan, a former Meretz Knesset member, articulates the growing fear of some Israelis that apartheid in the occupied territories is simply unsustainable:

Regrettably, however, it is more important to the Israeli leadership to safeguard the coalition than to safeguard the state. Instead of grabbing the bull by the horns and starting to shape a reality of building up Israel as a Jewish and democratic state within the accepted 1967 borders, a state that is integrated into global economic processes and establishes itself as a model society and a spiritual center of the Jewish people, the two are engaged in counting new construction projects, placating the settlers and making pointless maneuvers with Obama. At this rate, the constant evasion of making a decision will turn the two into the great missed opportunity of Israeli politics.

A love affair between a Palestinian man and woman in the West Bank and Gaza.

Life under occupation.

Roll up for your relaxing holidays, people. Occupation is now a tourist attraction:

The West Bank has a reputation for instability, military checkpoints and the ever-present threat of war with Israel.

But the UK is to promote the region as a sun, beach and wildlife destination for British tourists.
To the uninitiated, the image of the Palestinian territories is unlikely to be one of flip flops, suntan lotion and pre-dinner gin-and-tonics as a herd of elephants wanders across the horizon.

But for a small group of leading British tourism experts on a fact-finding mission in the West Bank led by the UK Trade & Investment ministry, a state that does not officially exist is also one that brims with secret promise.
The West Bank boasts a surprising number of scenic spots like the dramatic, undulating desert hills of the Wadi Qelt.

Intrepid tourists who venture here might not spot an elephant, but they are almost certain to catch a glimpse of its closest biological relative, the hyrax.

A family of these rodent-like animals, similar in appearance to the humbler guinea pig, attracted the enthusiastic attention of the British experts, who studied them closely through a telescope.

But if the prospect of an oversized guinea pig doesn’t have the British flocking into the West Bank, the hyraxes’ backyard might prove a more marketable tool.

Stretching down towards Jericho, the rolling hills where Jesus is believed to have wandered for forty days afford a hostile but spectacular vista of desert interspersed with oases of palm and ziziphus trees. The ruins of a Roman aqueduct lay nearby, while a monastery atop the Mount of Temptation was visible in the distance.

It’s vital for Westerners to visit the West Bank and see the reality with their own eyes. But simply touring the area and conveniently ignoring the ugly sides of Israeli behaviour is dishonest and simply perpetuating the image that everything is normal when it is anything but.

Jews, in case you weren’t sure how to live your life, a Rabbi who moved to Israel tells you how to do it. Daniel Gordis is a US-born Conservative rabbi:

Loving Israel isn’t like an affair. It’s a totally different thing. In a relationship, the person I love and I both matter – more or less equally, I guess. But not here. In this, I don’t matter. You don’t matter. Only justice matters. Only the future matters. Only the Jewish people’s survival matters. And without this place, there is no future, no Jewish people.

Given that, what’s the alternative to a deep and abiding love? I can’t think of one. So tonight, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and head off to shul.

The idea that the Jewish people couldn’t thrive without an occupying Israel is delusion on a grand scale.

The following interview is published this week in the literary journal, Quill:

SYDNEY-BASED ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN is the author of the best-selling book, My Israel Question, a controversial discussion of one of the most important issues of our time, as well as The Blogging Revolution, a searching examination of the ways the internet is threatening the rule of some of the planet’s most repressive governments. He actively seeks news on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, two countries everyone knows about but seldom chooses to engage.

Loewenstein’s interest in writing goes back a long time, including being an editor of his university newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, in 1997. He says, “I often liked the idea of provoking and challenging readers, especially about supposedly accepted ‘truths.’ For me, journalism should always be about shining light in the darkness and challenging the establishment, no matter who runs the joint.” This led him to becoming a journalist in 2003 and he has used various media, including the revolutionary transparent media of blogging, to get his reports out there.

“When I first started my blog in 2005,” he recalls, “it was primarily a space to discuss issues related to Israel and Palestine that wasn’t getting adequate mainstream media coverage, namely Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories and the gradual shifts in Jewish opinion around the world. These days, my site has become an important space to air views and news that should receive far more traction.” His blog has become so popular that he has lost count of the number of emails he has received. He takes his blogging very seriously, making sure his reports are credible. As in journalism, his idea of a reliable blogger is one who has “reliable sources, transparency in their methods” and is “not being a propagandist for one side or the other.”

With an endless archive of information, the World Wide Web is chaotic and unpredictable, but Loewenstein celebrates this. “Information overload happens to me all the time but it’s a generally pleasurable experience. The best journalists and writers are always the ones with the most facts and figures at their fingertips,” he states, and believes that readers can learn how to discern reliable and nonsensical web resources. “This is something that one learns over time, though this is no different to trusting certain newspapers and not others.” If in doubt, The Blogging Revolution makes a good reference.

Loewenstein thinks that the biggest misconception about the type of journalism he does is objectivity. He says, “Truth matters. When writing about Israel or Palestine, for example, the reality hits you in the face and you have to report it. Israel is an apartheid state that must be condemned (like any other country that oppresses people). This is not just my view, but the position of virtually every human rights group in the world, the United Nations, leading activists and citizens.”

Aside from backing Israel, Loewenstein feels the West has also fallen short in being a reliable source of news. “One of the great myths of the Western world, of course, is that our media is free and people can and do write whatever they want,” he says, before referring to Noam Chomsky who once stated “the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.”

However, the West also has its advantages. Although outspoken journalists aren’t always popular, they can escape repressive regimes found in persecuting nations. “Find Western allies to cause a noise if you are arrested or intimidated. Remember that your readers value transparency and honesty,” Loewenstein advices.

Constantly fighting against mainstream media has its setbacks and this is all familiar to Loewenstein. “Anybody who dares challenge Israeli policies should expect a barrage of abuse from the usual suspects but the internet has provided an essential portal for more global citizens to witness the reality of brutal Israeli policies against the Palestinians.” He calls himself “an atheist Jew.” He doesn’t practise Judaism, but culturally he is Jewish. As the Israel-Palestinian war has often been viewed as a Jewish-Muslim struggle, Loewenstein receives hate-mail and the occasional death threats. This fuels him though, so much so that even editors fail in censoring his work. And to him, terrorism is any violence against civilians; the only acceptable violence is “resistance to occupation is both legitimate and necessary, from Palestine to Sri Lanka.”

For his research, Loewenstein travels regularly overseas because “far too many journalists and bloggers pontificate from their offices, not realising that often they’re only having their prejudices confirmed, not challenged. Being on the ground is essential to understanding different cultures.” For My Israel Question, he spent two months in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine for research; and for The Blogging Revolution, his research on the web in repressive regimes took him to Cuba, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China.

Being a worldly journalist has certainly taught Loewenstein how to assess the state of affairs in a country. He can guess the motives of media coverage or silence. “I am opposed to media censorship. One can tell a great deal about a country from the ways in which its government treats the media. Censoring information shows a profound contempt for the general public. The internet is one way of challenging this, by publishing blogs, despite the often deep risks in doing so.”

With a multicultural background and being well aware of issues going on in other nations, what ishis ideal nation? “No country is perfect, but I think, with all its faults, of which there are many—not least an underlying distaste of complexity, atrocious treatment of the indigenous peoples and occasional bursts of racist fervour—Australia’s lifestyle is pretty decent.”

TAN MAY LEE graduated from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, where she was awarded the Bonamy Dobree Scholarship for International Students to do her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language. She also trained as a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Semantics Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She is the editor of Quillmagazine. Her story, “From the Roof,” was recently anthologised inUrban Odysseys: KL Stories (MPH Group Publishing, February 2009).

Reproduced from the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine

The following piece by Shakira Hussein in Crikey discusses a recent media conference in Canberra, Australia:

Last week’s conference on “War 2.0: Political Violence and New Media” amounted to a loya jirga of different tribes – old media, new media, academics, and the odd military representative.

The conference generated some interesting discussions on the implications of the seismic shifts in media for our understanding of war and other political violence, with presentations from Paul McGeogh as the grizzled Lion King of Old Media, Julie Posetti as Warrior Princess of the Tweets, Sophie McNeil via Skype from Paris, and Crikey publisher Eric Beecher, among others.

McGeogh acknowledged the failures of “old media”: “It is not a clear-cut case of murder. There is an element of suicide”. But he dismissed the suggestion that new media was equipped to fill the gap, with its emphasis on commentary rather than reportage.

He quoted New York Times journalist Roger Cohen on the need to “be there”, not only to fact-check, but also to gain the experience necessary in order to adequately distill the deluge of raw material:”…presence is required. Because part of the choice lies in something ineffable — the air you breathe, the sounds you hear, the shadow light as a bird’s wing that falls across fearful eyes — something that cannot be seized or rendered at a distance.”

But of course, you don’t only need to “be there” – at certain points, you need to be the only one there. And McGeogh did not seem to believe that new media had any entitlement to “be there” at all, ridiculing a website that had raised $8000 to send a correspondent to Gaza – you cannot cover Gaza on $8000.

Yet legions of independent journalists are “there”, reporting on a shoestring, and new media is provides a forum for their reportage. Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein says that he has reported from Gaza and elsewhere euqipped with:

“…a laptop, a few contacts, a fixer (only in Gaza), cheap hotels, persistence and online and print outlets to publish my work. I covered Gaza with a small amount of money and arguably was more trusted because I wasn’t associated with a Western corporation. In the last years, bloggers and freelancers have often beaten the corporate press to the story (witness human rights workers and Palestinian bloggers during the recent Gaza war) because they don’t always travel with as much baggage personally and professionally.”

The territorialism that simmered below the surface at the conference – among journalists old and new as well as academics – seemd to be to go beyond professional rivalry.

People who voluntarily take themselves to locations of great human crisis are often drawn by the desire for an intensity of experience, to beat witness to extremes. Reflecting on the compulsion to “be there”, I was reminded of the British poet James Fenton writing about his desire to witness the fall of Saigon:

“I wanted to see a war and the fall of a city because…because I wanted to see what such things were like. I had once seen a man dying, from natural causes, and my first reaction as I realised what was happening was to be glad that I was there. This is what happens, I thought, so watch it carefully, don’t miss a detail…”

Fenton’s journey to Vietnam was financed by a poetry award. These days, he’d probably be writing – reporting – for new media.
Those who have chosen to “bear witness” (as opposed to most witnesses, who are given no choice) can be very possessive of that experience. But possessiveness seems misguided. Sadly, there is more than enough bloodshed to go around.

It takes bravery to act this way in militaristic Israel. Bravo:

Dozens of graduating high school seniors signed a letter on Monday declaring their refusal to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces.

The missive, which was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, stated that the reason for their refusal to serve stems from the belief that “there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

“We hereby announce our refusal to take part in the military apparatus,” read the letter which was signed by 88 youths. “We do not see a military solution as the proper solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

America, sometimes you can be hilariously counter-productive and anti-intellectual:

Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America’s most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual’s anthology of post 9-11 commentary is taboo at Guantanamo’s prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam.

U.S. military censors recently rejected a Pentagon lawyer’s donation of an Arabic-language copy of the political activist and linguistic professor’s 2007 anthology “Interventions” for the library, which has more than 16,000 items.

Chomsky, 80, who has been voicing disgust with U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War, reacted with irritation and derision. “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,” he told The Miami Herald by e-mail after learning of the decision.