Antony Loewenstein

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on Benjamin Netanyahu’s definition of “war crimes”:

The Prime Minister says Hamas is guilty for denying Red Cross access to prisoners: exactly what the U.S. did.

South African anti-apartheid politician, activist and Jew Ronnie Kasrils, a man with a long history of support for the Palestinians, spoke on 24 October at the National Association of Democratic Lawyers of South Africa about the Goldstone Gaza report:

The reason for the hysteria against Justice Goldstone’s Report goes far deeper than the findings. Goldstone is a self-professed Zionist, of liberal persuasion. Some like him believe that Israel can and should live up to its founding ideals and commitment to justice, equality and the rule of law – and act as an inspirational “light unto the nations.” He clearly and sincerely hopes that Israel will reform its ways. Unfortunately this commonly held view of the past sixty years hides the reality of the expropriation by force of an indigenous people’s land, and their dispersal in a bloody process of ethnic cleansing from 1948 to present times. In their place a colonial, racist state has been installed which has become more militaristic, morally bankrupt and grotesque with time. Quite naturally those who have been dispossessed will fight for their land and rights as has happened in all other such cases of dispossession and injustice, including South Africa. Liberal Zionists like Justice Goldstone, and many governments and people particularly in the West, succumbed to the confidence trick that projects the establishment of an ethnic home for the Jews in another people’s land as a righteous act of national liberation and independence. It is like saying that an untamed South Africa was liberated by the white settlers.

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai:

Gays and lesbians are sick people. It’s definitely a disease. They haven’t invented a cure for it yet, but I hope they will.

Following my recent visit to Aceh in Indonesia, this piece in today’s Washington Post is particularly interesting (though highlights the seeming inability of the American corporate media to see the world in anything other than what benefits the US):

In many ways, Indonesia — a nation of 240 million people scattered across 17,000 islands — is moving in America’s direction. It has flirted with Saudi-style dogmatism on its fringes. But while increasingly pious, it shows few signs of dumping what, since Islam arrived here in the 14th century, has generally been an eclectic and flexible brand of the faith.

Terrorism, which many Indonesians previously considered an American-made myth, now stirs general revulsion. When a key suspect in July suicide bombings in Jakarta was killed recently in a shootout with a U.S.-trained police unit, his native village, appalled by his violent activities, refused to take the body for burial.

A band of Islamic moral vigilantes this month forced a Japanese porn star to call off a trip to Jakarta. But the group no longer storms bars, nightclubs and hotels as it did regularly a few years ago, at the height of a U.S. drive to promote “moderate” Islam. Aceh, a particularly devout Indonesian region and a big recipient of U.S. aid after a 2004 tsunami, recently introduced a bylaw that mandates the stoning to death of adulterers, but few expect the penalty to be carried out. Aceh’s governor, who has an American adviser paid for by USAID, opposes stoning.

Public fury at the United States over the Iraq war has faded, a trend accelerated by the departure of President George W. Bush and the election of Obama. In 2003, the first year of the war, 15 percent of Indonesians surveyed by the Pew Research Center had a favorable view of the United States — compared with 75 percent before Bush took office. America’s favorability rating is now 63 percent.

I found very positive thoughts towards America and Barack Obama but rising impatience. Will he deliver? Is his rhetoric sustainable? What’s really happening in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine?

I sensed that patience would not last forever and after all, those four conflicts are only getting worse. Besides, it’s the American military that is escalating tensions.

Zvi Bar’el writes in Haaretz on Israel’s sublime delusion and victim mentality:

Goldstone was born in June 1967. I am not referring to the judge from South Africa, but to his report, or more precisely, the notion that Israel needs a synonym for the soul-searching it must carry out after 42 years of occupation. In the 575 pages of the report that is loaded with details, names, numbers, a list of weapons, interrogation methods and articles of international law, three paragraphs hide among the conclusions on pages 521 and 522, numbered 1674 to 1676. Here lies the explanation for the tragic results of Operation Cast Lead.

In those paragraphs Goldstone uses the term “continuum” to establish that the operation cannot be understood on its own without assessing it as part of a chain of events, which also includes the complete closure of the Gaza Strip for three years, the policy of razing homes, the arrests, the interrogations and torture, not only in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In short, Operation Cast Lead is not an “incident.” It is a link in a chain as old as the occupation itself.

J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami talks to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and clarifies that his group is desperate to remain in the centre. The key problem with this position, of course, is that such “centrist” negotiations have taken place for years and the power imbalance is largely ignored. The Palestinians are under occupation. This won’t change simply by giving pretty speeches:

Jeremy Ben-Ami: J Street officially will not use the term “One-State Solution.” That is an oxymoron because it is a one-state nightmare. That is the thing we are most opposed to — moving in a one-state direction.

Jeffrey Goldberg: A nightmare for practical reasons or a nightmare for moral reasons?

JB: A nightmare for the Jewish people. There would be no more Israel. One state is not a solution, one state is a dissolution.

JG: The thing I’m worried about with the conference is that I think most of your supporters are well-meaning, left-of-center Jews who love Israel and are tortured by the various dilemmas, who do stay awake at night worrying about this. But there are others who are glomming on to you guys as a cover, just using you to advance another agenda entirely.

JB: I hope that we have a very strong left flank that attacks us, that Jewish Voice for Peace and other groups that are consistently upset with us for backing Howard Berman’s sanctions plan and for refusing to embrace the Goldstone report and for standing up for the right of Israel to defend itself or for its military aid — I hope we get attacked from the left because I would characterize J Street as the mainstream of the American Jewish community.

JG: You believe that you’re at the center of American Jewish thought?

JB: I believe that we are at the center. The Marty Peretzes and the Michael Goldfarbs and the Lenny Ben-Davids are on the right, to the far right, and there are people to our left, and we are in the middle trying to put forward a thoughtful, moderate, mainstream point of view about how to save Israel as a Jewish home.

South African judge Richard Goldstone’s damning report of the recent Gaza war continues its public hearing (highlighting the complete lack of interest or will on the part of Israel, or Hamas, to investigate their own crimes):

The Financial Times, with a history of real balance in the Middle East (or at least an ability to see Israel’s colonial project for what it is) editorialises thus:

The damning United Nations report on last winter’s Gaza war has unleashed a torrent of enraged polemics – beginning a long time before it was endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council last Friday.

The report, compiled by a team led by Richard Goldstone, the distinguished South African jurist, has been virulently condemned by Israel and its allies as biased, even though it points to possible war crimes committed by both Israeli forces and Hamas militiamen.

Much of the criticism centres on methodology – with a subtext characteristic of Israel’s irredentist right that since Mr Goldstone is a Jew he must be a traitor. This is, to say the least, disingenuous.

From the moment Mr Goldstone, former chief prosecutor for the UN special tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was appointed, Israel refused to co-operate with him and denied him entry. It was his reputation the government feared (and attacked) not his methods.

Israel is on much stronger ground objecting to the UN Human Rights Council and its predecessor. Israel has been the subject of about a third of country-specific resolutions, as council members from Libya to Angola hide behind the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from their own records of serious human rights abuse.

Yet, Israel should not complain too much. The UN is also the body where the US – often backed solely by Micronesia – has prevented any sanctions for Israel’s illegal colonisation of occupied Arab land or disproportionate conduct in war.

The UN can, occasionally, get something right, in for example voting down as head of Unesco Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosny – a censor and anti-Semite whose contribution to cultural freedom is far from evident.

The Goldstone report does give greater weight to Israel’s military activity in Gaza – but there was so much more of it. Some of the incidents it examines – the bombing of hospitals and schools and use of white phosphorous in dense urban areas – are already documented.

But while it finds this in violation of customary international law on the duty to minimise loss of civilian life, it also says clearly that indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hamas “would constitute war crimes” – even though some 1,400 Palestinians died, most of them civilians, as against 13 Israeli fatalities, three of them civilians.

This is a balanced report on an imbalanced conflict. The attacks on Mr Goldstone should not obscure its message: there can be no warrant or moral right for indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

The Guardian editorialises today on the remarkable Israeli journalist Amira Hass:

Only Amira Hass could have received the International Women’s Media Foundation lifetime achievement award by saying her life as a journalist had been a failure. By her standards maybe, but then she sets them high. If her aim is to stop successive Israeli governments lying about what they do in the occupied territories, then it is true that the language laundromat, as she once put it, keeps on turning. But make no mistake, the Haaretz columnist fully deserves this award. She is the only Israeli journalist to have lived in and reported from Gaza and Ramallah for much of the last two decades. In describing the effects of the occupation on the lives of Palestinians, she has been pilloried by Israelis and fallen foul of Hamas. Her moral anchor is firmly rooted in painful collective memories. Her mother survived a concentration camp and her father the ghettos of Romania and Ukraine. “What luck my parents are dead,” Hass wrote at the height of the Gaza operation in January. Her parents could not stand the noise of Israeli jet fighters flying over the Palestinian refugee camps in 1982, and nor could they have tolerated going about their daily chores in Tel Aviv with the knowledge of what was going on in their name in Gaza: “They knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area.” Only a Jew can invert the “never again” logic of the Holocaust that is used to justify Israel‘s least justifiable actions. It is that very experience, Hass argues, that should teach Israel to behave differently.

I’m now in Washington DC for the first J Street national conference.

Stay tuned.

At the end of September, I introduced in Sydney the leading Palestinian-American intellectual Saree Makdisi (my speech is here and a report is here.) (more…)

Jay Michaelson in the Jewish Forward on Zionist bullies in the mainstream community:

I loathe the company we Zionists are forced to keep: ethnocentrists, know-nothings, warmongers and worse; that angry pseudo-majority whose Disney-fied myths eclipse the region’s messy realities, who dehumanize Arabs and furiously lob the words “antisemitism” and “Holocaust” like rhetorical hand grenades. What they love is not what I love.

Which country does this remind us of?

The Sri Lankan government today angrily rejected a US state department report containing allegations of human rights abuses in the final days of the country’s civil war, saying the document would fan further conflict.

According to accounts said by a senior US state department official to be “credible and well substantiated”, government forces abducted and killed ethnic Tamil civilians, shelled and bombed no-fire zones, and killed senior rebel leaders with whom they had brokered a surrender.

Although the US stressed the allegations in the report did not constitute an accusation of war crimes, the Sri Lankan foreign affairs ministry in Colombo accused the US of smearing its reputation. “The allegations against the government of Sri Lanka … appear to be unsubstantiated and devoid of corroborative evidence. There is a track record of vested interests endeavouring to bring the government of Sri Lanka into disrepute, through fabricated allegations and concocted stories.”

But wait, there’s more:

The office of the UN human rights chief renewed its call Friday for a probe into alleged war crimes committed by Sri Lankan troops and Tamil rebels during the final stages of the country’s civil war.

“We still believe that something like the Gaza fact-finding mission is certainly warranted given the widespread concerns about the conduct of the war in Sri Lanka,” said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

Sri Lanka, like Israel, believes that killing civilians in its “war on terror” is both justified and necessary.

It’s really hard to understand why many in the civilised world now regard both countries as rogue nations.