Antony Loewenstein

Slowly but surely, Israel is starting to realise where it matters (in the back pocket) that its criminality will come at a steep price. Who truly wants to normalise relations with a state that brutalises another people (over and over again)?

Tense relations between Israel and Turkey are weighing on local companies as exports between the two countries dropped 40 percent in the first nine months of the year and Turkish companies failed to pay debt, Israel Credit Insurance Company reported Wednesday.

“In recent months we are seeing an exceptional rise in arrears by Turkish companies to pay Israeli exporters debt owed,” ICIC CEO David Milgrom said Wednesday. “Debt collection in Turkey is fairly complicated. Whereas in the past the banks in Turkey were providing important information on businesses in difficulties, in the recent period they are refusing to do so, which is making credit management of suppliers even harder.”

ICIC has been insuring credit since 1957 and is the leading credit insurer in Israel. Today it insures sales totaling more than $12 billion annually, in both local and foreign trade transactions.

Israeli exports to Turkey totaled $800 million in the first nine months of this year, down 40% from $1.3 billion in the same period last year, ICIC reported. The drop in Israeli exports to Turkey was nearly double the rate of decline in total Israeli exports, which were down 22% in the January-September period, it said. Metals, chemicals and plastics accounted for most of the decline in exports to Turkey, it added.

Books by American journalists about Iraq that avoid discussing the Iraqis themselves.

That’s a real achievement.

John Bolton, neo-conservative, former George W. Bush official and Fox News contributor:

So we’re at a very unhappy point — a very unhappy point — where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program , Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.

The fall-out from the UN’s Goldstone report over Gaza is that Israel is once again seen as existing above the law:

“That President Obama is receiving the Noble Peace prize after his failure to speak out during the Gaza war, and after his administration’s protection of a state that has committed war crimes, is an abomination,” Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS.

The number of Palestinians killed during the conflict is estimated at between 1,387 and 1,417, mostly civilians, compared with four Israeli fatal casualties in southern Israel and nine soldiers killed during fighting, four of whom died as a result of friendly fire.

Ratner said one would hope that the United States would not block the referral of both Israel and Hamas to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for an investigation of war crimes committed in Gaza.

“Sadly, its conduct at the Human Rights Council [in Geneva] where it called the Goldstone report deeply flawed shows that it will again do all in its power to try and bury any investigation of Israel for war crimes,” he added.

By doing so, Washington is giving Israel a green light to continue to commit atrocities, said Ratner, who heads the non-profit human rights litigation organisation.

The failure to refer the Gaza matter to the ICC undercuts any claim that the law is applied equally to Israel and the Palestinians, he noted.

Australia’s leading Zionist lobby loves peace but bombing Iran may be too tempting to resist:

People with their heads in the sand will be surprised and duly outraged if Israelis realise, once again, that no one will protect them but themselves, and decide to act.

I don’t want another Middle Eastern war. Nor does Israel. But, as we saw in the 1930s and ’60s, if the world doesn’t prevent a genocidal regime from pursuing its stated intentions, war becomes unavoidable. It’s time for the world to act and stop Iran.

Is there any war the Zionist lobby won’t support (Iraq, Iran, Syria etc?)

This ship was carried by the 2004 tsunami and dumped nearby in the middle of a Banda Aceh neigbourhood
15 October

The Washington Post discovers that the Middle East peace process is going nowhere. In fact, it’s moving backwards:

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mitchell report to the White House next week on the administration’s goal of restarting the peace talks, they will be describing a situation that has arguably regressed, particularly in the three weeks since a high-level session in New York involving President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

A fruit-seller at a market in Banda Aceh, Indonesia
15 October

Will Fatah – as much as Israel – be the target of the next intifada?

Israel is shocked, just shocked, that a Turkish TV program would depict Israeli troops as killers (“but we’re the most moral army in the world”). If you behave like thugs, you’ll be treated as such.

Gazan farmers are still paying the price for this brutality:

Thousands of Gazan farmers may be unable to replant their crops during the region’s main planting season in October due to agricultural land still damaged by the Israeli offensive at the start of the year, and a lack of agricultural materials like seeds and fertilizers, according to officials.

Half of Hatem Khubair’s four hectares of farmland in Beit Lahiya, a city in the northern Gaza Strip, were destroyed during the Israeli offensive earlier this year.

“I can’t afford to rehabilitate my land. The Israeli army bulldozed my crops – onions and carrots – and parked tanks on it, destroying the irrigation system,” said Hatem.

“I lack money and materials,” said Hatem, estimating the damage at US$27,000, not including the production losses he and his family of eight face this season.

Farmers are struggling to restore the 1,700 hectares of agricultural land damaged or destroyed during Israel’s 23-day offensive which ended on 18 January 2009, according to a UN Development Programme (UNDP) report entitled Damage Assessment in Gaza’s Agricultural Sector.

A cautionary tale about the recently deceased Jewish, Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Marek Edelman:

Edelman’s life was the stuff of fiction. From fighting in the Ghetto Uprising, escaping via the sewers to the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw, a founder of Solidarity in Poland who was briefly imprisoned by the Stalinists.

Edelman was the living proof that Jews could fight anti-Semitism where they lived and didn’t have to escape to a state mirrored on the principles of their oppressors in someone else’s land in Palestine. Above all he excoriated the Jewish collaborators and traitors who the Zionists had seen fit to call ‘heroes’. He didn’t fit in with or conform to Zionism’s narrative of the Holocaust.

Today Zionism praises the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but in the 1930’s and 1940’s it treated and made deals with the Nazis. In the Ghetto the Jewish leadership did nothing as two-thirds of the Jews were deported without resistance. The Chairman of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow, a General Zionist and compared to most leaders of the Judenrat, an honourable man, committed suicide. ‘what could we do’ was the familiar refrain of the Jewish leadership. But the Bund, which delayed the setting up of the Ghetto through demonstrations and mass mobilisation, believed in relying on the masses, not the lying words of the Nazi enemy.