Antony Loewenstein

GlobalPost interviews some radical, West Bank settlers, supported, funded and protected by the Jewish state:

Other than two friendly dogs and some iron bars, the kids on the hill have few weapons. Gottlieb keeps a small can of pepper spray in the pocket of his cargo pants in case of attack by people he calls his “enemies.”

“The people over there,” he said, pointing to a Palestinian village across a valley to the west. He looked around him, pointing to other Palestinian village. “The people over there. The people over there. The people over there. The people over there.”

Like most settlers, he doesn’t call them Palestinians. The name Palestinian implies, to them, that there ever was or ever will be a country called Palestine. Sometimes they’re “Arabs,” but mostly he calls them “terrorists.” Gottlieb said he was not afraid of them.

“God’s with me,” he said. “We’ve been here forever. This land has been ours forever. This land has been promised for God.”

And the threat is real:

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Tuesday published a report listing Palestinian communities that are especially vulnerable to the settler strategy known as the “price tag.”

The document includes 83 villages, hamlets and neighborhoods that appear to be particularly vulnerable to retaliatory attacks by settlers in response to army operations to dismantle illegal structures built by Jewish residents in the West Bank. In the past, such attacks have included rock-throwing and setting fire to Palestinian property.

According to the report, “the ‘price tag’ strategy entails the exertion of systematic, widespread and indiscriminate violence against Palestinian civilians and Israeli security forces, following attempts by the Israeli authorities to evacuate settlement outposts.

“The overall objective of this strategy is to deter the Israeli authorities from removing such outposts. In the immediate term, the ‘price tag’ strategy aims at diverting Israeli forces and troops from the scene of an outpost evacuation into other areas, requiring the intervention of those forces to contain violent incidents.”

A photo tells a thousand words:

Anna Baltzer, author, and Haithem El-Zabri, founder of the Palestine Online Store. Austin, TX, November 2008. [Photographer unknown]

Following this week’s controversy over Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Hartcher taking a free trip to Israel and returning to Australia with wonderful tales of Zionist adventure, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt argues that transparency in think-tanks and public figures is key. Where is the money coming from of major columnists and journalists?

We are drowning in information and opinion, much of it claiming to be objective and authoritative when it may in fact be inspired and funded by moneyed special interests eager to sell the public a story that advances their particular objectives. Most “think tanks” in Washington portray themselves as objective, quasi-scholarly institutions (indeed, they increasingly give researchers endowed chairs and other quasi-academic titles), but unlike most universities, most think tanks remain heavily dependent on “soft money” and are bound to be especially sensitive to what potential donors might be thinking. And some of them aren’t really scholarly at all; they are just public relations operations or “letterhead organizations” seeking to mold public opinion and push the policy process in a particular direction. But unless you know who’s paying for it, it’s hard to decide who’s giving you an honest opinion and who is just shilling for some powerful interest group.

Can we tame this beast without infringing on free speech?

Here’s a suggestion: let’s start by asking participants in the war of ideas to provide a lot more information about their financial dealings.

Ethnic cleansing, allegedly supported by far too many Israelis:

Transfer of Arabs from the Palestinian Authority to actual Arab countries was the most popular solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, according to a poll this week by Israel National News. Of the more than 6,400 people surveyed, 53.2 said ‘Transfer of Palestinians to another Arab country’ when asked, “What’s the best solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict?”

The “two-states for two peoples” solution being pushed by the United States and the international community received 30.8 percent support, while the idea of giving Palestinians Jordanian citizenship was approved by 14.5 percent. Maintaining the status quo received 1.3 percent of the vote.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on the continuing ability of the US corporate press to evade telling the truth about the Middle East:

The big news out of the Middle East yesterday was the Israeli government’s decision to approve an expansion of the Gilo settlement near Jerusalem. The White House’s muddled position on settlement expansion has been a key part of Israel-Palestine negotiations. Many headlines framed the news as you’d expect (New York Times: “Plan to Expand Jerusalem Settlement Angers U.S.”, for example) .

The Washington Post, though, went with this headline today: “Housing Plan for Jerusalem Neighborhood Spurs Criticism.”

The article by Howard Schneider refers to a “disputed neighborhood of Jerusalem,” the “Jewish neighborhood of Gilo,” a place “annexed to the city in a step not recognized by the international community.”

There is also a reference to White House policy, noting that the Obama administration “has vacillated in its stance on Israeli construction in areas claimed by the Palestinians.”  This is downright bizarre; the entire discussion about “Israeli construction” concerns illegal Israeli settlements–or, perhaps more accurately, colonies–in the West Bank. Why, then, refuse to label Gilo accurately? It’s an old story, actually; as Extra! pointed out in 2002, Gilo was a cause for pro-Israeli media activists, who pressured outlets like CNN to stop referring to Gilo as a settlement and use terms more innocuous like “neighborhood.” It’s still working, it would seem.

Saree Makdisi, recent visitor to Australia, speaks to Democracy Now! on a Palestinian threat to unilaterally declare statehood:

I think it would be a mistake for the Palestinians to declare statehood, because, first of all, they’ve already done that, and you can’t declare statehood twice. They did it in 1988. And the second thing is that a declaration of statehood in the Occupied Territories would do nothing to help the majority of Palestinians. Most Palestinians actually live in enforced exile, because they were expelled from their homes in 1948. And also, there’s a considerable Palestinian minority inside Israel itself, so the creation of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories would benefit, to a certain extent—actually, it’s quite limited how much it would benefit them—those living under occupation, but it would actually sell out the majority of the Palestinian people. That’s one of the major problems with the two-state solution. It always has been a problem with the two-state solution. It focuses on the minority of the Palestinian people and on actually a very small piece of historic Palestine.

…

I think that the only practical way out and the only just way out at this point is to create a single state, a democratic and secular state, in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians live as equal citizens, the ones under occupation, the ones who have been in exile for sixty-plus years, and the ones who are now living as second-class citizens inside Israel itself. I think that the only way—that the idea of trying to break up a very small piece of land into ethnic islands, first of all, it can’t work. I mean, just practically speaking, it can’t work. Second of all, it’s inherently unjust to try and divide people that way and to exclude people from their ancestral homeland because they don’t fit into the criteria of the state, which is essentially what the situation is now. And there’s no reason why people can’t live together as just—you know, in justice and as equal citizens.

South African writer and activist Virginia Tilley also argues against a unilateral move, arguing it would lead only to “Bantustans”.

Former head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy, who headed the agency from 1998 to 2002, spoke this week to ABC Radio PM about the importance of engaging Hamas:

Well as you know I am on record for the last six years saying that Hamas should be part of the solution not part of the problem.

In the last two weeks two developments have taken place, a, the former minister of defence and chief of staff General Mofaz has come out openly and said that in certain circumstances people should talk to Hamas. And in a recent poll which was carried out last week, at the end of last week in Israel, a majority of Israelis believe that Israel should talk to Hamas.

So I am no longer a lone voice on this. The timing of such an event of course is contingent on when it would be of interest to both sides. I think that it will be in the end in the interest of both sides and I think in the end Mr Netanyahu will talk to Hamas in one form or another.

After J Street condemned Sarah Palin for encouraging the expansion of illegal, Jewish settlements in the West Bank, J Street condemned her recklessness.

Leading Zionist figure Abe Foxman condemned J Street for condemning Palin and questioned the group’s “pro-Israel” position.

J Street responded and wrote this:

Abe, we can disagree on matters of policy.  You may support unlimited settlement expansion, I do not.  You may support immediate, unilateral sanctions on Iran at a delicate moment in international negotiations, J Street does not. We say give diplomacy the full opportunity to succeed and if it doesn’t then take action against Iran with broad, international support.  You may be willing to go along with the defamation of a world-renowned (and Zionist) jurist who has asked tough questions about the Gaza War, but, while we came out clearly against one-sided UN action against Israel, we have refused to join the chorus of personal attacks against Judge Goldstone.

You, of course, have every right to disagree with us. It’s a free country.

But you have no right to decide who is and is not pro-Israel based on whether they agree with your views.

The Financial Times covers the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel and finds a long road ahead. The fact that a leading newspaper even acknowledges the risk Israel faces due to its behaviour, including its recent strong editorial implicitly accepting a one-state solution as the only likely way forward, is progress:

Yet, despite Israel’s proven resilience, the strategy of targeting the country’s economic welfare in order to raise political pressure on the country is again gaining momentum. Pro-Palestinian campaigners say the so-called “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movement has gathered support above all because of Israel’s January invasion of the Gaza Strip, which left about 1,400 Palestinians dead and sparked condemnation of Israel round the world.

“People are looking for ways to show their disapproval,” says Betty Hunter, general secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK.

Her group is in talks with British supermarket chains Tesco and J Sainsbury to persuade them to stop selling products from Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. But she concedes that the movement has few concrete results to show for its efforts so far.

That perception is shared on the Israeli side, where economists and business leaders say they have yet to register an impact on exports, growth and investment. Even Israel’s fruit growers and exporters, by far the most visible target for consumers outside the country, say they have not noticed any drop in demand for political reasons.

“In my experience, this is a marginal phenomenon at best,” says Ilan Eshel, the chief executive of the Israeli Fruit Growers’ Association. “It is simply a question of supply and demand: if avocados and mangos are missing in Europe, they take our avocados and mangos.”

Activists such as Ms Hunter stress that applying economic pressure to Israel was never expected to yield results in the short term. “Our model is [the campaign against apartheid-era] South Africa. But people forget that the boycott campaign didn’t happen overnight. It took time.”

Who says a racist party can’t expand its base? One can imagine the kind of people dying to sign-up:

An elderly Sikh who describes Islam as a “beast” and once provided a character reference for Nick Griffin during his racial hatred trial is set to become the British National Party’s first non-white member.

Rajinder Singh, an anti-Islam activist in his late seventies who blames Muslims for the death of his father during the Partition of India in 1947, has been sympathetic towards Britain’s far-right party for much of the past decade even though he currently remains barred from becoming a member because of the colour of his skin.

But last weekend the BNP’s leadership took their first steps towards dropping its membership ban on non-whites after the Human Rights Commission threatened the party with legal action. The move will be put to a vote of members soon.

I want to be this kind of Jew:

A respected rabbi with a taste for cocaine and hookers was so tired after a three-day orgy that a pimp cancelled the prostitutes scheduled to visit him, a British court has heard.

No, Israel isn’t a racist society at all:

Beitar Jerusalem captain Aviram Baruchyan met Thursday evening with fans belonging to the “La Familia” organization and apologized for saying that he would like to see an Arab play in the football team.

The fans told him they were hurt by the remark he made about 10 days ago at an anti-violence conference.

Baruchyan said at the end of Thursday’s meeting, “The most painful thing is that I unfortunately hurt Beitar’s fans, and I understood that I hurt them very much. It’s important for me that the players know and that everyone knows that I am with them through thick and thin, and I don’t care what other people think or write.

“However,” he added, “it’s important for me to stress that I’m not the one who decides on these things, but if at the moment the fans don’t want it, there won’t be an Arab player in Beitar.”