Antony Loewenstein

When Israel and its blind supporters accuse any critics of anti-Semitism – the latest shameful example, this time in Canada, is reported here – it’s easy to claim that Zionists are the masters of crying wolf.

Then a story like this appears and it’s hard to know what to think, other than Israel’s enemies are often helped by the country’s criminal and inept behaviour:

Israel has admitted that pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others without the consent of their families – a practice that it said ended in the 1990s, it emerged at the weekend.

The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.

The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.

Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.

The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.

Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”

Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”

The failure of Copenhagen, writes the Independent’s Johann Hari, requires a new kind of action:

The time for changing your light-bulbs and hoping for the best is over. It is time to take collective action. For some people, that will mean joining Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or the Campaign Against Climate Change and helping them pile on the pressure. But those who can go further – by taking non-violent direct action – should do so. Every coal train should be ringed with people refusing to let it pass. Every new runway should be blockaded. The cost of trashing the climate needs to be raised.

It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.

There need to be parallel movements to this in every country on earth (and a much bigger one in Britain). Copenhagen had one value, and one value alone. It has shown us that if we don’t act in our own self-defence now, nobody else will.

How’s this for advertising, using the idea of a terrorist attack in Sydney to make a point about bowel cancer?

Israel, behave yourself or face the growing wrath of once friendly nations:

Turkish President Abdullah Gul told President Shimon Peres at a private meeting in Copenhagen on Friday that only after Israel takes action to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip would he pay Israel a visit.

The fundamentalist settler movement in Israel is a growing threat, for years indulged as noble colonists on Palestinian land.

And yet their ugly faces are now clear for all to see, the result of decades of Israeli and Western indulgence.

Here’s Rabbi Dov Wolpe, an extreme right winger, on Israeli TV recently:

Iranian Nasrin Alavi writes on a momentous day in Iran:

Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri passed away last night. His opponents have in recent years referred to him in the Iranian media as the “Simpleton Sheik” omitting to even use the prefix Ayatollah.

Crowds are gathering outside his residence in Qom for his funeral on Monday. While campuses around Iran, notably Teheran and Esfahan, have seen mourning precession.

Montazeri, once a powerful establishment figure, was sidelined for his criticism of the mass execution of thousands of young political prisoner in the 1980’s.  He even condemned Khomeini’s fatwa for the assassination of author Salman Rushdie saying: “People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.”  In 2004 Grand Ayatollah Montazeri stated that the Iranian people did not go through a revolution in order to “substitute absolutist rule by the crown with one under the turban”.

Iranians, who are predominately Shia Moslems, celebrate people’s deaths more so than their lives. You may come up with an excuse and decline a wedding invitation to a wedding of the son of an acquaintance…but it would be dishonourable to miss his funeral. As is the case he will be eulogised in death more so then he was ever in his lifetime and under the circumstances his funeral will turn into a rallying point. As it was his confinement had turned him into a martyr.

Despite the general (and erroneous) belief in a unified Shia clergy, the dozen or so Grand Ayatollahs in the world have their own groups of followers and take very different positions, even at times issuing religious edicts or fatwas that contradict one another. Yet only a tiny section of these Grand Ayatollahs are affiliated with the state in Iran. Many clerical leaders have been openly appalled by the government’s acts of post-election violence; While a clear majority have noticeably failed to  carry out the usual protocol of sending out official acknowledgments of the government’s proclaimed election victory in June.

For three decades Iran has been a laboratory of political and social experimentation. It has also experienced what no other Muslim state has experienced in the twentieth century, namely the coexistence of revolutionary Islam alongside what could be called a more ‘secular’ dimension. Ironically the Islamic republic has put its secular political interests above the sanctified power of the Islamic clergy and is unique in Iran’s Islamic history for having kept under house arrest two Grand Ayatollahs Montazeri and Shariatmadari.

Israeli peace group Ta’ayush, dedicated to resisting the occupation, attended a protest last week in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah against Jewish colonisation.

Blogger Joseph Dana, with whom I collaborated during my visit to Israel and the West Bank in July, has video from the event and writes the following:

A busy weekend in Israel for Ta’ayush and the Israeli direct action left. Below is clear video from last Friday’s Sheikh Jarrah protest. Quoted in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, Meretz Chairman Chaim Oron said “It’s unthinkable that every week left-wing protestors are prevented from expressing legitimate protest, while right-wing protestors, who violently and blatantly violate the government’s decisions, are being treated forgivingly.”

How times are changing.

This piece by Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz really speaks for itself. The case against Tzipi Livni is about far more than simply Gaza:

There is a much wider issue at stake here, beyond former ministers’ and generals’ lecture engagements and holiday plans. Those who say that this is Israel’s battle for international legitimacy are only telling us part of the story. The reality is that in many countries, that battle is over, that battle has been lost. In some of the most “enlightened” nations of the Western world, identifying Israel as a racist, warmongering apartheid state is no longer a radical view, shared mainly by anti-Semites and “Arab lovers” – it has become the mainstream opinion.

…

As far as much of the world is concerned, Israel today is the South Africa of yesteryear. And as it was with the end of apartheid, the only remedy here is relinquishing control of the West Bank and part of Jerusalem and establishing a viable Palestinian state. The alternative is accepting our status as a pariah state.

The Gaza Freedom March, which I’ll be attending, is about showing solidarity with the people of Gaza and Palestine. There are certainly obstacles in the way, but this preview film, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, outlines the reasons behind the mission:

Between a Rock and a Hard Place Preview 1.1 from Maurice Jacobsen on Vimeo.

Israel, says America, you can illegal blockade Gaza and expand settlements in the West Bank and we’ll still fund your work:

US President Barack Obama this week signed the 2010 foreign aid budget law which includes $2.775 billion in security aid to Israel. This is the second year the budget is transferred to the Jewish state as part of understandings that the American assistance to Israel in the coming decade will total $30 billion.

The invaluable al-Jazeera English reports:

Israel has announced a partial moratorium on settlement construction. Yet, at the same time, it has invested in those already established in a bid to solidify their existence.

In the Jordan Valley there are 22 settlements viewed as illegal under international law.

But, as Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston reports, they benefit from a system of Israeli funding specifically focused on kick-starting settler economies.

A helpful lesson in the wonders of US aid to Egypt.