Jonathan Tasini is a Jew who grew up in Israel and is a Democrat candidate for the US senate. He calls here for the end of the Gaza blockade.
Yet another small but significant Jewish voice in the US that simply doesn’t believe in the myth of Zionist solidarity:
Two more notable stories in the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli occupation.
A controversial UC Berkeley student senate bill opposing UC investments in companies providing military support to Israel has once again added a local twist to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Although the bill is labeled “UC Divestment From War Crimes,” it focuses on the conflict in the Middle East and human rights violations by the Israeli Army in Gaza and the West Bank.
The bill’s critics contend that singling out Israel as a perpetrator of war crimes is unfair, given the vast number of human rights violations that go on elsewhere in the world.
…
The Berkeley campus has been rocked by altercations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine student groups from time to time, some of which were caused by alleged incidents of hate speech, graffiti and vandalism.
“The bill cites facts, such as from the UN’s Goldstone Report, that should be disregarded,” said Cohen, as she boarded a flight Friday to leave for spring break. “It’s blatantly anti-Israel. I was told that the bill is not divesting from Israel, it’s divesting from war crimes. But then we should not have any reference of Israel in it. This is just dividing the community in Berkeley.”
Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, a second-year Economics Ph.D. student who co-authored the bill, said that Israel had been used as a case study to highlight the ethics violations being committed by its government on Palestinian settlements.
“What about the war crimes in other countries—China, Sudan, Afghanistan?” Cohen asked. “They are trying to make it about war crimes but it’s not about war crimes. If they cared about war crimes then the bill would have mentioned other countries. They are trying to dissolve the State of Israel.”
Oatfield said that the ASUC senate has a long history of taking strong action to divest funds from countries involved in war crimes.
“We have singled out Sudan, we have singled out South Africa in the past,” said Huet-Vaughn. “It’s our job to condemn unethical treatment. We want to make a statement about what can be done with student government funds. But the more significant thing is we don’t want our university to support war crimes.”
The bill specifically calls for ASUC and UC to stop investing in two American companies—General Electric and United Technologies—which are providing Israel with weapons.
Oatfield said that although the bill is focused on conflicts in Israel, it also asks the ASUC to create a commission which will investigate war crimes in Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
“The immediate action is pertaining to two companies, but it also has long-term goals,” Oatfield said.
E-mails supporting or denouncing the senate’s action started flying about right after the final vote, with author and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz being one of the first to issue a statement.
“Divesting from Israel is immoral, bigoted and if done by a state university illegal,” Dershowitz said. “It encourages terrorism and discourages peace. Any university that would actually divest from Israel will be subjected to countermeasures—financial, legal, academic and political. We will fight back against this selective bigotry that hurts the good name of the University of California. This misuse of the university’s name does not represent the views of students, faculty, alumni and other constituents of the greater Berkeley community. Instead it represents the hijacking of the university for improper ideological purposes. It must be rejected immediately and categorically.”
BDS leader Omar Barghouti emails and writes: “The South Africa spirit is in the air.”
H&M is a Swedish store chain planning to open seven stores in Israel. This boycott/divestment campaign is initiated by Swedish solidarity groups with Palestine and they are looking for international endorsement:
This campaign builds on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) call made by the Palestinian civil society in 2005 and the international BDS movement that followed. Inspired by the non-violent struggle against the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestine, we acted when we heard that H&M were about to open seven stores in Israel. To buy into the occupation and oppression is not fashionable and it shouldn’t be profitable. Make your voice heard – tell H&M not to invest in Israel until Israel respects international law and human rights!
On the 11th of March H&M is opening its first store in the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv. The second store will open on the 16th of March in Malcha Mall in Jerusalem. We will keep you updated.
Here’s the Facebook group.
This clip from CNN (via Mondoweiss) is interesting. Highlighting the undoubted anger in America over recent Israeli actions, it’s a small but significant debate over the amount of money Washington gives the Jewish state every year. Let’s have an open and public debate about the rights and wrongs of this or should Israel just be protected from such discussions?
Youtube poster Media Matters Action Network says that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was “surprised” by Jack Cafferty’s viewer criticisms of Israel, and this is the case. Cafferty takes an atypically-sober tone, cautiously criticizing the Israel-US special relationship, suggesting that we should “start cutting back on the approximately 2.5 billion in aid we give to Israel every year….” and quoting Maureen Dowd saying that the White House is “appalled by Israel’s self-absorption.” Then he polls viewers. The letters Cafferty reads are critical of Israel, 6-1. The 1 is repulsive: “We should be helping Israel occupy as much Arab land as possible.” “You got a lot of emails?” Blitzer asks. “And most of it was anti-Israel, you would say?”
Cafferty then says this was a helluva way to treat Biden, the 1600 new settlements. Blitzer agrees: “I think a lot of people were very, very upset about it, including by the way in Israel.” The former JPost reporter, playing the role of Israel apologist, to the end.
Leading Australian thinker and academic Scott Burchill comments on the recent revelations that American General David Petraeus is publicly linking the Middle East conflict and Washington’s failures in the Muslim world:
Assuming that [Mark] Perry’s report is accurate – and it apparently is – it’s quite a significant development. If the Pentagon decides to flex its muscles, there could be real pressure on Israel to carry out at least cosmetic changes, meeting some if not all of Clinton’s demands. All Petraeus et al have to do is go public with the charge that these upstart Jews are endangering our brave boys In Iraq and Afghanistan, etc, and the country could be swept by a wave of anti-Semitism. The generals have already taken this message to Congress. The power of the Israel lobby is not as great as the volume of its spruikers. It has nothing on the Pentagon lobby.
The situation is reminiscent of 20 years ago when Yitzak Shamir – arrogant, self-righteous and obnoxious – so irritated James Baker by purposeful humiliation that Bush the First’s administration imposed light sanctions. Israel got the message. Shamir was replaced by the supreme cynic Shimon Peres, who is much better attuned to Western hypocrisy. Things smoothed over. Same policies, but more politely pursued.
It’s not quite as easy this time because the ultra-nationalist and fundamentalist religious right (not identical – Shas is really unworldly) are much stronger now, and Western-oriented sectors in Israel are much weaker.
Interestingly there is apparently a split among elites in the US. The Washington Post seems to be demanding the Obama follow the Joe Lieberman line (“we are all one family”), but the New York Times and other centrist Democrats (like the Boston Globe) are calling for Obama to stand his ground, or there will be trouble.
Israel has decisive power in Congress. Arabs have oil, money and can make life difficult for US expeditions in the Middle East and Central Asia. Flip a coin. Netanyahu isn’t very bright, Obama loathes him but he remains a very resolute reactionary and Washington has a grave dilemma with him. They may try to finesse his coalition but there is no guarantee Kadima would play ball.
Interesting times.
Iranian dissidents clearly need more global support but surely backing from the US government is sending the completely wrong message?
At a time when the Obama administration is pressing for harsher sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, democracy advocates in Iran have been celebrating the recent decision by the United States to lift sanctions on various online services, which they say only helped Tehran to suppress the opposition.
But it is still a long way from the activists’ goal of lifting all restrictions on trade in Internet services, which opposition leaders say is vital to maintaining the open communications that have underpinned the protests that erupted last summer after the disputed presidential election. In recent months the government has carried out cyberwarfare against the opposition, eliminating virtually all sources of independent news and information and shutting down social networking services.
The sanctions against online services — provided through free software like Google Chat or Yahoo Messenger — were intended to restrict Iran’s ability to develop nuclear technology, but democracy advocates say they ended up helping the government repress its people. “The policies were contradictory,” said Ali Akbar Moussavi Khoini, a former member of Parliament who now lives in Washington, where he pressed for the change.
The new measure will enable users in Iran to download the latest circumvention software to help defeat the government’s efforts to block Web sites, and to stop relying on pirated copies that can be far more easily hacked by the government.
But the government’s opponents say they need still more help in getting around the government’s information roadblocks.
“The Islamic Republic is very efficient in limiting people’s access to these sources, and Iranian people need major help,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, the founder of one of the largest Persian-language social networking Web sites, the United States-based Balatarin. “We need some 50 percent of people to be able to access independent news sources other than the state-controlled media.”
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest synagogue movement in the US, urges Israel to halt building in East Jerusalem (not stop, mind you, merely postpone).
How much more sordid can this tale become?
Tony Blair‘s secret links to Gulf oil giants were revealed today as fresh details emerged of his “carte blanche” support for George Bush‘s Iraq war.
The former prime minister has been in the pay of the Kuwaiti government and a South Korean oil firm for up to 18 months, a parliamentary watchdog has revealed.
But the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments allowed Mr Blair to keep his contracts secret because of “market sensitivities” and because the Kuwaitis requested confidentiality.
In a further revelation, a classified memo from Mr Blair to President Bush showed the full extent of his support for the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
The personal note — which has been seen by the Chilcot Inquiry but not released by the Government — shows that Mr Blair wrote: “You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.”
The contents of the memo, which is buried in Andrew Rawnsley‘s book The End Of The Party, confirm the exact words Mr Blair used to offer his strong backing for Bush in July 2002, eight months before the invasion.
The Chilcot committee was barred from quizzing Mr Blair publicly about the private notes to the US president when he gave evidence in January. Downing Street has refused permission to release the secret documents.
Rawnsley’s book shows that Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US, reacted with astonishment when he saw the note.
He phoned Mr Blair’s foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, saying: “Why in God’s name has he said that again?”
Sir David replied: “We tried to stop him… but he wouldn’t listen.”
The Iraq war started seven years ago. It has caused unbelievable civilian suffering, something largely ignored by the corporate press.
Lest we forget:
Democracy Now! this week interviewed Yanar Mohammed, president of the Baghdad-based Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq:
…the economic agenda in Iraq, the privatization, the heavy privatization, that’s happened in Iraq in the last two years, where tens of thousands of workers have been laid off, with no work to go to, with no social insurance to support them, while in the same time there is an economic agenda of supporting foreign investment in a way where there is protection for foreign investment, but there is no labor law, no unemployment insurance for people. And in the same time, we are being surprised by the Ministry of Finance telling the Iraqis that we need to have a loan from the World Bank, which will put the Iraq policies under such pressure, and it is a surprise to everybody because the revenues of oil are so high that we do not really need a loan from the World Bank. So, economically, it’s a rollercoaster here in Iraq—privatization, no security for the working class, much investment for multinational countries, and, in the same time, a democracy which has brought forward groups which are transformations of the first political forces that started off with militias, but now they are politicians and they are sitting in the Green Zone.
With Israel under intense pressure to wind back its colonial project, the role of dissident Jews is vital, to make the wider community knows that we don’t support the actions of the Jewish state. Jews don’t speak with one voice.
It’s important, therefore, that the mainstream media is noticing. Take this piece in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by columnist Hamish McDonald:
The coolness didn’t last long. Along with standing firm on ”border security” and opposing higher taxes, our politicians find it hard to maintain any indignation, let alone anger or rage, against Israel.
This week the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, was buttering up Israel and its local lobbyists again, by staging a special press conference and media opportunity at Parliament House to ”receive” a written report and set of recommendations on boosting relations.
This was handed over by Albert Dadon, the new mover and shaker in Australia’s Jewish community, on behalf of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum, a second-track diplomacy venture started two years ago on the model of businessman Phil Scanlan’s longer-running Australia America Leadership Dialogue.
Kevin Rudd was a regular at Scanlan’s annual talkfest. Julia Gillard was a founder-member of Dadon’s one, joined by the opposition’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, Julie Bishop, and various other political, academic, business and media figures.
The Israeli forum seems already to be well into the uncritical boosterism of which Scanlan’s group gets accused in some circles. It has chosen this time to suggest that along with more trade, agricultural and scientific exchanges and so on, Australia develops military-to-military ties with Israel.
Smith said he was ”very happy” to receive this report, which would get ”serious consideration” from the Prime Minister, adding: ”The friendship between Australia and Israel is longstanding and it is enduring, and that will continue. Despite recent events, which have been the cause of public commentary between Australia and Israel, that friendship will endure.”
The, ahem, recent events include the use of forged copies of Australian passports in the recent assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, and the ”insulting” (US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s word) action of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in announcing more Jewish housing in disputed East Jerusalem as the US Vice-President, Joe Biden, arrived in Israel and US-brokered ”proximity talks” between Israel and the Palestinians were about to start.
Australian Federal Police agents have been sent to Israel to inquire about the passports, and ASIO has been put on the case too. But no-one is expecting the AFP to find a link to Mossad, unless the Israeli intelligence agency has been very careless indeed.
Some longer coolness about East Jerusalem would have been in order. Netanyahu, who included a smarmy letter in Dadon’s report, has been trying to weasel his way out of the row with Washington by blaming the timing, but not the substance, on his interior minister and the Jerusalem mayor.
Australia’s rebuke was mildly worded. ”I share the view that this is a bad decision at the wrong time and it’s not a helpful contribution to the peace process,” Smith said, adding that Israel was undoing the ”very hard work” of the US and others to get the two sides working towards a ”two-state” solution.
But the two-state solution that seemed a real prospect at the high water of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s has come to look more and more like a mirage, as power slips away from moderates on both sides.
Netanyahu has backed away from the offer made by his predecessor Ehud Olmert in the dying days of his leadership, when he was a caretaker prime minister under a corruption cloud. His right-wing-religious government pays only lip-service to the two-state goal.
Many of the Palestinians, as the Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari notes in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, are starting to think of separate statehood and sovereignty as a new form of imprisonment. Instead, they turn to continued struggle and faith that demographics will eventually yield dominance over the entire former Palestine Mandate. The rocket attacks out of Gaza have started again.
Israel meanwhile is steadily losing the sympathy that it once had as a beleaguered underdog threatened with extinction by hostile neighbours. Now it rains destruction with high-tech American weaponry at little risk to its own personnel (many of its 13 deaths in the Gaza operation were friendly-fire accidents; some 1300 Palestinians died). Its population, swollen by Russian immigrants accustomed to talk of Muslims as ”chyornaya zhopa” (black-arses) is now losing its old interest in the Arabs, with whom older Israelis grew up. They’re now away behind a high wall.
Meanwhile groups like Peace Now in Israel itself, J-Street in Washington, and individuals like Antony Loewenstein try to revive Jewish liberalism, to much vilification as ”self-hating Jews”. But even a hard realist like Yaari is worried about the trend: he suggests a short-circuit to endless haggling over the ”final status” agreement by recognition of a Palestinian state now, to take up negotiations, a suggestion that will shock some of the Jewish diaspora organisations that have brought him out on tour.
Behind its profession of undying support for Israel, the Rudd government has put a bit more detachment into our policy, ending our previous lining up with a bunch of tiny American client states in United Nations votes on the Middle East. In November 2008, it supported UN resolutions calling for a halt to settlements in the occupied territories and for adherence to the Geneva Convention in those areas. Last year it switched our vote from abstain to favour on the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. In February it went from oppose to abstain on a resolution calling for both Israel and the Palestinians to investigate possible war crimes in the Gaza conflict.
It doesn’t seem to be having any impact on Netanyahu and has opened Rudd to opposition sniping that he’s selling out Israel to win Arab votes for the UN Security Council seat. Both sides of our politics could do well to adopt the Rudd-Confucian doctrine of the ”zhengyou”, the ”true friend” (in Chinese) who can point out shortcomings.
Jon Stewart takes on Fox News’ Glenn Beck, a dribbling fool that has captured many hearts in the US:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Intro – Progressivism Is Cancer | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Conservative Libertarian | ||||
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A surprisingly progressive decision in Britain and a healthy precedent for other civil conflicts around the world:
Members of a banned terrorist organisation can claim asylum in Britain, the Supreme Court has ruled.
The court ruled that being a member of the Tamil Tigers, which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the government, should not prevent an individual claiming asylum.
Their ruling was made in the case of “R” who joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1992, at the age of 10.
The Tamil Tigers, or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have been involved in a bloody struggle in Sri Lanka, that stretches back 30 years.
“R” occupied various positions until, at the age of 18, he was appointed to lead a mobile unit transporting members of the intelligence division through the jungles to Colombo.
He also acted as chief security guard to the leader of the intelligence division and second in command of the combat unit of the intelligence division.
In October 2006 he was sent under cover to Colombo to await further instructions but two months later he discovered that the Sri Lankan government was aware of his presence in the capital.
He fled to Britain and claimed asylum on the basis that if he returned to Sri Lanka he would face mistreatment due to his race and LTTE membership.
The application was refused, saying that there were grounds for considering that he had committed war crimes.
It said the Tamil Tigers had been “responsible for widespread and systemic war crimes and crimes against humanity” and that his membership of an extremist group could be presumed to amount to “personal and knowing participation, or at least acquiescence amounting to complicity, in the crimes in question.”
The decision was quashed by the Court of Appeal which said the government was wrong to assume that the individual, as a member of the LTTE, was guilty of knowing participation in such crimes and that the government should have considered whether there was evidence that he had made a significant contribution to the commission of such crimes.
The Home Secretary appealed against the decision but on Wednesday that was turned down.
So:
Almost half of all U.S. voters believe that Israel should be made to cease all settlement construction as part of a future peace deal with the Palestinians, a Rasmussen Reports poll said on Wednesday.
The American institute claimed that a recent poll showed 49% of voters approved of forcing Israel to stop settlement construction, with only 22% of voters disagreeing, saying Israel should not be required to stop building those settlements. Another 29% were not sure.
But Isi Leibler, Zionist and backer of the entire colonial project, thinks America’s current stance is deeply unfair. I can just imagine him fuming and wondering why the poor, little Jews can’t just be allowed to do what they want (which is essentially what’s been happening for decades, even if the latest reports allege that Netanyahu has been “humiliated” by his government’s back-down over settlement expansion):
There are certain red lines which no government of Israel may cross. Netanyahu, on this occasion, must stand firm. The current crisis transcends political or ideological differences between Likud, Labor and Kadima. All mainstream parties should unite and convey to President Obama that Israel is a sovereign state and will not automatically bow to diktats of the US administration. They need to make the US administration and public understand that no government of Israel will agree to freeze construction in Jerusalem, the heart and soul of the Jewish people.
