Antony Loewenstein

British newspaper the Independent has been sold for £1 to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev.

Amira Hass in Haaretz:

Satisfaction – that’s what Israeli faces radiate, at least as observed by people who just came out of Ramallah or Gaza and watch Jerusalem’s busy Ben-Yehuda Street, the Ramat Aviv Mall or Ben-Gurion International Airport.

To the Israelis, nothing exists beyond the moment. It’s just like the smugness exhibited by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his private playing field, the AIPAC conference. Have our diplomats been expelled? Is the American administration angry? We’ll bow our heads for a moment, the storm will pass, and we’ll be accepted into the honorable club of the OECD. The main thing is that Israel’s obstinate policy of separation has succeeded and that two adversarial Palestinian entities has been created.

…

More than a decade ago, during one of the futile rounds of talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Saeb Erekat allowed himself to wonder: “Aren’t the Israelis thinking about their grandchildren?” A similar question is heard from inhabitants of Gaza whose homes were destroyed and whose children were killed, as well as from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank who have had their fill of harassment from settlers. Everyone wants to know: Don’t the Israelis understand that they cannot depend forever on their economic and military superiority? That it is impossible to maintain forever an aggressive regime based on extreme inequality and privilege for Jews?

The following is an extract from an ABC Radio program “Rear Vision” titled “The story of the Israeli secret service the Mossad” broadcast this week. Israeli historian Professor Benny Morris and Yossi Melman, journalist and intelligence expert for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, admit that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and some other western intelligence agencies spy on behalf of the Israeli spy agency Mossad in Arab and Muslim countries. Furthermore, they authorise Mossad to use their national passports in its clandestine spy activities in these countries.

Would Australia like to do something about this? What do you think?

Benny Morris: I think basically [Mossad is] spying in the Arab world, it had a small cell of spies Israeli agents who were sent into Lebanon and to Damascus and Syria, to spy on Syrian and Lebanese and Egyptian military and political activities and policies…

Yossi Melman:  …. A third role was to maintain secret, clandestine but very vital and useful contacts with its counterparts, whether it’s the Australian foreign espionage agency, the ASIO, or it’s the CIA or the British MI6 or the German Bundesnachrichtendienst. And they have developed over the years, very, very intimate relations, sharing information and sharing the assessments and even nowadays going into the field, enjoying [in fact what he said is, in joining] the operations in the war against global terrorism.

…. the Mossad is in charge of maintaining these liaisons relations with many, many intelligence services around the globe, what they call friendly organisations, the list is very, very long, Australia is included. They meet once in a while. First of all they send envoys to each other’s countries. There is an Australian ASIO delegate here or envoy or resident if you wish, working for the Israeli Embassy, and for the Australian Embassy in Tel Aviv and there is a Mossad agent or representative working from the Israeli Embassy in your country, in Australia. And so on and so forth around the globe. So on one hand there is very good, intimate, strong co-operation between the security services and they are doing each other favours occasionally, not only sharing information, but also scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours; do me a favour, I’ll do you a favour, and these favours can vary from Can you lend me your agent, for example, or I’m running an agent in country A, and can I join you in running that agent? Sometimes it’s to provide documentation. We need that you will provide us with a cover because we are working the clandestine in country B and we cannot operate in this country, while your documents, passports, travel documents are more welcome in that country. And then we come to that rough area in which you co-operate on the one hand, but on the other hand you don’t tell the other organisation all your secrets, even if you are very friendly and have intimate relations with it.

… Israelis cannot travel everywhere, cannot travel to some Arab countries. We cannot travel to Syria with Israeli passports; we cannot travel with [to] Iran with Israeli passports, we will be arrested on the spot and probably, even if you are an innocent civilian, you will be accused of being a spy. Therefore the Mossad needs to work occasionally by borrowing or fabricating foreign passports.

In case anybody was worried about the relationship between Washington and Israel, rest easy, friends, business isn’t being interrupted:

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel’s defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal.

According to the deal, Israel will purchase three new Hercules C-130J airplanes. The deal for the three aircrafts, designed by Lockheed Martin, is worth roughly a quarter billion dollars. Each aircraft costs $70 million.

From today’s Australian:

Britain is to be congratulated for expelling Israel’s ambassador to London. Australia should now expel Israel’s ambassador to Canberra. Further, the Israel embassy should be raided and searched by the AFP, the ADF and ASIS and any equipment used for criminal activity, like forging our passports, should be confiscated.

Adrian Jackson, Middle Park, Vic

Is Russia Google’s next weak spot?

Here’s some supreme propaganda for your weekend. Murdoch’s Australian places this story on page one, written by their favourite establishment supporting “reporter” Greg Sheridan – victims of Western wars, what are talking about? – and demands that Australia ignore Israel’s criminality:

TONY Abbott has called on the Rudd government not to expel an Israeli diplomat over allegations the Israeli secret service, Mossad, used forged Australian passports in the assassination of a Hamas terrorist in Dubai.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in his hotel room in Dubai on January 20 this year. The Dubai authorities later established he had been murdered.

The Opposition Leader wants the Rudd government to ignore the precedent set by Gordon Brown’s government in London, which expelled an Israeli diplomat as punishment for the use of British passports in the Dubai killing.

While stressing that he did not condone the misuse of Australian passports, and while it is not yet known whether Israel was involved in the assassination, Mr Abbott pleaded for understanding for the Jewish state.

“We can never forget that Israel is a country under existential threat in a way Australians find difficult to understand,” Mr Abbott told The Weekend Australian. “It’s also the only pluralist democracy in the Middle East.

“We have to understand that Israel sometimes has to do something which mercifully other countries are spared the necessity of doing. It strikes me that it would be an overreaction to expel an Israeli diplomat.”

The Rudd government is in the midst of considering how it will handle a report on the passports affair from the Australian Federal Police. The AFP group sent to Israel to investigate whether Mossad was involved in the misuse of Australian passports left Israel to return to Australia on March 8. Its report has not been finalised.

The British government gave Canberra a copy of its report, which found it “highly likely” that Israel was involved in the misuse of British passports.

Kevin Rudd told ABC radio yesterday that the government had yet to make up its mind on how it would react to the AFP report. The Prime Minister said: “It’s currently with the Australian Federal Police and others . . . those investigations are ongoing.”

Sources have also told The Weekend Australian that Australian intelligence agencies use forged passports in their clandestine work.

Analysts believe the agency most likely to do this is the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, which runs secret operations in numerous countries.

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop told The Weekend Australian: “It would be naive in the extreme to believe a foreign power never used a forged passport. The Australian government would have to be very careful to ensure that Australian agencies never used forged passports.”

She said expelling an Israeli diplomat would be an “extreme step” and that she would “not want to see Kevin Rudd politicise this case in an election year”.

Sources told The Weekend Australian that the Rudd government was having a vigorous internal debate about what action, if any, to take.

Some members of the government believe that it has already done enough to vent its anger with the Israelis.

Unless the AFP report comes up with some definitive proof of Israeli culpability that was not in the British report, these people believe the government’s strong statements, the calling in of the Israeli ambassador, Yuval Rotem, for a dressing-down, and the effective subsequent isolation of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Canberra, along with a changed Australian vote concerning Israel at the UN, constitutes more than enough action on Australia’s part.

This is especially so, in this group’s view, given the anti-Israel hysteria that is building as a result of the spat between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli building projects in East Jerusalem.

Others in the government prefer aligning more closely with the Gordon Brown strategy and with Mr Obama’s evident anger towards Israel.

Mr Rudd said there would be “a full and comprehensive statement from the government” once the AFP investigation had been completed. He also said he and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith were not satisfied with the answers they had received from the Israeli government.

Another option government strategists are believed to be examining is asking the Israelis for a public assurance that no Australian passport will be misused in the future. Israel’s government could give this assurance without admitting its involvement in Dubai.

The French, German and Irish governments, whose passports were also misused in Dubai, have not expelled any Israeli diplomats.

Analysts believe the Brown government may have been motivated by a desire to move domestic scandals out of the news agenda and to seek the votes of anti-Israeli Britons in the forthcoming British election.

And Sheridan in a separate op-ed essentially implies that Obama is anti-Semitic, extreme, radical, crazy, mad and causing danger to the world. In other words, consider the opposite true:

BARACK Obama’s anti-Israel jihad is one of the most irresponsible policy lurches by any modern American president. It rightly earns Obama the epithet of the US president least sympathetic to Israel in Israel’s history. Jimmy Carter became a great hater of Israel, but only after he left office.

Obama’s dangerous new lurch into anti-Israel populism changes global politics in extremely dangerous ways, and poses a challenge for Kevin Rudd.

Perhaps Obama’s most distinctive contribution to the foreign policy debate in the lead-up to the US presidential election was his avowed determination to talk to and engage the US’s enemies if he became president. He was happy in principle to talk to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but did not know for sure that the Iranian president wielded real power. But he sent all manner of felicitations and greetings to Iran and its government. When that government stole an election on Ahmadinejad’s behalf and viciously brutalised its citizens, Obama refrained from speaking too much or too forcefully, as, he said, he didn’t want to be seen to be interfering in Iranian internal affairs.

When Obama met the king of Saudi Arabia, a nation in which no one votes, women are subject to severe and demeaning restrictions and it is against the law to have a Christian church, Obama bowed in deep respect.

When Obama ran into Venezuela’s murderous despot, Hugo Chavez, at a summit, there was a friendly greeting observed by all.

But there is one leader whom Obama draws the line at. He will not be seen in public with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Astonishingly, when Netanyahu saw Obama at the White House this week, all photographers and all TV cameras were banned, a level of humiliation almost completely unique in modern White House practice.

You might even conclude that Obama is trying to interfere in internal Israeli politics and bring down a government. This is something post-colonial, post-multicultural Obama would never do with Iran, but with Israel, the US’s longstanding ally, it’s fine.

And what was Netanyahu’s crime, this act of infamy that Obama’s senior staff described as an “affront” to America? It was that the relevant housing authority passed another stage of approval for 1600 Israeli housing units to be built in East Jerusalem in about three years’ time. It was very foolish that the Israelis allowed this announcement to take place while US Vice-President Joe Biden was in Israel. But they apologised to Biden at the time, Biden kissed and made up with the Israelis and was back to delivering fulsome pro-Israel speeches before he left.

After that point, though, the US reaction went into overdrive. Impeccable American sources tell me this reaction was driven by Obama, and to a lesser extent the Chicago mafia around him.

We must ask why this is so, but first let’s get Netanyahu’s infamous crime into perspective.

Last November Netanyahu announced a 10-month moratorium on all building activity in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Israel has already promised not to take any more land for settlements but there is the question of renovating existing buildings and constructing new ones in existing settlements.

As Hillary Clinton acknowledged in her speech this week to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, East Jerusalem was never part of this agreement. The two main peace offers Israel has made to the Palestinians in recent years were the Camp David/Taba proposals and the accompanying Clinton parameters in 2000, and Ehud Olmert’s offer to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Both plans offered essentially the same formula. The Palestinians get all of the Gaza Strip, about 95 per cent of the West Bank and a compensating parcel of territory from Israel proper to make up for the small amount of territory in the West Bank that Israel would keep which houses the main Jewish population blocks. The Palestinians also get some parts of East Jerusalem as their capital. This principle of territorial swaps was accepted by Yasser Arafat and Abbas.

East Jerusalem has always had a different status from the West Bank and some Israelis certainly don’t want to give any of it to a new Palestinian state. But everyone accepts that some Jewish neighbourhoods would remain part of Israel. These are mostly neighbourhoods, as Netanyahu pointed out this week, which are five minutes from the Knesset and a couple of blocks beyond the 1949 armistice line. The administration of George W. Bush had formally agreed with the Israelis that these areas would be permanently part of Israel. Bill Clinton had negotiated an offer to the Palestinians in 2000 which accepted this.

It would be a radical change of policy for an Israeli government to decree that no building would ever take place in Jewish areas of Jerusalem. It would also be a change of American policy.

Moreover, no serious analyst could believe that such building is a roadblock to peace. Peace negotiations have gone on with such building taking place in the past. And all the things that truly make peace impossible – Arab and Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of any Jewish state, Palestinian insistence on certain deal breakers such as the right of return of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel proper, the insistent and violent anti-Semitism of Palestinian and Arab propaganda and the regional ambitions of players such as Iran and Syria – will be completely unaffected by any decision to build apartments in a Jewish neighbourhood in East Jerusalem in three years time. So why has Obama gone into full jihad mode against Israel? Three explanations suggest themselves. Obama has had a terrible year in foreign policy. He has achieved nothing on Iran or China or anything else of consequence. He is too smart to believe this intimidation of Israel will advance peace, but it might get peace talks going again. The Palestinians only made settlements a roadblock after Obama did. They are refusing to join Israel in peace talks, which Netanyahu would be happy to participate in. They have said they might engage in proximity talks – which means not talking to the Israelis directly but to mediators who will shuttle back and forth carrying messages between them and the Israelis. This is primitive and ridiculous stuff, but if such talks get going Obama could claim some kind of victory, or at least progress.

And Obama is showing that his personal popularity, not America’s standing, still less matters of substance such as Iran’s nuclear program, is what motivates him.

This leads to the second explanation of his behaviour, and that is to make himself personally popular in the Muslim world. Beating up on Israel is the cheapest trick in the book on that score and it can earn him easy, worthless and no doubt temporary plaudits in some parts of the Muslim world.

And thirdly, Obama is the first post-multicultural president of America. In his autobiography he talks of seeking out the most radical political theorists he could at university. For these people Israel is an exercise in Western neo-imperialism. Obama makes their hearts sing with this anti-Israel jihad.

Accompanying Obama’s own actions has been some of the most dangerous rhetoric ever to come out of a US administration, to the effect that Israeli intransigence endangers US troops by inflaming extremists in the Islamic world. No serious analyst anywhere believes that Israel is an important source of the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq. Using this type of argument comes dangerously close to the administration licensing a mutant strain of anti-Semitism – it’s all the Jews’ fault. Why is all this a challenge for Rudd?

The anti-Israel hysteria is totally disproportionate and wildly over the top. The British decision to expel an Israeli diplomat because Israel is alleged to have used forged British passports in a Mossad operation is a case in point.

The British precedent pressures Rudd to do the same. Rudd should resist this pressure, as Opposition leader Tony Abbott has urged him to. 2010 is a critical year for the Middle East. Israel’s friends now should rally round it, or the spectre of wild and hysterical anti-Israel sentiment will be unleashed with all manner of destructive consequences.

Now is the time for anyone who cares about Middle East peace, or who claims as Rudd does to care about Israel, to stick close to Jerusalem. The Australian Federal Police inquiry will not be conclusive about whether Israel used Australian passports or not. Obama wants to be popular. Gordon Brown wants Muslim votes and to distract attention from the latest scandals of his government. Rudd could be tempted to bash Israel as a way of courting Arab League votes at the UN. But the path of statesmanship here does not lie in apeing these foolish American and British moves.

There would also be a gruesome comparison in the way Australia responds to big as to small nations. China imprisons one of our citizens, denies consular access to most of the trial and treats Canberra with contempt. In return Rudd changes policy and declines to see the Dalai Lama and similarly declines to send an Australian minister to Taiwan in the entire course of the government’s parliamentary term.

Yet Israel, our close friend, is alleged to misuse a passport and then gets the very big diplomatic penalty of having a diplomat expelled. It would be disproportionate and foolish and cowardly.

The Americans and Brits don’t always get things right. There are times when Canberra should definitely not follow their lead.

My following article is published today in the Melbourne Age:

About 100 Chinese citizens gathered outside Google’s Beijing office this week to sing the popular tune Grass Mud Horse. They paid their respects to the web giant after it announced the closure of its censored Chinese search engine and redirected users to a Hong Kong-based counterpart. The song signifies resistance to authoritarianism and roughly translates as “Screw Your Mother”.

Police soon broke up the vigil but the event indicated a small but significant shift in public opinion towards opposing internet censorship in the world’s biggest online market (384 million and counting).

There’s hardly revolution in the streets, but Google’s departure has left many Chinese upset and more aware than ever of their country’s repressive policies towards free speech. “The Google China incident”, according to friends there, has caused some normally apolitical users to question why their leaders are isolating them from the world.

Although the majority of Chinese netizens don’t engage in political activities online – preferring to download movies and music and chat with friends – a growing number resent being told what they can’t view by Beijing authorities. An estimated 400,000 people access a virtual private network that allows the ”great firewall” to be circumvented.

But the attitude of Chinese netizens is decidedly mixed (with most users viewing home-grown content with a nationalist bent). During research in China for my book, The Blogging Revolution, I found occasional backing for some kind of government filtering. The constant refrain was to “protect children” from “pornography”, a term that refers to both sexual and political content.

A 2008 collaboration between the Pew Internet and American Life Project and a group of respected Chinese academics found that nearly 85 per cent of those polled said they wanted the government to control the web.

Google’s decision has the potential to unleash forces in the communist nation that authorities have spent years trying to suppress. Beijing has cleverly allowed a growing amount of online venting towards corrupt officials and wayward pollution, but there are strict limits to debate.

Although the People’s Daily accused Google of playing God and forcing its “values” on the Chinese people, a democratic alternative to Beijing’s web-based dictatorship will be viable only if developed by the Chinese people. Google can simply provide a spark.

It’s certainly far too early to determine the real reason behind Google’s move. A sudden concern for human rights and freedom of speech is possible, but Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov suggests a more cynical strategy: “Google was in need of some positive PR to correct its worsening image (especially in Europe, where concerns about privacy are mounting on a daily basis). Google.cn is the goat that would be sacrificed, for it will generate most positive headlines and may not result in devastating losses to Google’s business (Google.cn holds roughly 30 per cent of the Chinese market).”

He may be right, though I suspect Google’s decision was also due to its largely stagnant commercial growth against far savvier and more ethically versatile competitors. Like any multinational business, human rights concerns are rarely a leading consideration. This is despite Google co-founder Sergey Brin urging the Obama administration this week to put a “high priority” on fighting Chinese web blocking.

One undoubted benefit of Google’s self-immolation in China will be a closer appraisal of internet censorship across the globe. In another case, in Thailand, YouTube has agreed to block videos insulting the revered king.

Recently, Google objected to the Australian government’s request that they ”voluntarily” censor YouTube videos in accordance with refused classification rules. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy curiously promoted Google’s censorship in China and Thailand as reasons why the company should apply the same rules here. It’s hard to fathom how using these examples fits with Australia’s democratic tradition.

Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said this week that, over time, “it is good for our business to push for free expression”. He clearly wasn’t just talking about China.

Western-style democracy is not wanted in China, but Google’s stunning move guarantees a robust online debate about what netizens aren’t being told.

Antony Loewenstein’s book The Blogging Revolution is published by Melbourne University Press.

Evan Osnos, writing in the New Yorker, laments the rise of a supposed new super-power:

As Americans living in China at this moment in its history, many of us have fashioned an image of a country that is moving—in its own shambling pattern of fits and starts—toward something better for itself and the world. Sure, it thrashes around a lot along the way, but on many days it seems to end up a fraction of an inch closer to a better, healthier, more humane way of life. But this is not one of those days. A superpower that is willing to jettison a tool so central to life as a global citizen begins to look less like a calculatingly pragmatic steward of its people’s interests and more like an addled Goliath.

The kind of debate that only really happens on Al-Jazeera. A discussion on the Israel lobby, Iran, settlements and Palestine between Israel Lobby co-author John Mearsheimer, Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah and Israel lobbyist Meagan Buren:

Now, after the AIPAC conference, Benjamin Netanyahu has returned from Israel and finds a problem. Poor lad.

Here’s Akiva Eldar in Haaretz:

The messages coming to the White House from Riyadh and Amman, then, were starkly clear: If you don’t rein in your Israeli friends, Tehran won’t be the only Middle East capital where American flags will burn.

…

Netanyahu had been hoping to buy time until November’s Congressional elections, which coincide with the deadline he set for the settlement freeze. But with America’s strategic interest on the line, Bibi’s favorite political game (playing the Jewish community and Congress against the White House and the State Department) isn’t working anymore. Obama decided his moderate Middle East coalition is more important than Netanyahu’s extremist one. This is a point of no return.

When a serious academic from Sydney University – Ben Saul, co-Director of the Sydney Centre for International Law – writes a piece like this, it’s significant. A respected liberal who simply can’t remain silent any more:

Britain’s expulsion of an Israeli diplomat is a lesson for Australia to stop handling Israel with kid gloves.

Israel has made clear that it does not respond to gentle persuasion or constructive criticism from its friends, nor does it listen to the quiet language of international law. Israel is willing to abuse the trust of its friends by defrauding their passports, assassinating people on foreign territory, and approving new settlements on Palestinian land on the eve of peace talks.

Strangely, Australian politicians from both major parties have often fallen over themselves to defend Israel. In doing so, Australia has often been indifferent to shocking violations of international law by Israel.

Occupy another people for decades, get rewarded by the “progressive” EU:

Diplomats representing the European Union (EU) have drawn up a new plan for strengthening their relations with Israel despite the expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Spain, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, is eager that work proceeds on formally upgrading the Union’s political and commercial ties with Israel over the next few months.