Antony Loewenstein

A Zionist vision:

The leader of Israeli settlers’ council has said the regime plans to triple Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank despite international pressures to halt settlement expansions on Palestinian lands.

“It’s totally viable to envisage a million Jews living in Judea and Samaria,” said Naftali Bennett on Tuesday.

Bennett criticized the Tel Aviv regime for enforcing a temporary halt to construction in the West Bank, claiming, “We’re doing everything in our power to unfreeze the freeze.”

Good lord. Here’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham speaking at AIPAC with his vision for the Middle East (war against Iran, killing Persians and loving Israel). Don’t tell me that Zionism hasn’t deformed public debate in America (via Mother Jones):

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) laid it on thick at AIPAC’s annual gala banquet on Monday. Referring to the pro-Israel lobby, Graham declared, “The Congress has your back.” (What other lobby would he say that to?) He declared that Israel is “our best friend in the world.” (Does that tick off Canadians?) But Graham went especially far when he endorsed the idea of a military strike against Iran.

The former Navy judge advocate told the thousands of AIPACers that when it comes to dealing with Iran and the possibility it will develop nuclear weapons, “all options must be on the table” and “you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He then made the obligatory comments, saying that war is a “terrible thing” and that he hoped it could be avoided. But added Graham, a member of the Senate armed services committee, “sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time.” And he told the crowd that “time is not on our side” and that this AIPAC conference could be the last of the lobby’s annual get-togethers before Iran possesses nuclear weapons. Military action ought to be taken against Iran, he said, before the country acquires a nuclear bomb.

But Graham noted that any such military strike should not be limited to targeting the country’s nuclear program:

“If military force is ever employed, it should be done in a decisive fashion. The Iran government’s ability to wage conventional war against its neighbors and our troops in the region should not exist. They should not have one plane that can fly or one ship that can float.”

Graham was talking about a wide-scale attack on Iran—and one that might have take place within the next year. Destroying Iran’s military—which has about 130,000 regular soldiers and 14 air bases throughought the country—would entail a major assault, and it could trigger Iranian attacks  elsewhere in the region. It would be a rather good-sized war. But nothing less will suffice, Graham insisted. And the crowd applauded:

The New York Times praises Google’s decision to (finally) challenge China’s draconian censorship laws but Google’s David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, offers James Fallows at the Atlantic an insider’s view:

It may not be quite obvious that this is not really a “shutdown” of either our operations in China or of our mainland China-focused web site. We have moved the physical location of it [to Hong Kong], and the virtual location. The experience we are trying to offer to Chinese users is like the one on Google.cn, but done without the censorship on our part.

[Would this make any difference to users in mainland China, whose search results are still going to be "filtered" by the Great Firewall?] There is a difference in that we are censoring nothing. The Firewall can block access to certain kinds of search results regardless of how you get to them. They are treating Google.com.hk – treating it like Google.com [that is, as a foreign source that is screened by the Firewall]….

People tended to see this as an all or nothing kind of battle between us and the Chinese government, and that based on what we said, we were either going to pull out of China entirely, or else say, Never Mind! From the beginning our view had been, we would like to stay in China and have an operation there and serve the market there, and serve it as locally as we can. We’re just not willing to censor the search results any more.

I think there has been some grumbling or people questioning whether this is some kind of “deal” with the Chinese government. That’s not the case. We had conversations with the government. Would they be willing to lift the search- censorship  requirements, in terms of the substance and even more the lack of transparency? They made it clear that the self-censorship policy as it is now practiced was not going to change.

David Feith writes in the Melbourne Age:

I was disturbed to read recently that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is considering changing its international protection guidelines for Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers. The Australian government, predictably, was quick to state that any change to the UNHCR guidelines would allow Australia to send Tamil and Afghan asylum seekers back to their home countries.

The motivation of the Australian government is quite transparent – in an election year, the issue of asylum seekers is a potential political minefield for the government (unlike the asylum seekers, who if returned to their home countries could face literal minefields). This stems from the government trying to compete with the opposition on who could be tougher with border protection, rather than educating the Australian public as to the “push factors” behind desperate Tamils risking their lives to escape brutal suppression and atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan government.

The timing of the statements from UNHCR and the Australian government is also quite surprising, given that only three days earlier Sri Lanka’s parliament voted to extend the state of emergency across the island until after legislative elections. This was seen as a move to continue the government’s brutal crackdown on any opposition or criticism.

Following the recent arrest in the West Bank of an Australian activist, Israeli blogger Noam Sheizaf comments on the ominous, largely ignored, ramifications:

Two international activists, Ariadna Jove Marti (Spain) and Bridgette Chappell (Australia), who are living in Bir Zeit in the West Bank (it’s near Ramallah, and well within the Palestinian Autonomy), were arrested by the IDF last month. The two were about to be expelled from Israel, and as it happens in most cases, they appealed against the decision to the Israel Supreme Court.

As Chaim Levinson reports in Haaretz, while trying to defend the arrests and deportation, the state argued before the court that the two activists

“…belong to the International Solidarity Movement, an organization “that supports an ideology that is anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian and universally revolutionary.”

There are two precedents here, and I can’t overstate their importance:

A. The main charge against the activists had nothing to do with national security, but with the ideas they expressed (the state even presented before the court quotes taken from an internet site!). The “crime” involved words, not actions.

It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first (but certainly not last) attempt to present critic of Zionism or support for the Palestinian cause as illegal, and what’s even worse is that the actual arrest was carried out not by police and under orders from the state attorney, but by the army.

It takes a very flexible definition of democracy to describe a regime which makes questioning the dominant ideology a criminal offense.

One of America’s finest journalists, Jeremy Scahill, has won this year’s Izzy Award, named after muckraking journalist I.F. Stone.

He tells Alternet that independent reporting is more important than ever:

I would define an independent journalist as someone that’s totally un-embedded when it comes to their relationship with the powerful. In other words, you don’t get into bed with any political party. I’m not a Democrat; I’m not a Republican. I’m a journalist. It means that you don’t get in bed with the military, with the CIA, or wealthy corporations, and you don’t compromise your journalistic or your personal integrity in the pursuit of anything, including a story.

I believe that the way independent journalists are most effectively able to conduct their work is by maintaining their independence from the powerful. I don’t hob-nob with the powerful. I don’t count among my friends executives or other powerful people. I think it’s important for independent journalists to not be beholden to any special interests whatsoever.

On the flip side of that, it’s the role of independent journalists to embed themselves with the victims of U.S. foreign policy — in the case of U.S. journalists — or domestic policy. What I mean by that is to actually go out to where the people live who are most affected by these policies — be it Afghanistan or the slums of the United States. You have to be un-embedded from the powerful and you have to embed yourself with the disempowered, because I think part of our role as independent journalists is not only to confront those in power, but to give voice to the voiceless.

A reporter for the London Times, Jerome Starkey, is based in Afghanistan and documents the various ways in which the Western press uncritically accepts NATO lies in the country:

“Tied up, gagged and killed” was how NATO described the “gruesome discovery” of three women’s bodies during a night raid in eastern Afghanistan in which several alleged militants were shot dead on Feb. 12.

Hours later they revised the number of women “bound and gagged” to two and announced an enquiry. For more than a month they said nothing more on the matter.

The implication was clear: The dead militants were probably also guilty of the cold-blooded slaughter of helpless women prisoners. NATO said their intelligence had “confirmed militant activity”. As if to reinforce the point, coalition spokesman Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, a Canadian, talked in that second press release of “criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians”.

Only that’s not what happened, at all.

The militants weren’t militants, they were loyal government officials.  The women, according to dozens of interviews with witnesses at the scene, were killed by the raiders. Two of them were pregnant, one was engaged to be married.

The only way I found out NATO had lied — deliberately or otherwise — was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.

Noam Chomsky writes about the “change” brought by the Obama administration to Latin America:

Throughout the expansion of US Empire, Latin America retained its primacy in global planning. As Washington was considering the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1971, Nixon’s National Security Council observed that if the US couldn’t control Latin America, how could it expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world?” That policy has become more severe with recent South American moves towards integration, a prerequisite for independence, and establishment of more varied international ties, while also beginning to address severe internal disorders, most importantly, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering.

In July 2009, the US and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the US to use seven military bases in Colombia. The official purpose is to counter narcotrafficking and terrorism, “but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations told The Associated Press that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations.” There are reports that the agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to US military supplies. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of US military aid. Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s wound down. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.

The public campaign against Swedish clothing store H&M, after its decision to open stores in Israel, takes a very colourful form in France:

The latest edition of Gaza Gateway:

Between March 1 — March 5, 2010, the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was open, and 4427 people passed through the crossing, including 461 students. Of these students, 100 were returned to Gaza by the Egyptians either because Egypt believed that they would seek to remain in Egypt, or because they were missing the requisite exit documents.

According to the latest information, 502 students are presently seeking to leave the Gaza Strip in order to realize their dreams and study in universities abroad. Yet why do students in Gaza aspire to study outside the Strip? Among the reasons is the fact that in Gaza it is not possible to study certain fields, such as dentistry, occupational therapy, veterinary studies, environment preservation and democracy and human rights. In contrast, degrees in all these areas are available in the West Bank.

Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, the number of students that have received permission from Israel to study in the West Bank since 2000 stands at zero. This is due to the imposition by Israel of a sweeping prohibition on students from Gaza traveling to the West Bank in order to study there. Therefore, students from Gaza (who are able) focus on studying at universities abroad.

Since June 2007, Israel has imposed tight restrictions on the exit of students through the Erez border crossing, establishing strict criteria for the passage of students through Israel on their way to the Allenby border crossing (in Jordan) and from there to their studies overseas. As a result, students are forced to try and exit Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

Since June 2006 and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, the Rafah crossing has been officially closed and has been opened on an ad hoc and irregular basis. This is contrary to the Agreement on Movement and Access concluded in November 2005, according to which the Rafah crossing must be open to the movement of people between Gaza and Egypt.

In total approximately 1600 people, including 502 students who are eager to start their studies abroad, were not able to exit Gaza via the Rafah crossing when it opened at the start of March. They are forced instead to wait until the next time the crossing is opened.

Yet they have no way of knowing when the next time will arrive.

The Iraq war has produced nightmares for generations:

When one mentions refugees in Lebanon, one usually thinks about the estimated 300,000 Palestinians who live here in appalling social and economic conditions. But an estimated 50,000 Iraqis have sought refuge in Lebanon in the last few years, most of them without legal status and in constant fear of arrest. Like Jordan and Syria, Lebanon does not have a refugee law and accordingly treats most Iraqis as illegal immigrants, regardless of their need to be protected as refugees.

If you don’t believe the Zionist lobby still wields consideraable power in the US, think again.

Norman Finkelstein feels the wrath of its insecurity and fear of open debate.