Antony Loewenstein

For any Sydneysiders:

6pm Wednesday 7th July
Gaelic Club, 1/64 Devonshire St, Surry Hills

Join Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, journalist Antony Loewenstein and Lee Rhiannon to discuss internet censorship issues.

Communications Minister has announced plans to introduce an internet filter which will restrict Australians’ access to the internet and establish a system for widespread government censorship of the internet.

Senator Ludlam has led the opposition to the filter within the Parliament and Antony Loewenstein has been a prominent campaigner as a journalist and blogger.

Come and hear them discuss the issues with Greens NSW Senate candidate Lee Rhiannon.

With Israel’s Vice Premier and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon praising the terrorist founders of Israel as heroes – of course, they’re referred to these days as freedom fighters and the Jewish “underground” – the tone-deaf nature of the Jewish state is being noticed in various quarters. And it’s finally starting to dawn on Western reporters how unquestioning most Israeli journalists truly are (any official accusations of “terrorism” will be simply passed onto the public without question, correctly argues Max Blumenthal). The only comprehensive peace deal with the Arab world, the Arab Peace Initiative, remains ignored and even dismissed:

Journalist Samir Ratas, a Palestinian who now lives in Egypt, brought a message to Israel at the conference: “The peace initiative is not an Arab plot to destroy Israel nor is it an ambush. Many years ago, the Arabs recognized your existence.” Ratas departed with two questions in mind: “How many more years will we have to wait until you understand that this initiative is a strategic choice?” And “How many years do you think that it will wait for you?”

This arrogance is why the BDS campaign is gaining such traction across the world. This piece, published only in Hebrew in Haaretz, has been translated and explains the only language that Israel may understand: isolation:

Ayala Shani & Ofer Neiman

“Israel won’t change unless the status quo has a downside” – these words were written by journalist Tony Karon, a Jew from South Africa. This sentence reflects the rationale behind the broad BDS campaign – which includes sanctions, institutional boycott, and divestment – which has begun trickling down into public consciousness in Israel. Instead of a defensive, self-righteous response along the general lines of “the whole world is against us”, it would be best to learn the facts about the campaign and peer into the collective mirror, which reflects grievous and systematic violations of human rights and international law.

The current movement originally started with a call to action issued in 2005, signed by more than 170 organizations from Palestinian society: citizens of Israel, refugees in exile, and Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and in Gaza. The call to action was published in Hebrew, too, and citizens of Israel are requested to express their support of it. It is for this purpose that the Israeli group “Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from within” was founded.

The BDS movement that has developed in response to the Palestinian call to action does not have any formal, focal leadership. Regular citizens around the world, including many Jews, initiate activities and take part in them. The goal of the movement is to demonstrate to Israel the international community’s disgust and rejection of its actions, so that Israel will act for the immediate termination of the occupation, for the end of discrimination against the Arab citizens of Israel, and for recognition of the refugees’ right of return, as phrased in United Nations Decision 194. Elements of the oppression which the movement wishes to put an end to match the legal definition of the crime of apartheid – systematic and institutionalized racial separation, as practiced in old South Africa.

The movement does not promote any specific political solution (one state or two, the return of any particular number of refugees), but rather, strives to change in a nonviolent way the balance of power that makes it possible for Israel’s governments to violently withhold the basic rights of millions of people, and to renounce their accountability with unfounded statements (“the Arabs are to blame for the refugee problem”, “the settlements are legal”, “there is no siege upon Gaza”.)

It will be stressed here that the boycott is not a personal boycott on Israelis but rather, a boycott of official Israeli institutions and of events taking place under their auspices. Thus, for example, there is no call to deny an Israeli researcher her right to lecture abroad. There is a call to avoid holding international conferences in universities in Israel which proudly proclaim their contacts with the military establishment.

Is Israel being singled out? As was true about white South Africa, the world is justly sensitive to situations where a population that has civil rights determines the fate of a population which has neither civil rights nor the right to vote. Fairness is not always a feature of international relations, but Israel enjoys many international privileges, such as membership in the OECD. The citizens of China, where grievous human rights abuses take place, have never been given the opportunity to express a lack of confidence in the government that forcibly suppressed the student demonstrations in 1989. In contrast, the citizens of Israel cast their votes again and again for parties (including Kadima and the Labor Party) and governments under whose administration settlements are built, people are tortured and arrested for years with no trial, unarmed citizens are shot, and land and water resources are plundered.

Many people around the world ask, therefore, whether there is good reason for a normalization with Israel. Port workers in Sweden and Norway, countries which have historically been very sympathetic to Israel, refuse to unload Israeli container ships. Artists wonder why they must perform here and enhance the sense of “business as usual” when the very fact of their performance will be portrayed as support of Israel’s policy.

A deep-reaching public discussion is needed at this time, not only about the question of whether the boycott is or is not justified but about Israel’s policy. Many Israelis acknowledge the heinous acts being done in our name, under our very noses. It is appropriate for an effective and nonviolent campaign against these actions should have their support.

The authors are active in the Israeli group: “Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from within.”

This article was originally published in Hebrew in Haaretz Online, June 22 2010.

My following article appears in today’s Crikey:

On Tuesday lunchtime the Australian Human Rights Centre and the UNSW International Law and Policy Group (with assistance from the Israeli embassy) hosted a seminar on “The Fight against Terror: Practical Dilemmas in applying the Laws of War.” The two speakers were Professor Abraham Bell of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and Colonel Sharon Afek, Deputy Military Advocate General for the Israel Defence Forces.

In light of the recent Gaza flotilla disaster, the Goldstone report and ongoing global attempts to hold Israeli officials to account for alleged war crimes, the event was timely and occurred without an interruption or boycott call.

Five police stood guard outside the small lecture theatre, anticipating any possible trouble or public protest, an option I heard by pro-Palestinian activists was briefly discussed when the event was announced but eventually dismissed.

Bell, who has spoken extensively on the legality of Israel’s so-called security barrier that runs directly into Palestinian land in the West Bank, outlined his personal views that corresponded with the official, Israeli government position.

He condemned the limitations of international criminal law and wished that “armed terrorist groups be neutralised before they attacked Israel”. He lamented that international humanitarian law was not being enforced against non-state actors (despite the UN-backed Goldstone report directly condemning alleged breaches of humanitarian law by both Israel and Hamas, something Human Rights Watch says neither side has properly addressed).

During a recent talk in the US, Bell claimed that the Gaza Strip was no longer under Israeli occupation and had no obligation to provide humanitarian assistance to its people.

But Israel still maintains a control over the land, sea and air borders around Gaza and this week announced it would once again allow building materials like cement and steel and more food items into Gaza (including the now-infamous ketchup and mayonnaise items), objects that have been officially banned for years.

Bell said during his UNSW talk that after the flotilla incident, “Israel has essentially given up economic sanctions against Hamas in Gaza”, contradicting the official Israel position that the blockade was designed to provide security for Israel and stop Hamas rocket fire.

Bell used visual aides like photos of Muslim suicide bombers in Israel, fact sheets provided by UN Watch and the Anti-Defamation League and recounted the story of losing friends in terror attacks inside Israel. It wasn’t a dispassionate legal talk but a call to understand Israel’s isolation in the international community because of the abundance of Islamic nations in the UN.

The most revealing talk, however, was by Colonel Afek, a former legal adviser for the West Bank. A softly-spoken man, he played numerous IDF videos shot by pilotless drones over southern Lebanon and Gaza and asked the audience to understand the moral and legal dilemma over whether Israel should attack homes where militants were allegedly hiding or warehousing weapons. “We are forced to make split-second decisions”, he said.

Afek said that many commanders in the field resented having to receive legal advice before launching attacks on “terrorists”. He explained how the IDF made thousands of phone calls to residents in Gaza before launching attacks on their homes in late 2008/early 2009.

The IDF lawyer acknowledged that many in the world today see Israeli officers as war criminals and threaten to arrest and prosecute them in foreign courts. “The problem isn’t with international law”, he told a questioner who asked his opinion on the Israeli government wanting to amend humanitarian law to better support Israeli war aims. “The problem is with fighting terrorism.”

Both Bell and Afek articulated the frustration that the world didn’t understand Israeli actions. Afek said that he had shown one of the IDF videos to a US commander who couldn’t see any issues with dropping munitions on civilian areas that contain “terrorists”. It was a revealing statement. One of the reasons Washington and a number of other Western states have been equally against the Goldstone report was that its recommendations could be turned against Western actions in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.

I asked why neither man had explained the context for Palestinian “terrorism”, the fact that the occupation of the West Bank was illegal and the Palestinian legal right to resist it within legal means. Afek acknowledged that he had not discussed the wider issues in Palestine but “these are political questions, not legal ones”.

One questioner wondered why Israel had “hijacked language” by claiming Palestinians defending their land were terrorists while Israel always acted in “self-defence”, no matter the Palestinian death toll.

Bell responded that Palestinians “have no right to commit terrorism to defend their own land” (though he claimed the rights to the land were contested) and showed pictures of buses and cafes destroyed by Palestinian suicide bombers.

*Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

An aide to General Stanley McChrystal (currently in the firing line for making disparaging comments about Barack Obama over Afghanistan) tells journalist Michael Hastings that, “if Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”

This story isn’t about McChrystal’s criticisms but about the futile war in Afghanistan and why the West is there. It’s really about empire maintenance and giving the impression of taking the fight to “terrorists”.

We lost there years ago.

An Haaretz editorial on something that should outrage Jews the world over and yet elicits little more than silence:

Dr. Immad Hammada and Dr. Murad Abu-Khalaf are both lecturers in electrical engineering born in East Jerusalem. Their families have lived in the city for generations. They both left years ago, each one separately, to study in the United States, and after graduating and consolidating their careers they want to return to live in their home town.

But their right to be reunified with their families is being denied by the Interior Ministry, as Amira Hass reported in Sunday’s Haaretz. Hammada has been living in his city for some three years illegally, without any rights and under constant danger of being arrested and deported, while Abu-Khalaf is finding it difficult to return, even for a visit.

Judge Noam Sohlberg of Jerusalem District Court is hearing their cases against the ministry this week.

Interior Ministry regulations provide for the abrogation of the rights of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem who leave the city for a period of over seven years. Citizens of Israel can leave the country for any length of time, and their citizenship and all their rights are theirs in perpetuity. But when it comes to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, Israel applies draconian regulations whose covert intent is to bring about the expulsion of as many Palestinians as possible from their home city.

This situation is intolerable: At a time when the prime minister speaks grandiloquently of the reunification of Jerusalem, Israel practices inequality and discriminates against the city’s Arab residents. At a time when Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of the economic advancement of the territories, Israel prevents the Arab residents of East Jerusalem from advancing their careers abroad and returning afterward to their home city to contribute toward the development of its economy. The screws have been tightened in recent years: In 2008 the residents’ rights of 4,557 Palestinian inhabitants of the city were abrogated, the highest number ever.

Waiting on Judge Sohlberg now is not only the fate of two electrical engineering lecturers, but a far weightier question: Will Israel continue treating the Palestinian inhabitants of its capital as if they were foreign migrants whose rights are conditional?

The rights of the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem must be equal to those of Jews. All Jerusalemites have the right to live in their city, to go abroad and return as they will, without any danger posed by the authorities lying in wait for them.

Former Republican Presidential candidate and Fox News host Mike Huckabee loathes Arabs and Palestinians and believes Israel has the right to do what it wants, where it wants. Christian Zionism in action.

A New Yorker profile of the man provides an indication of the kind of mindset Rupert Murdoch hires for his “news” channel:

Sun was bouncing off the miles of Jerusalem stone and the black hats of the Hasidim on the afternoon when Mike Huckabee went to visit the Wailing Wall, earlier this year. Huckabee—the former governor of Arkansas, the host of a Fox News show, and, according to the most recent Rasmussen poll, the top pick among likely Republican primary voters for President in 2012—was making his fourteenth trip to Israel. This time, he was leading a group of a hundred and sixty evangelicals on a tour of Christian holy sites with the singer Pat Boone. Huckabee wore mirrored Ray-Bans and a polka-dot shirt with gold cufflinks in the shape of Arkansas. Boone, who is seventy-six and still keeps his hair strawberry blond, was in a light-blue leisure suit and white bucks. Both men were wearing yarmulkes. “I think what I should do is convert,” Huckabee said, squinting in the sunshine. “This covers my bald spot completely.”

Huckabee was a Baptist minister before he went into politics, but, like Boone and most of the other people in their group, he is crazy about Israel and extremely enthusiastic about Jews. “I worship a Jew!” Huckabee said. “I have a lot of Jewish friends, and they’re kind of, like, ‘You evangelicals love Israel more than we do.’ I’m, like, ‘Do you not get it? If there weren’t a Jewish faith, there wouldn’t be a Christian faith!’ ” In recent weeks, Huckabee has defended the Israeli attack on a Turkish flotilla headed for Gaza, in which nine people were killed. He does not support a two-state solution, or, at least, as he told numerous reporters in the course of the trip, “not on the same piece of real estate”—which is to say he thinks that coming up with a place for the Palestinians ought to be an Arab problem. In fact, Huckabee does not believe that Palestinian is a legitimate nationality. “I have to be careful saying this, because people get really upset—there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” Huckabee told a rabbi in Wellesley, Massachusetts, at a kosher breakfast on the campaign trail in 2008. “That’s been a political tool to try to force land away from Israel.” In a speech to the Knesset on our trip, Huckabee said, “I promise you, you do not have a better friend on earth than Christians around the world, who know where we have come from and know who we must remain allies and friends with.” The members of his tour group who were seated in the audience applauded vigorously; several rose to their feet and shouted, “Amen!”

Former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner reveals in the new film by Oliver Stone, South of the Border – about the rise of socialism in Latin America – something very revealing of George W. Bush:

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] I say it’s not necessary to kneel before power. Nor do you need to be rude to say the things you have to say to those who oppose our actions. We had a discussion in Monterey. I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war.

OLIVER STONE: War. He said that?

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] He said that. Those were his exact words.

OLIVER STONE: Was he suggesting that South America go to war?

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] Well, he was talking about the United States. The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by the various wars. He said it very clearly. President Bush is—well, he’s only got six days left, right?

OLIVER STONE: Yes.

NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] Thank God.

Australian NGO APHEDA is the aid arm of the country’s largest union, the ACTU. It has a history of speaking strongly against Israeli aggression and this will only continue in the coming months.

So when the APHEDA head recently called for the Israeli siege on Gaza to be lifted, it was almost inevitable that a Zionist-friendly politician would be outraged. What’s so shameless about Labor’s David Feeney’s response is how many of the Israeli government talking points he quotes without question.

It’s like a mantra without reason or facts. Israel is always right and the siege is necessary (though, er, Israel has just heavily reduced the blockade, rather ruining one of his talking points).

Perhaps one day we’ll have independent thinking from our politicians on the Middle East but it may take a while.

The latest decision by the US Supreme Court seems highly problematic, not least because America backs terrorists group every day (hello Afghanistan and Iraq, as two recent examples) yet wants to tell its citizens that they can only back groups that speak in lovely, warming tones about the super-power:

The US supreme court has upheld a broad-ranging law that allows Americans who offer advice to banned organisations, including legal assistance and information on conflict resolution, to be prosecuted as terrorists.

The case arose out of human rights advice given by a California group to Kurdish and Tamil organisations that are listed as terrorist groups in the US.

The supreme court upheld the Obama administration’s argument that even advice intended to be used for peaceful purposes amounted to “material support” for terrorism.

That includes a lawyer submitting a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a banned group or helping a proscribed organisation to petition international bodies to bring an end to a violent conflict.

“The supreme court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists,” said David Cole, a Georgetown university law professor who argued the case before the court.

“In the name of fighting terrorism, the court has said that the first amendment [on free speech] permits congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights. That is wrong.”

The ruling is likely to further complicate the work of activists in support of controversial causes that has already seen highly contentious prosecutions over other forms of support, such as fundraising.

Palestinian activists have been prosecuted and jailed for raising cash for social groups dealing with issues such as housing and welfare that have ties to Hamas, which governs Gaza.

Individuals and groups offering legal or other specialist advice to such groups are also now open to prosecution.

Israeli historian Tom Segev:

This is something Israelis know: that they very, very much depend on both America and Germany, or in the larger sense, Europe. And there’s nothing they fear more than being alone in the world.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times is forced to acknowledge that a key story that questioned the validity of climate change was riddled with lies and untruths:

The article stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall.

Tony Blair’s role in the Middle East is to appear balanced but is in fact designed to please Israel and offer a nice, kind face for Israeli occupation.

And now the Israeli press confirms yet more shameless propaganda:

It turns out that Quartet envoy to the Middle East Tony Blair was the person who in fact presented to the international media the change in the policy of the Israeli government on the Gaza blockade. This was decided in coordination with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. And what was the prime minister’s contribution to helping Israeli PR efforts? He made do with a short statement to the press that he gave at the Likud faction meeting, and another laconic statement in English that was given to the foreign media.

Indeed, since two evenings ago, Blair has been going from one television studio to the next; he gave six interviews in two days, he handled tough questions from interviewers and he is trying to employ his great experience to enlist support in international public opinion for the relaxing of the blockade and for Israel’s new policy.

Netanyahu’s aides explained that the most important arena was that of the media and international public opinion. It was therefore decided that it would be better to have Blair present the important change in the government’s policy since he is considered objective and of international stature and since the decision about relaxing the blockade was made in coordination with him.

Blair met in Israel yesterday with a series of public figures and politicians, among them Regional Development Minister Silvan Shalom, Deputy Prime Minister and Intelligence Affairs Minister Dan Meridor and Opposition Chairwoman Tzippi Livni. Earlier he met in Ramallah with PA Chairman Abu Mazen and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.