Antony Loewenstein

Non-Israeli Jews signing up for the Israeli army brings a multitude of potential problems, not least the rules of engagement by foreigners fighting in a rabble army and managing an illegal occupation on Palestinian land. How many Australians have signed up? An investigation that must come soon:

It used to be the kibbutz and its images of fruit picking and communal living that attracted streams of Jewish volunteers to Israel. Now many are looking for a different kind of service, one involving pre-dawn starts, a dose of boot camp and the very real possibility of some frontline action.

A new organisation is actively recruiting scores of non-Israeli Jews, many of them American, to serve in the Israeli army as it faces threats on multiple fronts in a region largely hostile towards it.

“We feel that Israel is fighting for its life,” said Jay Schultz, the executive director of Aish Malach, a new Israeli body set up to help foreigners enlist. For many, he said, “this is the right thing at the right time”.

While their peers may be easing into university life or setting off on their world travels, Israel’s foreign hopefuls are more likely to be wriggling through muddy streams or jumping over walls.

A rigorous six-week boot camp weeds out those not completely committed to a year of military service. Aish Malach is putting its first intake of 20 youngsters through their paces this month before placing them in selected units. Once in, the recruits could be deployed to frontline combat units guarding Israel’s volatile borders or to the occupied West Bank, where Israeli troops are often violently pitted against Palestinian civilians.

“They [the army] will send them where they need them. If they say ‘Go to Rwanda’, you go to Rwanda. If they say, ‘Go to the border of Lebanon, you go to the border of Lebanon’,” said Mr Schultz.

What America gets with a few billion dollars of aid every year:

Reporters Without Borders is outraged by the death of Khaled Mohammed Said, a 28-year-old human rights activist who is widely alleged to have been beaten to death by police in Alexandria on 6 June, and calls for an independent and transparent enquiry.

The prosecutor-general’s decision on 16 June to order a new autopsy is a positive move but is not enough. There are two very different versions of Said’s death and only an independent investigation will serve to shed light on this tragedy.

“Said probably lost his life for denouncing police corruption,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Courageous bloggers and netizens often expose police abuses online although they are risking reprisals. The authorities do not however take sufficiently firm measures to put a stop to the violence.”

The press freedom organisation added: “The impunity must stop. The authorities cannot keep using the state of emergency law to block the demands for justice. The international community must put pressure on the government in order to ensure that Said’s presumed murderers are tried and punished without delay.”

An Internet café owner said Said was beaten to death in the street after being arrested inside the café by two plain-clothes policemen. According to his family and local human rights organisations, he was killed after posting a video online that showed police sharing the profits after a drug deal.

A stunning essay by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the mysterious ongoing case of Wikileaks, the supposed military whistle-blower and media coverage of the scandal.

It’s no wonder Washington is so keen to silence dissenters within the ranks.

One of the Australian parliamentarians brave enough to actually understand Palestinian rights is departing Labor MP Julie Irwin.

In a completely ignored farewell speech this week, Irwin discussed “Israeli propaganda” after the Gaza flotilla massacre. She demanded the Jewish state accept international law or face isolation.

Note the Labor minister Craig Emerson’s shameful disassociation on behalf of the government at the conclusion of the adjournment debate.

This is what liberal Zionism has come to. Asking, almost begging, for understanding about Israel but nothing like demands for one person, one vote. Palestinians should be given equal rights in Israel? Perish the thought. Here’s American Jewish writer JJ Goldberg in New York a few days ago:

I’m beginning to feel like Amos Kenan…[who in 1969 wrote] a Letter to all good people, in which he said I have been rejected by the left that I belonged to all my life. I love Cuba, I believe in Fidel Castro, but I am not allowed to love Cuba because I’m an Israeli and a Zionist. I’m frozen out of the left because I believe in supporting my own people.

And I will begin to feel like that. No I won’t support dismantling the Israeli state. Again, your goal is to have Israel stop being a Jewish state. Israel aspired, originally aspired, to be as Jewish as France is French. That is, it should have a culture that reflects its majority–aspirationally the majority will remain Jewish–[and] that all citizens should be full citizens. And again it has not lived up to that. It’s gone better and it’s gone worse. But the goal is not to deprivilege the people who aren’t Jewish but to make a state that adheres by what we regard as traditional Jewish values in which all citizens are equal.

If it doesn’t go there, then I will be very very sad, and I will feel my life’s work essentially to have been a failure. But I don’t think it will get that far. Because if Israel launches another operation and kills 5,000 or 10,000 people, the pressure in the world community will be so great that it will be forced, it will be forced to sit down and negotiate to withdraw to the 67 borders. That’s what the world wants, the European union wants, the Arab League wants.

A country with which we “share values”:

“Hey, lady!” yelled the bus driver. He was loud but friendly. “You forgot your Psalms booklet.”

It was a typical weekday afternoon in Tel Aviv, Israel’s secular metropolis, and the Route 322 bus is picking up its first passengers as it gets going to Ashdod.

On this particular 322, the driver, a jolly middle-aged man with a mop of gray hair and a distinctly non-Haredi yarmulke balanced on top, has come up with an innovation: When you pay your fare, you receive a ticket in one hand and in the other a booklet with a passage from the biblical Book of Psalms.

Each passenger’s booklet contains a different passage and the idea is that if all the booklets are in use at the same time, passengers together will recite the entire Book of Psalms, which would be seen as a religious achievement. This trip, the driver hopes, is to be a spiritual journey in the literal sense.

The 322 is the only autobus mehadrin running to and from Tel Aviv. The phrase autobus mehadrin, a new addition to the Israeli lexicon in the last decade, literally means beautified bus. It refers to a route that meets Haredi standards of modesty: Men sit at the front and women at the back.

Critics say that these routes — around 60 in number — are anything but beautiful. They claim that the segregation they practice is religious coercion at its worst because if non-haredim refuse to comply with the separation of the sexes, violence sometimes results.

What Judaism can and should be about:

This is how Zionist fanatics operate; talk about Arab barbarity, defend Israel no matter what, make the occupation invisible and bully the world into backing the Jewish state because it’s not Arab:

Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar announced recently that he planned to promote a new initiative which would defend Israel’s right to exist, as “if Israel goes down, we all go down,” the former premier wrote in London newspaper The Times on Thursday.

“Israel is our first line of defense in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos,” Aznar wrote, adding that “to abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears.”

The Friends for Israel initiative will include prominent political figures and academics such as Irish Nobel Prize laureate David Trimble (Irish Nobel Prize laureate and a panel member in Israel’s internal investigation into the Gaza flotilla raid), Andrew Roberts (British hostorian) John Bolton (former United States Ambassador to the United Nations), Alejandro Toledo (the former President of Peru), Marcello Pera (philosopher and former President of the Italian Senate), Fiamma Nirenstein (the Italian author and politician), the financier Robert Agostinelli and the Catholic intellectual George Weigel, Aznar wrote in The Times.

I look forward to Sri Lankan hacks visiting Israel and teaching them the ways to defeat “terrorism” (bombing hospitals and refugee camps will come as second nature to them both):

A strong leadership and a disciplined military are the keys in wiping out separatist movements that have resorted to terrorism in our country, the Sri Lankan ambassador to the Philippines said at a roundtable with editors and reporters of The Manila Times.

The LTTE was known for its violent secessionist campaign to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Behind the longest running armed conflict in Asia until its defeat, the group became known for recruiting child soldiers, carrying out massacres of civilians, assassinating political leaders, suicide bombings, and other high-profile attacks. It went in and out of negotiations with the Sri Lankan government from 2003 until 2006, prompting the Sri Lankan military to wage major offensives against them that led to its demise.

“Our President went to the United Nations [to say] that we [Sri Lanka] are not against Tamils. We are against terrorism. We want to destroy and eradicate these terrorists,” Cooray said, referring to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

“It [LTTE] is the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world. [Its members] assassinate, stage suicide bombings [and] destroy Tamil leadership to get hold of power. They want a separate state, when we should instead collaborate to develop our country,” he added.

The Philippines is also dealing with separatist movements, which include the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The peace process between the Philippine government and the MILF broke down in August 2008 over the botched signing of an agreement on ancestral domain that would have expanded the existing Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The agreement was stopped by the Supreme Court, saying it was unconstitutional. on Tuesday. Nawalge Bennet Cooray said those two assets were Sri Lanka’s principal weapons in mounting the offensives that neutralized the 30-year-old separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in May 2009, just three years after the country’s military launched an all out-war against the LTTE in August 2006.

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at New York’s Revolution Bookstore, writer Raymond Lotta made the following astounding comment:

The US military…is one of the world’s largest polluters. If the war in Iraq were actually ranked as a country, in terms of carbon emissions, the war emitted more CO2 each year – that is more carbon dioxide each year – than 139 countries of the world emitted, in the aggregate, in any given year.

Ali Abunimah:

If the UN Security Council decided the outcome of the World Cup, USA and Israel would be the greatest football nations.

There has been massive pressure on Elton John to not play in Israel. Alas, he ignored those calls, saluted his fans in Tel Aviv…and then it emerged he recently accepted $1 million to play at Rush Limbaugh’s 4th wedding. A classy man:

Another week, another provocative concert by Elton John. Fresh off a gig as Rush Limbaugh’s wedding singer, the British icon performed Thursday in Tel Aviv, despite pressure from human rights groups and fellow artists to boycott Israel following the flotilla debacle off the coast of Gaza.

“Shalom, we are so happy to be back here! Ain’t nothing gonna stop us from coming, baby,” John said with a fist in the air.

The piano man then took a swipe at those artists, including Elvis Costello, Santana, the Pixies and Devendra Banhart, who have bailed on concerts in recent weeks.

“Musicians spread love and peace, and bring people together. That’s what we do,” he said. “We don’t cherry-pick our conscience.”
Costello specifically called his decision to cancel a June 30 show a “matter of instinct and conscience.”

The Jerusalem Post said John then “turned into a human jukebox for two-and-a-half hours,” mixing old and new favorites spanning his four decade career. Songs played included ‘Levon,’ Rocket Man’ and more obscure hits like ‘Mona Lisa and Mad Hatters’ and ‘Captain Fantastic.’

An estimated 50,000 fans crammed into Ramat Gan stadium in Tel Aviv.

John recently caused a stir when he played a secret show at Limbaugh’s June 5 wedding. The gay icon caught some flack for the performance, which netted him a reported $1 million paycheck from the radio commentator, who strongly opposes gay marriage and has a history of negative comments about homosexuality.

“It betrays either ignorance or self-interest or both, and jeopardizes his admirable record on gay rights,” Aaron Hicklin, Editor-in-Chief of Out, told PopEater at the time.

John’s longtime partner, David Furnish, said the singer was “a little surprised” to get the invitation, but accepted the job after deciding “Life is about building bridges, not walls.”

The singer said Limbaugh and his bride, Kathryn Rogers, “were incredibly gracious and very welcoming and very sweet and very appreciative.”