Antony Loewenstein

Now this is interesting. Since September 11, 2001, we’ve heard constant bleating from many conservatives and keyboard warriors that we shouldn’t “deal with terrorists” (er, apart from our friends who practice terrorism, of course).

The Guardian on reality in the real world:

A controversial new book produced by one of the world’s best-known aid agencies, Médecins sans Frontières, lifts the lid on the often deeply uncomfortable compromises aid organisations are forced to make while working in conflicts.

How humanitarian aid organisations work – and the sometimes unintended consequences of their actions – has been brutally cross-examined in recent years, not least by the critical Dutch author Linda Polman.

MSF’s collection of essays, Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed, has provided the most detailed and self-critical inside account of the deals aid agencies are forced to negotiate, often with groups and regimes which abuse human rights, to continue their work.

Launched to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the medical aid agency, the book offers a rare and unflinching portrait of some of MSF’s most difficult recent operations, including in Sri Lanka, Somalia, Burma, Pakistan and Gaza.

Amid the criticism that has been levelled at aid organisations – including the charge that humanitarian operations have sometimes prolonged conflict through imposed alliances with warring parties – the book asks: what constitutes an acceptable compromise with political and military figures?

Known for often being the last group on the ground offering assistance when others have pulled out, MSF decided that a candid examination of these operations was in keeping with its best tradition.

MSF found itself in an unenviable position in Sri Lanka. Suspected by the government of being pro-Tamil Tiger, MSF found itself co-opted to working within a government “pacification policy that had settled the ethnic question in Sri Lanka by bombings and military surveillance”.

In Somalia, MSF was forced to run many operations by “remote control” because of the risk from Islamist fighters. In 2009, MSF was subjected to a 5% tax on the salary of all MSF employees by the al-Qaida linked al-Shabaab militia, not to mention “registration” costs of $10,000 (£6,300) per project, a $20,000 tax every six months and was told to dismiss all female employees.

Benoit Leduc, head of mission for MSF, France, told the Guardian: “Each al-Shabaab demand leads to more discussions on the restrictions we are prepared to accept or that it is reasonable to accept in such a complex situation …

“[But] insofar as al-Shabaab controls the majority of the country and Mogadishu in particular [at the time Leduc is speaking of], all we can do is accept reality. It is crucial that our patients are not selected on the basis of their allegiance or membership of certain groups, and that we don’t choose whom we talk to – including those claiming to be from al-Qaida.”

Marie Noelle Rodrigue, operations director of MSF in Paris, said: “The time has come to explain the fragile equilibrium between the price it is necessary for an organisation to pay so that you are helping the victims.

“Often that means making a compromise to a degree where you are helping the authorities. This is a question that no-one has wanted to examine and it is good that MSF have looked into it and I think we are happy that we’ve done it honestly.”

She added: “I think too often there is a mystery about what goes on in the humanitarian world behind closed doors, despite the fact that people know there is often a price to pay to help the victims.

“What is crucial is the examination of how you make these kinds of difficult decisions.”

Israel 2011 (via Haaretz):

About 10 days ago, a fish merchant in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda outdoor market noticed a young man with sidelocks and a skullcap trying to determine which of the stalls employ Arabs. The merchant, Saleh, called the police, who detained the man for questioning on suspicion that he was planning a terror attack.

But the interrogation revealed that Meir Ettinger, 19, had a completely different goal in mind. Ettinger, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar and a grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, said he was investigating on behalf of a project called Hebrew Labor, whose goal is “to warn the public” against buying from businesses that employ Arabs.

Ettinger was released and ordered to keep away from Mahane Yehuda for two weeks. But last Thursday night, police detained four other young men from Yitzhar who were on the same mission.

Conversations with right-wing activists this week revealed that Ettinger and his comrades have been working on this project for several weeks now. Their goal is to map all of the businesses in Jerusalem that use Arab labor. They began in the northern neighborhoods of Pisgat Ze’ev and Neveh Yaakov, then moved to the western neighborhoods of Kiryat Moshe and Givat Shaul, and are now working on the downtown area, which includes Mahane Yehuda.

“They came to my boss and asked him if he has Arabs working for him,” related Yaakov Azaria, an electrician from Pisgat Ze’ev. “He said no, but I know they also went to others and asked them.”

About 20 people are working on the mapping project. Most are Yitzhar residents who were recently served with administrative orders requiring them to stay out of the West Bank, for fear that they might carry out attacks on Palestinians or soldiers, and are therefore living temporarily in Jerusalem. Their goal is to prevent people from patronizing businesses that employ Arabs.

“A booklet with a list of places that employ Arabs will be published soon,” said Moshe Ben Zikri, an extreme right-wing activist from Jerusalem. “That will be followed by hanging up posters and signs with these lists in the streets – just so that the public will know and be cautious.”

Post 9/11, countless companies saw an opportunity to make a killing on the desperate desire of both democracies and repressive states to monitor citizens. And when the US government, supposedly the freest nation on Earth, brazenly spied on people in the name of “security”, the path was set. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journalopen a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents, spanning 36 companies, include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country. The papers were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.

My following book review appeared in yesterday’s Sydney Sun Herald:

Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography
Julian Assange (Text, $29.95)

This is unlike any book you’ve ever read. Take one of the most recognisable figures in the world, sit him down for hours of interviews and sign a multimillion-dollar contract to publish an authorised autobiography. Talk about government secrets, challenging American hegemony, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unlock the motivations behind a truly revolutionary spirit.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Australian Julian Assange, is the subject of this curious release, a book that has been rejected as dishonest and incomplete by the man himself. The original publisher, Canongate, calls it an “unauthorised first draft” while Assange has stated that neither he nor the ghostwriter Andrew O’Hagan knew what would appear in the public domain when the title appeared. “Canongate is profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft,” Assange wrote.

Despite these hesitations, this book is a fascinating read. Most of the titillating media coverage so far has focused on the alleged sexual assaults by Assange on two Swedish women – he vehemently denies doing anything wrong and says “it has already turned out to be the most expensive phone call I didn’t make” – but the interest actually lies elsewhere. His likely extradition to Sweden is a sideshow.

Assange says his nomadism (“it suits some people’s situations”) was due to his mother’s destructive relationship with The Family cult in Australia and her abusive partner. Computers became a refuge, as he explains poetically: “Computers provided a positive space in a negative field; they showed us we could start again, against ‘selfhood’, against ‘society’, building something less flawed and less corrupt in these fresh pastures of code.”

Assange offers pithy social commentary on Australian society when his hacking began, a strong sense of rejecting the parochialism that this country then offered. “We felt we were the dead centre of the turning world,” he argues, “no less significant than cutting-edge computer guys in Berlin or San Francisco … We felt we could lead the world, which is a nice thing to feel at the bottom of the planet.”

The evolution of WikiLeaks, launched in 2006, was at once radical and simple. Assange believed in remaking the world in a transparent way that was guaranteed to upset the powerful.

“I was, always will be, more concerned with the wars going on around the world than with making things easier for myself.”

Assange has little time for most journalists, who he sees as lazy and unwilling to spend the required time to investigate documents dropped in their lap by WikiLeaks. This attitude undeniably contributed to the breakdown in relationships with The New York Times and The Guardian, two outlets Assange believes treated his integrity and independence with contempt.

In one curious aside, Assange notes, after the WikiLeaks release of documents relating to the American war effort, the material gained a steadily increasing amount of respect: “Some military personnel themselves began visiting our site, to see what kind of replacement parts they might need for their vehicles,” he writes. “Irony of ironies; some NATO military contractor would appear in a chatroom saying can you help me find a wheel for my armoured vehicle.”

Assange is portrayed as a man dedicated to exposing the secrets of lying governments in the service of war. He’s impatient, harsh on his own foibles and doesn’t suffer fools. He dismisses the excessive secrecy and collusion between journalists and officials during the prosecution of battle. “Open government is only worthy of the name when it is a real, lived value, not an empty branding exercise,” he argues.

The grand legacy of WikiLeaks, away from the petty personality politics, is undeniably positive.

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker that in the rush to accept the Israeli and American line over Iran – Tehran is a major threat and must be isolated (pretty much the same argument they’ve been making for a decade or more) – skepticism and rationality has once again disappeared:

I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeatedly inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron,” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.

Via the New York Times:

They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked — and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

The Middle East’s Only Democracy Inc (via the Guardian):

Jerusalem’s secular mayor, Nir Barkat, has pitted himself against the city’s swelling ranks of ultra-orthodox extremists by demanding that local police enable women to reclaim their position in the public domain.

Over recent months, women’s faces have disappeared from billboards across the city amid mounting pressure applied by the powerful ultra-orthodox lobby, who find the female image offensive.

Several advertisers have erased female models from their posters in Jerusalem. Elsewhere in Israel, the winter campaign of Israeli clothing brand Honigman features a model cosily dressed in winter knits. In the capital, the woman’s head has been removed from the image, leaving just her arm and a handbag.

Companies that do not fall in line with the standards of the extreme ultra-orthodox have frequently fallen victim to direct action. Across Jerusalem, female figures have been blacked out of billboards with spray-paint, or vandalised with graffiti branding the image “illegal”. Other posters are simply torn down.

On Sunday, Barkat wrote a letter to district police commander Niso Shaham in which he said: “We must make sure that those who want to advertise [with] women’s images in the city can do so without fear of vandalism and defacement of billboards or buses showing women.”

Police have confirmed an increase in vandalism on the borders of Jerusalem’s closed ultra-orthodox neighbourhoods. Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police would be stepping up patrols to prevent further acts of hooliganism and ensure it is investigated.

Rosenfeld added that despite being pelted with stones, police officers made several arrests in the orthodox Meah Shearim neighbourhood last week.

But activists claim the battle over Jerusalem’s billboards is only one manifestation of an alarming trend towards gender segregation across Israel driven by the religious right.

More here on this growing gender apartheid in Israel.

British MP Tom Watson offers a lesson in media management:

Are these captains of  the entertainment industry totally clueless, and have no idea that they’re being co-opted into selling the image of “cool Israel”? Haaretz reports:

Two delegations from Hollywood are visiting Israel to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one comprised of actors and another mainly featuring directors.

Today, both groups will meet with President Shimon Peres. The actors’ delegation is also slated to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the coming days, after having met with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Tuesday.

Both groups are here as guests of the Jewish Federation’s Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership, The Creative Coalition and the AIPAC-affiliated American Israel Education Foundation.

The actors’ delegation, headed by Tim Daley, has 21 members, including Emmy award winner Joe Pantoliano (“The Sopranos” ), Andrea Bowen (“Desperate Housewives” ), Steven Weber (“Brothers and Sisters” ) and Giancarlo Esposito (“Once Upon a Time” ). The directors’ delegation also includes scriptwriters and senior studio executives, inter alia, Marta Kauffman, one of the creators of “Friends,” and Nina Tassler, who heads the CBS television network’s entertainment division.

Last night, the actors held a press conference at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv in which they detailed their itinerary, which includes visits to Sderot and Ramallah, a tour of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and a visit to an absorption center for Ethiopian immigrants. Actress Patricia Arquette (“Medium” ) said the goal of the trip was to learn about the “nuances” of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Actor Richard Schiff (“The West Wing” ) added that when they return to the United States, they plan to share what they have learned with their friends and others.

Actor Rob Morrow (“Northern Exposure” ) related that Fayyad had spoken of peace and reconciliation with Israel, but shortly after they left the meeting, they heard that Fatah and Hamas had agreed to form a unity government. That, he said, made them realize how fluid the situation here is.

Delegation members also said they were surprised to see how short a distance separates Jerusalem and Ramallah and likewise Sderot and the Gaza Strip.

CCH Pounder (“Avatar” ) was the only member of the group who said she encountered opposition to her visit here – in her case, from South African friends. Schiff, for his part, was upset upon leaving the hotel to encounter a small group of demonstrators holding signs telling the actors they should be ashamed of themselves and denouncing Israel’s “apartheid” policies.

While Arundhati Roy addressed Washington Square Park in New York, held at Judson Memorial Church this week:

I like her vision:

We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As “cap-ists” and “lid-ites”, we demand:

• An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.

• Natural resources and essential infrastructure – water supply, electricity, health, and education – cannot be privatised.

• Everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.

• The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents’ wealth.

Meanwhile, the decade since 9/11 has seen a growth of militarised forces on the streets of so-called democratic societies. Stephen Graham is a professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K and his book is called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. He speaks to Democracy Now!:

Well, there’s been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry. That’s been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns. But more recently, there’s been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort of a domestic policing technology. It’s basically a really big, booming market, particularly in a world where surveillance and security is being integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems, on the back of the war on terror.

Why has the disillusionment emerged (via an interview in New Left Project)?:

There is a common misunderstanding here, because everybody just assumes that the one and only factor shaping American Jewish attachment to Israel, and also the inexorable one, is the ‘ethnic’ factor: if you’re Jewish you must be pro-Israel, in fact you must be fanatically pro-Israel. But the historical evidence shows that the relationship in fact depends on three factors.

One factor is ethnicity, for sure, because if you’re Catholic there’s just no particular interest from the get-go in Israel. It might develop, but as a point of departure it’s not there – it has to be created. In the case of Jews, the ethnic factor is the foundational factor. If you’re Jewish, you’re going to have an immediate connection with Israel. How powerful that connection is, that’s a secondary issue, but there will be something. So I’m not going to in any way deny or diminish the ethnic factor, but it has to be contextualised.

For example, there is an ethnic factor after 1948, but it is very seriously weakened by the ‘citizenship’ factor: the fact that Jews enjoy citizenship in the United States. After World War II, Jews were flourishing in the United States, and they didn’t want to jeopardise their standing as American citizens. Jews have always been burdened by the ‘dual loyalty’ bogey and have been historically identified with the Left (not without good reason – the American Communist Party was way disproportionately Jewish; the Bolsheviks were mainly Jewish; etc.). So Jews had to worry about both the historical legacy of the ‘dual loyalty’ charge, compounded by the fact that with the beginning of the Cold War they had to dissociate from the Soviet Union and the whole leftist tradition. Israel, moreover, was at that time seen as leftist – the ruling Mapai party was staunch Second International, and the main opposition party Mapam was staunch Stalinist. American Jews didn’t want much to do with that. And so the citizenship factor seriously diluted the ethnic factor, to the point where there was really no interest in Israel. If you look at the whole record, and I’ve read it carefully, from ’48-’67, there’s nothing on Israel there. You go through the issues of Commentary magazine, Israel would appear in about one issue out of every twenty, around article number thirteen headlined something like, ‘Bar Mitzvah in Israel’. Those were the kind of articles they would run about Israel.

The third factor, which I think is now the salient one, is ideology. American Jews have historically, at least for the past 80 years, been ideologically committed as liberal democrats. I go through all the evidence in the book – no point going through it now, but it’s clear. And I think that’s the factor that is most affecting American Jewish loyalties to Israel now. To put it simply: Israel has become an embarrassment. Its whole way of conducting itself, not to mention the whole mindset of its leadership, is illiberal: in its foreign policy, complete contempt and disregard for international institutions; in its domestic policy now, serious inroads on the most fundamental liberal principle of equality under the law and the rule of law; and in its treatment of the Palestinians and its neighbours, egregious violations of human rights on a systematic and methodical basis.