Antony Loewenstein

Juan Cole brings news of yet more Wikileaks cables that show the threat Israel poses to world peace:

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that

“The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of time, to which Aftenposten has gained access, leave a clear message: The Israeli military is forging ahead at full speed with preparations for a new war in the Middle East.”

The paper says that US cables quote Ashkenazi telling the US congressmen, “I’m preparing the Israeli army for a major war, since it is easier to scale down to a smaller operation than to do the opposite.”

The general’s plans are driven by fear of growing stockpiles of rockets in Hamas-controlled Gaza and in Hizbullah-controlled Southern Lebanon, the likely theaters of the planned major new war. Ashkenazi does not seem capable of considering that, given a number of Israeli invasions and occupations of those regions, the rockets may be primarily defensive.

…

The memos reveal that none of the goals of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and its 2008-9 war on little Gaza were achieved, and that both Hamas and Hizbullah have effectively re-armed. What makes Ashkenazi think things would be different this time? Israel hawks have doomed themselves to the particular hell of Sisyphus, forced to roll the same stone up the hill over and over again with no hope of ever balancing it on the summit.

The Jerusalem Post has the story but misses the lead:

In another cable released Monday, it was revealed that during a 2007 June 12 meeting with US Ambassador to Israel Richard H. Jones, then-head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin said that Gaza was “number four” on his list of threats, preceded by Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah in that order.

The actual cable is more revealing, outlining the ideal Zionist position; demonise and isolate Palestinians in the name of gathering global support. How’s the love for Israel coming along?

Although not necessarily reflecting a GOI consensus view, Yadlin said Israel would be “happy” if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state. He dismissed the significance of an Iranian role in a Hamas-controlled Gaza “as long as they don’t have a port.”

What emerges from the litany of Wikileaks cables is the ineptitude of American foreign policy, either jumping at shadows or trying to impose its bullying ways on the world, often unsuccessfully.

One:

Saudi Arabia proposed creating an Arab force backed by US and Nato air and sea power to intervene in Lebanon two years ago and destroy Iranian-backed Hezbollah, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

The plan would have sparked a proxy battle between the US and its allies against Iran, fought in one of the most volatile regions of the world.

The Saudi plan was never enacted but reflects the anxiety of Saudi Arabia – as well as the US – about growing Iranian influence in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The proposal was made by the veteran Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, to the US special adviser to Iraq, David Satterfield. The US responded by expressing scepticism about the military feasibility of the plan.

It would have marked a return of US forces to Lebanon almost three decades after they fled in the wake of the 1983 suicide attack on US marine barracks in Beirut that killed 299 American and French military personnel.

Faisal, in a US cable marked secret, emphasised the need for what he referred to as a “security response” to the military challenge to the Lebanon government from Hezbollah, the Shia militia backed by Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria.

The cable says: “Specifically, Saud argued for an ‘Arab force’ to create and maintain order in and around Beirut.

“The US and Nato would need to provide transport and logistical support, as well as ‘naval and air cover’. Saud said that a Hezbollah victory in Beirut would mean the end of the Siniora government and the ‘Iranian takeover’ of Lebanon.”

Two:

Syrian officials were stunned by the mysterious assassination of a senior Hezbollah operative in Damascus two years ago, triggering a blame game between rival security services and frenzied speculation across the Middle East about who did it.

US reports from February 2008, revealed by WikiLeaks, described how the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was shocked when Imad Mughniyeh was murdered by a sophisticated bomb planted in his car. Mughniyeh, a founder member of the militant Lebanese Shia movement, was wanted by the US, Israel, France and other governments. Hezbollah is backed by Iran and Syria.

“Syrian military intelligence and general intelligence directorate officials are currently engaged in an internecine struggle to blame each other for the breach of security that resulted in Mughniyeh’s death,” the US embassy reported.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Lebanon, the well-connected Abdel Aziz Khoja, told US diplomats in Beirut that Hezbollah believed the Syrians were responsible for the Damascus killing. No Syrian official was present at Mughniyeh’s funeral in Beirut’s southern suburbs the following day. Iran was represented by its foreign minister, who, the Saudi envoy said, had come to calm down Hezbollah and keep it from taking action against Syria.

Another rumour, Khoja said, was that Syria and Israel had made a deal to allow Mughniyeh to be killed, an Israeli objective. No one has ever claimed responsibility for the assassination, though Israel has been widely blamed for it.

US diplomats reported that the killing led to tensions between Syria and Iran, perhaps because Tehran shared Khoja’s suspicion of Syrian complicity in the affair.

Three:

Washington has worked discreetly to block the supply of Iranian and Syrian weapons to Islamist groups in the Middle East amid evidence showed Scud-D missiles had been supplied to Hezbollah, according to U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The United States, in many cases using secret intelligence provided by Israel, had pressured Arab governments not to cooperate with arms smuggling to Palestinian group Hamas or Lebanon’s Hezbollah, said a report in the Guardian.

Wikileaks news is coming thick and fast.

Some “highlights” over the last 24 hours.

One:

[Israeli] Defense Minister Ehud Barak Tuesday told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that a deal was never reached with the United States on a renewed settlement freeze because the US is preoccupied with the mass of documents being released by WikiLeaks.

Barak said, “At the moment, it has been completely halted” because of what he called a loss of American attention and concentration, saying they were “very busy with North Korea and the WikiLeaks releases.”

Two:

Several large Australian web-hosting companies said today they would be unlikely to host the Wikileaks repository if asked to by a customer, for a number of reasons.

Bulletproof Networks has earned a reputation for stability and reliability with its customers. The Australian company hosts several large Australian sites which attract record amounts of traffic — and sometimes controversy.

For example, the hosting provider houses broadband information site Whirlpool, one of Australia’s most controversial customer forums. Whirlpool has attracted numerous legal threats over the years, as well as denial-of-service attacks not dissimilar to the attacks that have targeted Wikileaks over the past several weeks as it released 250,000 US diplomatic cables to the public.

Bulletproof Networks director Lorenzo Modesto said his group hadn’t been approached, but that he would have to seriously consider ethical, political, commercial and “the most obvious” legal or potentially criminal implications of hosting a Wikileaks mirror for a customer if requested to do so.

“More than $1 billion per annum worth of transactions are served by Bulletproof’s mission-critical hosting infrastructure. As such, given potential issues with any number of the above considerations, we would probably kindly refuse, but refer them to another hosting partner like Rackspace,” he said. “The issue will be that the commercials required would preclude local public managed cloud hosting without the provider sponsoring it in some way.”

Another local web-hosting provider not known to shy away from controversy is Netregistry, run and co-founded by chief executive officer Larry Bloch.

Today, Bloch said that in many ways his sympathies were with the Wikileaks organisation, as he believed in transparency, but he thought the organisation had overstepped the mark in terms of the diplomatic cable release. “For the effective functioning of many sorts of relationships, you do need a bit of diplomatic secrecy,” he said.

In addition, the CEO said that typically Netregistry would tend not to make decisions about customers based on the content they wanted to host — as long as it wasn’t obviously illegal or unethical.

However, Bloch noted that the Wikileaks case was special, because of the scale of the situation from a technical perspective.

“It’d be suicide to put forward a hosting service other than one that is tailored absolutely to them,” he said, noting issues like the denial-of-service attacks could cause “ancillary damage”, and that Netregistry wasn’t set up for such needs.

Three:

Less than a month before a battle erupted in Beirut between Hezbollah and members of the ruling anti-Syrian coalition in May 2008, senior officials in the Lebanese government sent the U.S. embassy detailed intelligence that the militant group was operating an independent communications network across the country.

The uncovering of the network and the demand to shut it down were a central cause of the domestic rift in Lebanon.

A classified cable published by the online whistleblower WikiLeaks reveals that Minister of Telecommunications Marwan Hamadeh told U.S. diplomats that “Iran Telecom is taking over the country!”

The classified cable, sent by Charge d’Affaires Michele Sison in April 2008 from the embassy in Beirut to Washington, underscores the drama taking place in Lebanon over the course of those months and led to a “mini” civil war in Beirut.

The American diplomat wrote that Minister Hamadeh had asked to meet her urgently and disclosed to her a detailed survey of what he described as the complete fiber optic system that Hezbollah had established throughout Lebanon.

The previous evening, the Lebanese television station LBC had aired a program on Hezbollah’s telecommunications network, but Hamada told Sison that its existence had already been widely known.

Four (Glenn Greenwald in Salon):

Just look at what the U.S. Government and its friends are willing to do and capable of doing to someone who challenges or defies them — all without any charges being filed or a shred of legal authority.  They’ve blocked access to their assets, tried to remove them from the Internet, bullied most everyone out of doing any business with them, froze the funds marked for Assange’s legal defense at exactly the time that they prepare a strange international arrest warrant to be executed, repeatedly threatened him with murder, had their Australian vassals openly threaten to revoke his passport, and declared them “Terrorists” even though — unlike the authorities who are doing all of these things — neither Assange nor WikiLeaks ever engaged in violence, advocated violence, or caused the slaughter of civilians.

This is mainstream media reporting. Anonymous voices advocating war and chaos in the Middle East, courtesy of Israel and the US:

Syria’s fresh interference in Lebanon and its increasingly sophisticated weapons shipments to Hezbollah have alarmed American officials and prompted Israel’s military to consider a strike against a Syrian weapons depot that supplies the Lebanese militia group, U.S. and Israeli officials say.

This email was forwarded by Harvard Middle East expert Sara Roy. No real comment required:

I pass this along without making any claims to verify its accuracy.  From a NYC-based Israeli source, who just returned from Tel Aviv, where he met with senior IDF and Likud figures, including Netanyahu.  He is one of the Likud “princes” whose father was one of Menachim Begin’s closest personal friends.  He is very close with Benny Begin.

During a one week recent stay in Israel, he conferred with a military grouping that he is a part of.  They are generally opposed to the Iran war adventure and have a very active position within the current IDF hierarchy.  The incoming IDF chief of staff, Gen. Galant, is a very independent-minded soldier, with his own strong views on the folly of an Iran attack.  He is no pacifist.  He was in charge of the commando units that carried out the Gaza Flotilla operation.  He also ran a 16-man commando operation into southern Lebanon, tageting Hezbollah sites, which went afoul.  Hezbollah had the capacity to intercept transmissions from Israeli surveillance drones that were coordinating with the commando team, and Hezbollah was able to stage an ambush, that killed 16 members of the IDF team.  While the incident was totally hushed up, there is a serious IDF internal probe underway into the failed mission.   Despite these setbacks, Galant was made the new COS of the IDF.

There is a serious conflict between MOD Barak and the outgoing COS Ashkenazi, over the way that Barak handled his replacement, appointing Galant months before the February 2011 turnover.  Now, the Knesset has shortened the wait time before a retired IDF general can enter politics, from three years to 18 months.  Ashkenazi is already planning a challenge to Barak for the chairmanship of the Labor Party in the next election, and he will have a great deal of support in that effort.

Source had a meeting with Netanyahu, and came away concluding that he is completely irrational, and stubbornly refusing to listen to advice, even from Benny Begin.  Netanyahu is aware of the weakened political position of Obama, after the Nov. 2 midterm elections, and he plans to take advantage of this weakness to launch a hit against Iran.  He has solicited and won the backing of Sarcozy in this.  Bibi had several private meetings with Sarcozy.  Sarcozy has agreed to support Israel in an attack on Iran, and the recent Anglo-French military alliance, forged during Sarcozy’s recent visit to London, could be part of this French support for the Israeli attack on Iran.  Shades of Suez 1956?  An Israeli-French-British entente?   Sarcozy came to this arrangement with Netanyahu, in opposition to the European Union’s war-avoidance plans, which involve an approach to Iran, offering lucrative economic deals, if they freeze their nuclear program and remove the pretext for military action.  Germany has emerged as the leading channel for this approach to Iran, and Sarcozy, in part, is reacting against Merkel’s role in this EU effort.

The Israelis, during the Bush period, developed and partially tested a new bunker-buster weapon, which my source described as a ”semi-nuke.”  This was tested in the past in Nevada and in South Africa, but it still is in the final testing phases, even though approximately 100 of these bombs have already been produced.  The concern is that the fallout is strictly contained, and this requires some further refining.  At least one of the Iranian sites targeted by Israeli planners is close enough to the Iraq border, that they are deeply concerned that no fallout crosses into areas where there are American forces.  F-22 fighter jets “loaned” to Israel by President Bush have now been taken back by Obama, and so the French will provide top of the line Mirage jets to Israel.   The French are also providing mid-air refueling for the dozen planes (backed by 250 aircraft altogether)  that will carry out the bombing raid.

U.S. intelligence is aware of this situation, and Gates is deeply concerned that the situation has slipped out of any U.S. controls, due to indecision by Obama.  This is a factor in Gates’ determination to leave the Administration before August 2011.

For Israeli war planners, the biggest fear in not whether the operation itself will succeed or fail.  The biggest concern is what will happen the day after.  It is already factored into the equation that there will be very strong reactions to such an Israeli attack.  The stock markets around the globe will crash, and other chaos could result.  Israel will be clearly blamed and even further ostracized for the attack.

Israel is well aware of the Iranian retaliatory capabilities through Hezbollah and Hamas.  They know that Iranian support for both groups has tripled in recent months.  The strike plan developed by Ashkenazi involves attacks on southern Lebanon and Gaza, as the planes take off for their targets inside Iran.

Israeli war planners are aware of, and are factoring in several other possibilities.  First, there is a belief that Syria could make a military move to take back the Golan Heights as Israeli forces are focused on these other targets.  There is also a possibility of a military coup in Egypt, to prevent the succession of President Mubarak’s son Gamal.  Egypt could move into certain areas of the Sinai still held by Israel.

Israel is also aware of the danger of Pakistani strikes against Israel, in retaliation for the bombing of Iran.  A French delegation is in Pakistan, in an effort to derail any Pakistani retaliation against Israel, which, of course, could involve the use of nuclear weapons, which would wipe Israel off the map.

Netanyahu does not have the support of even the Begin faction of Likud for this action.  And if the attack takes place after February, when Gen. Galant takes over as COS of the IDF, he will refuse.  Source suggests that Netanyahu has significant respect for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and they could possibly dissuade him from taking this reckless action.  There was last week an eight-and-a-half hour meeting between Bibi and Hillary, and when she came out she said, “We still don’t see eye-to-eye.”  The prospect of some kind of political deal or shakeup in Israel, in which Kadima could come into a grand secular coalition and kill this crazy war scheme, is not very real.  Source believes that Avigdor Lieberman has sufficient power to block any move to oust him.  He is too powerful to dump.  Benny Begin met with him at length to get him to tone down the rhetoric.  He was not particularly successful.  He has built up a tremendous power base among the one million-plus Russian emigre.

When might such an operation be launched?  My source believes that, if it does not happen before December 10, it will next be on the table for March or April 2011.  Netanyahu is considering, but has not finalized in his mind, to order strikes in late November 2010.  All IDF vacations have been suspended as of this week;  and IDF officers studying abroad have been summoned home temporarily.  The line circulating around is:  “No repeat of the Yom Kippur War when Israel was caught by surprise.”

My following investigation appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

The Middle East “quagmire” is largely “the fault of Israel”, according to Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU).

In an interview with Crikey, the author of Confessions of a Faceless Man said that he was a “critical friend of Israel” and the ongoing building of illegal settlements in the West Bank was “mad”.

An investigation into Australian’s union embrace of the Palestinian issue, the growing popularity of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and the pro-Israel stance of Howes and the AWU has discovered deep divides between the AWU and many other mainstream unions.

Following Britain’s biggest union decision earlier this year to boycott Israeli companies, Australian unions are also signing up to target firms that profit from Israeli colonies in the West Bank.

The unions include the Electrical Trades Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union. The move was condemned by The Australian and Howes last month. “We don’t believe that it’s in the interests of Palestinian or Israeli workers to seek to divide them in the peace process,” he said to the Murdoch paper.

Howes told Crikey that he opposed BDS because he supported a two-state solution and believed “Israel was a vibrant democracy”. But he included this: “If I thought BDS could solve the problem (the Middle East conflict) I would back it but I know it will have no effect on the ground in Palestine. The analogy with apartheid South Africa is wrong because BDS had no effect there until Western states, including the US, boycotted the country.”

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Jewish writers overseas are expressing public concern over the direction of Israeli politics.

Gideon Levy, in Israeli daily Haaretz, says that “your beloved Israel is addicted to occupation and aggression”. Bradley Burston in the same paper claims that Americans are “emotionally divesting” from the conflict. This Washington Post report cites the fact that ultra-orthodox Jews are reproducing at such high rates that a more pro-settler mindset is gaining a foothold in the country and reducing its secular footprint.

More illegal structures are being built in East Jerusalem, yet barely any of this seems to enter the Australian discussion. Recent studies indicate the Jewish Diaspora here is “most closely tied to Israel” compared to every other Diaspora community.

This mindset has resulted in very few major figures speaking out against Israel’s occupation or ongoing siege of Gaza. I spoke to countless union officials and leaders across the country and most refused to talk on the record about these matters, the AWU and Howes.

Why? Perhaps it indicates an awareness of Howes’ media reach, his likely longevity in the Labor Party and union movement — he was recently voted one of the most powerful people in Australia in the Australian Financial Review.

But Howes is a contradiction. He is a man of the Labor Right, who is pro gay marriage and pro-refugees, supportive of nuclear power and the US alliance, mildly open to climate change and vehemently pro-Israel.

Howes told Crikey that he opposed Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla, Israeli discrimination against Palestinians, settlement expansion and the blockade of Gaza and acknowledged that he displeased Zionist audiences when he told them these views. He constantly said that he was optimistic about Middle East peace under US President Barack Obama and was hopeful  Washington wouldn’t allow the situation to deteriorate further.

I asked Howes why his union was so active in pro-Israel activity, what his members thought about it and who was paying for it all. “Most AWU members probably don’t care about Israel but we are a democratic union and I’ve received virtually no criticism for our stance. I’ve received one letter about it and it was backing our position.”

A union source told Crikey that the AWU was run like a business with little member discussion about important issues, so any serious disagreement of the union’s Israel policy could be ignored. It is impossible to determine how much AWU members’ money is spent on pro-Israel advocacy.

In his younger days, when Howes was in the Trotskyite Democratic Socialist Party, he said he “may have been anti-Israel” but the issue barely came up. “I strongly believe that Israel has the right to exist but it has no right to occupy other’s lands.” He took comfort from the fact that “most Israelis oppose colonies” but I asked if this was truly the case when settlements continued to expand at an unprecedented rate. It was because of Israel’s political system, Howes countered, that allowed “fringe” parties too much power.

Howes has placed pro-Israel campaigning at the centre of his union’s business. At the 2009 national conference, an Israeli trade union leader praised the AWU’s stand against boycotts. Howes himself gave a speech recently at the Zionist Federation of Australia conference in Melbourne where he vehemently opposed BDS but barely said a word against the occupation and implied that Palestinian workers were against BDS. In fact, the opposite is true, with the vast majority of Palestinian civil society groups agreeing in 2005 to a cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

Zionist advocacy is conducted in the AWU by a handful of major figures: national communications co-ordinator Andrew Casey in Sydney and campaigns co-ordinator Daniel Walton, who just returned from a Zionist lobby-paid trip to Israel. Several union sources told Crikey that Casey and Howes spend considerable time trying to pressure other local unions not to join the BDS movement.

Howes said he spoke regularly to union leaders in Australia and overseas and the vast bulk of them who do back BDS are doing so “because of constant Palestinian activist pressure” rather than actual belief in the ideology behind it.

Indeed, although the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union recently signed up for BDS, national secretary Dave Oliver, when contacted by Crikey, refused to comment beyond simply acknowledging the union’s “support for BDS at the national council”. I have been informed that Oliver is concerned about talking publicly about BDS for fear of upsetting Howes.

Howes, who acknowledged many times during our interview that he “didn’t know that much about the issue”, told me that he spends “0.1% of my time on Israel” and fully backs the TULIP (Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine) campaign that links some Israeli and Palestinian workers and “challenges the apologists for Hamas and Hizbollah in the labour movement”.

Supporting TULIP  makes sense for Howes when he told me that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East — he included Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda — “must be fought”. I challenged him to acknowledge that none of these groups are alike — for example, Hamas and Hizbollah have major electoral support — and conflating all Islamist organisations into one evil entity is the classic and deliberate mistake made by neo-conservatives since September 11.

Other union leaders do not share Howes’ liberal Zionist and rose-coloured view of the Middle East. The CFMEU’s John Sutton told Crikey that his union backed BDS and Palestine because of its history of supporting “left causes”. Israel was moving further to the right, he said, and he rejected allegations that he was anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. “I don’t back full BDS, just boycott of settlement products”, Sutton told me. “I back a two-state solution and UN resolutions.” He hoped the ACTU would follow the CFMEU’s embrace of BDS but knew Howes was desperate to avoid the major union body backing a partial BDS motion.

Former NSW CFMEU’s state secretary and political aspirant Andrew Ferguson told Crikey that the views of the AWU and Howes were “not relevant” to the BDS campaign. Ferguson’s union “has a large non-English speaking and Arabic membership, many of whom are pro-Palestinian”. He told me that Andrew Casey, AWU’s Jewish communications man, “reinforced Howes’ view on the Middle East”. Ferguson said Howes “has a strong point of view” on the Middle East and “he pushes that legitimately”.

It’s not a view shared by departed Labor politician Julia Irwin. She spoke exclusively to Crikey in August about the Zionist lobby’s infiltration of the ALP. When asked about Howes last week, Irwin said that her former Labor colleague Michael Forshaw, currently chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, “often argued that his union [the AWU] had long and binding ties with the [Israel union] Histadrut and this was the basis of his support for Israel”. The reason behind the affection for Israel felt by Howes was no different.

Irwin also expressed concern that ALP Jewish backbencher Michael Danby would likely become chair of the Defence and Foreign Affairs Committee next year, potentially upsetting Arab states with his hard-line Zionist views. She exclusively told Crikey that Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, “who fought off a determined challenge from Jewish influences in the Victorian ALP to retain pre-selection”, was furious with the potential Danby position but Danby had “done his homework”, being close to the architects of Rudd’s deposing.

When I asked Howes about the only Labor MP who spoke publicly for the rights of the Palestinians, he said that Irwin had “gone as far as her abilities would allow”. He claimed that there were several other ALP parliamentarians who were critical of Israeli policies but he couldn’t name one who said anything on the public record.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the long interview with Howes was a discussion about what was actually happening in Israel and Palestine. He was not like Canadian leader Stephen Harper, who this week said that Israel must be supported no matter what. “Unless Israel moves soon [and ends the occupation], disaster awaits”, Howes told me. “I don’t give a blank cheque for Israel.”

However, one of his columns in this year’s Sunday Telegraph was a complete backing for the Israeli assassination of Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and the use of Australian passports in the hit. He argued that Israel, along with “moderate” Arab states and Australia, were engaged in a war “fighting Islamo-fascism” and the extra-judicial murder of untried “terrorists” was a “small victory”.

But Howes wanted to stress that even he had limits. “If Israelis become hell-bent on ethnic cleansing [of Palestinians] I’ll know, and my support won’t continue.” Although it is true that the ALP has a long tradition of blindly backing the Zionist state, Howes said that he regularly condemned Israeli actions “but The Australian and Australian Jewish News only report my pro-Israel comments”.

He denied having any ALP career ambitions but argued that “being critical of Israel isn’t an impediment to career progression” in the party.

Although Howes has long spoken warmly towards Israel, his planned upcoming Zionist lobby trip to Israel will not happen, along with Labor front-bencher Bill Shorten and ALP politician David Feeney, due to the presence and tensions with Kevin Rudd, according to comments by Howes on ABC in Melbourne on 11 November. Howes told me that he realised deeper involvement in the issue was required when former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a motion to congratulate Israel on its 60th anniversary in 2008. “I thought it was highly inappropriate [for some union leaders and pro-Palestinian activists] not to praise Israel’s achievements. The activists had to be challenged.”

On the day of Rudd’s motion, a large advertisement appeared in The Australian condemning the move and accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing. Howes responded at the time: “In a de facto manner, Julie Irwin and some trade union people can be perceived to be supporting the lot of Islamic Jihad and Hamas through the action they have taken here.”

But union head Andrew Ferguson indicated to Crikey that he had recently noticed a small shift in the ability of the Zionist lobby to “convince Australian unions of the Israeli position”. Although he said the ALP was a “conservative party and never backed a pro-Palestinian position”, there was more questioning within ALP ranks and less fear of being accused of backing terrorism and Hamas for simply speaking out.

Demographic shifts in Australian society, Ferguson stressed, were changing perceptions of Palestine. As Israel moves further to the right, younger members of the ALP [such as Muslim and Arab members] and the general public were moving the Labor movement in a different direction. “In 10-15 years time,” he said, “we will see a real shift” towards more critical perspectives on Israeli actions.

Crikey has obtained a motion that was passed at the Brisbane South ALP regional conference (and other regional conferences) in late October, which signals growing anger within Labor ranks. It stressed support for a two-state solution but called for an end to Israel’s “separation wall” through the West Bank, an end to the siege on Gaza, cessation of West Bank colonies and a fair outcome for Palestinian refugees.

It was then sent to the ALP National Executive for action and shows frustration that the Gillard Government and Labor leadership are willing to simply mouth the official US policy on the region. Howes had no criticism of Gillard’s position on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

But Ferguson warned me not to under-estimate the power of Zionist lobbying and money on mainstream politicians to be seduced by the Zionist narrative. Witness the upcoming largest Australian parliamentary delegation ever to visit Israel organised by Melbourne-based, Zionist lobbyist Albert Dadon. They will be accompanied by journalists from most major Australian media companies.

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

Crikey Ed: This story originally cited national occupational health and safety unit director Dr Yossi Berger in Victoria in relation to Zionist advocacy conducted in the AWU; this reference has now been removed due to inaccuracy.

Following my article yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald on Israel/Palestine, the following letters appear in today’s edition:

For an alternative to Antony Loewenstein’s polemic against Israel (“Western politicians prefer to ignore Israel’s inherent racism”, October 28) I refer readers to Freedom in the World: Israel 2010 by Freedom House, a venerable and widely respected non-governmental organisation.

Under the Freedom House criteria, Israel has the highest of seven rankings for political rights and the second highest for civil liberties. It is the only country in the Middle East rated “free”. Its media is described as “vibrant and independent”.

Although Israel describes itself as a “Jewish and democratic state”, freedom of religion is respected, with Christian, Muslim and Bahai communities having jurisdiction over their members in matters of marriage, divorce and burial.

The judiciary is independent and regularly rules against the government. Freedoms of assembly and association are respected. Workers may join independent unions and have the right to strike and bargain collectively. Women have achieved substantial parity at almost all levels of society. Openly gay Israelis are permitted to serve in the armed forces.

Certainly, some serious discrimination exists in Israel, as in other democracies. But overall, not a bad record for a country faced with neighbours such as Iran and Syria, and organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

Peter Wertheim Executive director, Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Sydney

By all means, let us go back to basics, starting with the United Nations partition plan for Palestine, as [Zionist lobbyist] Colin Rubenstein suggests (”Oath’s emphasis on a democratic nation state is soundly based”, October 28).

The plan showed clear borders of the two states, with Jerusalem as a UN zone which was barred from being the Israeli capital. The war between the Arab nations and Israel led to the occupation of territory clearly intended as belonging to the Arab state. At no time since it unilaterally declared its statehood has Israel confined itself to the boundaries allocated by the UN. Its illegal expansion into Arab territories continues.

The UN requirement that the rights of resident populations be recognised in the new state has been consistently ignored.

The British foresaw problems with the new state and its expansionist ambitions, and abstained from the UN vote. They have since fallen into line, as have we, with the blinkered Western view of the conflict.

Don Brown Narrabeen

My following article appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Imagine a mainstream Australian politician saying that Aborigines should be banned from leading tourists around Uluru because they might “present anti-Australian positions” to visitors. The outcry would be furious.

But a bill is currently before the Israeli Knesset, led by a parliamentarian from the “moderate” Kadima party, that would bar Arab residents of East Jerusalem from working as tour guides in the city. Knesset member Gideon Ezra said it was essential tourist groups are “accompanied by a tour guide who is an Israeli citizen and has institutional loyalty to the [Jewish] state of Israel”.

It is just the latest sign in an ever-tightening noose around Arabs from the Zionist mainstream in the self-described Jewish nation.

Journalist Gideon Levy writes in the Israeli daily Haaretz that no politician “has even begun to think of Arabs as being equal to Jews”. The Israeli Jewish public increasingly shares these authoritarian views. In a study published in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, 36 per cent of Israeli Jews urged the revoking of Arab voting rights and restriction of free speech in “times of political difficulty”.

Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens but an insecure nation demanding obedience to an ideology that deliberately excludes the legitimate rights of its Arab population.

The occupation in the West Bank is deepening daily, after more than 43 years, with colonies expanding at the fastest rate in two years. The illegal siege on Gaza contributes to Palestinian children suffering debilitating malnutrition.

This is the Israel that Western politicians prefer to ignore. When I recently confronted Opposition Leader Tony Abbott over his blind backing for Israeli “democracy”, he muttered something about the Middle East not being “perfect.” But, I countered, what about Jewish-only settler roads in the West Bank? That was “bad”, he acknowledged, before looking away nervously.

Julia Gillard’s Labor Party shares these delusions. It is one of the reasons that the Independent Australian Jewish Voices group published newspaper advertisements nationally this month demanding the Australian government “exert pressure on Israel to conform to international law and humanitarian standards”.

The growing global concern over Israeli values has been crystallised by the Netanyahu cabinet voting to force non-Jews seeking citizenship to swear allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”.

The decision was met with furious indignation from a vocal minority in Israel, not least Palestinians who were being asked to negate their historical rights. Leftist Jewish Israelis marched through Tel Aviv chanting, “Fascism and ethnic cleansing are standing proud”.

In the Diaspora there was virtual silence. Blind loyalty came before defending democratic values. The Achilles heel is its deference to Israeli government decisions, a Maoist-like devotion to a country increasingly delegitimised by its own occupying policies.

One of the main reasons the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is thriving around the world – alongside the one-state solution idea – is that Israel ignores global demands to change its behaviour. Cultural and economic isolation worked against apartheid South Africa.

Just the latest example of a principled stance in reaction to the loyalty oath, was the refusal of the English filmmaker Mike Leigh to participate in a program at a Jerusalem film school. He also cited expanding West Bank settlements and the brutal attack on the Gaza flotilla.

Leigh was praised by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel for highlighting “the fact that collaborating with institutions of a state that practises occupation, colonisation and apartheid, as Israel does, cannot be regarded as a neutral act …”

No other Western state has tried to introduce anything like the loyalty oath. The oath is on an ever-growing list of anti-democratic proposals before the Knesset, including a one-year prison term for “incitement for the negation of the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”.

Palestinians and leftist Jews are loathed fifth-columns to be smeared and isolated.

No obfuscation about the supposedly devilish plans of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or al-Qaeda can distract from the reality of Israel’s inherent racism. The world should stop pumping in funds to perpetuate the infrastructure of oppression.

Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and author of My Israel Question.

So Richard Barrett, the coordinator of the United Nations Al Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team, thinks it’s time to “talk to the Taliban.”

Guess the next major piece in the New York Times will be that Israel should talk to Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran.

Post 9/11, finding nuance in the state view towards “terrorism” was rare, indeed. But here is a challenging example, questioning the idea that every form of resistance is somehow connected to al-Qaeda:

More than three years after federal agents locked up a Sri Lankan immigrant they say was the top U.S. representative of the Tamil Tigers, his fate may hinge on a complex question: Was the rebel group a terrorist threat to Americans?

Federal prosecutors who charged Karunakaran Kandasamy with supporting terrorism say the answer is yes. And they say he should get a stiff sentence approaching 20 years for raising money for the separatist group, which fought a 25-year war with the Sri Lankan government.

But a judge recently expressed his doubts.

The case against the jailed Kandasamy doesn’t neatly fit the definition of “a more obvious or garden variety terrorism case, where … our security interests are compromised and the safety of our citizenry is in jeopardy,” U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie said earlier this month at Kandasamy’s scheduled sentencing, which was postponed.

“Do we simply wave the red flag of terrorism and impose the maximum sentence?”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Knox argued the Tamil Tigers had earned a State Department designation as a terrorist organization in part by putting U.S. citizens living in Sri Lanka in harm’s way. He also said the group’s supporters in the United States extorted cash from Sri Lankan immigrants.

The Tamil Tigers pioneered and perfected technology for suicide bombings, Knox said. That technology “was borrowed and copied and sold on some occasions to other terrorist organizations — organizations like al-Qaida, that directly target the United States, organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and others in the region,” he said.

Internal documents show the Tamil Tigers considered other terror groups as fellow freedom fighters, and had a policy of “sharing black market arms shipments and explosive shipments, the financial system, bank accounts,” he said.

The judge put off sentencing after Kandasamy — who has battled a spinal problem and other serious ailments since his arrest — asked for mercy.

“I love this country and its soil,” the 54-year-old former cab driver said through an interpreter. “I’m sick and I’m afraid I’ll never live to be free with my family again.”

The story of Lebanon’s oldest synagogue restored to its former glory, including with the backing of Hizbollah.