Antony Loewenstein

Yet more evidence that the American Congress is a) divorced from Middle East reality and b) damn keen to do the bidding of the most extreme Zionist and racist ideas by the Israel lobby (via The Cable):

Thirty U.S. senators will vote today over whether there really are 5 million Palestinian “refugees” or just around 30,000 — a hot-button issue that has already become the subject of a vigorous international debate involving Israel and its Arab neighbors.

When the Senate Appropriations Committee takes up the fiscal 2013 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill today, senators will vote on an amendment crafted by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that would require the State Department to report on how many of the millions of people currently supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) are actually people who were physically displaced from their homes in Israel or the occupied territories, and how many are descendants of original refugees.

The amendment is just a reporting requirement and doesn’t change the way the United States classifies refugees or how it gives more than $250 million annually to UNRWA, about a quarter of the agency’s budget. But a battle is already raging behind the scenes over what it might mean if the State Department started separating original Palestinian refugees from their descendants, and opponents of the Kirk amendment fear the end goal is to cut off U.N. aid to millions of Palestinians.

After the show’s recent coverage of Israeli apartheid against Christians in Palestine caused a massive stir, it’s hard not to see this latest piece as a way of kissing and making up with the Zionist lobby. Despite the fact that the story features Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy telling US viewers that the Tel Aviv bubble allows Jews to ignore its brutal occupation down the road, racism in Israel continues apace. Just hear Netanyahu talking about “illegal” refugees poisoning the chances of Israel to thrive as a “Jewish and democratic state”:

This really shouldn’t even be a story. Of course, the Zionist lobby (who should be called the Israeli propagandist lobby) don’t think Palestinians should be heard at all. Here’s Vic Alhadeff, a paid lobbyist who simply repeats everything spoken by the Netanyahu government (anti-intellectualism has a new name), condemning Sydney-siders who want to commemorate the Nakba:

As Australians, we should not be importing overseas conflicts onto the streets of Sydney.  But there is a tragedy today, and it is that when the Jewish world accepted the State of Israel as decreed by the UN 64 years ago, the Arab world did not do the same. If it had, we would be celebrating a state of Palestine today which was 64 years old, just as Israel is. Isn’t it time we all moved on and explored ways to advance peace instead of dwelling on the past?

The offensiveness of such a statement is clear. I suppose he wouldn’t mind if non-Jews tell Jews to stop dwelling on the Holocaust and just move on? As if.

Here’s the full story in today’s Daily Telegraph:

A bid to stop a pro-Palestinian demonstration was rejected by a Supreme Court justice because it should be treated just like Anzac Day or Australia Day.

In allowing last night’s Sydney CBD march to go ahead, Justice Christine Adamson said freedom of speech and history was more important than the risk of commuters being inconvenienced.

Police had sought a court order to stop the demonstration, held to mark Nakba Day, when Palestinians were dispossessed from areas that now form part of the state of Israel, from going ahead.

Authorities had objected because the march, involving about 200 people, had been due to start at Sydney Town Hall at 5.30pm, when the area is “frequented by tens of thousands of commuters”.

After an urgent hearing on Monday night, Justice Adamson published her reasons yesterday, saying freedom of speech trumped commuter disruption – and the event could not be moved to another day because of its historical significance.

“Nakba Day ought to be regarded as a day which, like Anzac Day, Christmas Day or Australia Day, is referable to a particular date which is not movable,” she said in her judgment. “I do not regard it as reasonable to expect persons commemorating a particular date to defer or bring forward its commemoration so that it can be commemorated on a weekend. The date is the product of history.”

The police argued in court that because the protest was likely to result in “significant interference with commuters’ passage home” it may lead to “frustration and unintended outbreaks of violence”.

Justice Adamson noted that inconvenience was likely to be experienced, saying “if one’s purpose were to disrupt commuter traffic, one could hardly choose a better time or place”, but said to refuse the protest “would be inhibiting … the right to freedom of expression and assembly”.

“It will present a significant challenge to police officers to keep the peace and ensure the public assembly does not cause a breach of the peace or that the consequences of any such breaches is minimised,” she said. “Public facilities are to be shared. It is the nature of a protest that others will be affected and their routines will be interrupted.”

In its submission to the court, the al-Nakba planning committee, which changed the time of the march to 7pm to minimise disruption, highlighted other protests that had been staged near Town Hall.

If most mainstream politicians dare write or say anything overtly critical of Israel, they’ll be hounded.

But if you advocate ethnic cleansing, as Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill) did recently, they’ll be deafening silence:

Those Palestinians who wish to may leave their Fatah- and Hamas-created slums and move to the original Palestinian state: Jordan. The British Mandate for Palestine created Jordan as the country for the Palestinians. That is the only justification for its creation. Even now, 75 percent of its population is of Palestinian descent. Those Palestinians who remain behind in Israel will maintain limited voting power but will be awarded all the economic and civil rights of Israeli citizens.

If you think there’s been outrage, you’d be wrong. After all, it’s only Palestinians.

Putting aside a clueless BBC interviewer – it’s so clear that she thought she had to continually interrupt Finkelstein to be “balanced” – there’s a good discussion about young Jews turning away from Israel and the Zionist state’s seeming dedication to destroy itself:

Short but powerful piece by Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog:

Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book The Crisis of Zionism.

The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better.

There really isn’t much to be added to this short but incisive post by Phil Weiss on Mondoweiss except to agree with his sentiments; the lack of guts by so many mainstream American intellectuals to comment on Zionism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as it’s seen as negatively affecting the career. Grow a pair, already:

Good career move. One of the great moments in intellectual spinelessness. Look at the last paragraph here, the justification of intellectual irresponsibility by Dave Eggers. If Gunter Grass stands for anything now, it is the responsibility of prominent intellectuals to speak out on important questions when world peace is threatened. Reported in the Turkish Press, from AFP:

“US writer Dave Eggers will not travel to Germany to receive a prize Friday from the Gunter Grass Foundation due to the controversy over the Nobel laureate’s recent poem on Israel, his agency said.

“Eggers, 42, best known for his memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and Hollywood screenplays, was to pick up the foundation’s Albatross award for his book “Zeitoun” about a Syrian-American businessman accused of terrorist links during Hurricane Katrina.

“The New York-based Wylie Agency said in a statement released by his German publisher that Eggers would not attend the event in the northern city of Bremen because he did not wish to be drawn into the uproar over Grass’s poem.

“”Eggers won’t be coming for the ceremony because in light of the recent debate, he would be forced into commenting, endlessly and needlessly, on Grass and Israel and Iran, when the purpose of his visit was supposed to be about discussing his book Zeitoun, and the plight of Americans during and after Hurricane Katrina,” it said.”

This moment demonstrates something else. Eggers isn’t in the Israel lobby; I don’t think he’s said a word about the question. But the lobby has what Daniel Bell would describe as cultural hegemony (in the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism). Any criticism of Israel is still the third rail in American public life. Writers who take a stand endanger their hardwon status– their reviews, their assignments, their publishing futures. John Mearsheimer used to be published on the Times Op-Ed page all the time. He hasn’t been on there since the Iraq war. Brave guy. Or Naomi Klein– she is simply too independent a thinker to care about mainstream status. So she takes a brave stance on Gaza.

I gave the following talk at the University of Sydney on 15 March:

Strong essay by Israeli Uri Avnery:

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew, said years ago that the Jewish religion had practically died 200 years ago, and that the only thing that unites all Jews now is the Holocaust. There is much truth in this, but the Holocaust must be understood in this context as the culmination of centuries of persecution.

Almost every Jewish child around the world is brought up on the narrative of Jewish victimhood. “In every generation, they stand up to annihilate us,” says the sacred text that will be read in every Jewish home around the world in two weeks on Passover eve, “They”, as is well understood, are the “goyim”, all goyim.

Jews, according to our generally accepted narrative, have been persecuted everywhere, all the time, with few exceptions. Jews had to be ready to be attacked in every place at any moment. It is a continuous story of massacres, mass expulsions, the butchery of the Crusaders, the Spanish inquisition, the Russian and Ukrainian pogroms. The Holocaust was only one link in that chain, and probably not the last one.

…

What the assassin of Toulouse has succeeded in doing by his disgusting act is to bind French – and world – Jewry even tighter to the State of Israel. Already these ties have become very close in the last few years. A large proportion of French Jews are immigrants from North Africa who chose to go to France instead of Israel, and are therefore fiercer Israeli nationalists then most Israelis. They invest money and buy houses in Israel. In the month of August, one hears more French than Hebrew on Tel Aviv’s sea shore. Now many of them may decide to come to Israel for good.

Like every anti-Semitic act, this one in Toulouse contributes to the strength of Israel, and especially to the strength of the Israeli anti-Arab right.

…

The original Zionists did not intend to build a state that would be a kind of General Staff for World Jewry. Indeed, they thought that there would be no World Jewry. In their vision, all the Jews would congregate in Palestine, and the Jewish Diaspora would disappear. That’s what Theodor Herzl wrote, and that’s what David Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky believed.

If they had had their way, there would have been no anti-Semitic murders in Toulouse, because there would have been no Jews in Toulouse.

Ben Gurion was narrowly restrained from telling American Jewish Zionists what he thought of them. He held them in utter contempt. A Zionist, he believed, had no business to be anywhere but in Zion. If he had listened to Binyamin Netanyahu sucking up to the thousands of Jewish “leaders” in the AIPAC conference, he would have thrown up. And understandably, because these Jews, who were clapping and jumping up and down like mad, egging Netanyahu on to start a disastrous war against Iran, then went back to their comfortable homes and lucrative occupations in America.

Their English-speaking children attend colleges and dream about future riches while their contemporaries in Israel go to the army and worry about what would happen to their defenseless families if the promised war with Iran really comes about. How not to vomit?

This really a remarkable piece in The Economist that requires no explanation:

News flash: Israel is not master of its fate. It’s not terribly surprising that a country with less than 8m inhabitants is not master of its fate. Switzerland, Sweden, Serbia and Portugal are not masters of their fates. These days, many countries with populations of 100m or more can hardly be said to be masters of their fates. Britain and China aren’t masters of their fates, and even the world’s overwhelmingly largest economy, the United States, isn’t really master of its fate.

But Israel has even less control over its own destiny than Portugal or Britain do. The main reason is that, unlike those countries, Israel refuses to give up its empire. Israel is unable to sustain its imperial ambitions in the West Bank, or even to articulate them coherently. Having allowed its founding ideology to carry it relentlessly and unthinkingly into what Gershom Gorenburg calls an “Accidental Empire” of radical religious-nationalist settlements that openly defy its own courts, Israel is politically incapable of extricating itself. The partisan battles engendered by its occupation of Palestinian territory render it less and less able to pull itself free. It is immobilised, pinned down, in a conflict that is gradually killing it. Countries facing imperial twilight, like Britain in the late 1940s, are often seized by a sense of desperate paralysis. For over a decade, the tone of Israeli politics has been a mix of panic, despair, hysteria and resignation.

No one bears greater responsibility for the trap Israel finds itself in today than Mr Netanyahu. As prime minister in the late 1990s, he did more than any other Israeli leader to destroy the peace process. Illegal land grabs by settlers were tolerated and quietly encouraged in the confused expectation that they would aid territorial negotiations. Violent clashes and provocations erupted whenever the peace process seemed on the verge of concrete steps forward; the most charitable spin would be that the Israelis failed to exercise the restraint they might have shown in retaliating against Palestinian terrorism, had they been truly interested in progress towards a two-state solution. Mr Netanyahu believed that the Oslo peace agreements were a mirage, and his government’s actions in the late 1990s helped make it true.

Having trapped themselves in a death struggle with Palestinians that they cannot acknowledge or untangle, Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a happy development for Israel. Neither was Pakistan’s, nor indeed North Korea’s. The notion that it represents a new Holocaust is overstated, and the belief that the source of Israel’s existential woes can be eliminated with an airstrike is mistaken. But Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis because, unlike the Palestinians, it can be fitted into a familiar ideological trope from the Jewish national playbook: the eliminationist anti-Semite. With brain-cudgeling predictability, Mr Netanyahu marked his meeting with Mr Obama by presenting him with a copy of the Book of Esther. That book concerns a plot by Haman, vizier of King Ahasuerus of Persia, to massacre his country’s Jews, and the efforts of the beautiful Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, to persuade the king to stop them. It is a version of the same narrative of repression, threatened extermination and resistance that Jews commemorate at Passover in the prayer “Ve-hi she-amdah”: “Because in every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

Mr Netanyahu is less attractive than Esther, but he seems to be wooing Mr Obama and the American public just as effectively. The American-Israeli relationship now resembles the sort of crazy co-dependency one sometimes finds in doomed marriages, where the more stubborn and unstable partner drags the other into increasingly delusional and dangerous projects whose disastrous results seem only to legitimate their paranoid outlook. If Mr Netanyahu manages to convince America to back an attack on Iran, it is to be hoped that the catastrophic consequences will not be used to justify the attack that led to them.

Mr Netanyahu thinks the Zionist mission was to give the Jewish people control over their destiny. No people has control over its destiny when it is at war with its neighbours. But in any case, that is only one way of thinking of the Zionist mission. Another mission frequently cited by early Zionists was to help Jews grow out of the “Ghetto mentality”. Mr Netanyahu’s gift to Mr Obama shows he’s still in it.

Seriously: