Antony Loewenstein

Very few people understand the reality of life under Israeli occupation. Father Peter Bray, the Vice Chancellor of Bethlehem University, has regularly written missives about what it really means. This is his Easter message:

Easter Sunday 8 April 2012

Greetings from this holy city of Jerusalem where again I have had the opportunity to gather with others to reflect on the Easter mystery. It is indeed a privilege and an inspiration to walk the streets of the Old City and to reflect on what happened here some 2000 years ago.

I have had the opportunity to gather with locals as well as many pilgrims to reflect and pray. To see the international nature of the gatherings reminds me of how far what Jesus began here has travelled. The message of God’s love and of the need for peace and justice has been heard in the farthest ends of the earth. However, it is distressing for me to realize that some of the people with whom I work at Bethlehem University, and many others in that city, cannot join me in these ceremonies. They live some seven kilometres away but because they are Palestinian Christians they could not get permission to come into the Old City to be part of the ceremonies. In spite of the fact that many of these families trace their origins back to the earliest Christians, they cannot easily come to worship in the places where their ancestors worshipped down through the centuries.

This situation brings to mind the article by Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the USA. He claimed in the March 12 Wall Street Journal article, “Israel and the Plight of Mideast Christians,” that Israel is providing a supportive environment for Christians and that the Christians are leaving the Holy Land because of the pressure from Muslims. This contradicts what Christians are saying and experiencing.  For more information on this you might like to see the link.

The Palestinian Christians along with Palestinian Muslims are treated by the Israelis as Palestinians. Thus the Palestinian Christians are restricted in all sorts of ways because they are Palestinian. If they live behind the Wall they need special permission to go into Jerusalem. Israel claims it gives thousands of permits to Christians for special feast like Christmas and Easter. However, of the estimated 50,000 Christians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories only about 3000 get these special permits, but this is arbitrary. In speaking recently with one member of staff at Bethlehem University I discovered that over the past two years she received permission to go into Jerusalem on two of the four times she applied. Her three daughters had also applied and received permission on two occasions. However, there was never an occasion when they were able to go and worship as a family, as there was always someone without permission.

Even those Christians with permits cannot always get through. On Palm Sunday groups of people trying to get to Jerusalem for the procession coming from Ramallah, Nablus, Taybeh and elsewhere in the West Bank spent over two hours at the checkpoints and so gave up and returned home because they would have missed the procession anyhow.

This restriction on travel has an impact in many ways. I was speaking with one of our second year student before Christmas and he mentioned he had never set eyes on the sea or been to Galilee because he couldn’t get permission to go through the Wall. Many of our Christian students from Bethlehem have never been to the Galilee to see Nazareth or the Sea of Galilee or Mount of Beatitudes etc. We have tried all sorts of ways to get visits there but have never been able to get permission for them. So I can go and can take visitors to all these holy places, but people whose ancestry goes back to the early Christians cannot.

Pressure on Christians who occupy land the Israelis want is intense. Israel has systematically put pressure on Palestinians who possess land that Israelis wants. Daoud Nasser, for example, is on his family land just near Bethlehem. He has had to fight the Israeli government and military in the Israeli High Court to retain his land, even though it has been clear from the beginning that he has the documentation to show that it is his ancestral land. This was a very costly exercise. When the government and military could not win in the court they tried restriction. They would not allow any water, electricity, services, building permits and so on for the property. In addition, neighbouring settlers harassed him and his family in an effort to force them off the land. They have not succeeded. Daoud has founded the “Tent of Nations” where he seeks to educate people to what is happening and talks about his approach. He refuses to regard the soldiers, settlers or government as his enemy and acts accordingly. I have been to the site a number of times and I am always impressed with the determination to resist non-violently but to act in a Christian way. This confounds the Israelis at times but is a continual challenge for Daoud to live this approach. So far he has been able to survive through some ingenious moves, but it is a constant strain for him and his family. Many people are not prepared to go to these lengths so give up and leave.

The constant pressure on Christians is evident in restrictions, abuse at checkpoints, economic pressure, unemployment, unpredictable invasion of homes by Israeli military, insecurity and being in an open air prison. All these lead many of them to seek an alternative. So to say Israel is providing a supportive environment for Christians is contradicted by the evidence of what people have to endure.

It is in the midst of this situation that Bethlehem University continues to reach out to Palestinians and particularly Palestinian Christians. In a country where less than 2% are Christian, Bethlehem University has a student population where some 30% are Christian. We are ever looking for better ways to reach out and be supportive of them. There are many challenges facing us in doing this, but the resilience of the students is amazing and inspiring and makes the efforts involved so worthwhile. During the recent visit to Bethlehem University by Brother Alvaro, the Superior General of the Brothers, I felt so proud as I watched and listened to our students engage with him and those with him in a very confident, articulate and informed way.

For almost forty years Bethlehem University has been reaching out to provide university education. Over the past year or so I have been working with people to explore additional ways Bethlehem University could more effectively respond to the needs of the Palestinian people. We have come up with several options and at present we are in negotiations to purchase a property a few hundred metres from our present campus, which is about a third the size of it. To gain this will provide Bethlehem University with an excellent base from which to develop what is needed for the next twenty years. However, finding around $19 million to purchase, renovate, landscape and set up the new programmes is a big ask in the current international economic climate. So please keep us in your prayers that many people will be generous enough to enable us to more adequately respond to the needs of the Palestinian people.

Part of this challenge, and one of the most difficult aspect, is to keep hope alive in the midst of all that people face. Bethlehem University over the years has proved to be a beacon of hope for our students and we continue to reach out to find ever better ways to keep hope alive. This hope is not so much some vague idea that things will be better. Rather at this time of Easter it is good to reflect on Jesus’ victory over death. Against this backdrop our hope is that there is a victorious meaning to what is happening, no matter what the outcome. It its this type of hope that enables us to live our lives in the midst of oppression. This hope gives us the courageous to face whatever comes with a confidence that arises from knowing that we continually live in the presence of our loving God.

It has been a great thrill for me to have a number of visitors from Australia and New Zealand pass through the Holy Land and visit Bethlehem University. For so many of them engaging with our students is the highlight of their visit to the Holy Land. It is one thing to visit churches and holy sites, to see ruins etc., but to engage with students who live in this land and whose roots go back so far is something special. So if you are intending to come to the Holy Land make sure you ask the travel agent or tour organizer to put Bethlehem University on the itinerary! I would love to welcome you on campus and have you engage with some of our students. In May it will be a great please for me to welcome to campus Bishop Owen Dolan from Palmerston North in New Zealand. He follows in the footsteps of his namesake Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, who was with us recently on the same day we had Archbishop Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited us. However, Bishop Dolan will be given even more favoured treatment in coming from New Zealand!

Tomorrow I walk to Emmaus with a group from Jerusalem. It will again be an opportunity to walk the journey the disciples walked and reflect on what happened in Jerusalem. I will walk and reflect on what happened to Jesus, but also on what is happening to the Palestinian people who would love to walk with me but cannot because they cannot get permission to come through the Wall.  I will remember you as I wander and become even more aware of Jesus being with me on my journey.

I pray God’s blessing on you and a deep peace as you take in the meaning of this Easter season. Please keep us in your prayers as we seek to respond to God’s call. Thank you for your interest in and support for Bethlehem University.

Best wishes as the year continues to unfold for you.

Brother Peter Bray

Just another average day in occupied Palestine (via Haaretz):

The state has confirmed that, acting without a court order, the army has barred Palestinian villagers from freely accessing their farmland for two years. The admission was made in the state’s response to a High Court petition filed last year by Beit Furik residents.

The plots farmed by the residents of Beit Furik, which is southeast of Nablus, border several unauthorized outposts that were built near the Itamar settlement over the past decade and are known as the Gidonim outposts. In 2010, the Israel Defense Forces began preventing villagers from accessing their fields freely. As a result they must coordinate their farmwork with the army, in accordance with deployment levels.

Such events give weight to boycotting Israel, writes Ben White in the New Statesman (and I agree):

A fortnight ago, dozens of actors, playwrights and directors called on The Globe to cancel a planned performance by Israel’s national theatre company Habima, to avoid complicity with “human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land”.

Along with Emma Thompson, Mike Leigh and Caryl Churchill, opposition to the invitation includes Mark Rylance, founding artistic director of The Globe. The letter follows on from anearlier call by ‘Boycott From Within’, a group of Israelis who support the Palestinians’ Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

Since then, the letter’s critics have responded in an over the top fashion, successfully missed the point. Howard Jacobson reached for absurd clichés (“Kafkaesque”, “McCarthyism”) while Simon Callow and Louise Mensch signed a letter describing the boycott call an example of “the continued persecution of Jews”.

“Theatre ban ‘like Nazi book burning’ say West End stars” ran a headline in The Jewish Chronicle, whose editor Stephen Pollard compared pro-Palestinian protesters at the Proms to “Nazi party members” in “Weimar Germany” (as did Labour MP Denis MacShane who recentlylinked the murders in Toulouse to Palestine solidarity motions in UK trade unions).

This shameless blustering ignores the specific reasons for the Habima boycott call, namely that the company performs in illegal West Bank settlements – colonies that form a key part of Israel’s apartheid regime – and indeed promised Israel’s Minister of Culture that it would “deal with any problems hindering such performances”.

The wider context is the decision by Palestinians to call for BDS as part of their efforts to secure basic rights and freedoms. That call, endorsed by trade unions, faith groups, political factions, and civil society organisations, includes cultural boycott. Groups like the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) play a critical role in mobilising supportfor the Palestinian struggle.

Culture does not operate in some special, apolitical space – just like academic institutions in Israel are also not removed from complicity in systematic human rights abuses. As the Habima general manager put it, the invitation by The Globe is an “honourable accomplishment for the State of Israel in general”.

Let’s not be under any illusion. Israel bans a famous German, Gunter Grass, because it doesn’t like a poem he wrote. Seriously.

Meanwhile, in Ramallah, a city far too many Westerners believe represents Palestine, which it does not, the illusion of peace is out in full force. Amira Hass in Haaretz explains:

Billboards declaring “She wants a house,” showing a smiling, optimistic-looking Westernized couple, decorate the streets of Ramallah. The only thing left to do is to race over to the nearest branch of the Bank of Palestine and ask for a home loan. Simple? That’s how it’s seemed for the past four or five years when banks, directed by the Palestinian Authority, have conducted an aggressive campaign designed to encourage people to borrow money so as to fulfill their consumerist dreams – purchasing a house, or a wide-screen television, or a new car, or furnishings and new ceramic floor tiles from Italy. The Palestine Monetary Authority required banks to allocate a portion of their capital to loans. Western, especially American, development organizations appeared on the scene and delivered the consumerist message: Take out a mortgage. And people took the hint.

And so the topic of the day is not the Israeli military raids on Kafr Qaddum – the village that during the past nine months has joined in the demonstrations against the plunder of lands for the benefit of Israeli Jews. Not even Palestinian prisoners, especially the hunger strikers whose various fates receive considerable space in Palestinian newspapers, dominate conversation. No. The most urgent, troubling topic is debts owed by each family to banks, the fear of legal entanglements and foreclosure, and the loss of money invested in an apartment that has yet to be built.

Bassam Zakarneh, head of the union of public-sector employees, announced on Thursday that March salaries would not be paid on time. Once again, financial support promised by various countries, including Arab ones, as compensation for an economy that is hamstrung by a foreign occupier, is not being given in full. The Palestine Monetary Authority quickly issued a directive to banks: Do not make any deductions from the accounts of public-sector employees until they receive their wages. Nonetheless, many remain worried. When they took out loans for various consumer binges they banked on the assumption of steady employment. But over the past year the PA has continually had to rely on the dubious method of mass deferment of wages.

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Like the electric shutter, the whole American-inspired loan plan designed by the PA relies on an illusion of stability. People are simultaneously tempted by the illusion and also frightened that it will be shattered – in other words, that the status quo will be harmed. And the status quo, lest anyone has forgotten, is life enveloped within Israeli domination, enclaves of Palestinian pseudo-sovereignty, and the continued trampling and appropriation of land outside of the enclaves. Private individuals who need housing, small business owners worried about their investments, owners of large companies who thirst for more profits, banks, local and foreign NGOs, Palestinian security officers, PA big shots and American investors – everyone has a stake and an interest in this bloated bubble staying intact for as long as it can, without bursting.

The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities.

Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions:

Immigration control has traditionally been viewed as an inalienable sovereign function of the state. But today migration management has increasingly been taken over by private contractors. Proponents of privatization have been keen to argue that the use of contractors does not mean that governments lose control. Yet, privatization introduces a corporate veil that blurs both public oversight and legal accountability.

Despite efforts to introduce outside supervisors, performance reports and other monitoring mechanisms, the private nature of these companies breaks the ordinary administrative chain of command, placing both governments and the public at a disadvantage in terms of ensuring transparency.

Private companies seldom have an interest in securing public oversight, as any criticism may entail negative economic consequences. Australasian Correctional Management, which ran detention centers in Australia from 1998 to 2004, was known to require medical staff members or teachers entering its facilities to sign confidentiality agreements preventing them from disclosing any information regarding detainees or the administration of the centers. Being foreigners, migrants and refugees have always had a hard time gaining access to outside complaint mechanisms and advocacy institutions. As an employee in charge of reviewing disciplinary cases at a Corrections Corporation of America facility in Houston once told a reporter from this paper, “I’m the Supreme Court.”

The corporate veil also distorts lines of legal responsibility. Human rights law is largely designed on the presumption that it is states and not private companies that exercise sovereign powers like detention or border control. Legally holding governments accountable for human rights violations by contractors requires an additional step showing that it is the state and not just the corporation or individual employee that is responsible for the misconduct.

…

As the world’s largest security company with more than 650,000 employees, G4S is involved in a plethora of migration functions all over the world, from operating immigration detention centers in Britain to carrying out passenger screening at airports in Europe, Canada and the Middle East. In America, G4S operates a fleet of custom-built fortified buses that serve as deportation transports for illegal migrants caught along the United States-Mexico border. Just last month, the U.K. Border Agency signed a new contract with G4S worth up to $337 million to house asylum seekers.

G4S’s success in this market shows that deportation, detention and border control have become big business. Boeing’s current contract to set up and operate a high-tech border surveillance system along the United States-Mexico border is worth $1.3 billion and involves nearly 100 subcontractors. The Florida-based Geo Group — one of G4S’s main competitors — manages 7,000 detention beds in the United States and, until recently, at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, where migrants intercepted in the Caribbean are transferred. N.G.O.s and international organizations profit, too. In 2010, the International Organization for Migration was paid $265 million to assist governments in returning migrants to their home countries, among other activities.

The migration control industry covers not only detention and deportations but also border control. Many airlines today employ former immigration officers or themselves contract security companies to perform the document, forgery and profiling checks required by destination states. In Israel, the West Bank checkpoints are gradually being transferred to private security companies.

Gideon Levy in Haaretz on how the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is long dead – thank you America, settlers, the Israeli government and the Zionist Diaspora – and there’s only one outcome now:

Even a dead body can sometimes twitch reflexively. Here we go again: The settlers have occupied another building. Their lawyer isn’t ashamed to boast about the deceptive way the property was acquired. The ministers make their pilgrimages. The defense minister pulls a surprise eviction. The right is furious, the remnants of the left utter praise, and even Europe and America seem satisfied – look, another settler real estate grab has been thwarted.

If it hadn’t involved the private property of an unfortunate Palestinian family it would have been one more laughable farce. If we weren’t talking about a hopeless rearguard battle there would be a reason for outrage.

But there’s no point in outrage now. Migron, Hebron, whatever – the war is over. The victor was declared long ago, the vanquished was defeated long ago, notwithstanding yesterday’s evacuation in Hebron. All that’s left is the reflexive twitching of the corpse: the targeted removal – a drop in the bucket – and a last gasp from the moribund left.

The part of Hebron under Israeli control, H2 under the 1997 Hebron Protocol, has for years been a ghost town, with hundreds of abandoned apartments and dozens of shuttered stores; a mute testament to the purest and most undeniable form of apartheid. But the “protest” continues: Another house on the wild prairie was saved.

But we could have given the settlers that house; it wouldn’t have changed anything. Let them have Migron, that won’t make or break anything either. Even the 50 homes in Beit El’s Ulpana neighborhood won’t change the bigger picture. The occupation is more entrenched than ever, its end more remote than ever, and the settlers have won in a stinging knockout.

It’s time to raise the white flag, to admit publicly that the two-state solution has been foiled. There’s no point in celebrating yesterday’s evacuation of Hamachpela House, because there are thousands of other buildings just like it. It doesn’t even pay to fight for the rule of law; if the state has the audacity to try to circumvent a ruling of the High Court of Justice, as it tried to with Migron, even that looks like a lost cause.

If the apartheid neighborhood in Hebron could not stir Israelis from their moral fog – and any decent person who visits there is shocked to the depths of their being – and if life goes on undisturbed, with no moral questions, even as this horror occurs in our own backyard, then what difference does another stolen house make? Let it go, let other houses go; the chance for a solution is long past.

Even the twitching of the dead are moving. The determination of organizations such as B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence and Gush Shalom not to surrender should evoke admiration here and abroad. But it’s hard to revel in them when they are fighting a final battle.

Hamachpela House was evacuated. But like its predecessor in Hebron – known variously as “Peace House,” “The Brown House or “Beit Hameriva” (“The House of Contention” ), which has stood empty for more than three years, and hundreds of abandoned homes whose sole occupants are the ghosts of justice and of Israeli democracy – its owners will presumably never be able to return to live there.

The battle for Hebron has been decided. All that remains is to ask what will replace the solution that was put to death. There will not be two states. Even a child knows the alternative: one state. There is no third option. Israel’s most radical left won. For years it said one state, even as we played with ourselves at two states. Now everyone says two states, in unison, only because they know that train has left the station, and the great train robbery was pulled off.

From now we need only take care with our definitions: The extreme left is whoever endeavors toward a single state – the plundering settlers, the establishment that embraces them and the majority of Israelis, who do not lift a finger to stop them.

The Palestinians, as everyone knows by now, aren’t going anywhere. There is even a handful of settlers that has begun talking about giving them citizenship. If this, too, is not a ruse, then this little group is openly reconciling with the great victory of Israel’s most extreme left.

The struggle? From now on it must focus on human rights. Yes, equal rights for everyone who lives in Greater Israel, just as you wanted.

The American Jewish community is slowly but surely becoming more willing to critically debate Israel’s brutal policies towards Palestinians. Norman Finkelstein, here interviewed by Haaretz, says occupying Israel has a problem on its hands:

“Nobody really defends Israel anymore,” he said in an interview. “If you go on college campuses, there are some Hillel faithfuls who are bringing an IDF soldier to try to explain that not all IDF soldiers are war criminals. And among the 60 to 100 people in the audience, there are Palestinian supporters who come with tape over their mouth, and when the soldier starts to speak, many people stand up and walk out.

“They’ve lost the battle for public opinion,” he says. “They claim it’s because American Jews know too little – I claim it’s because they know too much about the conflict, and young liberal Jews have difficulty defending the use of cluster bombs in Lebanon or supporting the Israeli settlements. I was bashing Israel in the past because nobody else was exposing its true record. Many people are doing it now, so I switched hats from a critic of Israel to a diplomat who wants to resolve the conflict. I have not changed, but I think the spectrum has moved.”

Finkelstein’s book is suprisingly optimistic about the chances of settling the confict, and about changing the debate, even among American Jewry. The tide of public opinion is turning against Israel, he says, and once support for Israeli policy becomes widely unacceptable in the United States, the “self-designated voices for Israel,” as he calls them, will quickly drop out. Meanwhile, American Jewish college students are having their eyes opened.

“The academic research on Israel is no longer the footnoted “Exodus,” and younger Jews, when they go to college, are walking away with very different picture of Israel,” he said. “And the American Jewish community that for a long time was a huge obstacle to resolving the conflict is breaking up. If you put forth a reasonable and principled goal, I think a resolution is possible. We might be entering the endgame, but one that might take a long time.”

Last night, Al-Jazeera’s The Stream (great show, by the way, that allows new voices to be heard in the international arena) tackled the American Jewish community and its young people not simply blinding defending Zionism:

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

With the delusion of maintaining a Jewish, democratic state – a concept that never existed post 1948 and even less so today with the occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and discrimination against Arabs in Israel proper – the Israeli leader sounds like any number of liberal Zionists desperate to maintain Jewish supremacy (at the expense of true democracy for all):

Israel’s prime minister said Tuesday that he still hopes to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, because the alternative would be absorbing them into Israel and destroying the Jewish character of the state.

“I want to solve the conflict with the Palestinians because I don’t want a binational state,” Netanyahu told a rare news conference. “For as long as it depends on me, we will ensure the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.”

The statement was notable because it in effect concedes a key argument made by Netanyahu’s ideological opponents on Israel’s Zionist left: A pullout from territories the Palestinian claim for a state is not just a concession that could be made in exchange for peace — but also an imperative for an Israel that wants to remain a Jewish state that is also democratic.

Jews make up roughly 80 percent of Israel’s almost 8 million people. However, if Israel is combined with the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — the lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war — then the Arab population nears parity, and in the view of some demographers is likely to become a majority soon.

Indeed, as the prospect of peace seems to grow more remote, increasingly there are voices on the Palestinian side predicting — as a threatened default rather than a desired outcome — a “one-state solution” in which Jews and Arabs have equal status.

The so-called “demographic argument” for a pullout has become more critical to the dovish Israeli opposition in recent years, especially since the Palestinian uprising of 2000-2005, punctuated by grisly suicide bombings that killed hundreds, left many in Israel distrustful of Palestinian intentions and despairing of ever reaching peace on agreed terms.

The continuing expanding colonies in the West Bank are a key reason that Israel has a grim future as a Jewish state (rightly pointed out by Andrew Sullivan).

But what of the argument, made by many Jews and others, that Israel is a refuge for the Jewish people and has the right to exist on this basis alone? The Magnes Zionist takes care of those arguments:

One may wish to argue that Israel provides a cultural center that has inspired a flourishing of Jewish culture outside of its borders. But that involves a Zionist reading of center and periphery that may not be even true. There was more of a Hebrew literary culture in the United States before the establishment of the state of Israel than afterwards, and while it would be wrong to blame territorial Zionism for that culture’s demise, it and the State of Israel bear some responsibility – just as the State of Israel has to bear some responsibility for the demise of Jewish communities in Arab lands, especially since it did everything within its power to bring those communities to Israel, and when they arrived, to melt them in the Israeli melting pot. To this day, official Israel looks askance at the growth of Jewish communities outside its because according to mainstream Zionism, one can only be fully Jewish in the Jewish State.

Which  brings me to the “place of refuge” dogma:  If Israel exists as a physical refuge to ensure the survival of the Jewish people, then it has failed miserably in that respect.  We are told by Israel’s leaders that the Jewish state is, or soon will be, under an existential threat from Iran, or from terrorism. If this is true, then will some one please tell me how Israel is a safer refuge for the Jews than, say, the United States, or even, Europe? More Jews have died because of the Israel-Arab conflict since 1945 than as a result of all other anti-Jewish behavior combined since 1945. And since much of the new anti-Semitism is correlated to Israel’s actions, not only is Israel a dangerous place for Jews living within its borders, it isn’t so good for the physical safety of Jews outside it either.

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I repeat – there is a moral distinction between settling refugees in lands in which they desire to live, and repatriating refugees to their own land. In the case of the Palestinian refugees, they have a right to return to their homeland, even if it adversely affects the rights of the Israeli Jews, because they were barred from returning to their homes – despite the calls of the UN. Had the Zionists said, prior to the founding of the state, that the only way a Jewish State can survive is through the forced transfer of most of its native Palestinians, nobody would have recognized the legitimacy of the state. And if somebody had, then that person, or state, would be wrong.

Here’s a book review I wrote a while ago published here exclusively:

The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work

Belen Fernandez

Verso, $22.95

Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil?

Derrick O’Keefe

Verso, $22.95

Antony Loewenstein

Back in May 2003, two months after the start of the American-led war in Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman appeared on the Charlie Rose TV talk show. The conflict was “unquestionably” worth doing, said the self-described liberal. He went on:

“What (Iraqis) needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.”

Friedman, a former Middle East correspondent for the Times, has cemented himself as a key foreign affairs commentator in America and is regularly re-printed in publications across the world, including Australia.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Friedman has supported American or Israeli wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian West Bank, Lebanon, Gaza and covert American operations endorsed by both the Bush and Obama administrations. In the words of Belen Fernandez, author of this compelling book on Friedman – published in a new Counterblasts series by British publisher Verso – the Times writer “discredits himself as a journalist by championing the killing of civilians.”

Fernandez forensically dissects the career of Friedman and challenges the very basis of his currency. “Friedman’s accumulation of influence is a direct result of his service as mouthpiece for empire and capital”, she writes. “I.e. as a result apologist for US military excess and punishing economic policies.”

Friedman has championing the supposed glories of US-led globalisation – “Is this a great country or what?” and the Iraq war – “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched”. He celebrated the financial insights of Goldman Sachs until finally in 2010 Friedman acknowledged the firm as “the poster boy for banks behaving for ‘situational values’ – exploiting whatever the situation…allowed”.

The Times journalist is passionate about reducing America’s reliance on oil and yet, as Fernandez pithily comments, “Friedman has managed to greenwash the institution that holds the distinction of being the top polluter in the world…The US military’s overwhelming reliance on fuel means that its presence in Iraq is not at all reconcilable with Friedman’s insistence that dependence on foreign oil reserves is one of the greatest threats to US security.”

The Imperial Messenger isn’t just arguing that Friedman is an indulgent Times spokesman and faux liberal who dresses up his desire for the US to shed foreign blood as “humanitarian”, but a broader point against the Times itself as the centre of supposedly quality journalism.

Dishonest myth-making is the key reason the paper should not be taken as gospel, argues Fernandez, and not least due to its constant defence of Israeli crimes. Witness Friedman in 1989 writing about his Zionist dreams: “I’ll always want [Israel] to be the country I imagined in my youth. But what the hell, she’s mine and for a forty-year old, she ain’t too shabby.” This was expressed during the First Intifada, a time when Israel was torturing and killing unarmed Palestinian civilians.

But Friedman isn’t the only “liberal” needing to be fought. Canadian human rights activist, writer and politician Michael Ignatieff is the subject of The Lesser Evil by journalist Derrick O’Keefe. Like Friedman, Ignatieff frames his concern for humanity by loving the smell of American fire-power in the morning.

Incendiary British historian Tony Judt opined in 2006 about “Bush’s Liberal Idiots”, and included Ignatieff in a stinging rebuke. He stated that, “intellectual supporters of the Iraq War…have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.”

O’Keefe uncovers a litany of comments from Ignatieff since September 11 that place him in the inglorious tradition of countless “liberals” desperate to unleash Washington’s war machine on “apocalyptic nihilism.” Unlike Christopher Hitchens, who continues to champion the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and encourages a military strike against Iran, Ignatieff has at least had a few moments of doubt.

The vital importance of both these small titles is to highlight that some of the worst offenders, and least accountable, in the “war on terror” decade has been the warrior-scholar-journalist desperate to prove toughness. This desired projection of F-18s and drone strikes was encapsulated by a typically callous comment by Ignatieff in 2003:

“If the consequence of intervention of a rights-respecting Iraq in a decade or so, who cares whether the intentions that led to it were mixed at best?”

The death of innocent Iraqis was clearly an irrelevance (the numbers of dead in that country now number likely over one million).

At a time of American economic, political and moral decline – and fear that the Chinese economic model may supersede the unequal and fundamentalist capitalist model pursued by Washington since World War II – it’s grimly amusing to note an infamous Friedman thought:

“Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.”

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist writing a book on disaster capitalism

Something is stirring in the American, Jewish, liberal, Zionist heartland. Peter Beinart, former supporter of the Iraq war and tough Zionist, has become a very vocal and very public critic of occupying Israel. His “dream” is still to maintain so-called democratic Israel, an inherently undemocratic outcome for the countless Palestinians inside Israel, but this is an important step for such an establishment figure to make. His new book, The Crisis of Zionism, is nearly out.

Here is his article in Sunday’s New York Times:

To believe in a democratic Jewish state today is to be caught between the jaws of a pincer.

On the one hand, the Israeli government is erasing the “green line” that separates Israel proper from the West Bank. In 1980, roughly 12,000 Jews lived in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). Today, government subsidies have helped swell that number to more than 300,000. Indeed, many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all.

In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

In response, many Palestinians and their supporters have initiated a global campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.), which calls not only for boycotting all Israeli products and ending the occupation of the West Bank but also demands the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — an agenda that, if fulfilled, could dismantle Israel as a Jewish state.

The Israeli government and the B.D.S. movement are promoting radically different one-state visions, but together, they are sweeping the two-state solution into history’s dustbin.

It’s time for a counteroffensive — a campaign to fortify the boundary that keeps alive the hope of a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. And that counteroffensive must begin with language.

Jewish hawks often refer to the territory beyond the green line by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, thereby suggesting that it was, and always will be, Jewish land. Almost everyone else, including this paper, calls it the West Bank.

But both names mislead. “Judea and Samaria” implies that the most important thing about the land is its biblical lineage; “West Bank” implies that the most important thing about the land is its relationship to the Kingdom of Jordan next door. After all, it was only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948 that it coined the term “West Bank” to distinguish it from the rest of the kingdom, which falls on the Jordan River’s east bank. Since Jordan no longer controls the land, “West Bank” is an anachronism. It says nothing meaningful about the territory today.

Instead, we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.” The phrase suggests that there are today two Israels: a flawed but genuine democracy within the green line and an ethnically-based nondemocracy beyond it. It counters efforts by Israel’s leaders to use the legitimacy of democratic Israel to legitimize the occupation and by Israel’s adversaries to use the illegitimacy of the occupation to delegitimize democratic Israel.

Having made that rhetorical distinction, American Jews should seek every opportunity to reinforce it. We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.

But a settlement boycott is not enough. It must be paired with an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel. We should spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies in the settlements: call it Zionist B.D.S.

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.