Antony Loewenstein

This is a pretty remarkable set of comments by a former senior member of the Israeli elite. No commentary required:

Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin expressed harsh criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday in a meeting with residents of the city of Kfar Sava, saying the pair is not worthy of leading the country.

“My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” Diskin told the “Majdi Forum,” a group of local residents that meets to discuss political issues.

“I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defense minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” he added.  

Diskin deemed Barak and Netanyahu “two messianics – the one from Akirov or the Assuta project and the other from Gaza Street or Caesarea,” he said, referring to the two politicians’ places of residence.

“Believe me, I have observed them from up close… They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. These are not people who I would want to have holding the wheel in such an event,” Diskin said.  

“They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won’t have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race,” said the former security chief.  

In March, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan also spoke out publicly against a military option on Iran, telling CBS’ 60 Minutes that an Israeli attack would have “devastating” consequences for Israel, and would in any case be unlikely to put an end to the Iranian nuclear program.

Regarding relations between Israeli Jews and other groups, Diskin said, “Over the past 10-15 years Israel has become more and more racist. All of the studies point to this. This is racism toward Arabs and toward foreigners, and we are also become a more belligerent society.”

Diskin also said he believed another political assassination, like that of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a Jewish extremist, could occur in the future. “Today there are extremist Jews, not just in the territories but also inside the Green Line, dozens of them who, in a situation in which settlements are evacuated… would be willing to take up arms against their Jewish brothers.”

Doron Rosenblum writes in Haaretz:

In the eyes of foreign observers, or people with more critical vision, Israel already looks different: perhaps like an impatient and hysterical military man with a skullcap on his head from an army of occupation, who is threatening or threatened, it is not clear which, and is prepared to land a resounding thwack in the face of any gentile or leftist he happens upon, and see himself as the victim of a pogrom. It’s the work of the devil. This unflattering stereotype came out of nowhere recently and took on flesh and blood. The hysterical reactions to the affair of Lt. Col. Eisner – applause and support from broad sectors (which revealed their moral compass ) and from another direction the frantic efforts to dull the incident mainly for purposes of hasbara – “public diplomacy” – actually prove the extent to which this image really is representative. Indeed no hasbara effort can deny what is happening to Israel. It is becoming more and more of an ethnocentric, contrarian religious community with a shortening fuse and no tolerance or patience for any scrap of criticism or independent thought that doesn’t line up with the most extreme marker on the right.

Israel is perceived as a brutal state living in well-fanned hysteria and existential anxiety, which sees any political process as a conspiracy, any move on the ground as a justification for war and any criticism as an anti-Semitic campaign. In the 64th year of its independence, there is a strange contradiction in Israel: on the one hand, the apparent acceptance of the perpetuity of the conflict and of the view that it has no solution, and on the other hand the loss of the skills and sense of strength needed to withstand this conclusion.

Instead of steeling itself in the face of a conflict that will last for generations, it seems Israel is only becoming more fragile and more sensitive to every touch, even the slightest. The shadow of mountains looks like mountains; anything that in some way benefits the Palestinians is perceived as a threat to us. Any act of demonstrative protest is considered an “airlift” by the Luftwaffe or a terrifying “flotilla” in the style of the Spanish armada, and every foreign observer is perceived as an enemy requiring an “operation” and a “confrontation.” How does neurotic sensitivity like this accord with the apparent readiness for eternal war? Perhaps the psychiatrist of “The Big Brother” reality show has answers.

So this is the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian government the occupied should be loving? Dictatorship Inc. Shameful. Good reporting by George Hale in Maan:

The Palestinian Authority has quietly instructed Internet providers to block access to news websites whose reporting is critical of President Mahmoud Abbas, according to senior government officials and data analyzed by network security experts.

As many as eight news outlets have been rendered unavailable to many Internet users in the West Bank, after technicians at the Palestinian Telecommunications Company, or PalTel, tweaked an open source software called Squid to return error pages, a detailed technical analysis indicates. Several small companies are using a similar setup. 

The decision this year to begin blocking websites marks a major expansion of the government’s online powers. Experts say it is the biggest shift toward routine Internet censorship in the Palestinian Authority’s history. Aside from one incident in 2008, Palestinians have generally been free to read whatever they wanted.

Welcome to “democratic” Israel. +972 magazine reports:

Reports started flowing in at around 22:30 p.m. through text messages and phone calls. Some 15 activists from Zochrot (“Remembering”), an Israeli NGO dedicated to preserving the memory the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) among the Hebrew-speaking public, had gathered in the group’s offices on Ibn Gabirol Street in central Tel Aviv. They were planning a quiet symbolic action entailing placing placards with the names of villages demolished in the 1948 war on the ground in Rabin Square, the epicenter of Independence Day festivities. Actions very much like it have been carried out by the group every year on the same day for at least seven years.

However, this time the activists were surprised to see riot police forces building up a barricade around the building while they were inside. When they tried to leave for their quiet ceremony, activists were told by high ranking officers on the site that they are forbidden to do so, and that anyone trying to skip over the fences would be immediately arrested. “They said their goal was to prevent us from disturbing the peace,” says Liat Rosenberg, Zochrot director. “We were held captive for about four hours, and were told we could only leave if each and every one of us shows an ID, turns in all [protest-related] materials, and goes through an interrogation and a physical search. Attorney Gabi Lasky told police that they are unlawfully imprisoning the activists, but they refused to stand down.”

After last week’s interview with the Hizbollah leader, Julian Assange returns to his series The World Tomorrow with philosopher Slavoj Zizek and hardliner conservative David Horowitz. It’s all rather chaotic but fascinating nonetheless:

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.

The role of mainstream media in the West to shield the public from the realities of Israeli occupation is legendary. Occasionally there is a breakthrough, such as this 2010 piece on American 60 Minutes on East Jerusalem.

Yesterday the same program and the same reporter, Bob Simon, returned to the subject and covered Christians leaving the Holy Land. Israeli occupation is primarily to blame.  Importantly, notes MJ Rosenberg, Israel’s Ambassador to Israel, Michael Oren, tried to censor the program, a typical Zionist tactic. But the program called him on it:

Now this is interesting. Forward is granted an “unprecedented” five hour interview with Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official. Here’s one explanation from an Israeli journalist:

What [Abu Marzook] really wants is for Jewish Americans to convince the Israelis that Hamas is not like an animal.

Perhaps, but the content is revealing. This is not, despite the mountains of Western and Zionist propaganda over the years, an irrational terrorist organisation. There are goals, whether we agree with them or not, and legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation. Some highlights:

“Let’s establish a relationship between the two states in the historic Palestinian land as a hudna between both sides,” he said. “It’s better than war and better than the continuous resistance against the occupation. And better than Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza, making all these difficulties and problems on both sides.”

Pressed regarding concerns that Hamas’s goal during a hudna would remain the destruction of Israel as a state, and that a truce would give Hamas time to build up its arms toward that end, Abu Marzook said: “It’s very difficult to say after 10 years what will be on both sides. Maybe my answer right now [about recognizing Israel] is completely different to my answer after 10 years.”

But asked if, offered guarantees for his physical security, he would be prepared to go to Jerusalem to negotiate with Israel for exactly the kind of hudna he seeks, Abu Marzook replied bluntly, “No.”

Hamas has rejected negotiating with Israel directly. Abu Marzook said that under a previous understanding with Fatah, the faction controlling the P.A. in the West Bank, Hamas allows the P.A. to negotiate with Israel, despite its objections to the process. But Abu Marzook repeated his organization’s demand that any result must be approved in a referendum that includes all Palestinian refugees, not just those in the West Bank and Gaza. “All of the Palestinians should vote about this,” he said.

Interesting and disturbing sign that racism against Arabs is a normal affair in Israel:

My friend and I posed as ignorant tourists in the Old City of Jerusalem and asked an ex-IDF soldier some questions about the current situation in Israel/Palestine. Just to emphasise we are not ignorant on the conflict nor do we indorse the ex-soldier’s views. This video is attempt to show how this Israeli is indoctrinated into believing racist fallacies and how the de-humanistation of the Palestinians is the real obstacle to peace:

Ilan Pappe writes in the Electronic Intifada about irrational hysteria that envelops today’s Israel:

Being part visitor and part inmate in the ward [Israel] I found solace in three books, each one of which tells us how best to keep our wits even when the most armed and aggressive state in the region has replaced diplomacy and national strategy with hysterical brinkmanship that could easily transform into real war and greater bloodshed.

The first is an old classic, George Orwell’s 1984. In despotic Oceania, the leadership, the Inner Party, depends on a constant war with the other two global powers. The leaders manufacture hysteria to keep it going, but begin to believe in it themselves:

“It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.”

The second book is Miko Peled’s The General’s Son. Peled’s research in the Israeli military archives exposed how the generals of Israel on the eve of the June 1967 war manufactured mass hysteria in Israel and spun a tale of an imminent second Holocaust — as did David Ben-Gurion in 1948 — knowing very well, in both historical instances, they were facing a weak, disarrayed opponent more willing to compromise than to fight.

The third is Jay Feldman’s Manufacturing Hysteria, a compact history of how the leadership in the US manufactures collective hysteria whenever faced with real or imagined crises that had the potential to cost them their seat of power. Going to unnecessary wars, scapegoating minorities in the United States, oppressing other peoples around the world and the poor at home, are only some of the unavoidable outcomes of such hysteria (I dedicate this brief reading list to Wall Street Occupiers whose library was brutally destroyed and to whom I promised to recommend a reading list for a new future library, which I never managed to do).

Unlike in the Jack Nicholson movie, the hysteria is not kept within the ward, and it is not the inmates who are the problem but those who run the prison-hospital and want to intern even more people in their zone of hysteria, control and violence.

The current trial in Norway of far-right murderer Anders Breivik is a disturbing reminder of his horrific crimes last year.

I was involved in an e-book in 2011, On Utoya, that aimed to deconstruct the event and place it into context of the growing connection between hardline, Zionist supporters and the European racist Right.

This latest news, via Richard Silverstein’s blog, merely adds yet more evidence to the idea that hating Muslims and loving Israel, for many in the mainstream Jewish community, are perfectly acceptable:

Stephen Sizer reports that the UK national Jewish community’s Jewish Chronicle has offered a regular column to Carlos Cortiglia, a leader of the British National Party, the nation’s leading white supremacist political party.  Cortiglia is the BNP candidate in the London mayoral race.

I asked Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley to put BNP’s politics in a U.S. context, and whether it could be compared to the Tea Party.  He replied that BNP carries more political weight, but its politics are more extreme:

“Although they have moved towards a focus on Islamophobia and the counterjihad movement in recent years, their background is in the more traditional European neo-Nazi context and the National Front…

“They used to be solidly anti-Semitic and it’s said [their national leader, Nick] Griffin used to deny the Holocaust. In recent years and especially since 9/11, they’ve decided they hate Muslims more than Jews or blacks so have put the focus on agitating against Muslims…

“As part of their appeal to unite against Islam, they’ve made more recent attempts to distance themselves from anti-Semitism (although it can’t be far underneath the surface). Interestingly they are also now very pro-Israel.”

This seems part of the growing convergence of the European far-right and pro-Israel ultranationalists.  A perfect representative of this is of course Anders Breivik, who’s just gone on trial for murdering 77 young Norwegians.  I’ve also written here about a group of Russian neo-Nazis who were welcomed to the Knesset by two far-right Jewish MKs. The operative concept here seems to be that the enemy of my Muslim enemy is my friend, even if he’s a Nazi.

But white supremacists?  Is this how low the mainstream UK Jewish leadership are prepared to go?  To make common cause with those who only a decade or so ago admired Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust?

On a somewhat related subject, Electronic Intifada reports that the faux progressive UK Jewish rights group, Engage, surreptitiously accepted funding from the UK Jewish Board of Deputies in order to mount an anti-BDS campaign.  All the while Engage touted itself as an independent Jewish progressive voice when it was a paid shill of the monied pro-Israel interests of the UK Jewish leadership.  When you’ve been doing this as long as I have you develop a sense of smell about groups like this.  They make a pretence of believing one thing and do something entirely different.  Engage is one, as is StandWithUs.