Calls to seal off ultra-Orthodox areas add to Israel’s virus tensions

Purposely ignorant, fundamentalist religions, continue to spread disease and death throughout the word.

Rules enforcement highlights problem of getting message across to minority community

Oliver Holmes and Quique Kierszenbaum in Jerusalem

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Bnei Brak, which Israel has now declared a restricted zone. Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

It wasn’t a typical police operation. Two Israeli officers were to go undercover, although not posing as drug dealers or arms traffickers. For this particular assignment, they were to disguise themselves as ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Their mission on Friday was to bust an illegal gathering in a synagogue. People were praying together, a practice that is now against the law in the era of the coronavirus. Once the officers got inside to confirm the crowd, more units barged in and dispersed people.

Forces left the area, according to police, but: “An hour later, it was reported that people had returned again.” At that point, officers handed out fines amounting to nearly £4,000.

The operation in the county’s north was one small part of a sometimes fruitless nationwide effort to impose Covid-19 restrictions on a deeply religious and often cut-off community that has been slow, or even opposed, to change their way of life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Israeli soldiers deliver food to residents in Bnei Brak. Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters

Officials fear the result has been an explosion of cases in neighbourhoods populated with the minority, which makes up more than 12% of Israel’s nine million citizens.

In the most extreme case, an entire city, Bnei Brak, has been surrounded with barricades. Israel’s cabinet declared the city a “restricted zone” last week, sending in 1,000 police officers who blocked residents from leaving except under special circumstances. The army has also be deployed to deliver food to the elderly.

One medical expert estimated up to 38% of Bnei Brak’s roughly 200,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox inhabitants could be infected, significantly higher than the national average.

Many Israeli ultra-Orthodox live in poor, often congested areas with large families where infections can spread rapidly. Some religious leaders have refused to order their people to stay inside long after the rest of the country was locking down.

When a population are told the Torah will protect them there is no motivation to comply with orders Jessica Apple, Haaretz

Chaim Kanievsky, an influential rabbi, had initially refused to close packed synagogues and religious seminaries, where hundreds of boys and men gather daily. “The Torah protects and saves,” the 92-year-old said. Only in late March did the rabbi relent, calling for lone prayer.

There have also been several anecdotal reports that ultra-Orthodox communities in other countries, including the UK, are suffering an above-average infection rate.

In Israel, the outbreaks have deepened entrenched grievances between secular and religious populations that have festered since the state’s founding.

Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, known in Hebrew as Haredim, or “God-fearers”, occupy a unique role, with laws allowing them to avoid military draft and live off stipends while they study religion, leading to secular resentment.

Jewish leaders fear ultra-Orthodox Jews have missed isolation message

Many abhor Israel’s interference in their traditions. Some are vehemently anti-Zionist, rejecting the country whose Jewish majority is mostly secular, which has frustrated government coronavirus efforts when public trust and obedience are vital.

Attempts by police to enforce quarantine restrictions in religious neighbourhoods of Jerusalem have led to sometimes violent standoffs. Paramedics have been hit with rocks.

“When a population that regards its religious leaders as infallible are told that the Torah will protect them and that the secular law enforcement agencies are Nazis and anti-Semites, there is no motivation to comply with orders,” wrote Jessica Apple in the progressive local Haaretz newspaper; her article also called for ultra-Orthodox jews to wear face masks.

Now the cabinet is discussing using the Bnei Brak lockdown as a model for other outbreaks, and local media have cited an unnamed health official as saying more ultra-Orthodox areas could also be sealed off.

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Ultra-Orthodox Jewish burial society workers with a coronavirus victim outside the Shamgar funeral house in Jerusalem. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemite who used to take part in anti-government demonstrations, said some rabbis took a “long time to internalise the severity of the situation … and they truly believe that studying Torah is more important than anything else.”

However, he said the government was also slow to communicate with more radical parts of the community, many of whom have no internet, television, radio, smartphones or even newspapers and usually get news from posters stuck to noticeboards.

Meshi-Zahav, who runs a volunteer emergency medicine group that has been helping coordinate the Covid-19 response, has written posters on the rules. Still, he added: “It is not our job, it should be the Ministry of Health’s responsibility.”

He said he was concerned about growing anger. “In normal times, there are discussions on this, but now the seculars are saying, ‘you are infecting us’. This is terrible, there is a lot of antisemitism around the world, and now the seculars are doing this?”

“There are things they say that are correct, but to accuse a whole community? To generalise? Some people are using the situation to attack the Haredim.”

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man kisses the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City Marko Djurica/ File Photo

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Israel: The Original Terrorist State

Israel: The Original Terrorist State

Bruce Hoffman’s riveting new history of pre-1947 Palestine reviews the violent birth of the modern Jewish homeland

By Adam Kirsch

Civilians and soldiers attempt to rescue victims trapped in the debris of the ruined wing of the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, Palestine, on 24 July 1946, following the explosion of a bomb in the basement two days earlier. (Tablet Magazine; main photo: Imperial War Museum)

Today, the phrase “Palestinian terrorism” immediately conjures up Arab violence against Jews—suicide bombings in buses or restaurants, Hamas rockets launched from the Gaza Strip. Seventy years ago, however, a reader who encountered those words in a headline would have thought of terrorism not against Jews but by them. From 1944 until 1947, Palestine witnessed a series of assassinations, abductions, and bombings, perpetrated by Jewish terrorists against the occupying British. During that period, some 140 British soldiers and policemen were killed, along with dozens of civilian bystanders. In the end, the terrorists got what they wanted, when Britain announced its intention to withdraw all its forces from Palestine and leave the fate of the country up to the fledgling United Nations.

“Does terrorism work?” asks Bruce Hoffman on the first page of Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947, his riveting and deeply researched new history; and the answer, in this case, would seem to be yes. Of course, there were many factors leading to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The British Empire was on the decline everywhere, as the crushing economic toll of World War II forced Britain to curtail its overseas commitments. The Holocaust had created sympathy for the Zionist cause, above all in the United States, which kept up a continual pressure on Britain to admit Jewish refugees to Palestine. Most important of all, perhaps, the Jews of the Yishuv—the prestate settlement in Palestine—had created the infrastructure for a state, complete with an illegal but tacitly tolerated army, the Haganah.

Still, it is possible that none of these factors would have succeeded in winning Israel’s independence, if the Jewish campaign of terror hadn’t raised the cost of the British occupation so high. In writing Anonymous Soldiers, Hoffman made use of the previously classified archives of MI5, the British intelligence agency, and the book mostly tells the story of Palestine from the British point of view. As we read the memoranda and committee reports, the urgent telegrams from Jerusalem to London and the orders and reprimands that flowed back in return, we see something remarkable: the inner workings of a world power as it is utterly defeated by a few thousand determined militants.

Those militants belonged to two clandestine organizations, whose complex genealogy Hoffman explains in detail. Their story begins in 1929, when a series of Arab pogroms against Jews broke out across Palestine; altogether, 133 Jews were killed and more than 300 injured. These attacks made clear that the Yishuv needed an organized self-defense force, which it found in the Haganah (the Hebrew word means “defense”), an amateur volunteer group that was now put on official footing and greatly expanded. It was placed under the control of the Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation, which was the leading political institution in Jewish Palestine.

Within two years, however, a group of soldiers associated with the Revisionist Party—the more nationalistic and right-wing alternative to Labor Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinsky—split from the Haganah over ideological and tactical differences. They became known as Haganah Bet, and “unlike the Haganah,” Hoffman writes, “the Haganah Bet did not see itself as a self-defense force.” Instead, it trained its recruits in offensive operations “including sabotage, bomb making, and hit-and-run attack—in other words, the core tactics of terrorism.” In 1937, after a new round of Arab attacks broke out across the country, much of the Haganah Bet returned to the original Haganah, whose policy insisted on havlaga or self-restraint.

But a hard core of radical officers refused to submit to the Haganah’s discipline. Instead, they announced the formation of a new armed group, the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (National Military Organization), which became known by its Hebrew acronym Etzel, or more commonly simply as the Irgun. (The title of Hoffman’s book comes from the Irgun’s hymn, which begins, “We are the anonymous soldiers without uniform/Surrounded by fear and the shadow of death.”) In the late 1930s, this group directed its attacks primarily against Arabs, planting bombs in Arab cafés and markets and killing dozens of innocent women and children.

Once Britain entered World War II, fighting against the Jews’ greatest enemy of all, Nazi Germany, the Irgun announced a suspension of hostilities. This gesture, however, was bitterly opposed by a small fraction of its leadership, including Avraham Stern, who had spent months in a British prison. Upon release, he left the Irgun to found his own groupuscule, which became known as the Stern Gang. After Stern himself was killed by the British in 1942, it took the name Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), and was known by its acronym, Lehi. If the Haganah’s membership numbered in the tens of thousands, and the Irgun’s in the low thousands, Lehi claimed at most 250 or so followers.

Yet these were committed terrorists, inspired by the idealistic assassins of Tsarist Russia, and they managed to pull off one of the most spectacular outrages of the whole period: the murder of Lord Moyne, the highest British official in the Middle East, in 1944. (That operation was plotted by the future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.) By that time, the Irgun, too, had resumed its armed struggle against Britain, believing that once the defeat of the Nazis looked certain, it was time to begin pressuring the British on the future of Palestine. The Irgun was revitalized by the arrival in Palestine, in 1943, of Menachem Begin, a veteran activist and survivor of Soviet prisons (and another future prime minister), who commenced an audacious new campaign of attacks. The bloodiest of these was the bombing of the King David Hotel, in July 1946, which killed 91 people.

None of this history is new, but Hoffman excels at describing the complex internal politics of the terrorists, the Yishuv, and the British administration, which were constantly evolving. The mainstream Yishuv, which controlled the Haganah, regularly denounced the outrages of the Irgun and Lehi. But since the British had deeply alienated the Jews of Palestine by restricting Jewish immigration and deferring to Arab hostility, the Yishuv was not especially eager to cooperate with the British in actually cracking down on the terrorists. Indeed, for a brief period after the war, the Haganah and the Irgun actually joined forces.

The inability of the British to stop the terrorists, meanwhile, had officials in London and Jerusalem tearing their hair with frustration. They were caught in the familiar dilemma of the occupier: The more they cracked down on terrorism, the more the civilian population rallied to the terrorists’ side. The Irgun, never large or very popular, could nevertheless operate with impunity, and it answered every British escalation with a new response. When the British started flogging captured prisoners, Irgunists kidnapped some British soldiers and whipped them; when the British executed Jewish terrorists, Irgunists assassinated British policemen. As Hoffman shows in extensive detail, the British were never able to commit enough troops or police to Palestine to control it effectively. Instead, the occupying administration was forced to retreat behind heavily guarded camps, which the Jews mockingly referred to as Bevingrads, after the hated British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin.

What it came down to, in the end, is what terrorism always comes down to: the assertion of will. The relentless terrorist campaign convinced the British press and public that the Jews’ will to create a state in Palestine was greater than Britain’s will to keep ruling it. Indeed, by 1947, the British must have wished that they had never conquered the country from the Turks in the first place, or inserted themselves into the Arab-Jewish conflict with the Balfour Declaration. Ironically, as Hoffman argues, what made the Irgun’s campaign of terror possible was British restraint and moderation. Despite all the provocations, the British never responded to terrorism with mass punishments or reprisals in kind. A different kind of occupier, one not averse to the spilling of Jewish blood, could have pacified the country quickly, if it chose to.

Anonymous Soldiers does a wonderful job of elucidating this enormously complex and important period in Jewish history. Hoffman does not attempt to answer all the moral and political questions his story raises, but no reader can avoid asking them. Was the terrorism of the Irgun and Lehi morally justified, since in the end it did help to win a Jewish state? If so, what are the implications of that judgment for today’s Palestinian terrorism, which is also conceived as an armed struggle against an occupying power, and which uses many of the same techniques pioneered by Begin? (Indeed, Hoffman ends his book by noting that a copy of Begin’s memoir The Revolt was discovered in the library of an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan.)

Hoffman’s story offers two possible morals, which point in opposite directions. One is that a determined national liberation movement will always triumph in the end, since the occupier’s will to remain is always going to be weaker than the occupied’s will to freedom. If this is true, then presumably the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is only a matter of time, and every day that Israel resists such an outcome means more lives pointlessly lost.

The other moral, however, is that Israel only exists because of the ability of Jews to defend themselves with force. The British could be driven out of Palestine because they had a home to go back to; but the Israelis have nowhere else to go, and so they can never give up fighting. If this is true, then the struggle which began in the 1920s is destined to go on until the Jews convince the Arabs that they are in Israel to stay. (This was the view Jabotinsky advanced in his famous essay “The Iron Wall,” more than 90 years ago.) Whichever you believe, it’s clear that the future of the Jewish state depends on the correct interpretation of the story Hoffman tells in Anonymous Soldiers.

In Europe, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia go hand in hand

In Europe, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia go hand in hand

Both scourges are projections of the illiberal mind

 

by Paul Hockenos

Paris — The spate of anti-Semitic violence in Europe might appear to justify Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for European Jews to move to Israel where, he claims, Jews can be safe.

“Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country,” Netanyahu said on Feb. 15, “but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters, ‘Israel is your home.’ We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe.”

Europe’s Jewry should nevertheless reject Netanyahu’s call. It’s a populist ploy ahead of Israel’s March 17 election. Jewish citizens in Europe should instead be active participants in the societies in which they live, continuing to promote democracy, civil liberties and tolerance of diversity as they have done energetically in the past, to Europe’s enormous benefit.

Nowhere, even in long-established democracies such as France, can the liberal order be taken for granted. Every generation has to fight anew to maintain (or even, in a best case scenario, improve on) the quality of democracy as its circumstances change. Anti-Semitism is one challenge to this struggle, Islamophobia another. The two illiberal ideologies and their implications for open societies are more closely linked than they appear.

Anti-Semitism in Europe

Anti-Semitism is on the rise across Europe, propelled by familiar and new antagonists. The Jan. 9 shooting of four Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris followed a string of lethal assaults on Jews across the continent in 2014. Last month an attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, left one man dead and two police officers wounded. The incident forced Jewish schools in Belgium and France to close temporarily. Last year the Jewish Museum in Brussels was bombed. At least eight synagogues were attacked in Europe in July 2014. In Germany, Jewish men wearing the skullcap, or kippa, were harassed, cursed and beaten up on the street.

A 2012 European Union survey of 6,000 Jews in eight European nations, which together account for 90 percent of Europe’s Jewish population, found that 66 percent believed anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe; 76 percent said anti-Jewish sentiment increased in their country since 2007. In a survey a year later, almost half of the respondents said they were concerned about being verbally insulted or attacked in public. Seventy years after Auschwitz’s liberation, which is being commemorated across Europe, Jewish graves have been desecrated, and Jewish citizens are uncomfortable in certain neighborhoods, particularly those with high proportions of Muslims.

Anti-Semitism is not a new phenomenon in postwar Europe. But its usual standard bearers were Europe’s far-right groups. Far-right and populist groups still propagate hatred toward Jews, although in its more muted form than in recent decades. (There’s an anti-Semitic stripe in the far left as well, closely linked with anti-Americanism and sympathy for the Palestinian quest for statehood.) Parties such as the National Front in France, Austria’s Freedom Party and Belgium’s Vlaams Bok have long traded in anti-Semitism. Opinion polls show residual anti-Semitism in most European populations, which is largely understood as a reaction to globalization, modernity and urban values. In Central and Eastern Europe, where there was no postwar reconciliation, anti-Semitism burns hotter as part and parcel of old-school volkish nationalism.

Muslim leaders have to fight anti-Jewish mindsets as actively as Europe’s Jews must help dispel the falsehoods fueling the anti-Islam discourse.

But the far-right anti-Semites now have a more opportune target: Islam. The same tools and tropes that were once used to create fear of and resentment toward Jews have been turned against Muslims. They claim that Muslims are swamping their countries and diluting their national cultures — claims once made against Jews. Whereas Jews were claimed to partake in blood rituals, Islam is cast as an inherently violent religion and all Muslims as threats to European security and identity.

Germany’s PEGIDA movement, which took to the streets in Dresden and elsewhere in Germany in late 2014 and early 2015, offers a perfect example. While PEGIDA’s foremost target was the Muslim community, its closeness to neo-Nazi groups and anti-Israel currents was manifest. One man with an Israeli flag was chased from a PEGIDA demonstration, and marchers carried posters reading “Just say no to Israel” and “Let Germany finally be Germany,” the latter a resentful reference to Germany’s war guilt and coming to grips with the Holocaust. Just as contemporary anti-Semitism is often strongest in places with no Jews, PEGIDA support was the highest in Dresden, a city with a population less than 0.5 percent Muslim. In other words, as with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is highly irrational.

Muslim anti-Semitism

The chief perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence and terrorist attacks, however, are not the far right ideologues but radicalized elements in Europe’s Muslim community. It goes without saying that not all Muslims are anti-Semitic. (Collective guilt is almost always wrong-headed.) But polls show that anti-Semitism is strikingly high among European Muslims, particularly younger Muslim men and women.

A recent French survey found that 74 percent of French Muslims said they believe Jews have too much influence over the nation’s economy. (The figure among non-Muslim French was 25 percent.) Seventy percent of French Muslims said that Jews control the country’s media. A 2013 study by the EU found that Jews in Europe felt most threatened by Muslims in their societies. Günther Jikeli in his new book, “European Muslim Antisemitism,” corroborates these findings and argues that anti-Semitism is pervasive in the beliefs of young European Muslims.

The reasons for the new anti-Semitism are part socioeconomic, part political. So far, the young Muslims involved in the recent attacks against Jews have almost always been the kind of poor, disenfranchised young men whose circumstances breed resentment and anger. In Islam they find a home and identity. The politics of Israel in the Middle East have thrown fuel on the fire consistently over the last two decades; the ongoing violence against the Palestinians in Gaza is only the most recent agony. The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant has facilitated the mix of a toxic cocktail that targets Jews across Europe.

But Jews are not necessarily safer in Israel than they are on the streets of Paris or Berlin. Europe is facing an enormous challenge in reacting to this new element in its midst and defeating it without encouraging more converts to radical Islam. We saw this happen in the aftermath of United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in response to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Central Intelligence Agency’s black sites and the drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

On Feb. 14, the European Jewish Congress called for enhancing existing anti-racism legislation, which is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. It envisions prohibiting the wearing of the full-face veil everywhere in Europe, punishing denial of the Holocaust and hate speech and outlawing praise for a terrorist act. But the proposal is not constructive in the long run. Such measures cast suspicion on all Muslims and would work to alienate rather than integrate.

European countries must devise a way to make Muslims feel part of their societies. Here in Paris it is stunning to experience firsthand how abruptly the City of Light ends at the banlieues, the tenement housing on Paris’ periphery where much of the migrant population lives. Here one leaves the urban wonderland of museums, fine restaurants, graceful apartment buildings and good jobs and enters the underworld of poverty, marginalization, unemployment and ugliness.

There are many ways that French and other European societies can reach out to their Muslim neighbors. This could mean interfaith dialogue, common civic initiatives, integrated schooling and more inclusive governance structures. Projects such as Germany’s Schule Ohne Rassismus, a nonprofit that fights racial bias against Jews, Muslims and others in secondary schools across the country should be replicated elsewhere in Europe. Ultimately, all Europeans, including Muslim communities, must insist on more democracy, civic culture and tolerance. Muslim leaders have to fight anti-Jewish mindsets as actively as Europe’s Jews must help dispel the falsehoods fueling the anti-Islam discourse. This is the way to beat the twin menaces of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Paul Hockenos is a journalist living in Berlin. He has covered the transformations of the EU for over 25 years.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

Dancing the Apocalypse, ISIS and The Christian Right’s End Times Danse Macabre

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

By Jay Michaelson

Evangelicals & ISIS Feel Fine About the End of the World

End Times prophecies for Evangelical and the Islamic State are eerily similar. God help us if they ever become self-fulfilling.

What if two mortal enemies both wanted a cataclysmic, world-ending battle, at roughly the same time, in roughly the same place?

Can you say “self-fulfilling prophecy”?

As Americans become better acquainted with the apocalyptic beliefs of the Islamic State, thanks to a spate of recent presentations of them, it’s worth noting that there are end-timers on our side as well: over three-quarters of U.S. evangelicals believe we’re living in the End Times right now. And while evangelical millennialists are not calling the military shots at the moment, their prophecies align in potentially terrifying ways with those of our enemy.

ISIS, as Graeme Wood unveiled in The Atlantic recently, is an apocalyptic death cult. It is Aum Shinrikyu and the Branch Davidians, but with machine guns, brutality, and a swath of territory with 8 million people living in it.

(Many have criticized Wood’s article, but only that it does not emphasize enough that there are many other streams of Islam, that ISIS’s brand is on the fringe, and that there are alternatives to Wood’s literalistic reading of the Koran. Which is fine—and says nothing about his analysis of ISIS itself.)

ISIS’s “prophetic methodology” (Wood’s translation) involves not just a revanchist revival of slavery, crucifixion, and excommunication but also the reestablishment of a territorial caliphate that is necessary for the coming of the Mahdi, the messiah. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is said to be the eighth of twelve caliphs—which may mean that Armageddon will not take place for another few decades, or that the caliphs’ reigns may be short.

Wood proposes that ISIS’s military strategy is driven by millenialist zeal. The capture of the Syrian town of Dabiq, for example, was heralded as a great victory not because it is strategically important (it isn’t) but because it is prophesized as the place of the final battle. Just like Megiddo, the plain in Northern Israel that gives Armageddon its name.

Dabiq is also the name of the Islamic State’s newsletter.

The specific prophecy is that the armies of “Rome” (in Islam and Judaism, Rome is a euphemism for Christianity—though some experts say it may be a stand-in for the Byzantine empire, or infidels more generally) will come to Dabiq, and lose in a great battle. Then, the victorious caliphate will expand.

But things will not go smoothly. The dajjal, an Antichrist-like figure, will arise from Persia—conveniently, ISIS’s current nemesis, Iran—and defeat most of the caliphate. The remainder will retreat to, you guessed it, Jerusalem.

And then? Remarkably, the figure who will save the caliphate is none other than Jesus, who will kill the dajjal and enable the caliphate to re-form.

This may sound familiar—because it is. It is very close to the Christian apocalyptic narrative. Indeed, as a student of millennialism for some time (my dissertation was on a false messiah), it was shocking to see the congruence between the Islamic State’s vision of the End Times and that of evangelical Christianity: a large battle somewhere north to northeast of Jerusalem, a final battle in Jerusalem with the near-defeat of the heroic believers by an Antichrist figure, and then Jesus appearing from heaven to win the battle once and for all.

It was shocking to see the congruence between the Islamic State’s vision of the End Times and that of evangelical Christianity.

A recent post on one End-Times site, raptureready.com, noticed and endorsed this alignment. It describes the period between the battle of Dabiq and the battle of Jerusalem as “a time of warning,” similar to the Great Tribulation in Christian theology. Dabiq itself is close to Damascus, about which Isaiah 17:1 prophesized, “Behold, Damascus will cease from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap.” (Especially if ‘Damascus’ is interpreted as a metonym for Syria in general.)

There are many reasons for these alignments. Islam and Christianity have long drawn on one another’s ideas, even when they are superficially antagonistic. There may also be something archetypal about the millennial narrative: the evil forces come close, they are defeated, but then they emerge stronger, until finally supernatural help arrives.

Or, of course, they may be right. I don’t mean that ascetic visionaries in the 3^rd or 10^th centuries actually predicted the 21^st—but if enough people believe that a particular narrative is true, it can become true. Especially if those are the people with the guns.

Evangelical-led Christian Zionism has already had a substantive impact on U.S. policy, and has been driven by theological propositions. Congressman Dan Webster (R-Fla.) said in 2011 that if “we stop helping Israel, we lose God’s hand and we’re in big time trouble.” Christian Zionists point to Genesis 12:3, in which God tells Israel, “I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you.” With Judgment Day nigh, it’s best to be on the right side.

But what “blessing” Israel means has a very specific meaning, and a very specific endgame. Christians United for Israel, led by Pastor John Hagee, has long pushed a hard-right agenda when it comes to Israel. This week, for example, its website features a pop-up saying “Bibi Did His Job. Now We Must Do Ours.”

Hagee has put his money where his mouth is. Since 2001, the John Hagee Foundation has donated over $58 million to hard-right Israeli organizations, including settlements and Im Tirtzu, a extreme nationalist group which has depicted liberal Knesset member Naomi Chazan with horns, helped pass anti-NGO laws in Israel, and led a years-long campaign against the liberal New Israel Fund.

And, of course, Christian Zionists have paid millions of dollars for Jews to immigrate to Israel, on the belief that at least half of world Jewry must be in the Land of Israel for the End Times to proceed. Last October, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the largest evangelical Christian organizational supporter of Israel (annual budget, $111 million) even announced that it would set up its own immigration program, in competition with the Jewish Agency.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Jewish Daily Forward that such efforts are “ for their own salvation, not for Jewish salvation, it’s so they will see the second coming of the messiah.” Foxman added, “a campaign of Christians to send Jews to Israel is morally offensive.”

That may be, but it is also a billion-dollar business, and a popular one: over 60 percent of white Evangelicals believe that the State of Israel fulfills a prophecy about the Second Coming. In this view, Jews living in Israel will catalyze the End Times, culminating in a huge battle with the forces of evil—first in Northern Israel or Syria, and then in Jerusalem itself. A very similar goal to that of the Islamic State.

Of course, there the comparisons end. Christians United for Israel cannot be compared with ISIS. They may share a millennial view of the near future, but CUFI is not executing, torturing, beheading, or enslaving anyone. Christian Zionists are not building a theocracy. And while they can boast of many high-level allies in the Republican elite, most of those favoring a stepped-up military campaign with ISIS are foreign policy hawks, not messianic crazies.

But the crazies are out there, not on the fringe, but in CPAC, AIPAC, and the Republican establishment. And they are numerous. Seventy-seven percent of U.S. evangelicals believe we are living in the End Times, as do 40 percent of all Americans. They are avidly proselytizing not just to save the rest of us from sin—but also to save us from the tribulations that are imminent.

That America has twice been at war against Babylon (ancient Babylon’s ruins are adjacent to Saddam Hussein’s former summer palace) added fuel to the fire. Now, we find ourselves on the brink of yet a third war there.

But this time is different. When it comes to apocalyptic warfare, it takes two to tango. And now, apocalyptic Christian Zionists have found their perfect partners: a savage, bloody cult that wants to drag “Rome” into war and is doing everything possible to provoke it. God help us if both sides decide to dance.

Noam Chomsky: Why Israel’s Netanyahu Is So Desperate to Prevent Peace with Iran

Noam Chomsky: Why Israel’s Netanyahu Is So Desperate to Prevent Peace with Iran

By Amy Goodman

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the United States as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran during a controversial speech before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Dozens of Democrats are threatening to boycott the address, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. Netanyahu’s visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the United States, are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31 deadline. “For both Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran,” says Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They have a common interest in ensuring there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region.” Chomsky also responds to recent revelations that in 2012 the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, contradicted Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb, concluding that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.”

TRANSCRIPTThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu will address the lobby group AIPAC today, followed by a controversial speech before Congress on Tuesday. The visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31st deadline. At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Netanyahu’s trip won’t threaten the outcome.

PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: I think the short answer to that is: I don’t think so. And the reason is simply that there is a real opportunity for us here. And the president is hopeful that we are going to have an opportunity to do what is clearly in the best interests of the United States and Israel, which is to resolve the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program at the negotiating table.

AARON MATÉ: The trip has sparked the worst public rift between the U.S. and Israel in over two decades. Dozens of Democrats could boycott Netanyahu’s address to Congress, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. The Obama administration will send two officials, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to address the AIPAC summit today. This comes just days after Rice called Netanyahu’s visit, quote, “destructive.”

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also facing domestic criticism for his unconventional Washington visit, which comes just two weeks before an election in which he seeks a third term in Israel. On Sunday, a group representing nearly 200 of Israel’s top retired military and intelligence officials accused Netanyahu of assaulting the U.S.-Israel alliance.

But despite talk of a U.S. and Israeli dispute, the Obama administration has taken pains to display its staunch support for the Israeli government. Speaking just today in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for what he called an “obsession” and “bias” against Israel. The council is expected to release a report in the coming weeks on potential war crimes in Israel’s U.S.-backed Gaza assault last summer.

For more, we spend the hour today with world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Noam Chomsky. He has written over a hundred books, most recently On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Ilan Pappé, is titled On Palestine and will be out next month. Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50 years.

Noam Chomsky, it’s great to have you back here at Democracy Now!, and particularly in our very snowy outside, but warm inside, New York studio.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Delighted to be here again.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam, let’s start with Netanyahu’s visit. He is set to make this unprecedented joint address to Congress, unprecedented because of the kind of rift it has demonstrated between the Republicans and the Democratic president, President Obama. Can you talk about its significance?

NOAM CHOMSKY: For both president—Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran. They have a common interest in ensuring that there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region. And it is—if we believe U.S. intelligence—don’t see any reason not to—their analysis is that if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which they don’t know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Now, their general strategic posture is one of deterrence. They have low military expenditures. According to U.S. intelligence, their strategic doctrine is to try to prevent an attack, up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don’t think anyone with a grey cell functioning thinks that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon, or even try to. The country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But they might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don’t want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and aggression in the region and don’t want any impediment to that.

And for the Republicans in Congress, there’s another interest—namely, to undermine anything that Obama, you know, the Antichrist, might try to do. So that’s a separate issue there. The Republicans stopped being an ordinary parliamentary party some years ago. They were described, I think accurately, by Norman Ornstein, the very respected conservative political analyst, American Enterprise Institute; he said the party has become a radical insurgency which has abandoned any commitment to parliamentary democracy. And their goal for the last years has simply been to undermine anything that Obama might do, in an effort to regain power and serve their primary constituency, which is the very wealthy and the corporate sector. They try to conceal this with all sorts of other means. In doing so, they’ve had to—you can’t get votes that way, so they’ve had to mobilize sectors of the population which have always been there but were never mobilized into an organized political force: evangelical Christians, extreme nationalists, terrified people who have to carry guns into Starbucks because somebody might be after them, and so on and so forth. That’s a big force. And inspiring fear is not very difficult in the United States. It’s a long history, back to colonial times, of—as an extremely frightened society, which is an interesting story in itself. And mobilizing people in fear of them, whoever “them” happens to be, is an effective technique used over and over again. And right now, the Republicans have—their nonpolicy has succeeded in putting them back in a position of at least congressional power. So, the attack on—this is a personal attack on Obama, and intended that way, is simply part of that general effort. But there is a common strategic concern underlying it, I think, and that is pretty much what U.S. intelligence analyzes: preventing any deterrent in the region to U.S. and Israeli actions.

AARON MATÉ: You say that nobody with a grey cell thinks that Iran would launch a strike, were it to have nuclear weapons, but yet Netanyahu repeatedly accuses Iran of planning a new genocide against the Jewish people. He said this most recently on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, saying that the ayatollahs are planning a new holocaust against us. And that’s an argument that’s taken seriously here.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s taken seriously by people who don’t stop to think for a minute. But again, Iran is under extremely close surveillance. U.S. satellite surveillance knows everything that’s going on in Iran. If Iran even began to load a missile—that is, to bring a missile near a weapon—the country would probably be wiped out. And whatever you think about the clerics, the Guardian Council and so on, there’s no indication that they’re suicidal.

AARON MATÉ: The premise of these talks—Iran gets to enrich uranium in return for lifting of U.S. sanctions—do you see that as a fair parameter? Does the U.S. have the right, to begin with, to be imposing sanctions on Iran?

NOAM CHOMSKY: No, it doesn’t. What are the right to impose sanctions? Iran should be imposing sanctions on us. I mean, it’s worth remembering—when you hear the White House spokesman talk about the international community, it wants Iran to do this and that, it’s important to remember that the phrase “international community” in U.S. discourse refers to the United States and anybody who may be happening to go along with it. That’s the international community. If the international community is the world, it’s quite a different story. So, two years ago, the Non-Aligned—former Non-Aligned Movement—it’s a large majority of the population of the world—had their regular conference in Iran in Tehran. And they, once again, vigorously supported Iran’s right to develop nuclear power as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s the international community. The United States and its allies are outliers, as is usually the case.

And as far as sanctions are concerned, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s now 60 years since—during the past 60 years, not a day has passed without the U.S. torturing the people of Iran. It began with overthrowing the parliamentary regime and installing a tyrant, the shah, supporting the shah through very serious human rights abuses and terror and violence. As soon as he was overthrown, almost instantly the United States turned to supporting Iraq’s attack against Iran, which was a brutal and violent attack. U.S. provided critical support for it, pretty much won the war for Iraq by entering directly at the end. After the war was over, the U.S. instantly supported the sanctions against Iran. And though this is kind of suppressed, it’s important. This is George H.W. Bush now. He was in love with Saddam Hussein. He authorized further aid to Saddam in opposition to the Treasury and others. He sent a presidential delegation—a congressional delegation to Iran. It was April 1990—1989, headed by Bob Dole, the congressional—

AMY GOODMAN: To Iraq? Sent to Iraq?

NOAM CHOMSKY: To Iraq. To Iraq, sorry, yeah—to offer his greetings to Saddam, his friend, to assure him that he should disregard critical comment that he hears in the American media: We have this free press thing here, and we can’t shut them up. But they said they would take off from Voice of America, take off critics of their friend Saddam. That was—he invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. This is right after the Iraq-Iran War, along with sanctions against Iran. And then it continues without a break up to the present.

There have been repeated opportunities for a settlement of whatever the issues are. And so, for example, in, I guess it was, 2010, an agreement was reached between Brazil, Turkey and Iran for Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium for storage elsewhere—Turkey—and in return, the West would provide the isotopes that Iran needs for its medical reactors. When that agreement was reached, it was bitterly condemned in the United States by the president, by Congress, by the media. Brazil was attacked for breaking ranks and so on. The Brazilian foreign minister was sufficiently annoyed so that he released a letter from Obama to Brazil proposing exactly that agreement, presumably on the assumption that Iran wouldn’t accept it. When they did accept it, they had to be attacked for daring to accept it.

And 2012, 2012, you know, there was to be a meeting in Finland, December, to take steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. This is an old request, pushed initially by Egypt and the other Arab states back in the early ’90s. There’s so much support for it that the U.S. formally agrees, but not in fact, and has repeatedly tried to undermine it. This is under the U.N. auspices, and the meeting was supposed to take place in December. Israel announced that they would not attend. The question on everyone’s mind is: How will Iran react? They said that they would attend unconditionally. A couple of days later, Obama canceled the meeting, claiming the situation is not right for it and so on. But that would be—even steps in that direction would be an important move towards eliminating whatever issue there might be. Of course, the stumbling block is that there is one major nuclear state: Israel. And if there’s a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, there would be inspections, and neither Israel nor the United States will tolerate that.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about major revelations that have been described as the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. Last week, Al Jazeera started publishing a series of spy cables from the world’s top intelligence agencies. In one cable, the Israeli spy agency Mossad contradicts Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb within a year. In a report to South African counterparts in October 2012, the Israeli Mossad concluded Iran is “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.” The assessment was sent just weeks after Netanyahu went before the U.N. General Assembly with a far different message. Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate what he called Iran’s alleged progress on a nuclear weapon.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages. By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before—before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2012. The Mossad assessment contradicting Netanyahu was sent just weeks after, but it was likely written earlier. It said Iran, quote, “does not appear to be ready,” unquote, to enrich uranium to the highest levels needed for a nuclear weapon. A bomb would require 90 percent enrichment, but Mossad found Iran had only enriched to 20 percent. That number was later reduced under an interim nuclear deal the following year. The significance of this, Noam Chomsky, as Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares for this joint address before Congress to undermine a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the striking aspect of this is the chutzpah involved. I mean, Israel has had nuclear weapons for probably 50 years or 40 years. They have, estimates are, maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. And they are an aggressive state. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times. It’s carrying out an illegal occupation that carries out brutal attacks like Gaza last summer. And they have nuclear weapons. But the main story is that if—incidentally, the Mossad analysis corresponds to U.S. intelligence analysis. They don’t know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But I think the crucial fact is that even if they were, what would it mean? It would be just as U.S. intelligence analyzes it: It would be part of a deterrent strategy. They couldn’t use a nuclear weapon. They couldn’t even threaten to use it. Israel, on the other hand, can; has, in fact, threatened the use of nuclear weapons a number of times.

AMY GOODMAN: So why is Netanyahu doing this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Because he doesn’t want to have a deterrent in the region. That’s simple enough. If you’re an aggressive, violent state, you want to be able to use force freely. You don’t want anything that might impede it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this in any way has undercut the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Netanyahu-Obama conflict that, what, Susan Rice has called destructive?

NOAM CHOMSKY: There is undoubtedly a personal relationship which is hostile, but that’s happened before. Back in around 1990 under first President Bush, James Baker went as far as—the secretary of state—telling Israel, “We’re not going to talk to you anymore. If you want to contact me, here’s my phone number.” And, in fact, the U.S. imposed mild sanctions on Israel, enough to compel the prime minister to resign and be replaced by someone else. But that didn’t change the relationship, which is based on deeper issues than personal antagonisms.

 

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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/amy-goodman
[2] http://www.democracynow.org/
[3] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Noam Chomsky: Why Israel's Netanyahu Is So Desperate to Prevent Peace with Iran
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Noam Chomsky: America paved the way for ISIS

Noam Chomsky: America paved the way for ISIS

The famed linguist and philosopher on the conflict in Iraq, Israel and the myriad dangers of U.S. foreign policy

Noam Chomsky, Jacobin

Jacobin is happy to feature an interview with journalist David Barsamian and Professor Noam Chomsky. In it, Chomsky explains the roots of ISIS and why the United States and its allies are responsible for the group’s emergence. In particular, he argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq provoked the sectarian divisions that have resulted in the destabilization of Iraqi society. The result was a climate where Saudi-funded radicals could thrive

The interview also touches on Israel’s most recent massacre in the Gaza Strip, putting it in the context of the vital role Israel has always played for the United States. Chomsky then turns to today’s racist scapegoating of Guatemalan immigrants, tracing the conditions that lead them to leave their homes to the Reagan administration’s brutal destruction of the country.

Finally, Chomsky shares his thoughts on the growing movement for climate justice and why he thinks it is the most urgent of our time. The full exchange will be broadcast by Alternative Radio.

There are few voices more vital to the Left than Professor Chomsky’s. We hope you read and share the interview widely.

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The Middle East is engulfed in flames, from Libya to Iraq. There are new jihadi groups. The current focus is on ISIS. What about ISIS and its origins?

There’s an interesting interview that just appeared a couple of days ago with Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer, one of the leading intelligence and mainstream analysts of the Middle East. The title is “The United States Created ISIS.” This is one of the conspiracy theories, the thousands of them that go around the Middle East.

But this is another source: this is right at the heart of the US establishment. He hastens to point out that he doesn’t mean the US decided to put ISIS into existence and then funded it. His point is — and I think it’s accurate — that the US created the background out of which ISIS grew and developed. Part of it was just the standard sledgehammer approach: smash up what you don’t like.

In 2003, the US and Britain invaded Iraq, a major crime. Just this afternoon the British parliament granted the government the authority to bomb Iraq again. The invasion was devastating to Iraq. Iraq had already been virtually destroyed, first of all by the decade-long war with Iran in which, incidentally, Iraq was backed by the US, and then the decade of sanctions.

They were described as “genocidal” by the respected international diplomats who administered them, and both resigned in protest for that reason. They devastated the civilian society, they strengthened the dictator, compelled the population to rely on him for survival. That’s probably the reason he wasn’t sent on the path of a whole stream of other dictators who were overthrown.

Finally, the US just decided to attack the country in 2003. The attack is compared by many Iraqis to the Mongol invasion of a thousand years earlier. Very destructive. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, millions of other displaced persons, destruction of the archeological richness and wealth of the country back to Sumeria.

One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian divisions. Part of the brilliance of the invasion force and its civilian director, Paul Bremer, was to separate the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian conflict incited by the invasion.

You can see it if you look at Baghdad. If you take a map of Baghdad in, say, 2002, it’s a mixed city: Sunni and Shi’a are living in the same neighborhoods, they’re intermarried. In fact, sometimes they didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shi’a. It’s like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant group or another Protestant group. There were differences but it was not hostile.

In fact, for a couple of years both sides were saying: there will never be Sunni-Shi’a conflicts. We’re too intermingled in the nature of our lives, where we live, and so on. By 2006 there was a raging war. That conflict spread to the whole region. By now, the whole region is being torn apart by Sunni-Shi’a conflicts.

The natural dynamics of a conflict like that is that the most extreme elements begin to take over. They had roots. Their roots are in the major US ally, Saudi Arabia. That’s been the major US ally in the region as long as the US has been seriously involved there, in fact, since the foundation of the Saudi state. It’s kind of a family dictatorship. The reason is it has a huge amount oil.

Britain, before the US, had typically preferred radical Islamism to secular nationalism. And when the US took over, it essentially took the same stand. Radical Islam is centered in Saudi Arabia. It’s the most extremist, radical Islamic state in the world. It makes Iran look like a tolerant, modern country by comparison, and, of course, the secular parts of the Arab Middle East even more so.

It’s not only directed by an extremist version of Islam, the Wahhabi Salafi version, but it’s also a missionary state. So it uses its huge oil resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region. It establishes schools, mosques, clerics, all over the place, from Pakistan to North Africa.

An extremist version of Saudi extremism is the doctrine that was picked up by ISIS. So it grew ideologically out of the most extremist form of Islam, the Saudi version, and the conflicts that were engendered by the US sledgehammer that smashed up Iraq and has now spread everywhere. That’s what Fuller means.

Saudi Arabia not only provides the ideological core that led to the ISIS radical extremism, but it also funds them. Not the Saudi government, but wealthy Saudis, wealthy Kuwaitis, and others provide the funding and the ideological support for these jihadi groups that are springing up all over the place. This attack on the region by the US and Britain is the source, where this thing originates. That’s what Fuller meant by saying the United States created ISIS.

You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more extremist. The most brutal, harshest groups will take over. That’s what happens when violence becomes the means of interaction. It’s almost automatic. That’s true in neighborhoods, it’s true in international affairs. The dynamics are perfectly evident. That’s what’s happening. That’s where ISIS comes from. If they manage to destroy ISIS, they will have something more extreme on their hands.

And the media are obedient. In Obama’s September 10 speech, he cited two countries as success stories of the US counterinsurgency strategy. What were the two countries? Somalia and Yemen. Jaws should have been dropping all over the place, but there was virtual silence in the commentary the next day.

The Somalia case is particularly horrendous. Yemen is bad enough. Somalia is an extremely poor country. I won’t run through the whole history. But one of the great achievements, one of the great boasts of the Bush administration counterterror policy was that they had succeeded in shutting down a charity, the Barakat charity, which was fueling terrorism in Somalia. Big excitement in the press. That’s a real achievement.

A couple of months later the facts started leaking out. The charity had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism in Somalia. What it had to do with was banking, commerce, relief, hospitals. It was sort of keeping the deeply impoverished and battered Somali economy alive. By shutting it down, the Bush administration had ended this. That was the contribution to counterinsurgency. That got a few lines. You can read it in books on international finance. That’s what’s being done to Somalia.

There was a moment when the so-called Islamic courts, they were called, an Islamic organization, had achieved a kind of a measure of peace in Somalia. Not a pretty regime, but at least it was peaceful and people were more or less accepting it. The US wouldn’t tolerate it, and it supported an Ethiopian invasion to destroy it and turn the place back into horrible turmoil. That’s the great achievement.

Yemen is a horror story of its own.

Going back to National Public Radio andMorning Edition, the host, David Greene, was doing an interview with a reporter based in Gaza, and he prefaced his interview with this comment: “Both sides have suffered tremendous damage.” So I thought to myself, does this mean Haifa and Tel Aviv were reduced to rubble, as Gaza was? Do you remember the Jimmy Carter comment about Vietnam?

Not only do I remember it, I think I was the first person to comment on it, and am probably to date practically the only person to comment on it. Carter, the human rights advocate, he was asked in a press conference in 1977 a kind of mild question: do you think we have some responsibility for helping the Vietnamese after the war? And he said we owe them no debt — “the destruction was mutual.”

That passed without comment. And it was better than his successor. When a couple years later George Bush I, the statesman, was commenting on the responsibilities after the Vietnam War, he said: there is one moral problem that remains after the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese have not devoted sufficient resources to turning over to us the bones of American pilots. These innocent pilots who were shot down over central Iowa by the murderous Vietnamese when they were spraying crops or something, they have not turned over the bones. But, he said: we are a merciful people, so we will forgive them this and we will allow them to enter the civilized world.

Meaning we’ll allow them to enter trade relations and so on, which, of course, we bar, if they will stop what they’re doing and devote sufficient resources to overcoming this one lingering crime after the Vietnam War. No comment.

One of the things that Israeli officials keep bringing up, and it’s repeated here in the corporate media, ad nauseam, is the Hamas charter. They don’t accept the existence of the state of the Israel, they want to wipe it off the map. You have some information about the charter and its background.

The charter was produced by, apparently, a handful of people, maybe two or three, back in 1988, at a time when Gaza was under severe Israeli attack. You remember Rabin’s orders. This was a primarily nonviolent uprising which Israel reacted to very violently, killing leaders, torture, breaking bones in accordance with Rabin’s orders, and so on. And right in the middle of that, a very small number of people came out with what they called a Hamas charter.

Nobody has paid attention to it since. It was an awful document, if you look at it. Since then the only people who have paid attention to it are Israeli intelligence and the US media. They love it. Nobody else cares about it. Khaled Mashal, the political leader of Gaza years ago, said: look, it’s past, it’s gone. It has no significance. But that doesn’t matter. It’s valuable propaganda.

There is also — they don’t call it a charter, but there are founding principles of the governing coalition in Israel, not some small group of people who are under attack but the governing coalition, Likud. The ideological core of Likud is Menachem Begin’s Herut. They have founding documents. Their founding documents say that today’s Jordan is part of the land of Israel; Israel will never renounce its claim to the land of Jordan. What’s now called Jordan they call the historical lands of Israel. They’ve never renounced that.

Likud, the same governing party, has an electoral program — it was for 1999 but it’s never been rescinded, it’s the same today — that says explicitly there will never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan. In other words, we are dedicated in principle to the destruction of Palestine, period.

This is not just words. We proceed day by day to implement it. Nobody ever mentions the founding doctrines of Likud, Herut. I don’t either, because nobody takes them seriously. Actually, that was also the doctrine of the majority of the kibbutz movement. Achdut Ha-Avodah, which was the largest part of the kibbutz movement, held the same principles, that both sides of the Jordan River are ours.

There was a slogan, “This side of the Jordan, that side also.” In other words, both western Palestine and eastern Palestine are ours. Does anybody say: okay, we can’t negotiate with Israel? More significant are the actual electoral programs. And even more significant than that are the actual actions, which are implementing the destruction of Palestine, not just talking about it. But we have to talk about the Hamas charter.

There is an interesting history about the so-called PLO charter. Around 1970 the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi, published an article in a major Israeli journal in which he brought to light something called the PLO charter or something similar to that. Nobody had ever heard of it, nobody was paying any attention to it.

And the charter said: here’s our aim. Our aim is it’s our land, we’re going to take it over. In fact, it was not unlike the Herut claims except backwards. This instantly became a huge media issue all over. The PLO covenant it was called. The PLO covenant plans to destroy Israel. They didn’t know anything about it, nobody knew anything about it, but this became a major issue.

I met Harkabi a couple years later. He was kind of a dove, incidentally. He became pretty critical of Israeli policy. He was an interesting guy. We had an interview here at MIT, in fact. Incidentally, at that time there was material in the Arab press that I was reading saying that the Palestinians were thinking about officially throwing out the charter because it was kind of an embarrassment.

So I asked him, “Why did you bring this out for the first time just at the time when they were thinking of rescinding it?” He looked at me with the blank stare that you learn to recognize when you are talking to spooks. They are trained to pretend not to understand what you’re talking about when they understand it perfectly.

He said, “Oh, I never heard that.” That is beyond inconceivable. It’s impossible that the head of Israeli military intelligence doesn’t know what I know from reading bits and pieces of the Arab press in Beirut. Of course he knew.

There’s every reason to believe that he decided to bring this out precisely because he recognized, meaning Israeli intelligence recognized, that it would be a useful piece of propaganda and it’s best to try to ensure that the Palestinians keep it. Of course, if we attack it, then they’re going to back off and say: we’re not going to rescind it under pressure, which is what’s happening with the Hamas charter.

If they stopped talking about it, everyone would forget about it, because it’s meaningless. Incidentally, let me just add one more thing. It is now impossible to document this, for a simple reason. The documents were all in the PLO offices in Beirut. And when Israel invaded Beirut, they stole all the archives. I assume they must have them somewhere, but nobody is going to get access to them.

What accounts for the almost near unanimity of the Congress in backing Israel? Even Elizabeth Warren, the highly touted Democratic senator from Massachusetts, voted for this resolution about self-defense.

She probably knows nothing about the Middle East. I think it’s pretty obvious. Take the US prepositioning arms in Israel for US use for military action in the region. That’s one small piece of a very close military and intelligence alliance that goes back very far. It really took off after 1967, although bits and pieces of it existed before.

The US military and intelligence regard Israel as a major base. In fact, one of the more interesting WikiLeaks exposures listed the Pentagon ranking of strategic centers around the world which were of such significance that we have to protect them no matter what, a small number. One of them was a couple of miles outside Haifa, Rafael military industries, a major military installation.

That’s where a lot of the drone technology was developed and much else. That’s a strategic US interest of such significance that it ranks among the highest in the world. Rafael understands that, to the extent that they actually moved their management headquarters to Washington, where the money is. That’s indicative of the kind of relationship there is.

And it goes way beyond that. US investors are in love with Israel. Warren Buffet just bought some Israeli enterprise for, I think, a couple billion dollars and announced that outside the US, Israel is the best place for US investment. And major firms, like Intel and others, are investing heavily in Israel, and continue to. It’s a valuable client: it’s strategically located, compliant, does what the US wants, it’s available for repression and violence. The US has used it over and over as a way of circumventing congressional and popular restrictions on violence.

There’s a huge fuss now about children fleeing Central America, say, from Guatemala. Why are they fleeing from Guatemala? You can see a photo of one of them here in my office. They’re fleeing from Guatemala because of the wreckage of Guatemala, of which a large part was the attack on the Mayan Indians, which was really genocidal, in the early 1980s. That’s a Mayan woman in the photo, in fact. They’ve never escaped this, and many of them are fleeing.

Reagan, who was extremely brutal and violent and a terrible racist as well, wanted to provide direct support for the Guatemalan army’s attack, which was literally genocidal on the Mayan Indians. There was a congressional resolution that blocked him, so he turned to his terrorist clients.

The major one was Israel. Also Taiwan, a couple of others. Israel provided the arms for the Guatemalan army — to this day they use Israeli arms — provided the trainers for the terrorist forces, essentially ran the genocidal attack. That’s one of their services. They did the same in South Africa. Actually, this led to an interesting incident with the great hero Elie Wiesel.

In the mid-1980s, Salvador Luria, a friend of mine who is a Nobel laureate in biology and politically active, knew about this. It wasn’t a big secret. He asked me to collect articles from the Hebrew press which described Israel’s participation in genocidal attacks in Guatemala — not just participation, it’s a leadership role — because he wanted to send it to Elie Wiesel with a polite letter saying: as a fellow Nobel laureate, I would like to bring this to your attention. Could you use your influence — he didn’t ask him to say anything, that’s too much, but privately could you communicate to the people you know well at a high level in Israel and say it’s not nice to take part in genocide. He never got a response.

A couple of months later, I read an interview in the Hebrew press, where they really dislike Wiesel. They regard him as a charlatan and a fraud. One of the questions in the interview was, “What do you think about Israel’s participation in the genocidal assault in Guatemala?”

The report says Wiesel sighed and then said: I received a letter from a fellow Nobel laureate bringing to my attention these actions and asking me if I could say something privately to try to restrict them somehow, but, he said: I can’t criticize Israel even privately. I can’t say anything even privately that might impede Israel’s participation in genocide. That’s Elie Wiesel, the great moral hero.

Even this story is astonishing. Now children and many other refugees are fleeing from three countries: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Not from Nicaragua, about as poor as Honduras. Is there a difference? Yes. Nicaragua is the one country in the 1980s that had a way of defending itself against US terrorist forces — an army. In the other countries the army were the terrorist forces, supported and armed by the US, and its Israeli client in the worst cases. So that’s what you had.

There is a lot of upbeat reporting now saying the flow of children has reduced. Why? Because we’ve turned the screws on Mexico and told them to use force to prevent the victims of our violence from fleeing to the US for survival. So now they’re doing it for us, so there are fewer coming to the border. It’s a great humanitarian achievement of Obama’s.

Incidentally, Honduras is in the lead. Why Honduras? Because in 2009 there was a military coup in Honduras which overthrew the president, Zelaya, who was beginning to make some moves towards badly needed reform measures, and kicked him out of the country.

I won’t go through the details, but it ended up with the US, under Obama, being one of the very few countries that recognized the coup regime and the election that took place under its aegis, which has turned Honduras into an even worse horror story than it was before, way in the lead in homicides, violence. So, yes, people are fleeing. And therefore we have to drive them back and ensure that they go back into the horror chamber.

In the current situation, it seems that this is an opportunity for the Kurdish population of Iraq to realize some kind of statehood, some kind of independence, something that they’ve wanted for a long time, and which intersects, actually, with Israeli interests in Iraq. They have been supporting the Kurds, rather clandestinely, but it’s well known that Israel has been pushing for fragmentation of Iraq.

They are. And that’s one of the points on which Israeli and US policy conflict. The Kurdish areas are landlocked. The government of Iraq has blocked their export of oil, their only resource, and of course opposes their statehood bid. The US so far has been backing that.

Clandestinely, there evidently is a flow of oil at some level from the Kurdish area into Turkey. That’s also a very complex relationship. Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader, visited Turkey about a year ago, I guess, and made some pretty striking comments. He was quite critical of the leadership of the Turkish Kurds and was plainly trying to establish better relations with Turkey, which has been violently repressing the Turkish Kurds.

Most of the Kurds in the world are in Turkey. You can understand why, from his point of view. That’s the one outlet to the outside world. But Turkey has a mixed attitude about this. An independent Kurdistan in, say, northern Iraq, which is right next to the Kurdish areas of Turkey, or in the Syrian Kurdish areas, which are right by them, potentially, from the Turkish point of view, might encourage separatists or even efforts for autonomy in the southeastern part of Turkey, which is heavily Kurdish. They’ve been fighting against that ever since modern Turkey arose in the 1920, very brutally, in fact. So they have a mixed kind of attitude on this.

Kurdistan has succeeded somehow in getting tankers to take Kurdish oil. Those tankers are wandering around the Mediterranean. No country will accept it, except probably Israel. We can’t be certain, but it looks as though they’re taking some of it. The Kurdish tankers are seeking some way to unload their oil in mostly the eastern Mediterranean. It’s not happening at a level which permits Kurdistan to function, even to pay its officials.

On the other hand, if you go to the Kurdish so-called capital, Erbil, apparently there are high rises going up, plenty of wealth. But it’s a very fragile kind of system. It cannot survive. It’s completely surrounded by mostly hostile regions. Turkey is sort of unclear because of the reasons that I mentioned. So, yes, they do have that in mind. That’s why they took Kirkuk as soon as they could.

There are a couple of questions I want to close with, actually from our latest book, Power Systems. I ask you, “You’ve got grandchildren. What kind of world do you see them inheriting?”

The world that we’re creating for our grandchildren is grim. The major concern ought to be the one that was brought up in New York at the September 21 march. A couple hundred thousand people marched in New York calling for some serious action on global warming.

This is no joke. This is the first time in the history of the human species that we have to make decisions which will determine whether there will be decent survival for our grandchildren. That’s never happened before. Already we have made decisions which are wiping out species around the world at a phenomenal level.

The level of species destruction in the world today is about at the level of sixty-five million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the earth and had horrifying ecological effects. It ended the age of the dinosaurs; they were wiped out. It kind of left a little opening for small mammals, who began to develop, and ultimately us. The same thing is happening now, except that we’re the asteroid. What we’re doing to the environment is already creating conditions like those of sixty-five million years ago. Human civilization is tottering at the edge of this. The picture doesn’t look pretty.

So September 21, the day of the march, which was a very positive development, an indication that you can do things, it’s not a foregone conclusion that we’re going to wipe everything out, that same day one of the major international monitoring scientific agencies presented the data on greenhouse emissions for the latest year on record, 2013. They reached record levels: they went up over 2 percent beyond the preceding year. For the US they went up even higher, almost 3 percent.

The Journal of the American Medical Association came out with a study the same day looking at the number of super hot days that are predicted for New York over the next couple of decades, super hot meaning over ninety. They predicted it will triple for New York, and much worse effects farther south. This is all going along with predicted sea-level rise, which is going to put a lot of Boston under water. Let alone the Bangladesh coastal plan, where hundreds of millions of people live, will be wiped out.

All of this is imminent. And at this very moment the logic of our institutions is driving it forward. So Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest energy producer, has announced — and you can’t really criticize them for it; this is the nature of the state capitalist system, its logic — that they are going to direct all of their efforts to lifting fossil fuels, because that’s profitable. In effect, that’s exactly what they should be doing, given the institutional framework. They’re supposed to make profits. And if that wipes out the possibility of a decent life for the grandchildren, it’s not their problem.

Chevron, another big energy corporation, had a small sustainable program, mostly for PR reasons, but it was doing reasonably well, it was actually profitable. They just closed it down because fossil fuels are so much more profitable.

In the US by now there’s drilling all over the place. But there’s one place where it has been somewhat limited, federal lands. Energy lobbies are complaining bitterly that Obama has cut back access to federal lands. The Department of Interior just came out with the statistics. It’s the opposite. The oil drilling on federal lands has steadily increased under Obama. What has decreased is offshore drilling.

But that’s a reaction to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Right after that disaster, the immediate reaction was to back off. Even the energy companies backed off from deep-sea drilling. The lobbies are just pulling these things together. If you look at the onshore drilling, it’s just going up. There are very few brakes on this. These tendencies are pretty dangerous, and you can predict what kind of world there will be for your grandchildren.

Read more Jacobin here.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements.

 

UNICEF: Israel Has 4th Highest Child Poverty Rate In The Developed World

UNICEF: Israel Has 4th Highest Child Poverty Rate In The Developed World

“This report is a warning light to Israel. We must make children our focus to prevent further deterioration and bring about long-term change,” Jonny Cline, UNICEF’s Israel office executive director, reportedly said. A large number of the poor children, however, are members of haredi families whose male adult members refuse to work.

UNICEF: Israel Has 4th Highest Child Poverty Rate In The Developed World

A new United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report has found that Israel has the fourth-highest child poverty rate in the developed world.

The UNICEF report, “Children of the recession: The impact of the economic crisis on child well-being in rich countries,” found that child poverty in Israel increased from 35.1 percent to 35.6% from 2008 and 2013, ranking Israel fourth worst in the developed world behind Greece (40.5%), Latvia (38.2%), and Spain (36.3%), the Times of Israel reported based on a report in the Hebrew language Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Achranot.

An estimated 76.5 million children in the n the 41 countries developed world live in poverty – an increase of 2.6 million since 2008, the report found.

The report also found that Israel has the highest rate of young adults aged 15-24 who are not enrolled in a school, training program or employed – 30.7 percent. A large number of those, however, are likely serving in the IDF.

“This report is a warning light to Israel. We must make children our focus to prevent further deterioration and bring about long-term change,” Jonny Cline, UNICEF’s Israel office executive director, reportedly told Yediot Achranot today.

Out of the 41 countries surveyed, 23 – almost all in the Mediterranean region – had large increases in child poverty rates.

Israel’s high rate of child poverty is caused in large part by persistent anti-Arab discrimination and by the haredi community’s refusal to work and by its rabbinic leaders’ ban on secular education.

Instead, tens of thousands of haredi men opt to study full time in yeshivas well into middle age. Haredi grade school, middle school and high school level schools – especially male-only schools – teach little or no secular studies. And haredi rabbis have effectively banned most haredim from getting higher education. All of this causes extreme haredi poverty, which was deepened when the government decided to partially cut some of the welfare benefits and child allowances these haredi yeshiva students and their families rely on.

But even after those cuts, haredi rabbinic leaders have refused to change their anti-secular-education policy.

Related:

The UNICEF Reoprt as a PDF file.

Israelis Watch Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats

Israelis Watch Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats

Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot on Monday to watch the bombardment of Gaza. Credit Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Open Source

By ROBERT MACKEY

Last Wednesday night, as he stood on a hilltop outside the Israeli town of Sderot and watched the bombardment of Gaza on the plain below, a Danish newspaper reporter snapped an iPhone photo of about a dozen locals who cheered on their military from plastic chairs while eating popcorn.

Allan Sorensen, a veteran Middle East correspondent for Denmark’s Kristeligt Dagblad, then uploaded the image to Twitter with a sardonic caption that described the macabre scene as “Sderot cinema.”

Sderot cinema. Israelis bringing chairs 2 hilltop in sderot 2 watch latest from Gaza. Clapping when blasts are heard.

The image of the Israeli spectators was taken after 9 p.m. local time on Wednesday, the reporter said, about the same time that what was intended to be a “precision strike” from Israel’s military killed at least eight of their Palestinian neighbors, seated in similar plastic chairs at a beachside cafe in Gaza, waiting to watch the World Cup semifinal between Argentina and the Netherlands.

As his image reverberated around the social network, where it was shared more than 10,000 times, the reporter was surprised by the response. It was, he said in a telephone interview from Israel, “nothing new.” Similar scenes, of Israeli spectators gathered on the high ground above Gaza to view the destruction below, were documented in a Times of London article and a video report from Denmark’s TV2 during Operation Cast Lead in 2009.

 

A Danish television news report from January, 2009 showed Israelis watching the bombing of Gaza from a nearby hill. TV2 Denmark, via YouTube

Explaining that he has also previously witnessed Palestinians cheering news of bombings that killed Israelis, Mr. Sorensen said that in a war, “this is what happens.” Civilians and fighters on both sides, he said, “go through a process of dehumanizing the enemy.”

Photo

Israelis sitting on a hilltop outside Sderot watched a smoke plume rise over Gaza on Wednesday following an airstrike. Credit Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images

Despite the willingness of some residents to stand in the open watching the war unfold, Sderot is well within range of rockets launched by Islamist militants in Gaza and has been hit in recent days.

When he was a candidate for the American presidency in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama visited the town and saluted “the brave citizens” of Sderot while standing in front of a collection of spent rockets that had been fired at them from Gaza. He was also presented with an “I Love Sderot” T-shirt that channeled the dark humor of the residents, with the image of a heart on its front pierced by a rocket.

 

Video of Sen. Barack Obama’s visit to Sderot, Israel in 2008, posted online by his campaign. BarackObamadotcom, via YouTube

While some partisans of Israel on Twitter accused the Danish reporter of fabrication, the same scene, captured in photographs by several other journalists in recent days, was also witnessed by Mr. Sorensen’s colleague Nikolaj Krak, who wrote: “The hill has been transformed into something that most closely resembles the front row of a reality war theater. It offers a direct view of the densely populated Gaza Strip. People have dragged camping chairs and sofas to the top of the hill. Several sit with crackling bags of popcorn, while others smoke hookahs and talk cheerfully.”

Photo

Israelis watched the bombing of Gaza on Saturday night from a couch dragged to a hill overlooking the Palestinian territory. Credit Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When the bombs find their targets, Mr. Krak reported, “cheers break out on the hill, followed by solid applause.”

Mr. Sorensen, who stressed that he has “a complete understanding of what the people of Sderot have been going through for 14 years,” attributed the particularly vitriolic response to his Twitter report to the climate in Israel since three young religious students were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank last month. The journalist called the “extreme incitement to violence from very right-wing Israeli groups unprecedented” in the many years he has been reporting from the region.

RIGHT NOW: Jewish fascists rally in downtown Jerusalem, chanting “Death to Arabs!”, “Traitors!” & “Leftists to Gaza!”

An Israeli blogger, David Sheen, reported that a far-right rally in Jerusalem on Monday was marked by calls to kill Arabs and send Jews opposed to the bombardment to Gaza.

Jewish Religious Cult Breeds Ignorance and Superstition; Haredi Middle Age Men Have An 8th Grade Education – Or Less

Almost 50% Of Israeli Haredi Middle Age Men Have An 8th Grade Education – Or Less

Haredi men have very poor educations, as the new State of the Nation report by the prestigious Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel shows. And that low educational level cripples haredim and makes it very hard for them to enter the workforce.

 

 

 

In the chart immediately below, “great yeshiva” means yeshiva gedolah – a yeshiva with classes starting in 9th grade:

The entire haredi section of the Taub Center’s report as a PDF file:

Download Taub EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN THE HAREDI SECTOR section of national report 2013

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Jewish Sex Abuse Victim From New Square Speaks Out

Jewish Sex Abuse Victim From New Square Speaks Out

 

 

Jewish religious community defends a paedophile.

Says that ‘he is the best’ and ‘a nice guy’.

Still working with the kids.

Yossi, who prefers to use only his first name, says he wants to speak out about his ordeal in the hope that other victims of abuse will come forward. (8/29/13)

NEW SQUARE – A shroud of secrecy surrounds the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of New Square. Many of the residents shun the outside world and keep to themselves.

However, a sex abuse victim from the community has spoken exclusively to News 12.

Yossi, who prefers to use only his first name, says he wants to speak out about his ordeal in the hope that other victims of abuse will come forward.

Yossi claims that Herschel Taubenfeld, a teacher in his community, inappropriately touched him three times a week for four months.

The teen asked for help from the head rabbis of New Square who had just set up their own sex crimes unit called the VAAD. The agency told him to see a therapist.

Two months later, Yossi reported the abuse to the Ramapo police. He says that his friends stopped talking to him and treated him like he didn’t exist.

Yossi says his attacker admitted to the crimes, but religious leaders in the community sent Taubenfeld to Israel to obtain his rabbinical ordination. He also says he was offered  $100,000 to keep quiet about the situation, which he refused.

In December 2011, one month after Yossi reported the abuse, Taubenfeld turned himself in. He was charged with 30 misdemeanor counts of forcible touching, endangering the welfare of a child and third-degree sex abuse. However, the rabbi avoided jail time in exchange for six years probation.

According to students, Taubenfeld is still teaching at one of New Square’s largest religious schools.

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Life and Loathing in Greater Israel: A Review of Max Blumenthal’s ‘Goliath’

Life and Loathing in Greater Israel: A Review of Max Blumenthal’s ‘Goliath’

by Jim Miles

Goliath – Life and loathing in Greater Israel.  Max Blumenthal, Nation Books, 2013

From Foreign Policy Journal

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/

This is a powerfully written book, a mixture of current events, historical data, and personal anecdotal comments and stories.  Throughout there are pervasive themes that clearly outline the nature of the Israeli state as it exists today. From May 2009 up to early 2013, Max Blumenthal passed “many prolonged stays in the Holy Land,” from which he derived this current assessment.

The over-riding themes—and they tend to intermingle within the right wing ideologies of the Netanyahu/Lieberman government—are all based on the demographic threat that Israel perceives to be the main problem, which has always been seen as a problem from the earliest Zionists.

While in the past there were some at least minimally effective two-country advocates, the current situation has developed into one of over-riding racist state fascism.  This expresses itself in the ongoing settlements developments, now more overtly antagonistic to the Palestinians; the many race based laws prohibiting Palestinian participation in society, accompanied by overt acts of racism to Palestinians and African refugees; and open expressions of hostility indicating the desire to simply get rid of both groups.

The idea of a “Jewish and democratic state” also comes to a crashing halt as there are many instances of political leaders essentially indicating that they would choose Jewishness before democracy.

The first section of the work provides the current events background that gives rise to the Netanyahu/Lieberman

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Wicked Jews will Unite With Antichrist says Xtian Zionist John Hagee

Hagee: Jews Will Make End Times Deal With Antichrist, 9/11 Was God’s Judgment

This is the guy who founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI).

This guy and others like him are the ones that always yammer about America’s “Judeo-Christian” values. What a truly disgusting load of two-faced B.S.

Trinity Broadcasting Network hosted a Praise The Lord prophecy special this month, featuring a number of speakers including televangelist John Hagee. The right-wing pastor explained that during the End Times, the Jewish people will not accept Jesus as the Messiah until he returns “because they have just— three-and-a-half years or seven-years before — made a deal with the Antichrist, who is the false messiah, and they are extremely skeptical of that.”

David Reagan, another Christian Zionist preacher, said the Jewish people will experience a “horrible holocaust” and the vast majority will die during the End Times: “Two-thirds of them are going to die and that one-third that is left at the end is going to finally come to the end of themselves.” […]

More: Hagee: Jews Will Make End Times Deal With the Antichrist, 9/11 Was God’s Judgment

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Pentagon: Israel’s Future Fighter Jet Critically Flawed

Pentagon: Israel’s future fighter jet critically flawed

Leaked Pentagon report reveals fatal F-35 fighter jet flaws; ‘Unacceptable for combat or combat training,’ says report; Israel to buy 25 jets for $238 million each

Ynet

Fatal flaws within the cockpit of the US military’s most expensive fighter jet ever are causing further problems with the Pentagon’s dubious F-35 program, Israel’s future combat aircraft.

A new report from the Pentagon warns that any pilot that boards the pricey aircraft places himself in danger without even going into combat.

In a leaked memo reported by the RT news agency, a Pentagon official prefaces a report on the F-35 by cautioning that even training missions cannot be safely performed on board the aircraft at this time.

“The training management system lags in development compared to the rest of the Integrated Training Center and does not yet have all planned functionality,” the report reads in part.

The F-35 (Photo: Reuters)

“The out-of-cockpit visibility in the F-35A is less than other Air Force fighter aircraft,” one excerpt reads.

Elsewhere, the report includes quotes from pilots commenting after test missions onboard the aircraft:

“The head rest is too large and will impede aft (rear) visibility and survivability during surface and air engagements,” said one. “Aft visibility will get the pilot gunned (down) every time” in dogfights, remarked another.

“Aft visibility could turn out to be a significant problem for all F-35 pilots in the future,” the Pentagon admits.

In one chart included in the report, the Pentagon says there are eight crucial flaws with the aircraft that have raises serious red flags within the Department of Defense.

The plane’s lack of maturity, reduced pilot situational awareness during an emergency and the risk of the aircraft’s fuel barriers catching fire are also cited, as is the likelihood of a pilot in distress becoming unable to escape his aircraft during an emergency.

The Pentagon report described flaws as “unacceptable for combat or combat training.”

Yedioth Aharonoth reported that jet makers Lockheed Martin stated they are aware of the problems and that some have already been solved, adding that the aircraft’s maintenance and operation are being improved.

The latest news regarding the F-35s comes less than one month after a separate incident forced the Department of Defense to ground their entire arsenal of fighter jets. In February, jet makers Lockheed Martin issued a statement acknowledging that a routine inspection on a test plane turned up cracked turbine blade.

Each F-35 fighter jet is valued at $238 million and, according to recent estimates, the entire operation will cost the country $1 trillion in order to keep the jets up and running through 2050.

That high price tag has given several countries cold feet about the jet. Last week, Canada pulled out of a deal to buy 65 F-35s over fears that the aircraft could be too expensive to run. Italy reduced its purchase to 90 F-35s from an initial 131, and even the US has delayed some of its purchases.

 

Suppressed News | Mystery Suicide of Alleged Mossad Spy

Alleged Mossad Spy Jailed For Treason Had Chabad Connection

Ben Zygier, the alleged Mossad spy who was imprisoned in Israel under intense secrecy – allegedly because he acted as a double agent for another country – had a Chabad connection. The 34-year-old native Australian known to the world as “Prisoner X” is said to have committed suicide in his supposedly suicide-proof cell in a suicide-proof Israeli prison in December 2010.

Ben Zygier

The Age reports:

…[Ben] Zygier grew up in the comfortable suburb of Malvern, and  attended  Chabad House, a synagogue  near the confluence of well-heeled Toorak and Kooyong. It is the congregation of (among others) retail billionaire  Solomon Lew. A bright and studious learner, he went to Wesley College  and then Bialik College, graduating from the latter in 1993. He  completed a law degree at Monash  in 2001, and later began an MBA at the same university. He started articles at law firm Deacons (now Norton  Rose) in 2001, became a junior lawyer there and left in 2002. But these  are the places – not the person.…

OVER the past week, two portraits have emerged of the man called ”Prisoner  X”.

In one, we have a purported Mossad agent under investigation by ASIO for his  work as an Israeli spy, a dual citizen with multiple  aliases    charged with  unknown offences (perhaps treason), and who died alone  in the cell of a maximum  security prison in Israel one week after his 34th birthday. It is a picture made  murky by official obfuscation and confidentiality.

The other mosaic of the man  is of blue-eyed Melbourne boy Ben Zygier, son of  Geoffrey and Louise, brother of Tully. This image is  also shrouded, only this  time  because Melbourne’s Jewish community has closed ranks, partially out of  respect for a traumatised family and partially because so much is unknown.

Zygier grew up in the comfortable suburb of Malvern, and  attended Chabad  House, a synagogue  near the confluence of well-heeled Toorak and Kooyong. It is  the congregation of (among others) retail billionaire Solomon Lew. A bright and  studious learner, he went to Wesley College and then Bialik College, graduating  from the latter in 1993. He completed a law degree at Monash  in 2001, and later  began an MBA at the same university. He started articles at law firm Deacons  (now Norton Rose) in 2001, became a junior lawyer there and left in 2002. But  these are the places – not the person.

Patrick Durkin, a journalist with The Australian Financial Review,  completed his articles with Zygier. This week he remembered an open and engaged  friend  who  enjoyed recounting ”his famous story of taking a bullet in the  posterior during his military service in Israel”. He recalled an informal   footy tournament where ”five-foot something Ben dominated on the ball”, but  also cerebral debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict with ”a serious young  man who was largely aloof from the rest of our tight-knit group”.

The only person in the Jewish community to speak publicly  has been family  friend Henry Greener,  who described Zygier as ”one of the top kids in  Melbourne”.

”He did all of the things that we all did. He wasn’t a loner. He was part of  the social world, but not excessively,” Greener said. ”He was the nicest kid  that I knew. When he saw me he would give me a big hug. We’re all still gutted.  We know that he died under suspicious circumstances, and there’s nothing you can  do, and that’s the biggest frustration.”

Other friends, speaking on condition of anonymity, called him  ”sweet”,  ”focused”, ”serious, but with a joking side”, ”committed to anything he  did”, ”super intelligent” and with a wide circle of mates – one of whom noted  that the community was shocked, confused and ”genuinely concerned and disturbed  for his family, and hope that this will be resolved and understood. It’s a world  quite removed from us.”

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Why the Bible Is Immoral and How Modern Christians Excuse and Justify Genocide

Excusing Genocide – How Modern Christians Excuse and Justify Genocide

By Austin Cline

Because Christians treat the Jewish scriptures as holy, they must contend with the morality of behavior depicted in those scriptures — both the behavior of those characters held up as exemplary and the behavior of Yahweh. How Christians deal with the issues raised by that behavior can tell us a lot about Christianity and Christians.

Enlightenment Changes

It’s no surprise that Christians in the past either ignored the genocidal stories like those in the Book of Joshua (because they couldn’t read the stories themselves) or accepted them as normal (because their own society was so violent). This began to change in the Enlightenment, though, as scholars and philosophers began to subject their own religion to more critical scrutiny.

One theological shift was especially important: whereas in the past Christian theologians assumed that whatever Yahweh did was good because Yahweh did it, during the Enlightenment they started to assume instead that Yahweh did or ordered things because they were good. This allowed them to evaluate the morality of actions and ordered attributed to Yahweh.

The importance of this shift should not be underestimated. The previous approach was ultimately passive because it required a person to accept as legitimate, just, good, and moral, whatever was attributed to God — no questioning, doubt, or skepticism was permitted. The Enlightenment approach, in contrast, required a more active engagement with both the text and one’s own moral reasoning. It required the Christian to not only make a judgment about the actions and commands attributed to God, but take responsibility for that judgment.

As a consequence, many Enlightenment thinkers concluded that the stories of genocide were patently immoral. This contributed to some leaving Christianity entirely because they couldn’t remain part of a religion which worshipped such a barbaric deity. Others concluded that the stories were simply a product of their times — that the ancient Israelites lived in a violent age, were as violent as other societies around them, and naturally believed in a god that would command them to do horrible, violent things.

As John Rogerson writes in “The Old Testament: Historical Study and New Roles,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Theology:

“The Old Testament was not, therefore, a collection of examples of pious living worthy of imitation by Christians; it contained stories of Israelites who lived in barbaric times when human life was valued cheaply, and when belief in God was sufficiently primitive for people to believe that he could legitimately command immoral acts.”

Modern Apologetics

These realizations did not entirely end all Christian use of genocidal stories in their theological systems, though. One major reason is that so many Christians have refused to accept the premise that their god only does or commands things which are good. Instead, they hold to the older view that whatever their god does or commands is, by definition, good. Combined with reading the texts as literal, factual history they conclude that the genocidal destruction of the Canaanites was necessarily a good act.

As a consequence, more than a little bit of time and effort is invested into trying to get people today to accept that genocide is good when Yahweh orders it. Modernity is in large part a product of the Enlightenment, which means that the sorts of moral reasoning that characterized the Enlightenment are now taken for granted. People aren’t as willing to just accept without question the genocide can be good for any reason, even this one, so apologists struggle to find other rationalizations.

William Lane Craig, for example, argues not only that Yahweh was perfectly justified in ordering the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites, but that any such orders that might come today would be equally justified. Indeed, he argues that we humans have a moral obligation to commit genocide whenever and against whomever Yahweh commands:

The command to kill all the Canaanite peoples is jarring precisely because it seems so at odds with the portrait of Yahweh, Israel’s God, which is painted in the Hebrew Scriptures.
…According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill.
He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are.

This is a direct defense of the pre-Enlightenment idea that whatever Yahweh commands is automatically good, but Craig still felt it necessary to argue that the command was somehow good for independent reasons as well:

By the time of their destruction, Canaanite culture was, in fact, debauched and cruel, embracing such practices as ritual prostitution and even child sacrifice. …So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life.
So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children?
The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

What William Lane Craig is describing here is a completely amoral being — a being that cannot even conceive of morality, much less act morally and exist in any sort of moral relationship. It’s little wonder, then, that it would be described as massacring large numbers of people without second thought or a tiny twinge of the conscience. It has no conscience. No empathy. No moral sense whatsoever.

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5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence

5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence

An anonymous complaint to the Israel Police has reportedly sparked fears that a five-year-old girl was raped in the haredi Wast Bank city of Modiin Illit last week, but haredim have refused to cooperate with the police investigation and neither the girl or her alleged rapist has been located.

5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

An anonymous complaint to the Israel Police has reportedly sparked fears that a five-year-old girl was raped in the haredi Wast Bank city of Modiin Illit last week, but haredim have refused to cooperate with the police investigation and neither the girl or her alleged rapist has been located, Ynet reports.

The girl reportedly received medical treatment, but members of the local haredi medical organization have also refused to cooperate with police.

Despite this lack of cooperation, the town is reportedly rife with rumors about the rape.

Police warned several haredim that they would be charged with obstruction of justice if they continue to refuse to cooperate.

Sometime in the past two weeks a man lured a five-year-old girl he saw on the street to a storeroom at a nearby synagogue. He allegedly sexually abused the girl for two hours.

The girl was allegedly treated by haredi medics and brought to a hospital in central Israel. But police could not find any evidence that a five-year-old girl had actually been treated at that hospital, and at least one of the hospital workers who were questioned by police denied having treated the child.

“Everyone is shocked. Some rabbis even discussed it over the weekend… One of them urged us to keep children safe and report anything of the sort. Nobody wants to protect such criminals, but parents know that in the haredi public the one who will be tarnished by this is the girl. She will not be able to get married and this will ruin her entire future. I have reason to believe that (her parents) took care of her and probably also took her to therapy, but they wouldn’t complain, so everyone who knew about the case simply respected their wishes,” a haredi resident told Ynet.

Other residents believe the rape never happened.

But another resident told Ynet that he had personally been order not to cooperate with police or the media.

[Hat Tip: Jonny.]

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80% Of Jewish Israelis Want Haredim Out Of Government

80% Of Jewish Israelis Want Haredim Out Of Government

“[The haredi political parties] United Torah Judaism and Shas have made the wide public hate them after many years of aggression and extortion.”

Ynet reports:

…[A] new survey reveals that 80% of Israeli Jews are in favor of a civil government [i.e., no haredi political parties in the governing coalition] with an agenda focusing on freedom of religion and an equal share of the burden.

The survey, commissioned by the Hiddush association for religious freedom and equality, was conducted by the Smith Institute among 500 respondents – a representative sample of the adult Jewish population in Israel. The maximum sampling error was 4.5%.

Sixty-eight percent of Habayit Hayehudi voters were also in favor of such a government (26% said they were very supportive and 42% said they were pretty supportive of the idea).

In addition, even 39% of Shas voters voiced their support for a civil government.

In parties affiliated with the centrist-leftist camp, the support level was close to 100%. All Labor, Hatnua and Meretz voters and 99% of Yesh Atid voters said they were in favor of such a government.

According to Hiddush CEO Rabbi Uri Regev, the fact that an overwhelming majority among Likud Beiteinu voters supports a government that will advance freedom of religion and an equal share of the burden shows that “the era in which haredi parties were perceived as natural coalition partners is over.”…

In previous Knessets, the chairman of the Finance Committee was mostly a representative of the United Torah Judaism faction. The survey’s last question tried to find out whether the Jewish public is in favor or against continuing this tradition.

About two-thirds of the Jewish public (67%) were against giving the job to a UTJ lawmaker, and one-third were in favor. Eighty-eight percent of seculars were against the idea, while 97% of haredim were in favor.…

“United Torah Judaism and Shas have made the wide public hate them after many years of aggression and extortion,” Rabbi Regev added.…

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Israel Attacks Syria, Adding Complexity to Syrian Civil War

Israel Attacks Syria, Adding Complexity to Syrian Civil War

Israeli Officials Refuse Comment Amid Conflicting Stories of What Was Attacked

by Jason Ditz 

Fresh off of weekend claims by Vice Premier Silvan Shalom that Israel was considering attacking Syria, they did exactly that, sending warplanes through Lebanon into Syrian territory and launching air strikes that killed two people.

Exactly what was hit, who was killed, and why the attack was launched at all remain matters of intense speculation, and with Israeli officials refusing any comment on their attack, conflicting stories from Syria and the United States are being pushed.

The US claims that Israel attacked an “arms convoy” en route to Lebanon, carrying Russian-made anti-aircraft weapons to the Hezbollah faction, which would make Israeli attacks in Lebanon less convenient.

Syria, on the other hand, claims that the attacking warplanes struck a military research facility near Damascus, killing two workers and wounding five others. They accused Israel of doing so to aid the rebels.

Experts say that whatever was hit likely had nothing to do with Syria’s chemical weapons program, which Israeli officials have often cited as a likely target. Such an attack would’ve caused massive environmental damage and would’ve been readily confirmed.

Whatever the case, the attack will have a major impact on Syria’s civil war, complicating the conflict and adding credence domestically to Assad’s claims of a Western conspiracy against him. Though it is highly unlikely Israel launched the attack in coordination with Syria’s Islamist rebels, the perception of an Israeli role in the war for regime change could shift popular opinion both in Syria and in the various nations from which Islamist fighters are flocking

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Jewish Cult Ruling Forbids Victim of Sex Abuse from Testifying in a Secular Court Against Rabbi Abuser

Beit Din Ruling Meant To Block Testimony In Haredi Molester’s Criminal Trial

The ruling forbids a victim of sex abuse from testifying in secular court against his rabbi abuser.

This was originally posted on March 16, 2010.

I’m re-posting it now because this ruling was cited in the Baruch Lebovitz trial, and even though it was, the Brooklyn DA did not prosecute the beit din judges for witness tampering and intimidation.

And now that the DA is about to prosecute Samuel Kellner for allegedly extorting Baruch Lebovits’ son Meir, even though the evidence the DA has against Kellner seems to be trumped up, I thought it would be a good time to remind him that there are other haredi criminals who need to be prosecuted, men who intimidate witnesses and harass victims. And here you have hard evidence against one of them. I hope you use it, Joe.

Please click to enlarge:

A rough translation:

PSAK DIN – JUDGEMENT

In the matter of the dispute-matter between the sides, that is Mr. ____ Side A the plaintiff, and between Rabbi Berl Ashkenazy shlit”a (should merit to long good years??) the defendant, side B, after the (sides) disputants agreed to heed the judgment of the dayan signed below, and after listening to the arguments and counter arguments of both sides, and after sorting out the facts and the halacha (Jewish law) ,the following ruling went out.

A. There is no obligation from side B to side A.

B. In contrast to this, it is forbidden for the young man (bochur) _____ to inform on side B (Rabbi Ashkenazy) to the courts (because) [that] he (talked on his heart) [tried to persuade him] that he should leave the courts, which is according to their laws a grave crime, and there is an obligation on side A to do whatever is in his ability to deter the above mentioned young man from this (mesirah) [informing].

C. Side B accepted on himself of his free will that he is prepared to help the above mentioned young man with whatever is in his ability to encourage him to go in good ways, however he will begin with him after the above mentioned young man will remove himself altogether from the courts of the goyim also in other matters.

And there are no more arguments and counter arguments between the sides, only peace to us and to all Israel.

And on this I applied my signature in the 9^th day of Shevat 5769

Says Israel Meir Makovetzky, Dayan

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MK Candidate Joked with Church Group about Dome of the Rock being “Blown Up”

MK Candidate Joked with Church Group about Dome of the Rock being “Blown Up”

Posted by Richard Bartholomew

This one is being reported widely; from Haaretz:

Atlanta-born Jeremy Gimpel, who moved to Israel at the age of 11, is angling for a seat with Habayit Hayehudi and serving as a voice for English speakers in the West Bank.

…Now Gimpel, who sits precariously at number 14 on the party’s list, faces a more uncertain future following Channel 2′s broadcast Friday of a video in which he makes controversial remarks about the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Speaking at the Fellowship Church in Florida in 2011, Gimpel… reads from the book of Ezra then adds: “Imagine if the Golden Dome – I’m being recorded so I can’t say ‘blown up’ – but let’s say the Dome was blown up, right? And we laid the cornerstone of the Temple in Jerusalem. Can you imagine? None of you would be here. All of you would be like, ‘I’m going to Israel, right?’ No one would be here, it would be incredible!”

Gimpel now explains that this was a “joke”. I noted Gimpel back in 2006, when Agape Press (now OneNewsNow) unaccountably described him as being an “IDF spokesman”, based on the fact that he’s an IDF reservist with an unrelated radio show. At that time, Gimpel was visiting New Orleans to talk to a group called “Manna from Heaven Ministries“. He also met up with Maggid ben Yoseif, who is a ”Joe”; this is someone who has an inner conviction that he is a member of the lost tribes of Israel, and destined to replace the Palestinians in the West Bank.

The Fellowship Church, based in Winter Springs, is typical of a growing strand in American Evangelicalism in which Jewish cultural forms are appropriated as “Hebrew roots”; according to the church’s blurb:

…We identify with all who know God and serve Him through Jesus the Messiah. We identify with Israel and the international Jewish community as the elect people of God. We identify with upright men everywhere who both fear the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and seek to walk uprightly before Him. We identify with the person in bondage to Sin because we all have a sinful past from which God, by His grace, has rescued us. Our two-fold mission is to confirm God’s promises to His people, Israel, and to demonstrate His grace toward all men as expressed through Messiah Jesus (Romans 15:8-9).

Further:

An exciting area of ministry has developed in Israel. We as a congregation have become active in the settlement movement in the Land of Israel and in the struggle for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Both of these areas are crucial for the continuation of God’s redemptive purpose in the midst of His people Israel.

The site also mentions “our sister Israeli community, Kedumim, ‘The Vanguard of Jewish Resettlement in Biblical Samaria’”.

Returning to Haaretz:

Gimpel has also hosted church groups in his home in the settlement of Neveh Daniel, where he lives with his wife Tehila, a Cleveland-born lawyer, and their three children.

He denies speaking to or accepting donations from Messianic Jewish groups.

This highlights a particular problem for Gimpel from the right: forging links with right-wing Christian groups is one thing, but associations with “Messianic” Jews would be controversial: just the other day, the MK Ben Ari was reprimanded for ripping up a Christian Bible he had received in July (“those who sent the book to MKs wanted to trample the bodies of the millions of martyrs who were murdered for being Jewish”). Gimpel himself has spoken out against missionaries in Israel. “Manna from Heaven Ministries”, where Gimpel spoke in 2006, describes itself as a “Messianic congregation”, but this again appears to be a congregation of Judaizing Christians rather than a community of Jews who accept Jesus as the Messiah.

Apocalyptically-minded Christian Zionists are indeed known for their Taliban-like hostility to the existence of the Dome of the Rock; Billye Brim, a Regional Director for Christians United for Israel, was recorded in 2007 promising that “that Dome is coming down!”, and a mentally-disturbed follower of Herbert Armstrong made an attempt to burn down the adjacent Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969. Gimpel’s “joke” has led to calls for his disqualification.

Habayit Hayehudi is headed by Naftali Bennett; he and his party were recently profiled by the Daily Telegraph.

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Video Shows Far Right Jewish Extremists Harassing African Refugees

Video: Far Right Israelis Harass African Refugees After Anti-Refugee Demonstration In Tel Aviv

On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2012, Israelis rally in south Tel Aviv  and demand that the government round up, jail and deport all non-Jewish  African asylum-seekers. After the rally, right-wing anti-African activists linked to the banned Kach Party and current MK  Michael Ben-Ari of the the Otzma LeYisrael political party harass  any African people they see on the street. Ben-Ari is a disciple of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

The peaceful but uncooperative one coming out of Ben-Ari’s campaign office is a Chabad follower:

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Sadistic Jewish Ritual Slaughter | Horrendous Animal Cruelty

Animal Cruelty At Israel’s Premier Glatt Kosher Slaughterhouse Causes International Outcry

Tnuva’s Beit She’an slaughterhouse was caught in a PETA-style undercover hidden camera investigation willfully abusing and torturing animals. Because many of those those animals came from Australia and their handling and slaughter is governed by international agreements, the Government of Australia has launched an investigation into what it calls shoking animal cruelty. The Israeli governemt has also opened an investigation, as has Israeli police.

Animal Cruelty At Israel’s Premier Glatt Kosher Slaughterhouse Causes International Outcry Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

Israel’s Environmental Protection Ministry and the Australia’s Department of Agriculture have reportedly opened investigations against Israel’s giant food conglomerate Tnuva after animal abuse at one of the corporation’s glatt kosher slaughterhouses was exposed on Israeli national television.

Channel 2’s investigative program Kolbotek’s exposé was shown last week. Ronen Bar, an animal rights activist posing as a worker at the Adom-Adom slaughterhouse in Beit She’an, videoed employees using stun guns on the genitals and eyes of cattle, and a manager standing by and watching as a calf was dragged across the ground by a forklift.

Employees also reportedly told Bar that Adom-Adom’s management ordered employees to shock cattle in the rear end to move them to the slaughterhouse.

Following the show, there were reportedly widespread calls on social media for a boycott of not only Adom Adom meat products, but of Tnuva’s large line of dairy products, as well, and Beit She’an police reportedly opened a criminal investigation into the abuse.

Because most of the abused cattle had been shipped in from Australia, the Australian Department of Agriculture opened an investigation. Animal rights groups in Australia, including the Royal Society for Protection from Cruelty to Animals and Animals Australia, are calling for a ban on cattle exports to Israel. Meanwhile, on Monday, which was International Animal Rights Day, hundreds of protesters demonstrated in Tel Aviv against Tnuva and demanded the resignation of its CEO.

The day before that protest Israel’s Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan called for a criminal investigation into the allegations exposed by the video.

“There is no reason for animals to endure such horrible abuse,” Erdan said.

This is not the first time animal abuse at Adom-Adom have been exposed. In September 2011, the activist group Anonymous for Animal Rights released a report that documented many similar abuses at Adom-Adom’s Beit She’an  slaughterhouse. But the report was widely ignored.

Adom-Adom’s CEO Erez Wolf issued a statement saying that “everything we saw [in the Kolbotek video footage] is completely unacceptable to us.”

Wolf announced that he had accepted the resignation of the manager of his slaughterhouse. He also said he had fired all of the employees who had taken part in the abusive practices.

Wolf also had cameras installed in the pens, so he can personally ensure that the animals are not being abused in the future.

“We will continue to be very strict about quality, not only in terms of our excellent products, but also in terms of prevention of cruelty to animals. The extreme examples that we have seen here will never happen again,” Wolf said.

Moving animals from outdoor pens or barns through chutes to the slaughter floor can be done smoothly and without use of electric cattle prods and other painful methods.
Dr. Temple Grandin, the foremost animal welfare and animal behavior expert in the world, has designed chutes and other equipment that make this possible by eliminating the aspects of poor design that cause animals to balk.

Grandin also consults with slaughterhouses and adapts their existing chutes and pens.
Many of the largest slaughterhouses in the US and Canada use Grandin’s methods, not only because they are better for the animals, but because calm, compliant animals are faster and easier to slaughter and, because of reduced stress hormones and related physiological issues, their meat is higher quality.

Adom-Adom does not appear to be using Grandin’s equipment or methods.

Kosher slaughterhouses in Israel, South America, Europe and the United States have all been caught up in major animal abuse and inhumane slaughter scandals over the past eight years.

In the most notorious case, Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, owned by Chabad’s Rubashkin family, cattle were mistreated before slaughter, put in a poorly maintained, poorly operated rotating slaughter pen and flipped on their backs. They were then – often after an uncomfortable and terrifying delay – slaughtered with a cut that was too shallow to quickly kill the animal.

But the horror did not end there.

As the animals lay on their backs chocking in their own blood, an untrained plant worker used a meat hook and and a hacking knife to pull out their tracheas and hack at their blood vessels. The pen was then rotated to return the animals to the upright position, and they were dumped down a short chute onto a blood-soaked concrete floor.

But many of the animals were not dead or unconscious. Instead, grievously wounded, they struggled to right themselves and get up. Some managed to do so and tried to run away, their esophagus dangling from their open throat wounds.

Instead of condemning this barbarity, Orthodox and haredi rabbis – including Israel’s chief rabbis – with almost 100% public uniformity endorsed the cruelty, making it clear that the meat Agriprocessors produced was 100% kosher.

In the years after the Agriprocessors abuses were made public, Israel’s Chief Rabbinate promised to stop other cruel practices at South American slaughterhouses that export to Israel and at Israeli slaughterhouses. But those changes were, for the most part, never made.

[Hat Tip: Seymour.]

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Jewish Racist Rabbi | Goyyim Are Murderers And Thieves, Blacks Might Have Killed Jews Over Obama Loss

Satmar Rebbe: Goyyim Are Murderers And Thieves, Blacks Might Have Killed Jews Over Obama Loss

“President Obama is from the Children of Ham [the biblical Noah’s Black  son], and in America there are many millions from the same race as  Obama. [Make no mistake, the] Children of Japheth [another son of the biblical Noah who was white; White Europeans, Caucasians] are not  any better than the Children of  Ham. Like all other goyyim, there are very many murders and thieves among them.”

Originally published at 10:39 pm CST 12-5-2012. Updated 10:32 am CST 12-6-2012 to reflect this correction: “Like all other goyyim, there are very many murders and thieves among them.”

This is a three-and-a-half minute excerpt from Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum’s speech last night at the massive Satmar dinner in Williamsburg.Please click the gray bar to listen:

Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum 12-4-12

What follows is a free translation done by a hasid. I Put that free translation into standard American English (whenever possible) to make it more easily understandable:

The president [Obama] is from the Children of  Ham [the biblical Noah’s Black son], and in America there are many millions from the same race as him.
[Make no mistake, the] Children of Japheth [another son of the biblical Noah who was white; White Europeans, Caucasians] are not any better than the Children of Ham. Like all other goyyim, there are very many murders and thieves among them.

Jews are in exile here [in America]. We are spread out in between the goyyim to earn our livings.

We should think about what would happen if the results in the US elections would have been different and President Obama would have had a downfall and lost.

It would now be known to whole world that Jews campaigned [against Obama and] that caused Obama to lose.
What kind of hatred against Jews [would have come from that]?!?! It would have caused massive sinat Yisrael [hatred against the Jewish people], [hatred] against thousands of Jews living here in US! The results for thousands Jews in all 50 States would have been terrible!

Simply put, the head of the Zionist regime [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] made Jewish blood hefker [free, connoting “Jewish blood is cheap”] in America. [Through his open support for Mitt Romney is risked many Jewish lives].

The Jews have not forgotten the pogroms in Crown Heights when the blood of Ya’akov Rosenbaum, may God avenge his blood, was spilled [by Blacks]!
With so many goyyim [non-Jews], [what Netanyahu did] is a great danger [to Jews] that has no end!

The politics that the state’s [Israel’s] prime minister does with the leaders of the Nations of the World, and what he did in Gaza – the provoking of conflict! – is very terrible!

It is very surprising that his religious [coalition] partners agree with him. They practice shtika k’hoda’ah [silence is equivalent to agreement] and give him endorsement with full mouths…

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Nazism, Zionism and The Arab World | Countering Myths

Nazism, Zionism, and the Arab World: Countering myths

By Cecilie Surasky

Holocaust survivor Annette Herskovits has written an important article— Nazism, Zionism, and the Arab World: Countering the myths spread by pro-Israel ideologues.

She describes the tactics and goals of pro-Israel campus watchdogs and the harm wrought by their unabashed falsification of history and of current realities in Palestine/Israel.

Conquerors have always justified seizing another people’s land on “moral” grounds, to ward off the world’s disapproval as well as the burden of a bad conscience. And while the world’s support for the creation of Israel was fueled in large part by the plight of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust–the fact remains that the taking of land already occupied by Palestinians in order to create a refuge was (and still is) justified using false histories and slogans like “A land with no people for people with no land.”

The process of removing Palestinians from their land—which goes on to this day– requires a literally never-ending production of moral justification, and pro-Israel zealots are only too happy to oblige.

Most damaging? People like Alan Dershowitz paint Arabs and Muslims as heirs to Nazism, bent on exterminating the Jews. The sparse history of Arab collaboration with the Nazis—nothing like what took place in most European countries—is used to “explain” Arab hostility to Israel and obscure Israel’s crimes.

This “nazification” of Arabs and Muslims has been debunked by historian Gilbert Achcar in his book, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.” Campus Watch then launched a smear campaign against Achcar.

From Herskovits’ article:

About hasbara:

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse… Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

About pro-Israel zealotry:

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human.

Annette Herskovits, a holocaust survivor and the daughter of holocaust victims, holds a PhD from Stanford University and is the author of Language and Spatial Cognition (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2009). She has written more than a dozen published articles on Palestine/Israel and is a Palestinian rights activist.

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Silencing Judith Butler

Why Judith Butler had to be shut down

Posted by Cecilie Surasky

The announcement of a prestigious international academic prize doesn’t typically generate endless sturm und drang on the pages of major newspapers around the world, threatening to turn into an international incident. But when that prize is given by a German city, and the recipient is Judith Butler, one of the great thinkers of our time– who also happens to be a vocal critic of Israeli policies—apparently it signifies the end is near.

Within minutes of announcing that Judith Butler, who can best be described as the Mick Jagger of left academia, had won the prestigious Theodor Adorno prize for her extraordinary and wide-ranging body of critical theory work, the hapless judges of the Frankfurt prize were besieged with complaints by those who said it should be revoked immediately.

Writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal,  Richard Landes and Ben Weinthal claimed the decision to give Butler the award would threaten Germany and Israel’s “special relationship”, and compared it to

Germany’s circumcision bans, Berlin sending submarines to a newly belligerent Egypt, and ugly revelations of German behavior in the Munich Olympics terror attack.

Elsewhere in Opposite-landia, the weird through-the-looking-glass world created by those who would defend Israel at all costs, right-wing critics claimed Judith Butler is anti-Semitic.  Judith Butler loves Hamas. Judith Butler is too political. Judith Butler isn’t political enough . Or my favorite, Judith Butler is ignorant.

But the truth is Butler became a lightning rod because one of the world’s best-known philosophers, who happens to be Jewish, is also deeply engaged in questions of Judaism, Jewish ethics and Zionism. Her lifelong investigation of these questions, in the spirit of Arendt and Buber who inspired because they walked their own paths—led her to keep one foot solidly in Jewish culture while placing the other in solidarity with precisely the people much of the Jewish world want us to forget, Palestinians.

Equally unforgivably, her intellectual and personal journey led her to support a movement that mainstream Jewish institutions are desperately trying to claim as anti-Semitic: the Palestinian-led, nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. (My use of the the word desperately is deliberate. As more and more individual Jews and Jewish organizations support some form of boycott or divestment to pressure Israel into being accountable to international law and basic Jewish ethics, the argument that doing so is essentially anti-Jewish reveals itself for the emptiness that it is.)

Butler wrote her own defense:

I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. I received a Jewish education in Cleveland, Ohio at The Temple under the tutelage of Rabbi Daniel Silver where I developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought. I learned, and came to accept, that we are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation. But to do this, we have to hear the call, find the resources by which to respond, and sometimes suffer the consequences for speaking out as we do. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and perhaps that should not surprise me, since their tactic is to destroy the conditions of audibility.

WWTD? What would Theodor Do?

Back in the late 80s as an undergraduate at Brown, my world couldn’t get enough of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. And when the Matrix films came out, we were all certain the Wachowski (then) Brothers had stayed up late nights imbibing Marcuse and Adorno, and probably something a bit stronger, to come up with their too-close-to home dystopian trilogy.

Reading Adorno helped us understand the signs of fascism and our own willing imprisonment. I suppose his criticisms of mass culture helped herald the rise of the corporatocracy.

Adorno was a big Schoenberg fan. He didn’t go for treacly harmonies, for much the same reasons my mother used to refuse to let us watch the Brady Bunch, though the cynical MASH was OK. Adorno liked dissonance. It revealed the dark truth behind harmonious bourgeois culture. I suppose it was the only thing that made sense to someone who witnessed, and escaped, the Nazi Holocaust. (Real differences aside, it could be said that it took the war to help Adorno and others like him see the underlying brutality and dehumanization that colonized peoples of all kinds have always known firsthand at the hands of “the civilized”. Just ask the Congolese about King Leopold. Or just ask…women.)

This is the realm in which Judith Butler and her work dwells that makes her so utterly inspiring–especially to those of us who aspire to justice in Israel and Palestine while remaining firmly grounded in our Jewishness.

There is Butler’s personal willingness to try to embody the best of the Jewish texts she studies. And her willing look at the dark underbelly of “civilized” cultures (think Pamela Geller ads) which declare some people grievable and others entirely unworthy of grieving. (In that sense, the United States and Israel have more than a special relationship, they are conjoined twins, awash in self congratulatory language about democracy and civilization that obscures the foundation of structural violence that in both cases, has never really ceased.)

Adorno is often quoted for sayng that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. But he also wrote:

“The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.”

Hold that thought. Let us all, like JB and so many countless others, refuse to cooperate. We must refuse to be that person laughing at a Tel Aviv café while just miles away a captive population in Gaza is bombed ceaselessly, or to simply ask someone to pass the cereal moments after reading again that the US military drone dropped a bomb on a group of civilians, this time a group of women and girls.

Let us refuse to cooperate with the mythical Jewish consensus that to be a good Jew, one must not mourn Palestinians as one mourns Jews, and one must not hold Israel up to those same standards.

This Yom Kippur, I’m going to think about the times I didn’t refuse.

I hope also that some of the people who called Judith Butler and so many like her anti-Semites, simply in order to maker them “inaudible,” will consider the gravity of their actions. But I’m not holding my breath.

(Oh, and by the way, Judith Butler did get that prize after all. And the room of 700 cheered.)

-Cecilie Surasky

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Against The Herd, Minority Rebel Israelis Oppose Penile Mutilation

In Israel, Some Rebel Against Circumcision

By Maayan Lubell

JERUSALEM

(Reuters) – Circumcision is one of Judaism’s most important laws and for generations of faithful it has symbolized a biblical covenant with God.

But in Israel, more and more Jewish parents are saying no to the blade.

“It’s such a taboo in Israel and in Judaism,” said Gali, nursing her six-week-old son, about the decision not to have him circumcised.

“It’s like coming out of the closet,” she said, asking to be identified by her first name only because she had not told her relatives yet.

Nearly all baby boys in Israel are circumcised. Be their parents ultra-Orthodox or totally secular Jews, it is by far the most common choice. Most Israeli-Arabs also keep with a practice that is widespread in the Muslim world.

Jewish circumcisions are done when the baby is eight days old. The majority are performed by a mohel, a religious man trained in the procedure carried out in a festive religious ceremony called a “brit“, Hebrew for covenant.

But an increasing minority fear it is a form of physical abuse.

“It’s the same as if someone would tell me ‘it’s our culture to cut off a finger when he is born’,” said Rakefet Kaufman, who also did not have her son circumcised.

“People should see it as abuse because it is done to a baby without asking him,” she said.

When Gali learnt she was carrying a baby boy it was obvious to her that he would be circumcised. But she started to think again after a conversation with a friend whose son was uncircumcised.

“She asked me what my reason was for doing it, was it religious? I said no. Was it for health reasons? No. Social? No. Then it began to sink in. I began to read more about it, enter Internet forums, I began to realize that I cannot do it.”

PHENOMENON GROWING

“The phenomenon is growing, I have no doubt,” said Ronit Tamir, who founded a support group for families who have chosen not to circumcise their sons.

“When we started the group 12 years ago we had to work hard to find 40 families … They were keeping it secret and we had to promise them we’d keep it secret,” she said. “Then, we’d get one or two phone calls a month. Nowadays I get dozens of emails and phone calls a month, hundreds a year.”

Tamir believes Jews in today’s Israel find it easier to break religious taboos.

“People are asking themselves what it means to be Jewish these days,” she said, and that leads some to question rules of all kinds, including circumcision.

In societies around the world who circumcise boys for non-religious reasons, out of habit or tradition or because of the perceived health benefits, the practice can be controversial.

Rates of circumcision in Europe are well under 20 percent, while in the United States, according to 2010 statistics cited by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), more than half of newborn boys continue to be circumcised.

The American Academy of Paediatrics said in August that the health benefits of infant circumcision – potentially avoiding infection, cancer and sexually-transmitted diseases – outweighed the risks, but said parents should make the final call.

But where the decision is ultimately a matter of personal choice for many families around the world, for Jews who question the tradition, it is more complicated.

“It is the covenant between us and God – a sign that one cannot deny and that Jews have kept even in times of persecution,” said one well-known mohel who has been performing circumcisions in Israel for more than 30 years. He asked not to be named to avoid being connected to any controversy.

He pointed to the Book of Genesis, where God said to Abraham: “And you shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins; and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.”

It is this covenant that, the mohel said, that “keeps the people of Israel together”.

The Bible goes on: “And the uncircumcised male child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

Scholars have differed over the years what this means in practice.

BEING DIFFERENT

Tamir is unswayed by the ancient verses.

“This edict is painful, irreversible and maims,” she said. The Internet was helping to spread the word, she said, allowing parents to find information about circumcision and seek advice anonymously.

Some Jewish groups in the United States which oppose circumcision offer alternative religious brit ceremonies that do not include an actual circumcision.

“There is definitely a growing number of Jewish families in the U.S. who are choosing not to circumcise,” said Florida-based Rebecca Wald. In 2010 she started a website to connect parents who are unsure about what to do.

“Since then, in phone calls, emails, and on social networking sites I have connected with hundreds of Jewish people in the U.S. who question circumcision.” she said in an email interview. “Many of them have intact (uncircumcised) sons or plan to leave future sons intact.”

Wald’s son was not circumcised.

“I have a very strong sense of Jewish identity and, believe it or not, having an intact son has only deepened it,” she said.

In Israel, where the vast majority are circumcised, the dilemma may be particularly difficult.

Although she is confident of the choice she and her husband made, Gali still has one concern.

“The main issue which still troubles me a little is the social one, that one day he may come to me and say ‘Mom, why did you do that to me? They made fun of me today’,” Gali said.

The Health Ministry does not keep records on circumcisions but estimates about 60,000 to 70,000 are held in Israel every year, which roughly corresponds to the number of boys born in 2010, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.

The ministry said it treats about 70 cases a year of circumcisions gone wrong, mainly minor complications such as excessive bleeding.

Kaufman said “people were shocked” to learn that her son is not circumcised.

“In Israel everybody does it, like a herd,” she said. “They don’t stop and ask themselves about this specific procedure which has to do with damaging a baby.”

Watching her son rummage through a stack of toys, Kaufman said: “The way he was born is the way his body should be.”

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Follow German Court’s Lead And Ban Circumcision, Israeli Child Advocate Says

Eran Sadeh, the founder of the Protect the Child website, argues that Israel should follow a German court’s lead and ban infant circumcision.

Eran Sadeh, the founder of the Protect the Child website, argues in Ynet that Israel should follow a German court’s lead and ban infant circumcision.

Sadeh gives eight reasons why he believes that infant circumcision should be banned:

The following are eight reasons why the circumcision ritual should be abolished:

1. A whole member is more natural. Males and females are born with foreskin.

2. A whole member is more pleasurable. The foreskin is the most sexually sensitive part of the penis. Like the tips of the fingers and the lips, the foreskin contains a high concentration of blood cells and sensory nerve endings. The foreskin protects the glans and keeps its surface soft, moist, and sensitive.

3. A whole member is more protected. During infancy, the foreskin protects the glans of the penis and the urethra from irritation and infections. When the foreskin is removed, the glans and urethra are exposed to abrasion that can eventually cause scarring and urination problems. Ten out of every 100 circumcised children will have to undergo surgery to expand the opening of the urethra.

4. A whole penis is more common throughout the world. Some 80% of men are not circumcised (close to 100% in Europe, not including Jews and Muslims). In Israel, more and more parents are leaving their children’s members whole due to the massive amount of information that is available on the Internet on the subject.

5. A whole penis is more humane. Parents who do not circumcise their child spare him of a host of painful experiences: The pain of the knife cutting through the flesh and the pain of an open, bleeding wound which takes 7-10 days to heal. The trauma of the pain is etched in the infant’s mind and affects the way he reacts to pain in the future.

6. A whole penis is safer. Each year hundreds of babies are rushed to the emergency room due to various complications related to the removal of the foreskin: Constant hemorrhaging that requires surgical intervention or an infusion due to the massive loss of blood; dangerous infections; a distortion of the penis; pain during erection and more.

7. Parents who leave their baby’s penis whole are respecting their child’s basic right to grow up with a whole body, with the whole penis he was born with. Due to the availability of information on the subject, more and more men are aware of the irreversible emotional damage circumcision has caused them and feel violated.

8. A whole member is more ethical. A surgical procedure is considered justifiable – from a medical standpoint – when it meets two conditions: A – It is performed to treat a medical condition, disease or injury. B – It is the least invasive treatment available. Obviously, circumcision does not meet either requirement, as the procedure is performed on healthy babies.

I think point number three is demonstrably false. Point number six needs a comparison between the number of uncircumcised babies who get urinary tract infections and the number of circumcised babies who are damaged from the circumcision. Point number eight would be true if circumcision did not lower certain disease transmission risks and lower the incident rate of urinary tract infections and penile cancer.

This is a sloppy, poorly written, poorly supported piece – which is sad, because, agree with it or not,  a good argument can be made to ban infant circumcision.

Unfortunately, Sadeh lacks the tools, it seems, to make it.

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Rupert Murdoch’s Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory Endorsed By Neocon, Right Wing Jews

[Were it any other voice aside from Rupert Murdoch, circumstance or situation, these same Jewish Neocon and Rightist voices would typically be howling and barfing “anti-Semitism” until they were blue in the face.]

Rupert Murdoch and the ‘Jewish Owned Press’   

Eric Alterman

 

Rupert Murdoch. Reuters/Paul Hackett

The Joseph Kennedy portrayed in The Patriarch, David Nasaw’s magisterial new biography, didn’t dislike Jews per se. In fact, he rather admired the way they stuck together, looked out for their corporate interests and ultimately, in his view, trapped (or brainwashed) Franklin Roosevelt into allowing the United States to become embroiled in the fight against Nazi aggression. But he blamed “a number of Jewish writers and publishers” for trying to “precipitate a war with Germany.” While Jewish community leaders were desperately trying (and failing) to convince Roosevelt to intervene on behalf of the victims of Hitler’s repression (soon to be genocide), and to lobby other nations to do so, Kennedy—then ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—did everything in his power to frustrate these aims, believing that Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews was unworthy of American attention.

One particularly disturbing aspect of the story Nasaw tells concerns the tendency of Jewish communal leaders—particularly the Zionist leaders—to fool themselves about Kennedy. Rabbi Stephen Wise, for instance, wrote his colleagues in New York that the new ambassador was “going to be very helpful, as he is keenly understanding” of the Jewish position on immigration and could be counted on to lobby Roosevelt in its favor.

Like Joseph Kennedy, Rupert Murdoch is a man of immense wealth and political influence, much admired in the Jewish professional community. Also like Kennedy, Murdoch sees a world in which Jews use their financial power on behalf of the Jews themselves. Or, more accurately, he thinks this is what they should do, and complains when they do not.

During the initial days of the recent Israel-Hamas conflict, Murdoch tweeted, “Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” Consistent with the Murdoch media ethos, he presented no evidence for either contention: that the US press was “Jewish owned” or that it was “consistently anti-Israel.” In fact, both contentions are ridiculous. The mainstream media are largely owned by multinational corporations. The most powerful single owner of media in the United States is Murdoch himself. Viacom, Disney, Comcast, Time Warner and Bertelsmann are not “Jewish owned.” Neither, though it may come as a surprise to Murdoch, is The New York Times. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is neither Jewish by birth—according to traditional Jewish law—nor by choice. (He was raised Episcopalian, his mother’s faith.)

True, the percentage of Jews working in the MSM is high, as it is in the medical, legal, financial and entertainment fields. But most of the time, when someone insists that Jews use their power in these industries on behalf of so-called Jewish interests—much less bias their actions deliberately on behalf of another country—they are correctly deemed to be anti-Semites. Would Murdoch expect a Jewish president to act explicitly on the basis of what was “good for the Jews”? If so, maybe we should scotch that idea right now, since my landsmen do not represent even one-fiftieth of the country’s population.

It’s worth remembering that Murdoch’s employees at Fox News have been known to engage in some hateful Jewish stereotyping as well. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly once told a Jewish caller to “go to Israel” if he found himself offended by public Christmas displays. Glenn Beck, while a Fox employee, slandered George Soros as America’s “puppet master,” an old anti-Semitic canard, and even displayed the image of a Star of David while doing so.

Complaints about the allegedly Jewish-owned media are supposed to spur organizations like Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League into action. But Murdoch is not only a powerful right-wing publisher; he is also a billionaire who funds quite a few of the right-wing Jewish publications and organizations he does not own, picking up awards (and apologists) from them like lint on a cheap suit. I didn’t make it to the ADL International Leadership Award dinner honoring Murdoch, or the Simon Wiesenthal Humanitarian dinner, the Museum of Jewish Heritage Award dinner, the American Jewish Committee National Human Relations Award dinner, etc., though I did once attend a United Jewish Appeal-Federation “Humanitarian of the Year” ceremony for the guy. (The award was presented, I kid you not, by Henry Kissinger.) Norman Podhoretz took the podium to thank Murdoch for helping keep Commentary afloat after the American Jewish Committee (belatedly) cut it loose.

Now that Commentary, like a family dry-cleaning business, has been passed down to the younger (and lesser) John Podhoretz, it is not so surprising to see its blogger, Jonathan Tobin, endorse Murdoch’s anti-Semitic formulation. Tobin, who recently worked himself up into a froth over an allegedly anti-Semitic Maureen Dowd column about Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers that made no mention of anyone’s religion or ethnicity, insisted that “it wasn’t unreasonable for the non-Jewish Murdoch to wonder why these [Jewish-owned] papers as well as much of the liberal media are often so reflexively hostile to Israel’s cause.” Other Jewish neocons followed suit. When Murdoch issued a narrowly worded clarification, Seth Lipsky’s New York Sun (which I did not know still existed) declared that Murdoch’s “apology was unnecessary.” Michael Goldfarb, a former Bill Kristol protégé now at a Koch brothers–sounding outfit called the Center for American Freedom, tweeted “New York Times proves @RupertMurdoch correct,” also apparently unaware that the paper is not Jewish-owned (nor, it must be said, consistently or even inconsistently critical of Israel). Foxman, too, has chimed in on Murdoch’s behalf.

When FDR died in April 1945, Joe Kennedy, while admiring the Jews’ “marvelous organizing capacity,” nevertheless celebrated the fact that “the power of certain groups to control the future life of this country [is] finished.” Rupert Murdoch is apparently betting that the old man was wrong yet again.

So who really does own the media? More and more, it’s the fewer and fewer. Read New Press head André Schiffrin on “How Mergermania Is Destroying Book Publishing.”

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Marxist View On Gaza: What Does It Mean?

Gaza: What does it mean?

Posted by Alan Woods

On the morning of November 15, Israel carried out the extrajudicial killing of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari. This act sparked off a new and deadly conflict between Israel and Gaza. This whole affair has all the hallmarks of a premeditated provocation.

“When the leaders speak of peace the common people know that war is coming.” (Bertolt Brecht)

IDF chief of staff visits southern Israel Photo: Israel Defense ForcesIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly wanted to provoke Hamas into an armed conflict. He has succeeded. Hamas responded with rocket attacks on Israeli towns that border the Gaza strip. The Israelis have used these attacks as an excuse for pulverising Gaza.

Throughout the night of Nov. 16-17, the Israeli Air Force bombed targets across the Gaza Strip including key Hamas ministries, police stations and tunnels near the border crossing with Egypt. They also carried out strikes in Rafah’s al-Sulan and al-Zahour neighbourhoods, as well as east of the al-Maghazi refugee camp. Later attacks included the bombing of a building that was known to be occupied by international journalists.

The Israeli propaganda machine has gone into overdrive. They try to present their military onslaught as a justified response to “terrorist attacks”. Obediently falling into line, the mass media in the western world show their “impartiality” by presenting the conflict as a war between equals: “Israeli bombs against Hamas rockets”.  But this conflict is absurdly unequal.

Gaza is an open-air prison in which 1.7 million people live in just 140 square miles. It is entirely at the mercy of its powerful neighbour, Israel. The latter possesses the most formidable military machine in the entire region. Its stockpile of arms, which includes nuclear weapons, is funded by Washington to the tune of US$3 billion a year.

By contrast, Gaza is a tiny besieged enclave composed mainly of impoverished refugees. The primitive, homemade rockets fired from Gaza are no match for the sophisticated weaponry of the Israeli army and air force. Israeli jet fighters and drones are bombarding Gaza by day and by night.

The Israelis claim that they are aimed to kill only “terrorists” and Hamas officials. But the television cameras of the world give the lie to this propaganda. Despite the claims of the Israelis that these attacks were carefully targeted, most of the victims were, as usual, civilians, including many women and children. The harrowing scenes of diminutive corpses being carried by grieving relatives to the cemeteries have shocked the public opinion of the world.

The population of Gaza is angry and desperate, but increasingly traumatised by the unrelenting bombardment, against which they have no defences. Despite talk of a ceasefire, Israel continues its airstrikes on Gaza, and Gaza continues its long-range rocket attacks on major Israeli population centres. The sight of rockets flying in the direction of Israel may or may not boost morale, but in fact their effectiveness as weapons of war is minimal.

As of last night (Monday) at least one hundred people have been killed in Gaza, while the Israeli death toll has reached the grand total of – three. This is not a case of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” The death toll of Palestinians exceeds that of Israelis by thirty three times.

The Israelis claim that their Iron Dome defence system has intercepted most of the rockets. To judge by the very low Israeli casualty figures, this may be partly true. However, the claims of the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) that its Iron Dome interceptors have successfully intercepted 90 percent of the rockets are clearly exaggerated.

Israel appears to be positioning itself in preparation for a ground operation. The Israeli Cabinet on Nov. 16 approved Defence Minister Ehud Barak’s request to call up 75,000 reservists, even more than in the 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza. The main roads leading to Gaza and running parallel to Sinai have been declared closed military zones. Tanks, armoured personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and troops have been massing on the border in recent days. Whether this is an act of intimidation or a preparation for something more serious remains to be seen.

What was the purpose of all this?

What interest can Israel have in taking on Gaza this time?

The timing cannot have been an accident. It follows the same pattern we saw exactly four years ago. On Nov. 4, 2008, while Americans were going to the polls to elect a new president, the Israeli army entered the Gaza Strip with infantry, tanks and bulldozers Its alleged aim was to dismantle the extensive tunnel network used by Hamas to smuggle in weapons.

Hamas responded with a barrage of mortar and rocket fire. On Dec. 27, 2008, Operation Cast Lead was launched. The military campaign began with a seven day aerial bombardment was followed by a 15-day ground incursion. By the end of the campaign, many people were killed and the infrastructure of Gaza was devastated.

According to figures from the Israel Defence Forces figures, only ten Israeli soldiers died (four from friendly fire). The hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas killed three Israeli civilians. But 1,166 Palestinians were killed, of which 709 were said to be combatants.

It is no secret that Netanyahu wants to bomb Iran, allegedly to sabotage its nuclear programme. It is also no secret that Netanyahu was hoping for the victory of Mitt Romney in the US elections. The Republicans are well known to be active advocates of an attack on Iran.

Obama is a more cautious representative of US Big Business and is worried about the effect of an Israeli air strike against Iran. By flexing his muscles only a few days after the US elections, Netanyahu is ending a message to Washington, which says more or less: “Obama can say whatever he likes, but we are the ones who decide what happens in this part of the world.”

It has been said that certain forces in Gaza may be manufacturing long-range rockets locally. Even more significantly, it is said that the rockets that have been fired into Israel have been imported from Iran. The latter accusation would give a sinister twist to the present conflict, providing it with a regional dimension that is highly convenient to Netanyahu, who is looking for any excuse to launch an air attack on Iran. Part of his calculations may have been an attempt to shoring up his rear prior to such an attack.

At the same time, he may also be sending a message to the new Egyptian government. The Muslim Brotherhood is supposed to be hostile to Israel. It is also supposed to be friendly towards Hamas. But this attack has shown the Morsi regime to be weak and pusillanimous. Cairo makes noises about the “humanitarian disaster” in Gaza but does not lift a finger to go to its defence.

Prospects for Negotiations

The present conflict has once more glaringly exposed the impotence of the so-called United Nations. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has said he will go to Gaza, but he will not be able to do anything.

All kinds of contradictory rumours regarding the outcome of cease-fire negotiations between Hamas and Israel have been circulating in Cairo. A Hamas spokesman told Al Jazeera that Israel and Hamas have “agreed to 90 percent of the terms of a new cease-fire”. But he did not say what the remaining ten percent consisted of. And while Israeli officials have told news outlets that the government is in talks with Cairo on a cease-fire, Israeli officials are now denying reports that an Israeli envoy is in Cairo at all.

On the face of it, there seems to be some basis for a deal. Hamas would like to enjoy the prestige of a symbolic victory from its long-range rocket attacks against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but does not want to pay the price of seeing its leadership and infrastructure pulverised in an Israeli ground invasion.

For its part, Israel would like to remove or neutralize the threat posed by Hamas’ long-range rockets but does not want to go through the experience of a ground invasion, drawing Israeli forces into urban warfare with the threat of suicide bombings that could prove costly.

It would appear that Hamas is pressing for a temporary truce in return for Egypt opening the border blockade on Gaza and Israel halting targeted killings of its leaders and military commanders. Whether the Israelis will accept this is open to doubt. Who will guarantee such a deal? Unless Egypt agrees to assume responsibility for Hamas’ rocket arsenal to satisfy Israel’s security concerns, it will be difficult for Israel to take these talks seriously. But that would place Egypt itself right in the firing line of future conflicts. It would also fatally undermine the Morsi government.

Both sides want a negotiated end – but on terms that would leave the other side in a weaker position. Both sides are well aware of the other side’s game. In order to reach a deal, Hamas would have to recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel would have to accept something resembling a Palestinian state led by Hamas in Gaza, which would gradually take over the West Bank. Both these assumptions seem wildly improbable. It is hard to see how this contradiction can be resolved peacefully.

Hamas does not want to give up its rockets. Israel cannot allow Hamas to possess weapons that threatens its heartland. The long-range Fajr-5 rockets can reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The possession of these rockets improves Hamas’ strategic position and also serves to undermine the Palestinian National Authority (In the West Bank) vis-a-vis Hamas. They will therefore resist any deal that deprives them of the rockets. But Israel will not accept the Fajr-5 in the hands of Hamas. Netanyahu announced to his Cabinet Nov. 18 that targeted killings would not only continue, but would increase.

It is possible that all this merely means that both Israel and Hamas are trying to strengthen their negotiating positions by continuing their attacks before a cease-fire deal is struck. Be that as it may, while the leaders talk of peace, the war is already under way. And although a direct ground attack on Gaza by the Israelis has been temporarily stalled, the Israelis have already mobilized their forces and are ready to attack whenever they choose.

Although probably the Israelis would prefer not to attack because of the consequences, both in terms of human casualties and in political reverberations, they are poised to attack. And one must not assume that this is just a bluff. Netanyahu has given notice that if a truce is not agreed soon, a ground war may be launched even before the end of this week.

Gaza and the Arab Revolution

The Europeans are putting heavy pressure on Jerusalem to desist from an actual invasion of Gaza. Western capitals fear that any serious conflict in the region can spiral out of control. Though they always speak of humanitarianism, their real motives are quite different.

Paris, London and Berlin fear the effects on the price of oil and the anaemic economic recovery. Above all, they fear a new eruption of the “Arab Street”, always highly sensitive to the Palestinian cause. It is this that inspires their insistent calls for peace and restraint. But the Europeans are far too concerned in trying to halt the disintegration of the European Union to get involved with what is happening.

The same fears exist at the highest levels of the United States government. That is why Hillary Clinton is on a plane heading for Cairo. But, having burnt their fingers in Iraq, the gentlemen in Washington do not wish to be dragged into another conflagration in the Middle East.

In theory the United States can pressure Egypt by threatening to withhold financial and military aid. But in practice no US administration can oppose what Israel does because, after the Egyptian Revolution, it is now its only reliable ally in the whole region. Therefore, despite his weasel words, Obama has effectively endorsed the Israeli position.

On the broader scale, however, Israel has never been so isolated. Back in 2008, Mubarak’s Egypt could be relied upon to adopt a position of benevolent “neutrality”, which was, in practice, support for Israel. Now Mubarak has gone, and the present Egyptian government can no longer be relied upon.

In 2008 Turkey was a close ally of both the USA and Israel. But Israel’s relations with Turkey have been strained to breaking point by the attack on a Turkish ship bringing aid to Gaza in May 2010, during which several Turkish citizens were killed by Israeli troops. The Turkish Prime Minister, Erdogan, has recently denounced Israel as a “terrorist state”.

Under Assad Syria was an adversary, but at least it was a predictable one. With the chaos in Syria spreading to the Lebanon, Israel can no longer rely on Damascus to keep Hezbollah in check. Moreover, Iran has increased its influence in the region, bringing it closer to Israel and intensifying the tension over Iranian nuclear facilities.

Closer to home, the growing crisis in Gaza threatens to provoke renewed instability in the West Bank and arouse the Palestinians in Jordan. Across the Jordan River valley, to Israel’s east, the Hashemite kingdom is hanging by a thread.

But the country most directly affected is Egypt. The Egyptian government, terrified of the repercussions of a new war on the streets of Cairo, has been the most active in trying to secure a cease-fire: Cairo is hosting talks on a ceasefire, involving senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad members. It is said that Israeli officials are also present in Cairo.

The Egyptian government has a vested interest in preventing an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza because of the explosive effects inside Egypt. The Moslem Brotherhood is supposed to be aligned with Hamas. But in reality, its support is confined to hypocritical speeches about the plight of the people of Gaza. Morsi will have to promise the Israelis that he will do everything in his power to prevent weapons smuggling via Gaza. He will stand exposed before the masses.

The leaders of Hamas have the ambition of donning the mantle of “resistance” that was earlier worn by Hezbollah. They hope that the present crisis will enable them to win a symbolic “victory” over Israel. But that is an idle dream, which can end up in the complete devastation of Gaza.

The people of Gaza are increasingly desperate. They have no control over events that are destroying their lives. They hate the Israeli oppressors, but also resent the dictatorial rule of the “men with beards,” which has brought them nothing but death and suffering. Neither Hamas nor the so-called Palestinian Authority can offer any solution. Only a genuine revolutionary leadership can show the way out for the Palestinian people.

For its part, the Israeli ruling clique pretends that their aggressive actions are intended to eliminate Hamas’ arsenal of rockets and thus guarantee the safety of Israel. But with every new war, Israel becomes a less secure place. It is increasingly isolated both in the region and internationally.

These brutal attacks on Gaza have added yet another twist to the bloody imbroglio of the Palestinian question. The spectacle of death and destruction will have filled yet another generation of Palestinian youth with feelings of rage and hatred, adding fresh fuel to the fire. In what way this can be presented as making Israel safe for future generations is s mystery.

Every Palestinian child that dies in an air raid deepens the mood of bitterness and feeds the thirst for revenge. Every “victory” merely sows the seeds of new wars, new terrorist acts, new murders and atrocities. On this path lies nothing but death and destruction for all the peoples of this unhappy region.

In this struggle, the IMT stands firmly on the side of the oppressed and against the oppressors. The question of who fires the first shot and all the rest of the diplomatic sophistry is of no interest.  We stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Gaza against the barbarous onslaught of the Israeli aggressors. We will be to the forefront of every anti-war movement, protest and demonstration. We will endeavour to bring out the class content of the struggle, its anti-imperialist character. We will mercilessly expose the hypocrisy of western governments and their false “humanitarian” rhetoric.
We must build links with the most revolutionary sections of the youth in Gaza, who are fighting against imperialism and the Israeli state and also against the reactionary leadership of Hamas and the bourgeois collaborationist wing of the Palestinian leadership. Above all, we must maintain a broader perspective. The present conflict is just part of a far wider picture that encompasses the entre Middle East and cannot be understood outside this context.

The Gaza crisis is only the prelude to a far greater crisis. It is inseparably linked to Netanyahu’s plans for an air attack against Iran, which will set the entire Middle East ablaze. It will have incalculable consequences, economic, political and military. It will provoke a new wave of upheavals in the Arab world and beyond. Regimes will fall. People will take to the streets. The price of oil will go through the ceiling, and the world economy will take a nose dive, as it did in 1973 for similar reasons.

The Gaza crisis can be the match that reignites all the combustible material that has accumulated in the Middle East. It will mark a new stage in the ongoing Arab Revolution.

The stage is set for dramatic events on a world scale

Related articles

• Israeli Gunfire Kills 1 Palestinian, Wounds 19 Near Border (huffingtonpost.com)
• 1 Dead in Israeli Gunfire Near Gaza (abcnews.go.com)
• Analysis: With eye on Iran, Gaza conflict reassures Netanyahu | Reuters (reuters.com)
• Gaza crowds surge at Israel border fence, 1 dead (cnsnews.com)

Israel Planned a “Nuclear Armageddon,” New Book Shows

Israel planned a “nuclear Armageddon,” new book shows

Rod Such

The Electronic Intifada

Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country — And Why They Can’t Make Peace by former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Patrick Tyler is an unflinching history of the role of militarism in Israeli society. Tyler previously wrote A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East — from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2009), which examined how US presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush responded to events in the Middle East.

In this new work Tyler narrows his focus to the Israeli establishment. He sums up his thesis in the prologue: “Israel, six decades after its founding, remains a nation in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy, who seem ever on the hair trigger in dealing with their regional rivals, and whose contingency planners embrace worst-case scenarios that often exaggerate complex or ambiguous developments as threats to national existence. They do so, reflexively and instinctively, in order to perpetuate a system of governance where national policy is dominated by the military.”

In Fortress Israel, Tyler mines a trove of US government documents declassified in 2007, many of which were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, where Tyler is a fellow.

These documents, especially those from the administration of Richard Nixon, have received scant attention from the corporate media. Tyler also relies on interviews he conducted with many Israeli leaders, as well as secondary sources — the most prominent of which is The Iron Wall (2000), a book by the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim.

Both The Iron Wall and Fortress Israel demolish key pillars of Israel’s long-standing propaganda effort to portray itself as the perpetual victim of surrounding, hostile Arab nations. They show instead that Israel was the aggressor in nearly all of its military conflicts.

The 1956 Suez Crisis, for example, resulted from a conspiracy hatched by France, Britain, and Israel in which Israel attacked Egyptian forces so that Britain and France could pretend to intervene as “stabilizing” forces and thereby maintain control of the Suez Canal. Similarly, both studies reveal that Israel launched the 1967 war not because it believed Egypt was about to attack but because it saw an unprecedented opportunity to destroy the Egyptian army.

Imperial interests

Tyler’s research demonstrates that the Israeli elites long ago recognized the usefulness of aligning Israel with Western imperialist interests in the Middle East and openly courted the US on that basis. Although the Eisenhower administration forced the withdrawal of Britain, France and Israel from Egypt in 1956, angered that all three countries acted without its support, it soon realized that Israel represented a valuable Cold War ally — especially as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser tilted toward the Soviet Union.

But Tyler argues that whereas the Eisenhower administration acted to restrain Israel “so that it might find accommodation with its neighbors,” the Nixon administration, especially National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, sought to use Israel to achieve US interests in the Cold War.

Drawing on the 2007 documents, Tyler quotes from a 1969 memo to Nixon from Richard Helms, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, saying Israeli aggression against Egypt should be encouraged “since it benefits the West as well as Israel.” A cover note by Kissinger argued that if Nasser were toppled, any successor would lack his “charisma.”

“Hit ‘em hard”

An Israeli bombing campaign against targets deep inside Egypt followed in January 1970. In May that year Nixon told Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban and Yitzhak Rabin, then the Israeli ambassador to the US, to “let ‘em have it! Hit ‘em as hard as you can!” One of those hits had already included an Egyptian elementary school, killing 47 children.

During this same period, Tyler notes, US officials became aware that Israel was a nuclear weapons power, after years of Israeli denials. Kissinger had just received a CIA estimate that Israel possessed at least ten nuclear weapons. According to a Kissinger memo, Rabin told him there were two reasons for developing the bomb: “’first to deter the Arabs from striking Israel, and second, if deterrence fails and Israel were about to be overrun, to destroy the Arabs in a nuclear Armageddon.’”

Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons — along with the peace accord it subsequently reached with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat — established Israel as a regional superpower, Tyler notes, adding that Israel reluctantly agreed to recognize Palestinian national rights as part of that accord. At the same time, he writes, the Israeli military establishment was determined to remain independent of the great powers and never allow them “to become the arbiters of peace.”

Nakba overlooked

Tyler demonstrates convincingly that the Israeli military often either ignored or overrode civilian authority. Although numerous examples support his thesis that the military is the dominant force in Israeli politics, he provides insufficient evidence to indicate that there were ever any substantive strategic differences between Israel’s civilian and military leaders in relation to the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He overemphasizes the “sabra [native born] culture” within the military as the wellspring of Israeli militarism, failing to note that Israel’s civilian leaders, even though many were not sabras, nevertheless were strategically aligned with Israel’s principal military ambition — to erase Palestine from the map.

But perhaps the book’s most significant failing is that it ignores the Nakba (catastrophe), the systematic ethnic cleansing that led to Israel’s foundation in 1948. This omission tends to frame the narrative as simply an ethnic conflict among nation-states rather than a conflict between a Palestinian national liberation struggle and a racist settler-colonial state.

To his credit, Tyler ultimately does address the core issue — the suppression of Palestinian national rights. He suggests Israel’s military elites may be determined to keep Palestinians permanently subjugated under occupation. However, his one-sided focus on the military obscures the role of Zionist ideology and its grip on both civilian and military elites.

Even the two-state solution favored by “liberal” Zionists anticipates the ongoing second-class status of Palestinians in Israel and the denial of refugees’ right of return. Ultimately, this is why the Israeli elites cannot make peace. Instead of envisioning a peace based on human rights, they can only propose a “peace” based on violence.

Rod Such is a freelance writer and former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He is a member of the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign and Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights.

Related articles

• Two new resources: Timeline of Israeli escalation in Gaza and Israel’s history of breaking ceasefires (mondoweiss.net)
• Viewpoints: In Gaza, it’s time to move beyond the tired status quo (sacbee.com)
• The Anguish Of Being A Jew Now (mjayrosenberg.com)
• Who Is Winning In Gaza? (mjayrosenberg.com)