In today's New York Times, Ethan Bronner writes that the United States AND JAPAN consider the settlements legal.

The United States and Japan take no stand on the settlements’ legality, according to spokesmen of their embassies in Israel, although they oppose them on policy grounds.

I checked with the Japanese Embassy, which proceeded to check with the Japanese government. It got back to me a few minutes later [on Friday afternoon]: Of course it's a lie: the Japanese government considers the settlements illegal. Poor Bronner, sitting in his Jerusalem office, calling up every consulate in the phone book starting with the A's trying to find just one other country that considers the settlements as legal. He gets to the J's, calls Japan, and you know how polite the Japanese are. So, Bronner probably pleads, "Don't you agree with the United States that the settlements are legal, although OF COURSE they are an obstacle to peace?" And the Japanese are just too considerate to hurt Bronner's feelings, so they say, "Well, yes, they are an obstacle to peace." Bronner, thrilled that he's finally found ONE other country that agrees (sort of) with the U.S. (even if the U.S. judge on the ICJ [International Court of Justice], Thomas Buergenthal, agreed with the other 14 judges on the court that the settlements are illegal) rushes into print that the U.S. AND JAPAN say the settlements are legal. But it ain't so Ethan. You'll just have to go back to the phone book and start ringing up more embassies. Here's a hint: you might have better luck with the N's, as in...Nauru. By the way, Ethan, when you issue the correction, you might also mention that according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the settlements are not just illegal but a WAR CRIME. So every time your son protects a settlement, he's an accessory to a war crime.

{ 0 comments }

Annie’s awakenings

by annie on October 16, 2010 · 0 comments

Weiss asked annie, who often posts here, how she came to the Israel/Palestine issue:

well, my i/p connection came about strickly because of my introduction to the internet. in 2003, i was heading off to thailand/india/europe w/ my son and wanted a cheap way to contact people back home and heard email addresses were free so i got one thru msn.com which we already had because my son was on the internet. then i took a little class at the neighborhood community center in ballard (seattle) which was attended by mostly people over 70 because everyone else in seattle was already on the internet.

so, in class i found the msn homepage and typed my name in the search to find my email account. imagine my surprise when my gallery appeared with photos of my art on it. i was in shock. i already had an internet presence. within a matter of days my friend told me i could read the nyt online (because i was a news junkie, but only seattle times and seattle post intelligencer or local papers wherever i was on the planet. i don't get my news from tv). that first day upon learning i could read the nyt for free i discovered paul krugman. a little googling of his name landed me on atrios (blogger) who linked to billmon. my first day on the internet!

it was thru reading billmon and other linked blogs/commenters ravenously those next few years israel first came into my radar. it was thru those blogs i first was linked to mondoweiss. i blogged about the iraq war for years. it was cheney and the neocons and their attention towards all things israel that put israel on my map along w/billmon and some jewish/arab posters at that site. i didn't even know who what where palestine was before any of that.

i knew nothing, that's how quiet israel was in my world for most of my life. when i was a teen i heard about the kibbutzes and thought it would be so cool to go live on one. i had no idea there was another people there. when i finally got to israel/gaza/WB w/code pink (the trip i introduced myself to you in the basement of that hotel in gaza, you probably don't remember) was actually the first time on that trip, if you can believe this, i ever actually grokked there were as many palestinians in is/palestine as there were jews. i thought they were a minority before that.

{ 0 comments }

Is Israel a good counter-terrorism role model for the US? This question has been on my mind ever since the morning of September 12, 2001, when professors in two consecutive lecture classes told us first-year law students that we needn’t worry, that they had been talking to friends in Israel, friends who knew just what we were going through because they deal with terrorism all the time, and that we’d get through it just like they did, whether with tighter airport security or with other measures. We’d get through this just like the Israelis do every day. This was intended as a soothing reassurance, and taken as such by many students. 

I found it disturbing. Do we really need to start living like Israelis? In constant tension with neighboring countries, in a state of permanent national emergency, under constant threat of terrorist attack? Do we really want to be the defiant practitioner of many policies—assassination and preventive detention for instance—that most of our peer nations profess to abhor? (We americanos used to officially abhor them too in that sepia-toned decade before 9-11.) Beefed-up airport security has indeed come to pass, a farce and a headache. Overall, not my idea of the good life.

Last week I went back to NYU for a short conference, “Democracies and National Security: The American and Israeli Experiences,” sponsored by NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies and an Israeli outfit called the Israel Democracy Institute. 

[read the full article…]

{ 9 comments }

Two related articles of note. First, from ynet, a new poll finds that 36% of Israeli Jews want to revoke voting rights for Palestinian citizens. Of course, this exclusion would represent a change only for the 1.4 million or so Palestinians who are citizens, and not the 4 million Palestinians under occupation who have no say in the regime that rules over them.

The number 36% is shockingly high, and indicates that Israel’s rightward shift in the government is a reasonably accurate reflection of its constituents’ sentiment. Will this growing trend translate into policy? Palestinians comprise about 20% of the Israeli electorate, and as long as the non-Jewish population remains at a safe level, with zero chance of Palestinians gaining a significant voice in how the country is run, there is nothing to gain by stripping them of the right to vote; on the other hand, any pretense of democracy would be obliterated. But with the whiff of loyalty oaths in the air, and even forcible “transfer” openly discussed as a possibility, who knows?

That 20% figure will inch upward in coming decades because of a higher birthrate, and at some point, something will have to be done to “save” Israel as a supposed Jewish and democratic state. The demographic time bomb is a lively topic of discussion, and no doubt many are preparing to lay the groundwork to defuse it, even if it means risking international condemnation, which Israel always manages to weather until the storm passes.

How troublesome is this descent into unabashed racism? It’s hard to evaluate. Any change that makes things more difficult for Palestinians, both citizens and non-, is surely a change for the worse. However, Israel’s international legitimacy has always depended on a veneer of respectability. Many articulate the position that Israel’s noble experiment, and the moral righteousness of its founding generation, have been corrupted by today’s leaders. There is a longing for the good old days when Israel truly was a moral beacon for the world, a noble revival of a people from the brink of annihilation.

This myth remains quite persistent, despite the abundance of evidence that from the start, the Jewish State was conceived and realized only through racist dismissal of the indigenous population. As Israel’s racism becomes more and more brazen and unapologetic, the immaculate conception myth recedes further into history, and the necessity of compelling its people to accept fundamental 21st century norms of racial/ethnic equality becomes clearer.

But bad news cannot be welcomed on the theory that it will provoke a pendulum swing. Which brings us to the second article, on Israel’s budding citizenship law, which requires non-Jewish applicants for citizenship to swear an oath of loyalty to the Jewish and democratic state, as if repetition by enough people could transform an oxymoron into reality. It turns out that the law, which has application to a very limited number of people, will have one prominent victim: journalist Jonathan Cook, who is married to a Palestinian citizen and has a pending application for citizenship himself.

Cook writes about his dilemma in facing this new law and eloquently dissects the law itself. As others have pointed out here, Cook warns that this is probably just the first step toward requiring Israel’s non-Jewish citizenry to swear the same oath upon penalty of loss of citizenship and voting rights, which brings us back to the new poll regarding disenfranchising Palestinians.

{ 7 comments }

This coming Sunday, "60 Minutes" will go to Silwan, the neighborhood just outside the walls of the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem that Jews are colonizing. The trailer suggests that she will put some emphasis on the biblical stories that rightwingers tell themselves to justify the landgrab. The Brook Kidron, etc. Though the trailer ends with that shocking video of the settler in his car upending two Palestinian boys in the road in Silwan as they threw rocks. I am told that Stahl turned to Ir Amim for her reporting, the group that wants to share Jerusalem, and that offers some hope that she will expose the occupation in all its gory.

{ 6 comments }

Every other day, the IDF kills a Palestinian civilian with impunity in the occupied territories. And the Israelis have treated these killings as "combat action," reports B'Tselem in a report on Israeli military killings in the occupied territories, 2006-2009, not including the Gaza war.

From 2006 to 2009, the IDF killed 1,510 Palestinians, not including Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead. Of these 1,510 deaths, 617 were of persons who were not taking part in hostilities.

Regarding these 617 fatalities, BʹTselem demanded an MPIU [Military Police Investigation Unit] investigation into the deaths of 288 of them, who were killed in 148 incidents. Ninety‐five of these incidents occurred in the Gaza Strip, accounting for 230 of the deaths. The other 53 incidents took place in the West Bank and resulted in the killing of 58 Palestinians. One hundred and four of the fatalities were minors under age 18, 23 were persons 50 and above, and 52 were women. One hundred of the Palestinians whose deaths B’Tselem demanded to investigate were killed in 2006, 86 in 2007, 93 in 2008, and 9 in 2009.

Stephen Lendman's comment:

Most are witnessed by bystanders whose testimonies are crucial to achieve justice. Yet Israel won't use them, clearly hiding the truth and obstructing justice.

[read the full article…]

{ 17 comments }

The plan

by Philip Weiss on October 15, 2010 · 11 comments

This is the new neoconservative echo-chamber. Marty Peretz at the New Republic has adopted Jeffrey Goldberg's tactic (and Michael Oren's too): to rattle the sword for Americans to hear and so give our permission to Israel to bomb Iran:

Iran now has three frontiers with Israel. The line with Gaza, patrolled by Hamas. The line with Syria proper. And the line with Lebanon which is not Lebanon at all. But Hezbollah land. These are all unstable fields of battle. Israel may be forced to deal directly with Iran itself.


 

{ 11 comments }

and other news from Today in Palestine

[read the full article…]

{ 0 comments }

Good reporting at the Forward, by Joy Resmovits, on Columbia U. opening a new Center for Palestine Studies. No funding for it, though note the appearance of filmmaker James Schamus, who is Jewish, near the end of the story. I wonder why the Forward did not call Columbia alum Robert Kraft, who gives a ton of money to Jewish causes and to dialogue causes, and ask why he isn't ponying.

The piece contains in the negative the shadow possibility (which I sense even at AIPAC with its blind generosity), that two Jewish American traditions, rachmones (or compassion) and wealth, might actually at last be turned like a spigot on the only critical-moral real-world object of Jewish attention, the Palestinians, whom we have done so much to dispossess, dishonor and disfigure. I believe naively and faithfully, that some day that will happen, because the Schamus's are defeating the Foxman's, slowly.

“We have absolutely no money,” Rashid Khalidi, the center’s co-director, told a packed audience at the launch event, attended, among others, by some notable supporters from the campus Jewish community. The center is now funded through Columbia’s Middle East Institute. In an interview, Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature, expounded on his hopes for the center. “We’d like to have post-docs, be able to bring students here from Palestinian universities and fund research,” he said. “I’d like to give Palestinian universities the sense that they’re not so isolated.”

[read the full article…]

{ 5 comments }

This website is necessary because there is a crisis in Israel and Palestine in which the U.S. is implicated, and American Jews as well. Writes a friend from occupied East Jerusalem:

Did whites in Jim Crow country call blacks "ANIMAL" to their faces? A soldier said that to me, in Arabic, today. To be humiliated for no good reason...

{ 22 comments }

Spade, duck, fowl, apartheid, ghetto

by Eva Smagacz15 October 2010

 Lets talk about spades.
Did you know that  saying “calling a spade a spade” may have originated as an early response to political correctness? When “black as an ace of spades” was a saying in use, it was describing a black person by his/her skin colour.  It was also stating the obvious. 
Now lets pinch this delightful [...]

4 comments

When you lose Yglesias…

by Philip Weiss15 October 2010

Another striking paragraph below from Matt Yglesias, who’s clearly not buying the Fayyad magic, observing that he has “no democratic legitimacy.” Yglesias has come a long way since this (the idea of expelling Palestinians) and this (his tweeted desire to have an “I’m Jewish too!” sticker to wear in Israel). He has lately made the [...]

7 comments

ADL concession: JVP and ISM and SJP are affecting the ‘mainstream discussion’

by Philip Weiss15 October 2010

The crisis continues. Recognizing the significance of the movement questioning the policies of Israel inside American and Jewish life now , the Anti-Defamation League has compiled a list of the “top ten anti-Israel groups” in the U.S. It includes many good organizations, among them the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Students for Justice in Palestine, Friends [...]

2 comments

When will Americans be informed of what is stirring in Israel?

by Philip Weiss14 October 2010

This is reportedly a Gush Shalom ad in Haaretz:
A state
That declares war
On a fifth
Of its citizens –
Can it be called “Democratic”?
A state
That persecutes
Its minority –
Can it be called “Jewish”?
Tomorrow, Saturday evening, we shall demonstrate against the racist laws. Starting at 7.00 pm from Gan [...]

35 comments

The yearly settler festival of destroying the Palestinians’ olive trees and orchards

by Seham14 October 2010

and other news from Today in Palestine

1 comment

Brooklyn-Jenin: ‘The Messiah will only come the day after his arrival.’

by Udi Aloni14 October 2010

Jenin State of Emergency: Subject
I finished off my last post with a heartfelt cry to the residents of the Occupation Matrix to help Mustafa get to New York, for a film festival which could dramatically promote him, and help establish a cinema center for young Palestinians at the Jenin refugee camp.
And indeed, the best of [...]

5 comments

Blogging for the enemy

by Yonah Fredman14 October 2010

The author has done a couple of earlier posts. First here, then here.
 
With this post I include my name and not just my nom de blog, wondering jew.
 

Weeks ago when I informed a right wing Israeli friend of mine that I had visited a West Bank settlement for a Shabbat, he commented that unlike [...]

145 comments

‘The Palestinians have won’

by Philip Weiss14 October 2010

A friend in Jerusalem just told me: The Israelis won’t negotiate because they won’t give up land. They’ll fudge and fret but this time their intransigence will be made plain to the world. The world is behind the ‘67 borders, and Israel can’t go near that position. The world sees that. And the Palestinians have [...]

84 comments

Can you support the Palestinians when you live on their stolen land?

by Joseph Glatzer14 October 2010

Every time I would tell my girlfriend (she’s Palestinian) about a famous Israeli activist or writer or she would ask why they still call themselves Israeli. She tells me things like, “See. They still call themselves Israeli. When they use that word they are automatically erasing Palestine.”
I always used to argue with her over that [...]

29 comments

Cold Turkey

by Philip Weiss14 October 2010

Amazing that it was once controversial for Mearsheimer and Walt to write The Israel Lobby. They drove the golden spike of mental connection, and now hundreds of us journalists can fly across state lines without thinking about it. Here is Jonathan Broder, CQ Staff, writing about the ferocious response of American Jewish groups to Turkey [...]

22 comments

Donna Edwards’s pro-Israel identity

by Philip Weiss14 October 2010

Good reporting by the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo on the Donna Edwards flap we reported on yesterday. Notice the pressure on gritty tough Donna Edwards to toe the line. I think you can’t bend that lady’s mind; so t’s inevitable that we’re going to have a conversation about one state in the media, which [...]

6 comments

Jewish groups seek to bar Abunimah from campus

by Ali Abunimah14 October 2010

Editors’ note: You don’t think BDS is having an effect? Here two New Mexico Jewish org officials seek to smear Ali Abunimah as an anti-Semite, and bar him from speaking, because he supports BDS, which they say is about demonizing and destroying Israel. Laughably, they say that describing Israel as a colonial project is anti-Semitic. [...]

18 comments

Judt’s beautiful bloody mind

by Philip Weiss14 October 2010

Last night the family of Tony Judt held a memorial service at NYU for the historian, who died at 62 in August, and I got a sense of Judt’s spirit from the movie excerpts that his family had picked out to play: scenes of class humiliation and lawlessness from The Bicycle Thief and 400 Blows, [...]

11 comments

They up and died!

by Philip Weiss14 October 2010

Ethan Bronner writes in the New York Times today about Avigdor Lieberman:

But he also started to resent being sidelined. When, for example, relations with Turkey reached a crisis level after nine people died in May in Israel’s raid on a Turkish flotilla, Mr. Netanyahu sent Trade Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer to see Turkey’s [...]

22 comments

Last man out of mine greets Chilean president with fervent statement about worker safety

by Philip Weiss13 October 2010

I’m a fool for the Chilean mine story, I’ve watched a lot of the rescue. It has produced in me the warm fuzzy global feeling that the story has been staged to produce as international spectacle; and yes I’ve wondered about the political consequences of this historic event.
Well I just saw Manuel Gonzalez come out, [...]

19 comments

Groundwork laid for media narrative of failed peace talks: It’s the Palestinians’ fault

by Alex Kane13 October 2010

With direct “peace talks” between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government headed nowhere fast after the Netanyahu government let the so-called “settlement freeze” lapse, the groundwork for the media narrative on who to blame if the “peace talks” officially break off is being laid. Predictably, it will be, and already is, a narrative [...]

47 comments

Gaza man, 26, dies of heart disease after waiting weeks for an exit permit

by Seham13 October 2010

and other news from Today in Palestine:

0 comments

‘Budrus’ on Charlie Rose, and the Israel lobby on ‘the Good Wife’

by Andrea Whitmore13 October 2010

I’ve taken to watching Charlie Rose online since it comes on too late here in Kansas City for me to stay awake, and I hate to miss it. Night before last (October 11), the same night that Andrew Sullivan appeared, Charlie also interviewed Brazilian filmmaker Julia Bacha and Jordan’s Queen Noor about the documentary Budrus. [...]

29 comments