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.
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.
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…]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.
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.
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…]
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.
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…]
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...
