And other news from Today in Palestine:
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When Berkeley's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter (comprised of Jews, Palestinians, and many other diverse folks) launched a campaign to persuade the University of California student government and the UC Regents to divest from companies that profit from Israel's occupation and war crimes, we discovered that the American Jewish establishment was giving out prepared talking points to our opponents. And so young Jewish students were compelled to parrot "Israel: Right or Wrong" propagandistic distortions and outright lies during the public debate on the divestment bill.
Where does this propaganda come from, exactly?
At the General Assembly in New Orleans, I found out the answer: groups like The David Project, and characters like Doctor Delegitimizer.
I interviewed one of the leaders of The David Project, whose name happened to be David. He spoke to me about how the David Project is deploying "a mythic figure" named Dr. Delegitimizer (apparently an adult in a costume!) who will attack Israel on such grounds as that it prevents Palestinians from having equal rights, and thereby train young Jews to tell a pro-Israel tall tale. Check out the video, above, which would be preposterously funny if the consequences of these lies weren't such severe suffering for the Palestinian people. One key clip, which I think says it all:
Q: Critics say all of the settlements being built in the West Bank, all of the land being taken from the Palestinians, makes the two state solution impossible. That delegitimizes the whole idea that Israel is interested in a two state solution. Your response?
A: Israel has offered to not only end settlements, but to dismantle settlements. It did so at Camp David, it did so again just two years ago under Olmert. If you look at the geography, the actual [territorial] footprint of the settlements hasn't expanded in the West Bank lately...
Unfortunately I didn't capture footage of Dr. D in action -- I was too busy preparing to protest Netanyahu's speech -- but David's comments paint quite the picture.
David, I love you as a brother...even when I disagree, I do my best to maintain my feelings of respect for you as a fellow human being. So please don't take this personally: Your comment about settlements is absolutely false. Over the past decade, the footprint of the settlements has expanded massively. Just look at all the land confiscated from villages like Bil'in, to make way for the expanded settlement Matityahu East, and so many others. The Land Grab Wall is built illegally inside the West Bank, not on the green line, confiscating a significant portion of the West Bank land that the entire international community sees as rightfully and legally part of a Palestinian state. Additionally, what about all the Palestinians being ethnically cleansed, including children, in occupied East Jerusaelm? And serious journalistic investigation has thoroughly -- well, what can I say -- delegitimized the mythological narrative of the "generous offer" at Camp David.
Doctor Delegitimizer (and The David Project) needs to get his license revoked. Doctor Delegitimizer is doing the same thing as all the other "Israel: Right or Wrong" cheerleaders: enabling Israel's addiction to land theft and colonization. He needs to get into a truth telling rehabilitation program so he can help Israel to end its cruel, self-destructive policies, so we can have true equality, safety, and dignity for all Israelis and Palestinians.
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Josh Nathan-Kazis reports in the Forward from New Orleans that the Jewish leadership is not really interested in hearing from Israel's critics, or even from young Jews:
Communal leaders said that their effort to bring students to the conference undercut protesters’ complaints about exclusion. “The community gets it right when it says we’re not just giving you a symbolic presence, but we’re inviting you into the discussion,” said Wayne Firestone, president of Hillel.
But one Hillel student pointed out that although Hillel professionals spoke on G.A. panels, no undergraduate students were included as speakers.
And though conference leaders claimed to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from delegitimization, the panels promoted as addressing the issue contained no public critics of Israeli policy. The audience heard instead from Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz and from representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the right-leaning Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
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To its credit, the Times faults Netanyahu in its editorial on the peace process today. I was shocked by the news in this editorial that Hillary Clinton spent 7 hours with Netanyahu on Thursday. What's that about? Isn't it time to freeze Netanyahu? This is reminiscent of the fact revealed in Clayton Swisher's Camp David book that Ehud Barak had an open line to Bill Clinton throughout 2000. And why was that, do you think? An election year, in which Hillary was running for New York Senate. This is why the peace process is doomed in its present form, structurally undermined by the conservative Jewish prominence in the Establishment... Even The Times knows that Netanyahu is trespassing in our politics, giving speeches all over the U.S.:
[He is] counting on his newly empowered Republican allies on Capitol Hill to back him up, no matter what he does. Since last week’s American elections, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has published plans for 1,000 new housing units
Yes and why does he have this power? The Times warns that if this process fails, extremists will take over. Excuse me but if Netanyahu is coddling his coalition-- loyalty oaths, transfer, second-class citizenship-- those are extremists, getting blind support from the American Jewish leadership.
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One of the most devastating pieces of information we learned this year was Yonatan Shapira's revelation, in an Upper West Side church, that while Israel has fostered the creation of hundreds of new Israeli towns since 1948, no Palestinian towns have been founded, evidence of rampant discrimination. Below is a report from occupied East Jerusalem-- which Israel annexed in 1970 and considers part of Israel-- that shows the racial discrimination. Note that the neighborhood of Isawiya (also spelled Issawiyya) neighbors Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood that is now being colonized by Jews.
Yuri Pines wrote the report. Ofer Neiman translated it from Hebrew.
Background: The village of Isawiya is located just below the Hebrew University campus on Mt. Scopus, near the French Hill neighborhood. Between 16-18,000 people reside in the village nowadays (many – immigrants from more remote neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and some – holders of West Bank ID cards). The village suffers severe neglect; the municipality refuses to authorize the new master plan submitted in the name of the residents by the Bimkom association; infrastructure is crumbling, sanitary conditions are very bad, and there is a general sense of extreme deprivation and contempt about the municipality’s treatment of Isawiya.
The most salient manifestation of this attitude is the fate of the little playground built by the municipality in the village a decade ago (at the request of the French Hill administration – to dissuade the village children from going to the neighborhood’s playgrounds). After five years of leasing the plot, the municipality dismantled the facility in its entirety, leaving behind an ugly desolate plot in the entrance to the village. Contempt for the village and dereliction of municipal duties towards its inhabitants are nowadays more evident than in the past. Land that was once slated for development is now being slated for “natural reserve”/”national park” use; there is no minimal urban planning and driving on the village roads requires acrobatic skills.
The situation in Isawiya began to deteriorate last Friday (5 November) when the local youths stoned a Jewish vehicle which came (apparently by accident) within the boundaries of the village. As a result of this, the police decided "to teach the village a lesson" in the manner remembered by many of us from the first years of the Second Intifada. What follows are some of the actions of the police over the past two days:
* Renewed blockage of alleys and roads (licensed and unlicensed) which link the village with the outside world. New concrete road-blocks have been set up, and in a few places bulldozers have dug trenches and raised ramparts of earth in order to prevent movement in and out.
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Dum Spiro Spero: “While I breathe I hope” is South Carolina’s state motto. With that in mind, it was unsettling to hear Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina call for military action against Iran from, of all places, the Canadian Maritimes.
“The last thing America wants is another military conflict, but the last thing the world needs is a nuclear-armed Iran... Containment is off the table,” the Agence France-Presse quoted Graham as saying in Halifax. This week’s calls for ratcheting up the military option with Iran have an odd geographic discordance to them.
While a senator of the south was in foggy Nova Scotia, Israeli’s Benyamin Netanyahu was in humid New Orleans.
“Containment against Iran won’t work,” Netanyahu told the Jewish Federations of North America, echoing his American friend.
In the wake of the mid-term elections, it feels like a pile on — a version of “when did you stop beating your wife?” When, President Obama, did you become soft on potentially nuclear-armed Holocaust denying sponsors of terrorism who want to obliterate Israel and the West?
These containment-dismissers follow veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder and his suggestion of an invigorating war with Iran to get the country into the swing of things and to raise Obama’s poll numbers for 2012.
Even the recent WikiLeaks document-drop on Iraq has been used to rationalize belligerence. The New York Times focused on Iran; Michael Gordon and Andrew Lehren filed a 2,267-word front-page piece detailing various border skirmishes and intelligence that suggested various Shiite insurgents were being trained and armed by elite Iranians.
Der Spiegel, meanwhile, in its English-language International on-line edition, devoted about a paragraph or two to Iran, of an entirely different flavor:
“The special attention the Americans were paying to weapons shipments from Iran reads more like a deliberate search for proof that Iran was one of the main supporters of the Shiite militias in Iraq, especially given the relatively sporadic discoveries of such weapons. The reports do show, however, that such weapons shipments existed. Nevertheless, the documents offer no evidence that the government in Tehran controlled the arms trade centrally.”
The Guardian had a similar response to how U.S. publications reacted to the WikiLeaks revelations:
“Much of the U.S. press also focused on the claim that the WikiLeaks papers supported the former president George Bush’s claim that the war in Iraq was severely complicated by Iran’s covert role. The Washington Times said the leaked documents showed ‘Iran was orchestrating one side of the Iraqi insurgency.’”
And, back in July when the first WikiLeaks material was published, the Weekly Standard made the most of reports in the Guardian of various alleged collaborations between al Qaeda and Iran.
“One of the more interesting aspects of the WikiLeaks document dump is the persistence of intelligence reports indicating collusion between al Qaeda, al Qaeda-affiliated parties, and Iran.”
The same Standard article went on to qualify that it could not vouch for the veracity of the reports.
Arthur Brisbane, the current Public Editor for the Times, offered an email from Executive Editor Bill Keller to explain in part the venerable paper’s choices with WikiLeaks:
"‘We chose the documents that struck us as most interesting,’ Mr. Keller said in an e-mail message. ‘We did our own analysis of the material. We decided what to write. We did not discuss any of those matters with WikiLeaks, or give them an advance look at our stories.’”
With all this impatience with containment, one must ask: what’s the rush? Iran is a country of 72 million people and not yet a single nuclear weapon. The world lived nearly a half a century with a Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear warheads. Not to mention China, India, Pakistan and Israel herself.
Stemming the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a noble aim, but the proliferation of heated exhortations that could needlessly spark another ill-starred cataclysm in the Middle East feels like the clearer, and more present, danger.
Voskamp is the editor of the Block Island Times.
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The latest New York Review of Books has a great piece by James McPherson about Eric Foner's new biography of Abraham Lincoln that emphasizes the transformation of Lincoln's view of blacks, especially during the Civil War. The piece is behind a fire wall, but let me summarize its main points:
Lincoln was born and grew up in strongly pro-slavery country (KY, IN) and it is a sign of the majesty of his mind that he maintained a hatred of slavery through his youth and adulthood. Slavery was evil, he said often.
That belief was compatible in his mind with the belief that blacks were not the equals of whites, and indeed that slavery as an institution must be tolerated for the sake of peace, though of course he said as a failed Senate candidate in 1858 that he would "place it [slavery] where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction..."
Even as president, Lincoln subscribed to a policy of ethnic cleansing, or transfer, to use the phrases we use today. He was for the "colonization" of blacks, their return to Africa (Liberia).
And yet, according to Foner, Lincoln "began during the last two years of the war to imagine an interracial future for the United States."
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