I’d like to start by thanking those readers who supported Informed Comment last year in our annual fundraiser. Your contributions made several important trips possible.
I spent much of the months of June through August in Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt. Tunisia and Egypt were research trips, Spain was a jumping off point because of conferences there. Ironically, Spain is having its own popular youth protests, which I saw in Barcelona, Toledo and Madrid before going on to the Middle East.
Why would the Israeli government bite the hand that feeds it, and risk insulting the American Jewish community this way? The real issue here is demographics, that is, it is about Israel’s population war with the Palestinians. It is a war that Israel is losing.
There are hundreds of thousands of first- and second-generation Israelis in the United States, and the Likud Party wants them back. That is the point of the offensive commercials.
The advertisements for re-immigration to Israel have the same rationale as Israel’s campaign against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. A third of Israelis say in polls that they would leave the country if Iran got an atomic bomb. There could be a panicked out-migration. Trying to stop an Iranian bomb is key to retaining Israel’s Jewish population (which finds it nerve-wracking to try to live in a hostile Middle East), just as the ads were thought key to attracting migrants out of Israel to return home.
[pdf] There are about 7.8 million Israelis, including 5.8 million Jewish-Israelis and 1.6 million Palestinian-Israelis (there are also three hundred thousand persons who are simply not Jewish. Within this group, there are some whose mothers were not Jewish and so are not counted officially as Jews, even though they might consider themselves Jewish and hold Israeli citizenship. Others have no claim on Jewishness at all. Neither group is being allowed to convert in any numbers by the Chief Rabbi).
Over time, the proportion of Palestinian-Israelis in the population will rise, and the number of Jews who do not strongly identify with Israel will likely do so, as well. Ian Lustick has argued that [pdf] in recent years the number of Jews who departed Israel probably equaled or exceeded the number who came in, so immigration as a method of retaining a Jewish majority is no longer viable.
Lustick [pdf] also quotes Israeli officials who estimate that up to a million Israelis live outside that country, some 600,000 in North America. Both Israel’s present and its future would look a lot different if Israel could entice these expatriates back. That was the point of the ads. Obviously, if Israeli-Americans intermarry with and assimilate into the Jewish-American community, they are unlikely to return to Israel in any numbers; indeed, if their children adopt Jewish-American ways and intermarry at high rates with non-Jews, a large proportion of their descendants wouldn’t even be eligible for full citizenship as Jews in Israel.
There are no further big Jewish communities that are likely to emigrate to Israel. Few American Jews want to live there. Some 50 percent of American Jews marry out into other communities, something that cannot even be done inside Israel. My suspicion is that more Israelis emigrate to Europe nowadays than European Jews emigrate to Israel. The Israeli Jews of European ancestry (Ashkenazim) and most of those originally from the Middle East (Mizrahim) have increasingly small families. An estimated 70-80 percent of Israeli Jews have other passports, just in case they need to jump ship, and a quarter of all Israeli academics live abroad.
The two populations in Israel with the youngest median age and the greatest likelihood of increase in numbers in the future are the Palestinian-Israelis and the Haredis or ultra-Orthodox Jews. These two groups will, through the 21st century, eclipse the Ashkenazi or European Jews, as well as the non-Haredi Eastern Jews. By 2030, 55% of Israeli school children will likely be either Palestinian-Israeli or Haredi, and they will be 47% of 15-19 year-olds, as well. (See this paper [pdf] by Richard P. Cincotta and Eric Kaufmann.) That is, by 2050 or 2060, if current growth rates continue and no dramatic changes take place in their political status, Palestinian-Israelis and Haredis will comprise a majority of voters outside the elderly.
Note that I am speaking of Israel proper, leaving aside the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel is likely also to inherit, since it won’t give them a state of their own. But leave that issue aside for the moment.
The problem for Israeli nationalists is that neither Palestinian-Israelis nor Haredim are typically Zionists. The Ultra-Orthodox often reject the legitimacy of the state of Israel because they believe only the Messiah can establish a Jewish state and rule Jerusalem, and it is hubris for secular Zionists to make the attempt.
Palestinian-Israelis will probably be 30% of the Israeli population by 2030. Although they would not get along with Haredim on most issues, both communities avoid service in the Israeli army (with the exception among Palestinians of the Druze). Neither will be dutiful taxpayers. An Israel made up of a joint majority of Palestinian-Israelis and Haredis will be militarily and financially weak.
Hence the desperate propaganda attempt by PM Binyamin Netanyahu to convince the 600,000 Israeli-Americans and Israeli-Canadians to come home, and to avoid the taint of the soft deracinated (as the ads imply) Jewish-Americans.
In a globalizing world, the Likud Party’s frantic attempts to craft and maintain a Jewish Israel are probably doomed. They are doomed even if Israel is not forced ultimately to absorb the stateless Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, which it is highly likely to be forced to do over the long run. One could even imagine a Palestinian-Israeli and liberal Jewish-Israeli majority of 55 percent voting in the Palestinians in 2030 so as to avoid further economic boycotts (which will likely burgeon by then as Israeli Apartheid becomes less and less acceptable). In the US, non-Latino whites are already a minority in California, and will be in the whole country by 2050. Askhenazi Jews, like other white people, will just have to get used to not being in charge all the time.
I sometimes talk to Muslim audiences. There is often an FBI agent in the audience and sometimes an ACLU representative. Maz Jobrani suggested at one such event that everyone else leave and let the two of them talk. Now it turns out that the agents often are there gathering information on participants and storing it, even though it is legal for American Muslims to have a public dinner together. The ACLU is blowing the whistle on these FBI practices. Obviously, Muslim groups may be increasingly reluctant to invite agents (done anyway on the unreasonable grounds that law enforcement needs to be reassured about a perfectly peaceful and loyal American community).
FBI Storing Information on Activities Protected by the First Amendment, Memos Obtained by ACLU Show
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The FBI has been illegally using its community outreach programs to secretly collect and store information about activities protected by the First Amendment for intelligence purposes, according to FBI documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“The trust that community outreach efforts aim to create is undermined when the FBI exploits these programs to gather intelligence on the very members of the religious and community organizations agents are meeting with,” said Michael German, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former FBI agent. “The FBI should be honest with community organizations about what information is being collected during meetings and purge any improperly collected information.”
FOIA documents showing instances of inappropriate intelligence gathering include:
• San Francisco FBI memos, written in 2007 and 2008 by agents who attended Ramadan Iftar dinners under the guise of the FBI’s mosque outreach program, documenting participants’ names, conversations and presentations. The 2008 memo also recorded participants’ contact information and descriptions of their opinions and associations.
• A 2009 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing FBI participation in a career day sponsored by an Assyrian community organization. Agents detailed conversations with three community leaders and members about their opinions, backgrounds and charitable activities.
• A 2007 San Jose, Calif. FBI memo describing a mosque outreach meeting attended by 50 people representing 27 Muslim community and religious organizations, identifying each person by name and organization and analyzing their “demographics.”
“Except under certain special circumstances, the Privacy Act bars the FBI from maintaining records like these describing how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Congress passed this law to prevent records obtained by the government for one purpose from being used for another reason without a person’s consent, but that is precisely what the FBI has done.”
There is no indication in the FOIA documents that community members were informed that the FBI’s outreach activities were used for intelligence gathering purposes or could be potentially used to target these people and their organizations for investigations.
One of the organizations whose members were noted attending the mosque outreach meeting was the Muslim Community Association (MCA). “Like all Americans, we want to help the FBI. Now we feel betrayed,” said MCA Board Secretary Isa Shaw. “We support the idea of building trust through FBI community outreach programs, but the government should not be taking advantage of it to violate our First Amendment rights like this.”
The ACLU is calling on the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate Privacy Act violations in the FBI’s San Francisco and Sacramento Divisions and to initiate a broader audit of FBI practices nationwide. It is also urging the FBI to stop using community outreach for intelligence purposes, to be honest with community organizations regarding what information is collected and retained during community outreach meetings and to purge all improperly collected information.
The request for these documents was made by the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
A detailed description of examples (with links to FOIA documents) showing the FBI’s improper collection of information at community outreach meetings is available at: [this site]…
The Senate passed a war expenses appropriation bill on Thursday that appears to hold out the possibility that the military could be ordered to arrest and hold an American citizen anywhere in the world (including the US) without trial and indefinitely. Senator Lindsey Graham insisted that the move is necessary so that information can be extracted from just-arrested terrorism suspects without all that rigamarole about reading them their rights, etc.
There is no evidence that important and timely information has regularly been obtained by torture, so the whole premise of Graham’s position rests on facts not in evidence. If torture could defeat terrorism and insurgencies, the French would still be ruling Algeria. Moreover, there is no evidence that the US military is good at telling terrorists from non-terrorists. Many of those sent to Guantanamo were found to have been sold by the Taliban (a few Iraqi Shiites who had fled to Afghanistan to escape Saddam ended up at Guantanamo, even though the Taliban and al-Qaeda kill Shiites on sight).
Language was added to the bill at the last minute specifying that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” But the language also says that the military can arrest US citizens anywhere, including the US. Promises that a provision against terrorism would be somehow limited and would not be used in criminal and other cases have been made before and usually violated. Moreover, since many (but by no means all) of our politicians are apparently a bit unbalanced (something about high office must attract a disproportionate number of people with too much of one chemical and not enough of another), you can’t tell which president will get to order the troops into action and why.
This militarization of police duties in the name of counter-terrorism is a dire threat to the rule of law in the United States, and clearly unconstitutional.
We have seen with the misnamed PATRIOT Act, moreover, that once law enforcement has tools on the books, it typically does not stop at terrorism. The PATRIOT Act’s unconstitutional provision for warrantless wiretapping allowed the FBI to bust strip club owners in Las Vegas for bribing city council members, even though the bureau did not have the kind of evidence for wrong-doing that would have been needed to obtain a warrant. This was terrorism?
The point is that if you let the US military arrest Americans for terrorism, you probably are letting them arrest Americans for anything. Bradley Manning has been formally charged with aiding the enemy by releasing low-level State Department cables to Wikileaks. If you reposted one of those cables on the web or Facebook, is that treason? Could the military come after you for it? Would you also be in the brig and tortured via sleep deprivation, and in danger of being executed? (By the way, former vice president and unindicted felon Richard Bruce Cheney revealed to Iran and everyone else that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operative working to counter nuclear proliferation in Iran. That’s not “aiding the enemy”? But releasing some inconsequential cables is?)
Or what about civil disobedience tactics such as those on many of today’s college campuses and city squares, on the part of Occupy Wall Street? Couldn’t mayors just call in the military if these activities were construed as “terrorism”?
Since our Congress is now almost completely bought and paid for, it has been pushing weird acts that only benefit authoritarian politicians and some billionaire corporations recently, and which are wholly injurious to American liberties. Destruction of internet liberty is another cause apparently dear to the hearts of our plutocrats.
The British government has closed its embassy in Tehran and given Iranian diplomats two days to depart the UK. London has not severed diplomatic relations with Iran, but has reduced them to the lowest level possible without a break. Some other European countries have followed suit.
Apparently the angry students and other forces suspected the British embassy has having been behind incidents such as the killing of a nuclear scientist and the explosions at Iranian military facilities.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi admitted that Iran had a duty to protect embassies in the country, and told his Turkish counterpart that he hoped relations could get back to normal with the United Kingdom. The USG Open Source Center translates:
‘Iran’s Salehi Hopes Ties With UK To Continue ‘Normally’; Meets Davutoglu
“Davutoglu Met With Iranian Foreign Minister” — AA headline
Anatolia
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
Jedda (AA) — Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met with his Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi, in Jedda where the OIC foreign ministers are holding a meeting on Syria.
Our correspondents have learned that the two ministers discussed a variety of issues, particularly Syria. Foreign Minister Davutoglu reiterated Turkey’s stand on Syria.
At the bilateral meeting where regional developmens were also taken up, Davutoglu expressed his displeasure with the statements recently made against Turkey by certain Iranian officials. The Iranian foreign minister said he does not share the views of these officials, and that the said views do not reflect Iran’s official stand.
The two ministers also discussed the raid on the British Embassy in Tehran. Davutoglu stressed that diplomats and diplomatic representations must be protected. Ali Akbar Salehi Speaks to AA
Salehi spoke to AA about the raid on the British Embassy. He said that this was an unfortunate incident and that Iran is responsible for the protection of foreign embassies. He pointed out that he spoke with the British foreign secretary for 90 minutes on 29 November. He added: “I hope that both we and Britain will consider this incident as if it did not happen, and that our relations will continue normally from now on.”
(Description of Source: Ankara Anatolia in Turkish — Semi-official news agency; independent in content)’
Speaker of the Iranian parliament Ali Larijani spoke on the radio on Wednesday, and unlike Salehi he blamed Britain for pursuing bad relations, according to a summary by the USG Open Source Center:
‘Iran: Parliament Speaker Says UK Behavior ‘Organized Hostility’
Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 2
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 …
Document Type: OSC Summary…
Larijani was asked about the recent developments concerning ties with the United Kingdom and the position of Majles deputies over this issue. He said the problem was that Britain’s behavior towards Iran had not been justifiable in the past. He recounted Britain’s role in Iran’s history and said that after the revolution Britain had been behaving craftily trying to maintain diplomatic relations while at the same time carrying out hostile acts. Larijani described Britain’s behavior as “organized hostility.” He said: “We have no problem with the fact that they have certain objectives and would like to advance them. Every country has some objectives. But they cannot cunningly hide their hostility under the guise of political diplomacy.”
He said in the recent events, Britain’s anger over the issue was not justified. He said resorting to the UN was a desperate move and Iran had the right to lower its ties with a country if it deemed fit. He said Britain should observe political protocol.
Finally, Larijani briefly talked about Iran’s nuclear program. He said the West was trying to stop this process through behind the scene deals. He explained that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s written report on Iran’s nuclear program had clearly mentioned that all ambiguities over Iran’s nuclear activities had been resolved but this did not satisfy Western powers. He said “I think this is a political issue.” He said he was advised that “if you resolve the issue with America, your problem will be solved.” Larijani said in his view nuclear issue would be a giant leap forward for Iran and the West did not want to see Iran’s progress.
He said the West could not stop Iran’s progress but it could attempt to build confidence. He said “Iran is not after confrontation.”
Larijani said all proposed plans to date by the West really ask one thing, that Iran had to stop its nuclear activity. He added that no one could stop Iran’s nuclear activity now that the process was underway. Larijani said logical talks were acceptable but talks in which the results were known in advance, were unacceptable ‘
The “Independent Islamic Student Association” took credit for the embassy invasion. But the consensus seems to be that they were Basij militiamen (the Basij is several hundred thousand hardline pro-regime volunteers).
The hard liners have thus succeeded in their goal, of isolating Iran further from the rest of the world.
This campaign is a mistake. One of the disadvantages Iraq faced in 2002 was that it was so isolated. When the outside world does not know you intimately, then other forces can characterize you and depict you with no fear of contradiction.
