Mondoweiss

Last night President Obama admitted that it wasn't going to be easy to work with the new Israeli government. Today they showed why.

Ha'aretz is reporting the Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman have cut a "secret deal" to build 3,000 new illegal housing units between Jerusalem and the illegal Israeli settlement Ma'ale Adumim. These units will be in E-1, a highly contested stretch of land that Israel wants to colonize in order to control the strategic corridor connecting Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley. The map to the right (click to enlarge) from the Israeli organization Ir Amim shows the area.  Israeli control of E-1 would cut the West Bank in half and make a viable Palestinian state impossible. Ha'aretz notes that "For this reason, the United States has strongly opposed this sort of Israeli construction for more than a decade. Israeli governments have avoided construction in this area, mostly because of U.S. pressure." Clearly the incoming Israeli government isn't afraid of US pressure or they feel the endgame is at hand.

Paul Woodward over at War In Context connected this story to the Obama press conference and noted:

If Obama really believes that the status quo is untenable then it’s up to him to demonstrate that he means what he says.

Netanyahu is clearly ready to get straight back to business as usual: talking peace, building settlements.

Obama administration, your move.

Tonight the 92d Street Y held a panel on "Why Zionism has become a dirty word," with four Zionists on stage and some non-Zionists demonstrating out in Lexington Avenue. The hall was less than half full, and the panel itself had a confounded feeling. The token liberal, documentarian Oren Rudavsky, said Zionism has become a dirty word because of Israel’s actions. Neocon Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal said it’s because the anti-Semitic left has captured public opinion and is practicing "Stockholm syndrome" on it. And Abe Foxman insisted it's all because of anti-Semitism.

Foxman seemed somewhat fulfilled by this, as if he continually needs to find fresh evidence that the Holocaust, which he survived, is a living reality. It seemed out of time.

I am going to dispense with Rudavsky right at the start because he was very good and restrained, for instance, saying that everyone loved Israel after '67 and now opinion is reversed and--well, look what Israel did in Gaza. But the event wasn’t about Rudavsky. It was about Foxman and Stephens.

Stephens was very impressive. Attractive, fluid, articulate, a little crazed yes-- but he deflected that by saying he was a "lunatic neoconservative." I liked that; and I need to take Stephens on here. But before I get to him: the entertainment section, a portrait of a vaudeville character, crowdpleaser Abe Foxman.

Stephen Collinson from Agence France-Presse identifies the Israeli government as the greatest obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians and President Obama doesn't really disagree. From last night's press conference:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Okay. Stephen Collinson, AFP.

QUESTION: Mr. President, you came to office pledging to work for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah.

QUESTION: How realistic do you think those are hopes are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who’s not fully signed up to a two- state solution and a foreign minister who’s been accused of insulting Arabs?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It’s not easier than it was, but I think it’s just as necessary. We don’t yet know what the Israeli government is going to look like. And we don’t yet know what the future shape of Palestinian leadership is going to be comprised of. What we do know is this; that the status quo is unsustainable.

Jeff Blankfort writes:

Tom Ricks post today at Foreign Policy:

Israel Defense Forces soldiers did not consider medical teams as entitled to receive the special protection granted to them within the framework of their duties during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, according to a new report by Physicians for Human Rights. ..."

Good on ya, Ricks, now can you move that to my country's interests?

My friend Peter Voskamp sent me this thought experiment:

From Foreign Policy:

That was about Darfur.
Imagine (writes a friend) for an instant if we performed a transliteration:

The new consensus, led by Michael Walzer: defeat the settler movement. I'm all for it, though it is a little like closing the barn door after the horse is gone. Here is Hitchens at Slate:

Thanks to Dan Sisken.

It hasn't taken long for the Lieberman ascendancy to pay dividends. Right-wing Jewish activists descended on Umm al-Fahm, the largest Palestinian city inside Israel, today in to carry out a provocative march to "demand loyalty" from the Palestinian citizens of Israel who live there. The protesters were primarily settlers from the West Bank who now find themselves in the Israeli political mainstream with the incoming Israeli government. Fascist Israeli activist Itamar Ben-Gvir was one of the leaders of the march and his talking points could have been lifted directly from Avigdor Lieberman's campaign stump speech. He is quoted as saying:

Our statement talks about loyalty to the State of Israel," added Ben-Gvir, one of the leaders of the "march of the flags."

There is in Umm al-Fahm a gang of hooligans, who think they can win using violence. The State of Israel is the Jewish people's state. We are here to voice our truth and not to create provocations.

The Umm al-Fahm march is another sign of the trend that the settler movement is turning its sights onto the Palestinian areas inside Israel in an effort “judaize” all of historic Palestine. But this movement is just a symptom of a broader ideology that now getting explicitly articulated and publicly embraced. Uri Avnery writes about this in the Palestine Chronicle in describing a recent debate in the Israeli Supreme Court which hardly received any attention. The case involved the Israeli law which prevents a Palestinian citizen of Israel from sharing their Israeli citizenship, or even living, with a spouse if they are living in the occupied territories or a “hostile” Arab country. Avnery writes:

The matter came before the Supreme Court, The petitioners, Jews and Arabs, argued that this measure contradicts our Basic Laws (our substitute for a nonexistent constitution) which guarantee the equality of all citizens. The answer of the Ministry of Justice lawyers let the cat out of the bag. It asserts, for the first time, in unequivocal language, that:

“The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective.”

One should read this sentence several times to appreciate its full impact. This is not a phrase escaping from the mouth of a campaigning politician and disappearing with his breath, but a sentence written by cautious lawyers carefully weighing every letter.

If we are at war with “the Palestinian people”, this means that every Palestinian, wherever he or she may be, is an enemy. That includes the inhabitants of the occupied territories, the refugees scattered throughout the world as well as the Arab citizens of Israel proper. A mason in Taibeh, Israel, a farmer near Nablus in the West Bank, a policeman of the Palestinian Authority in Jenin, a Hamas fighter in Gaza, a girl in a school in the Mia Mia refugee camp near Sidon, Lebanon, a naturalized American shopkeeper in New York – “collective against collective”.

Avnery is clear that this government position is not an exception. Rather, it is a rare instance of speaking the reality that everyone knows. He continues:

These anonymous lawyers should perhaps be thanked for daring to formulate in a judicial document the reality that had previously been hidden in a thousand different ways.

The simple reality is that 127 years after the beginning of the first Jewish wave of immigration, 112 years after the founding of the Zionist movement, 61 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, 41 years after the beginning of the occupation, the Israeli-Palestinian war continues along all the front lines with undiminished vigor.

The Umm al-Fahm march is just the shock troops of the "radicalization process the entire country is undergoing." Avigdor Lieberman is currently the face of this process but its roots and history run much deeper.

This is the most important political post I've done in a while, so listen up.

Joe Bodell is a progressive reporter in Minnesota, and Jewish. On Wikileaks recently, he explored a list of  former Senator Norm Coleman's financial contributors, evidently provided by Coleman's campaign, and examined the "Source" column for the contributors, which indicates how they came to the campaign. About 20,000 of 50,000 contributors, Bodell reports, are Jews identified as "gopjew_091307" in the source column. Look for yourself at that spreadsheet. The list of gopjew's in a column on the right begins most of the way down. And the contributors are from California, Pennyslvania, New York, New Jersey, not just Minnesota.

Bodell wrote up his findings in this post called, appropriately, "Coleman's database: lots and lots of Jewish names." He speculated that the source of the list was the neoconservative Republican Jewish Coalition:

More lobby fingerprints: Facts & Logic about the Middle East, a tambourine group, here takes credit for forcing Chas Freeman's withdrawal:

Congratulations to all FLAME supporters who responded to our last FLAME Hotline, in which we encouraged you to write to President Obama about his misguided attempt to appoint Charles (Chas) Freeman as head of the National Intelligence Council (NIC).  We were successful in ousting him!...

My Kafka kick began a few weeks back, when an anti-Zionist friend sent me an email containing a story by Kafka. Here's the whole story, which his friend Max Brod, going through his papers after his death, titled "A Little Fable":

I asked my anti-Zionist friend why he was sending it to me and he said it was just one of those days, and the story was "shattering." The next weekend I was at my parents' house and saw Kafka's letters to his mistress in an upstairs room and fell into that. The very first letter, reintroducing himself strangely to Felice Bauer a couple of weeks after their meeting in person, begins with Palestine. This has led to my appreciating a central truth of Kafka's life: he was, as Hannah Arendt says, a Zionist. Maybe just a cultural Zionist, certainly an imperfect Zionist, certainly an areligious disliker of creeds more drawn to Dostoyevsky's (Christian) religiosity than to what he called the "hot Jews" of eastern Europe. Feeling like a wooden coatrack pushed around the room when he attended Zionist meetings... Still he was a Zionist for a simple reason: he understood the Jewish condition of Europe. It was his condition and it is reflected in the fable. As it is in so much of his work. In his diaries and letters, Kafka worried over assimilation, Jewishness, emancipation, and Zionism constantly. He died even as he and his last mistress were thinking of moving to Palestine.
The other night a friend said that one problem he has in pro-Palestinian situations is that there is not an understanding of "the Jewish experience," which he learned about from his grandfather. I don't reflect that experience enough on this site. P.S. Kafka's sister died in the Holocaust. P.P.S. If you think I am changing my views on Israel, you have another think coming.

another brilliant video by Max Blumenthal, on Wall Street, tapping the rage against Goldman. Blumenthal suggests waterboarding and rendition of the AIG guys to get the bonuses back, and at 5:44 does the famous Goldman alums as a hall of fame. The I went to Yale and now work in a strip club moment is at 8:45. Blumenthal is a change agent. He's balanced between print and internet and television, doing journalism as performance art...

One of my themes is that the Israel lobby has too much power in American life because both parties are behind it. I compare it to the consensus for slavery that existed in the 1850s between Whigs and Dems before Abraham Lincoln broke it up. Today we need a wedge coalition that it going to separate the progressive human-rights Democrats from the colonialist Democrats and the isolationist human-rights Republicans from the Pentagon Republicans and build a coalition that respects human rights in Palestine. I don't know where Sam Haselby, a historian and junior fellow at Harvard, stands on My Issue, but he clearly understands the way that the two-party system defeats insurgent causes in the name of bipartisanship. From the Boston Globe:

On Fareed Zakaria's CNN show on March 15, Chas Freeman said that the Zionist Organization of America had coordinated a campaign against his selection to be Obama's National Intelligence Council chair, an appointment he had given up under pressure five days before the interview aired. Freeman cited a "posting" by ZOA that took credit for an effort to dig up information against him and "to agitate first congressmen who were sympathetic to them and later others." 

The ZOA responded on March 18: "There is no such ZOA posting that Freeman describes."

Well here's the posting, from a Zionist website, an email that Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America sent out March 11, the day after Chas Freeman withdrew his name. It's also here, on an Israeli site. It describes just such a campaign:

The ZOA's role in calling for the rescission of Freeman's appointment was noted in the March 10 report in JTA by Eric Fingerhut, who observed that, "The Zionist Organization of America and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs were the only Jewish organizations to come out publicly against the pick." (But of course ZOA did much more than send out a press release). ZOA's role was also noted in the Jewish Week's (New York) March 4 Washington blog, and in several other political blogs as well.

The co-directors of the ZOA's Government Relations office in Washington, Josh London and Dan Pollak, lobbied hard every day, educating Members of Congress about Freeman's anti-Israel, anti-American record, urging them to take up the issue with the Obama Administration and to sign on to the Berkeley-Kirk letter. I personally phoned numerous Jewish communal and Congressional leaders repeatedly in recent days on the subject and was successful in getting Congressmen to add their name to the letter as well pledge to make calls to the White House.

The ZOA leaders and members can therefore derive special satisfaction on a positive outcome on an important matter affecting Israel and the American-Israeli relationship.

Yesterday, the Washington Post asked David Kilcullen, an Australian army reservist and top adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus who has spent years studying insurgencies in Iraq, Indonesia and Afghanistan, among other countries, "What are the lessons of Iraq that most apply to Afghanistan?"

Notice what Kilcullen does not advise: wage a brutal siege against a largely civilian population and convey to them that the brutality will not be mitigated unless they capitulate.

The Guardian has published three videos with statements from Palestinians supporting allegations of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza assault. The Guardian says Israeli soldiers used Palestinian children as human shields for tanks, targeted medics and ambulances, and used drones to fire missiles, sometimes killing whole families. Ilene Cohen writes:

The new J Street poll has some fascinating findings re the complexity of Jewish attitudes re Israel.

First the good news. 60 percent of American Jews are against expanding the settlements and the same number say the Gaza war didn't gain anything. When you break out the subgroup of "political donors," i.e., influential Jews, the number who oppose settlement expansion rises to 72 percent. Jews are well-informed. Avigdor Lieberman has a shocking 62 percent name recognition--I think he could give Jon Stewart a run for his money--and about 1/3 say that Lieberman having a cabinet portfolio would weaken their personal connection to Israel. As I noted earlier, 40 percent of those under 30 say that Lieberman in the cabinet would weaken their connection to Israel. 

These Jews are for peace. 72 percent are for the U.S. putting pressure on Israel and the Palestinians to bring about a peace. 69 percent are for the U.S. talking to a unity government that includes Hamas. 76 percent are for a peace deal along the Clinton parameters. 

So far so good. J Street's doing good work, and it can work with those numbers. (Richard Silverstein echoes my view here.) 

But the poll also underscores my feeling that we're not going to make progress till we form a coalition that includes Jews and non-Jews. There's evidence of some obdurate attitudes among J Street's Jews. Look at my headline. It's just "settlement expansion." A good start, but we're not talking about occupation. Or consider Gaza. Yes, 60 percent said Gaza gained nothing. But most of that number are people who said the slaughter had "no impact" on Israel's security. If you compare those Jews who think Gaza helped Israel's security to those who say it hurt Israel's security, the hardliners win 41 to 18 percent. That's what we're up against: 41 percent who approve a massacre.

From the Associated Press in Jerusalem:

(Picture by Tara Todras-Whitehill)
This was not a riot; it was a nonviolent protest against the illegal wall in Ni'lin. As my tipster says, "The amount of lying and self-denial is breathtaking and pathological."

J Street has a new poll out on American Jewish attitudes that has some fascinating wrinkles re Middle East policy. Including the fact that 60 percent of American Jews oppose the settlements in the West Bank. And that 32 percent say that their "personal connection" to Israel would be "weakened" if Avigdor Lieberman assumes Cabinet position. "I was surprised by this result," says Jim Gerstein, who did the poll, saying that it shows the remarkable effect that a single individual could have on Jewish opinion. And the number goes to 40 percent for Jews under 30!

But here's the headline. The poll shows that 39 percent of American Jews had some degree of Madoff connection. 2 percent say they were personally affected. 17 percent know someone who was affected. 28 percent say: an organization I support has been affected. I'm in that group; some leftleaning orgs were affected. (Why do the numbers add up to 47? Because there's overlap of the three groups.)
I'll have more on the Middle East data later...

First Melanie Phillips accuses Haaretz and all others of the blood libel for suggesting that the atrocities in Gaza were anything other than an accident. Then she calls these critics "Uncle Tom Israelbasher" and says the phenomenon is "global." She's got a point there; it is global.

Ilene Cohen writes:
Richard Falk in this interview is, as always, unflappable and indefatigable. He is challenged by the BBC interviewer that the Israelis "dismiss" him because he is "biased," and following the interview, an Israeli spokesperson is quoted as (what else) dismissing Falk, again, because he is "biased." This is of course the stock Israeli response to all negative reports about its behavior, whether from its own human rights organization, foreign human rights organization, journalists, or others (Chas Freeman, for one). You will note, however, that the pattern is always the same: the standard talking point is all the "evidence" (in this case, the "bias against Israel," or "anti-Israel") without reference to any of the specific issues raised by the individual or organization in question. That holds for the Gaza War and it always holds for talk of settlements: mention settlements and you're accused of having a "bias." There's never a discussion of the settlements. Obviously, if they had a credible answer, they'd offer it up. But the settlements are illegal and even violate US policy, so they're consigned to the "bias" defense.

Michael Walzer was my government professor in college. We revered him. Today I celebrate him for saying just what John Mearsheimer says, that the American gov't must put heavy pressure on Israel to defeat the settler movement; but I cannot forgive his parochialism, his endlessly justifying Israeli militarism, lately defending it during the Gaza slaughter. I have meant to write about this, but been inhibited by that old reverent feeling. Here is the brilliant Magnes Zionist:

Yesterday's Jerusalem Post ran an important piece by Samuel Freedman on the likely end of the two-state solution and calls for democracy in Israel/Palestine. Last week at the 92d Street Y, another American Jewish journalist, Michelle Goldberg, said the same thing: now's our last chance to save the Jewish state, because Zionism isn't looking democratic.
Last year Bernard Avishai published a book, The Hebrew Republic, in which he quoted Israeli P.M. Ehud Olmert saying the same thing, more than two years ago (history gets impatient), at a breakfast at his house. Avishai then takes up the great realistic/democratic chore that follows from this understanding: how to lead Israeli Jews and American Jews toward imagining acceptance of a democratic basis for coexistence in Israel/Palestine.

Readers know that I am compiling answers, from Jews and non-Jews, to the Dershowitzian question, why we at this site single out Israel for criticism from the great sea of living evidence of man's inhumanity to man? Hannah Arendt:

"In this entire affair I can confess to you one thing: that injustice committed by my own people naturally provokes me more than injustice done by others." (Letter to Gershom Scholem, 1963, during the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, reprinted in  Gershom Scholem, a Life in Letters.)

David Bromwich writes:
Ethan Bronner in the New York Times today gives an informative view of "A Religious War in Israel's Army," but his story evades the requirements of full description at a couple of points. Dany Zamir, the military instructor who released the testimonies on Gaza, is described as "left-leaning." By contrast, the fanatical orthodox rabbis, who teach the settlers and the soldiers that it is better to die or kill for the land than to live and let live without the land, are referred to as "religious nationalists." As if this were a conflict between politics (left) and religion (orthodox). Why not admit that the rabbis are ultra-right--very much part of the Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition--and draw the relevant analogy with the politics of Le Pen and Haider?
Bronner writes: "For the first four decades of Israel's existence, the army--like many of the country's institutions--was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated." Saw themselves as? They were in fact secular, Western and educated. And that has changed. The testimonies of the Israeli soldier-witnesses in Gaza are the first record of the extent of the change to be seen by an international audience.
The article turns slack and unspecific when it comes to address the refusal by Zamir in 1990 "to guard a ceremony involving religious Jews visiting the West Bank city of Nablus." A ceremony involving? They brought Torah scrolls to the Tomb of Joseph in a Palestinian city in the Occupied Territories. An act of overt religious propaganda, carried out with clear provocative intent; and an act of the sort the IDF had often winked at or passively supported. Zamir was tried and sentenced to prison for refusing to give aid to the provocation: the stand of a secular conscientious objector.