Here are the headlines from Mondoweiss for 12/22/2010:
'I was as blind as the average left-of-center American. And then I spent a week in Ramallah and Bethlehem–'
Dec 21, 2010 09:26 pm | Philip Weiss This is an important week. We're approaching the second anniversary of the Gaza onslaught, and some day it will be recorded that the Gaza onslaught changed everything.  It's important to me personally, too, because I'm coming up on five years of this site, and in our fundraiser I've talked to a lot of the donors, by email, and gotten a real sense that the American conversation is changing. The following note should be deeply inspiring to anyone who comes to this site. It's from an American writer who doesn't want to give her name, but says she reads important work here. When I read a testimony like this, I feel great about all the hours people have devoted to building this site, and also very optimistic that if we keep at it, other good, thoughtful Americans will catch a clue: I see my own experience reflected in many of the personal stories that get posted. Until I visited the West Bank, I was as blind as the average left-of-center American. I had been to Eilat, Jerusalem and Haifa for work. And though I didn't realize it at the time, I had drunk the Israeli kool-aid. I thought I knew who was right and who was wrong. And then I spent a week in Ramallah and Bethlehem and realized that I had been utterly blind. It's so frustrating (as you know), because it's so hard to get the point across to people who haven't been through a checkpoint, who haven't met science and engineering professors who have to live apart from their families because they can't get from Bethlehem to Ramallah--which should be an easy commute, by bike even! Heck, their families can't even leave Bethlehem without permission from the Israeli army! No one who lives there can. I had no idea. "Freedom of movement" is such a stupid, abstract term. Anyway, you can see why I appreciate what you're doing.   
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The smoking cable: Israel said it had 'secret accord' with U.S. over expanding settlements even as Obama said in Cairo they must stop!
Dec 21, 2010 09:20 pm | Philip Weiss This is why Wikileaks is so crucial: A June 2009 cable from France, days after the great Cairo speech of Obama, in which the Israelis are said to claim a secret deal with the US for settlement growth. I'm running. More to say later. And note too where Sarkozy says, Israel, the horse of history is galloping past the window. Jump now or you are finished. The Palestinians are stronger than you think. Beautiful. Europe is taking Palestine's side now because of this understanding. Wow. Thank you, Mr. Assange: "MFA Middle East Director (Assistant Secretary-equivalent) Patrice Paoli informed POL Minister Counselor June 18 that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak
told French officials in Paris June 15 that the Israelis have
a "secret accord" with the USG to continue the "natural
growth" of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Paoli noted
that the French anticipate strong Israeli resistance to USG
pressure on this issue.... "President Sarkozy will have
three messages to convey to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu
when they meet in Paris on June 24:
"-- 'You think you've got time, but you don't.'
"-- 'You think you have an alternative solution, but you
don't.'
"-- 'You think you're stronger than the Palestinians, but
you're not.'
"Paoli said that Sarkozy will stress that 'there is a single
door and it is imperative to move through it now.'" 
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Siege mentality: Israel designates BDS activist 'a suspect of hostile terrorist activity'
Dec 21, 2010 09:14 pm | Philip Weiss I know Matan Cohen, he's a really nice guy. Just 22, he got his eye shot out demonstrating against the occupation a few years back. Now he's an active proponent of boycott/divestment/sanctions, and Noam Sheizaf reports, he was detained for three hours at Ben Gurion airport and had to sign a paper "They searched my stuff and then asked me to sign a form, on which it was written that I am 'a suspect of hostile terrorist activity.'" Cohen says that he was told that this sentence doesn't relate to a specific charge, but rather is a permanent status, determined by the ISA. [internal security agency] 
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This time round, we get to do the pogrom
Dec 21, 2010 09:09 pm | Philip Weiss I recommend Yossi Gurvitz's summary piece on the shocking new testimonies released by Breaking the Silence, from former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupation. It's a chronicle of scatological humiliation, theft of workers' important papers as pranks, and "pointless killings," with all that phrase summons... Gurvitz begins with this wrenching episode narrated by an anonymous former soldier. How much more do you need to know? "And my story is we and my story is that one time we grabbed a kid, not a big kid, a 10 or 12 year-old boy, something like that, we explained to him with the help of point with the barrel of the gun what he has to do, meaning waving the gun, showing him what do. The situation that was created was like…there is a little boy behind him, a patrol jeep, and three soldiers aiming their weapon at him and he [the boy] has to go and remove, he has to remove the blockade, these blockades. And he's working and crying…and removing the blockades, and we go and point our weapons, and he goes to the next one and like that…then the patrol jeep commander that was with me decided that maybe they'd do something like that down the road, something which is of course not logical at all, because you leave the village from there, so there is no chance it would happen, and he says to me maybe there is something down the road, we'll take him with us. Inside the patrol jeep there is no place to put the boy so what he does is he throws me in back, my friend and I sat in the back of the patrol jeep and the boy is strewn between us on our legs and our equipment and the grenades, and he's crying the whole time, while he's lying down on us, and on the equipment and our feet. I felt through his pants that he was peeing out of fear. And he's crying and lying between two soldiers in the patrol jeep, after 10 kilometers from the village when it was completely clear that apparently they did not walk 10 kilometers with furniture to make a blockade, the commander decided that it was enough, you can take him out, he stopped the jeep, he got out and came to the back, pulled the kid out, threw him on the side of the road, crying again, with wet pants, to walk 10 kilometers back, and we kept going to the settlements that were there." (Prevention 34, Unit: Armored Corps, Location: Baka A-Sharaqiya, Year: 2000). Gurvitz writes: In 1988, a song by Si Heiman, "Shooting and Crying", caused a scandal precisely because it tried to make Israelis see what happens on the other side of the Green Line. The Israelis didn't want to know and still don't. The settlers have their all-excusing ideology. The leftists still demonstrate, uselessly. The soldiers, who until recently have mostly kept silent, or waited a decade or so and turned their memories into a book or a movie, have started speaking out. Then he gives this testimony about Palestinian i.d. papers, again from an anonymous Israeli veteran: "Now these cards, what's amazing about them, is that you already know from the checkpoint how hard they are to get. Because people only show you those that are expired, and they tell you stories about how they are already trying to renew it. And you realize that itself that is almost impossible to get while still valid. So we were shocked to see that apparently the guys that work on the settlement had valid ones. In Yakir, in the Yakir settlement, they had Arab workers. So the few workers leave their documents at the gate, and enter the settlement. So what did the two guys that were with me do? They took the documents and put them in their pocket. A guy without his documents, you can imagine what…
Why did they put them in their pockets?
Because of their ill will. Just because, he went out for a smoke and they played a prank, they hid it from him. Of course nothing would happen to him [the reservist] Like what? It's just some guy's travel document. […]I don't remember how it ended. I only remember it like…I really remember that it was the frst time I realized that an 18 year-old boy with a bit of ill will can fuck up someone's life. The next day the guy can't get to work, and you already know that the guy, in order to get the card, went through seven circles of hell. Gurvitz is enraged, enraged, enraged, he says, by the revelations. He writes: This ill-will, or rather this power to harm, of an 18 years old is the scarlet thread binding this book together. This is a book about slaves rising to the throne, of little nobodies granted control over the lives of others, and of the automatic tend to sadism in such positions. This is the story of the trigger happy soldiers throwing stun grenades into a marketplace, killing some chickens by the blast (Fabric of Life 1); of MPs who routinely spill out the contents of boxes of produce on the road, randomly selected, and when one of them hears a remark she doesn't like from a Palestinian, they spill out all his produce (Fabric of Life 3); of Shimson soldiers taking a shit on the sofas in a house they occupy, and pillage the house (Prevention 47); of a paratrooper commander who, out of boredom, decided to fire at every vehicle he passes and defend his action by saying it might have been a car bomb (Prevention 37); of a company commander "whose mind was fucked", who decided to shoot every vehicle, and a team firing at every ambulance since it may "smuggle terrorists" (Prevention 38); about paratroopers who, in a scene reminiscent of a famous movie, decide to search the entrails of a piano, find a collection of artistic swords, and confiscate them (Prevention 64); about a combat engineer doing all he can to keep his humanity, snapping when some Palestinian gives him lip, while the other soldiers snicker because now we have another criminal in the gang, no more righteous people (Fabric of Life 18); about Border Policemen having a contest about who can humiliate a parent in the presence of his children to the point of making him "shit his pants" (Fabric of Life 16); how… There are quite a few stories of pointless killings.... Aside from the obvious effects – the creeping corruption of the occupation; the turning of the IDF into a garrison army, incapable of dealing with a real enemy; the burning hatred the soldiers leave behind, which will make ending the hostilities very difficult – there is the unspoken problem. A very large segment of young Israelis have experienced trauma, or, in the more severe case, have internalized it and made it a part of their lives. And what happened there, will return to haunt us here.  
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In a big antiwar piece, Mearsheimer dares to say 'why they hate us'
Dec 21, 2010 08:53 pm | Philip Weiss The reason I like Realists is that they have made the most forceful, full-throated arguments against war. Period. I know, some lefties have done so too. But liberal interventionism and Israel lobbyism have traction even inside the Democratic center-left, and this has spavined the antiwar effort. Liberals have done nothing to make neoconservatism a dirty word, they seem far more concerned about Tea Partiers. Here is John Mearsheimer at the National Interest: The results [of neoconservative worldview] have been disastrous. The United States has been at war for a startling two out of every three years since 1989, and there is no end in sight. As anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of world events knows, countries that continuously fight wars invariably build powerful national-security bureaucracies that undermine civil liberties and make it difficult to hold leaders accountable for their behavior; and they invariably end up adopting ruthless policies normally associated with brutal dictators. The Founding Fathers understood this problem, as is clear from James Madison's observation that "no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Washington's pursuit of policies like assassination, rendition and torture over the past decade, not to mention the weakening of the rule of law at home, shows that their fears were justified. To make matters worse, the United States is now engaged in protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have so far cost well over a trillion dollars and resulted in around forty-seven thousand American casualties. The pain and suffering inflicted on Iraq has been enormous. Since the war began in March 2003, more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, roughly 2 million Iraqis have left the country and 1.7 million more have been internally displaced. Moreover, the American military is not going to win either one of these conflicts, despite all the phony talk about how the "surge" has worked in Iraq and how a similar strategy can produce another miracle in Afghanistan. We may well be stuck in both quagmires for years to come, in fruitless pursuit of victory. The title of Mearsheimer's long essay is "Imperial by Design." And here's the design. Notice that leftwingers can sign on to Mearsheimer's anti-imperial thrust: The root cause of America's troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected all these other avenues, instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda. Again, some political values I share-- Mearsheimer dismisses the fear that underlies the GWOT: Finally, the ability of terrorists to strike the American homeland has been blown out of all proportion. In the nine years since 9/11, government officials and terrorist experts have issued countless warnings that another major attack on American soil is probable—even imminent. But this is simply not the case. The only attempts we have seen are a few failed solo attacks by individuals with links to al-Qaeda like the "shoe bomber," who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001, and the "underwear bomber," who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in December 2009. So, we do have a terrorism problem, but it is hardly an existential threat. In fact, it is a minor threat. Midway through the piece, here comes my big enchilada. Again, how many Democratic congressmen say any of this? TO DEAL effectively with terrorism, it is imperative to understand what motivates al-Qaeda to target the United States in the first place. One also wants to know why large numbers of people in the Arab and Muslim world are so angry with America that they support, or at least sympathize with, these types of terrorist groups. Simply put, why do they hate us? And this clarity about chickens coming home to roost-- which Chris Hedges has praised in Jeremiah Wright. Two more lefties. Anger and hatred toward the United States among Arabs and Muslims is largely driven by Washington's policies, not by any deep-seated antipathy toward the West. The policies that have generated the most anti-Americanism include Washington's support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians; the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War; U.S. support for repressive regimes in countries like Egypt; American sanctions on Baghdad after the First Gulf War, which are estimated to have caused the deaths of about five hundred thousand Iraqi civilians; and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Not surprisingly, President Bush and his advisers rejected this explanation of 9/11, because accepting it would effectively have been an admission that the United States bore considerable responsibility for the events of that tragic day. We would be acknowledging that it was our Middle East policies that were at the heart of it all. Mearsheimer says that Obama has followed the Clinton path of liberal interventionism and is failing to see the virtues of-- his Realist Rx--offshore-balancing. Staying out of most foreign issues, concentrating on the American interest in the Gulf, Europe, and northeast Asia. Next is to address the other causes, like Washington's unyielding support for Israel's policies in the occupied territories. Indeed, Bill Clinton recently speculated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is responsible for about half of the terrorism we face. Of course, this is why the Obama administration says it wants to achieve a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. But given the lack of progress in solving that problem, and the fact that it is going to take at least a few years to get all of the American troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, we will be dealing with al-Qaeda for the foreseeable future.... Yes I know a lot of my leftwing friends don't like Realists, don't like talk of national interest, but how can you argue with this analysis of civil liberties and human rights? Perhaps most importantly, moving toward a strategy of offshore balancing would help us tame our fearsome national-security state, which has grown alarmingly powerful since 9/11. Core civil liberties are now under threat on the home front and the United States routinely engages in unlawful behavior abroad. 
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Our 4th Mondo Awards judge: Joseph Dana, scholar, activist, tweeter, optimist
Dec 21, 2010 08:26 pm | Philip Weiss It brings me great pleasure to announce our next judge in the Mondo Awards week contest, Joseph Dana, the American-Israeli journalist/activist/scholar who also serves as a media coordinator for the Popular Committees, organizing nonviolent actions across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Dana is a friend; he's been a guide to me to Israeli culture. Anybody who knows his work can tell you that he is generous, patient and careful. And he's a man of many parts. Though he's gaining a big following on twitter, his work reflects the rigor of someone who has two Master's degrees in Jewish history, from the Hebrew University and the Central European University of Budapest. Dana is particularly inspiring to me because he has demonstrated such personal courage over the last few years. Recognizing that his society is in crisis, he has enlisted in the struggle to change it, and he has been willing to change himself in the process. I asked him how activism had changed him two months back and he wrote: The last three years of activism have driven home a very important point which is that co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians which could form the basis of a one state solution is entirely possible and could be realized in the near future. I do not feel pessimistic about the future of the conflict, in fact, I feel the optimist about our ability to defeat the occupation via grassroots and unarmed joint struggle. These ideas have come about through an intense personal engagement-- constantly going out to demos as a journo, taking considerable personal risk, observing the conditions of Palestinian life, and most of all, working alongside Palestinians as a co-equal and friend. He has done this as a proud Jew with a thick connection to Jewish civilization in the Diaspora. He is, in short, a leader; and we're grateful for his joining our judges team. Joseph joins a stellar crew: Helena Cobban, Omar Barghouti, and Susan Abulhawa. So: Get your submissions in now! 
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Europe's impatience
Dec 21, 2010 07:37 pm | Philip Weiss One of the main themes of recent days is that the failure of the peace process has now shifted the European actors to take a larger role. Ilene Cohen points out this headline in Haaretz: Jerusalem scrambles as European states move to upgrade ties with Palestinians Reports indicate Palestinians urging about a dozen EU states to upgrade the PA's diplomatic status; Israel orders envoys abroad to take 'urgent' action against Palestinian efforts at UN. and she adds: They're now fighting their war for Greater Israel on multiple fronts—in addition to the literal war against the Palestinian people. Eric Cantor, Howard Berman, Chuck Schumer, and the other friends of Israeli colonialism in the US Congress won't be able to save them. As for the administration: According to information obtained by the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, senior American officials have approached Arab diplomats both in Washington, D.C. and UN headquarters in New York with the message that the measure is "unwise and unhelpful" and the administration therefore wants the Arabs to abandon it. How many times did the US respond to the most egregious, aggressive, and illegal behavior on the part of Israel will the pathetic words, "It [the latest war, the latest killings, the latest settlement expansion] is 'not helpful.'" There's something of a "just desserts" quality to the US using similar vapid language in pressing the Arabs to help poor little Israel. What goes around . . . 
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Jewish Perspectives on the
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A respectful dialogue on BDS—whether you already have a position on it or you want to clarify for yourself the complex issues it raises. This event will provide an opportunity to hear from people who disagree about whether BDS is an appropriate and effective strategy.
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