Mondoweiss

'Exodus' was published in 1958
I'm sorry, you can say anything you please but Walt & Mearsheimer nailed it, this is about the Israel lobby
A window into the rightwing American mind re Israel/Palestine
Breaking the Silence publishes shocking testimonies from women who served Occupation
trying to get Washington's head around… 'basic human rights'

'Exodus' was published in 1958

Posted: 30 Jan 2010 08:08 AM PST

Forces in Israeli society are trying to save that society. I am sure they are trying to preserve the Jewish state, but the least we could do is give them some airtime in the U.S., so that Americans and yes American Jews open one eye. This is from Ynet; I have no idea why "the researcher" is not named:

Israel plundered and destroyed tens of thousands of Palestinian books in the years after the State's establishment, according to a doctoral thesis to be submitted next month by a Ben-Gurion University researcher.
In an interview with the researcher published on al-Jazeera's website Thursday, he claimed that Israel destroyed the Palestinian books in the framework of its plan to "Judaize the country" and cut off its Arab residents from their nation and culture.
According to the doctoral dissertation, Israeli authorities collected tens of thousands of Arab books in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Safed, and other towns that were home to Arabs. Israeli officials proceeded to hand out about half the books, while destroying the second half, characterizing them as a "security threat," the researcher said.
…The researcher told al-Jazeera that according to documents he possesses, Israel destroyed 27,000 books in 1958, claiming that they were useless and threatened the State. Authorities sold the books, most of them textbooks, to a paper plant, he said.

"This was a cultural massacre undertaken in a manner that was worse than European colonialism, which safeguarded the items it stole in libraries and museums," the researcher charged.

Note that Israel is barring the teaching of the Nakba in Israeli schools. Note that 10 years from now this will be in the New York Times. Or maybe 20– when they open the Nakba museum on the mall and Spielberg puts out the blockbuster, "Passover 1948" about the destruction of Jaffa, when the Irgun and the Haganah pushed nearly 70,000 Palestinians out of a city promised to them under Partition, and many of those Palestinians were forced into the sea.

And remember: Exodus by Leon Uris was published in the U.S. in 1958, just as they were destroying these books.

I'm sorry, you can say anything you please but Walt & Mearsheimer nailed it, this is about the Israel lobby

Posted: 30 Jan 2010 07:32 AM PST

Robert Fisk, in the Independent:

When Obama's elderly envoy George Mitchell headed home in humiliation this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated his departure by planting trees in two of the three largest Israeli colonies around Jerusalem. With these trees at Gush Etzion and Ma'aleh Adumim, he said, he was sending "a clear message that we are here. We will stay here. We are planning and we are building." These two huge settlements, along with that of Ariel to the north of Jerusalem, were an "indisputable part of Israel forever."

It was Netanyahu's victory celebration over the upstart American President who had dared to challenge Israel's power not only in the Middle East but in America itself.

A window into the rightwing American mind re Israel/Palestine

Posted: 29 Jan 2010 04:43 PM PST

This is kind of amazing. You've seen the story about James O'Keefe, the 24-year-old young Republican prankster who got pinched trying to tamper with Mary Landrieu's phone system, right? So here's the first issue of the alternative conservative paper he started when he was at Rutgers back in '04.

It includes a parody of the New York Times, from an aggrieved right-winger's point of view. One of the stories on the fake NYT front-page is about Israel/Palestine: "Five Palestinians Murdered by Israeli Militant." In the parody version, the Palestinian victims were "on their way back from a charity bake sale to raise awareness about women's rights" and were killed "for no apparent reason by Israeli soldiers occupying their land." And on and on. At the bottom of the column is the "punchline":

"For info on 26 Israeli children killed, please turn to A26."

So the joke is that the liberal, America-hating New York Times sides with Palestinian terrorists. There are a million ways to respond to this. I don't even know where to start. They obviously don't know the basics of the I/P conflict nor have they ever apparently looked at the NYT's coverage of it. To me, it just underscores the kind of reflexive, emotion-driven ignorance we're up against. How do you get all of the O'Keefes out there – and there are millions of them — to actually think about this? I don't think I'm putting my finger on quite what it is. Maybe racism is the best description. And the obliviousness to how the Times approaches the issue (an issue the right wing purports to care about) is staggering.

Breaking the Silence publishes shocking testimonies from women who served Occupation

Posted: 29 Jan 2010 04:45 PM PST

There's a new and shocking booklet of testimonies out from Breaking the Silence, this one from anonymous female soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories and routinely abused the "Arabs" or "illegal aliens." Because they could, or needed to. Ynet has published many of the testimonies, and they're horrifying/nightmarish, all about the kind of warped psychological/gender power abuse that people talk about in David Hare plays or in Eastern European memoirs. What if these stories of sexualized humiliation were published in the U.S.? (Noam Sheizaf asks). Don't worry, they won't be. And they won't be acted out in Jewish Community Centers, not for another ten years, till the kids take over.

What did you do mom when this was happening?

Well honey we didn't know anything about it.

But that guy in the play says it was all over the internet, on Ynet, and Promised Land–

Well I know, but you know, well, there was a lot of anti-Semitism then, and Israel-bashing. And your father and I– well, we used to read– [Mom breaks down]

What, mom, what did you used to read?

The New York Times–.

Totally inappropriate. Sorry. A few excerpts.

[1] A female Seam Line Border Guard spoke of the chase after illegal aliens: "In half an hour you can catch 30 people without any effort." Then comes the question of what should be done with those who were caught – including women, children, and elderly. "They would have them stand, and there's the well-known Border Guard song (in Arabic): 'One hummus, one bean, I love the Border Guard' – they would make them sing this. Sing, and jump. Just like they do with recruits… The same thing only much worse. And if one of them would laugh, or if they would decide someone was laughing, they would punch him. Why did you laugh? Smack… It could go on for hours, depending on how bored they are. A shift is eight hours long, the times must be passed somehow."…

[2] Was there also abuse of women?

"Yes" [a different] soldier replied. "Slaps, that kind of thing. Mainly slaps."

From men?

"Also. From whoever. It was mainly the female combat soldiers who beat people. There were two who really liked to beat people up. But also men, they had no problem slapping a woman around. If she screamed, they'd say, 'Shut it,' with another slap. A routine of violence. There were also those who didn't take part, but everyone knew it happened."

[3] A female Border Guard officer in Jenin spoke of an incident in which a nine-year-old Palestinian, who tried to climb the fence, failed, and fled – was shot to death: "They fired… when he was already in the territories and posed no danger. The hit was in the abdomen area, they claimed he was on a bicycle and so they were unable to hit him in the legs." But the soldier was most bewildered by what happened next between the four soldiers present: "They immediately got their stories straight… An investigation was carried out, at first they said it was an unjustified killing… In the end they claimed that he was checking out escape routes for terrorists or something… and they closed the case."…

[4] They really just started to laugh at me. The commander looks at me and tells me, 'What? Are you going to let that slide? Look how he's laughing at you'.

"And you, as someone who has to salvage your self-respect… I told them to sit down and I told him to come…I told him to come close, I really approached him, as if I was about to kiss him. I told him, 'Come, come, what are you afraid of? Come to me!' And I hit him in the balls. I told him, 'Why aren't you laughing?' He was in shock, and then he realized that… not to laugh. It shouldn't reach such a situation."

You hit him with your knee?

"I hit him in the balls. I took my foot, with my military shoe, and hit him in the balls. I don't know if you've ever been hit in the balls, but it looks like it hurts. He stopped laughing in my face because it hurt him. We then took him to a police station and I said to myself, 'Wow, I'm really going to get in trouble now.' He could complain about me and I could receive a complaint at the Military police's criminal investigation division.

"He didn't say a word. I was afraid and I said. I was afraid about myself, not about him. But he didn't say a word. 'What should I say, that a girl hit me?' And he could have said, but thank God, three years later I didn't get anything and no one knows about it."

What did it feel like that moment?

"Power, strength that I should not have achieved this way. But I didn't brag about it. That's why I did it that way, one on one. I told them to sit on the side, I saw that he wasn't looking. I said to myself that it doesn't make sense that as a girl who gives above and beyond and is worth more than some boys – they should laugh at me like that because I am a girl. Because you think I can't do it…"

Today, when you look at it three years later, would you have done things differently?

"I would change the system. It's seriously defective."

Noam Sheizaf writes:

[T]o me this set of testimonies is even more important than the one Breaking the Silence published regarding operation Cast Lead in Gaza – or at least just as important – because it reveals something of the real nature of the occupation that many people don't get. Israel's occupation is not the most murderous regime today, certainly not in history. It's the daily pressure on the entire population and the humiliations all Palestinians go through that's unprecedented, at least today. We are talking about millions of civilians, in roadblocks, on the streets and even in their houses, at the hands 18 years old kids, with no one to appeal to and no law to guard them – and that's before the settlers come into the picture. In this reality, and with a popular uprising against the occupation in the background, acts like those described in the Breaking the Silence report are almost inevitable.

trying to get Washington's head around… 'basic human rights'

Posted: 29 Jan 2010 03:10 PM PST

MJ Rosenberg gets read inside the Beltway, and inside the lobby, too, and in this column on the end of negotiations for the 2-state-solution, he seems to be preparing power types for the one-state solution. An important signal to the forces of rejection in Washington. Note the radical principles that Rosenberg invokes: "basic human rights." The question here is whether American Jews (the only game in town, in my view) will marry Netanyahu's institutionalized dont-worry-be-happy apartheid. Or will they take up the struggle against it. Rosenberg:

Netanyahu's announcement yesterday that Israel intends to annex Ariel, a West Bank settlement of 15,000 that is 25 miles deep into the West Bank, could be the death knell for negotiations. The Ariel announcement means that the borders of Israel would extend so far into the West Bank that a contiguous Palestinian state could not be created…

Are [Palestinians] completely without recourse?

Not at all.

They can demand their rights without reference to statehood and without negotiations to achieve them. That means they punt on the question of one state, two states, or three states (don't forget Gaza). They demand their rights whether they are exercised within Israel or within their own country. After all, basic human rights are guaranteed to all people, whether in their own state or as a minority in another country.

These rights are specifically guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was ratified by the United Nations with the support of, among others, the United States and Israel. (It was written by Eleanor Roosevelt, the US delegate).

The rights it guarantees (the right to vote, equality before the law, freedom of movement and resistance, peaceful assembly and association, the right to own property and not to be deprived of it, among others) are precisely the rights denied to the Palestinians of Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Why shouldn't the Palestinians demand these rights, laying aside the question of a state with internationally recognized borders until the Israelis are ready to seriously discuss returning to the pre-'67 borders?…

What would happen is that the Palestinians would go to the United Nations, to the European Union, and even to the United States to seek those consequences. And these would most likely come in the demand for sanctions. [Here's Rosenberg's news alert:] There is already a burgeoning BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement that is seeking to bring down the occupation the way a similar movement brought down apartheid.