Mondoweiss
- The greatest lecture Chomsky never gave is boost to BDS movement
- Chomsky reportedly denied entry into Israel
- 'Haaretz' covered Berkeley BDS struggle while 'NYT' turned a deaf ear
- Englander short story in 'New Yorker' says Holocaust legacy gives Israel a pass to do anything
- Saddling Petraeus
- Barghouthi: Until Congress listens to Palestinian-
Americans, forget about two state solution - Gaza and BP
- Angry in Ames
The greatest lecture Chomsky never gave is boost to BDS movement
Posted: 16 May 2010 10:18 AM PDT
For me it's less about what that apartheid regime does and more about the fools in this country who stand behind Israel's actions and attack the BDS movement. In a normal society someone from the NY Times would now call Margaret Atwood and say, "Now that you're back from accepting your prize in Israel do you have anything to say about Noam Chomsky being denied entry into Israel?" But I guess integrity is too much to ask.
[webmaster note: Chomsky has now made Fox, the AP wire, and 22 outlets. Oh and shouldn't we be saying that he was denied entry into Palestine? Allenby Bridge is into occupied West Bank.]
Chomsky reportedly denied entry into Israel
Posted: 16 May 2010 08:15 AM PDT
Oh my. Wake up America. The great Chomsky, pride of American intellectual life and Jewish life and a liberal [ok, left] Zionist if ever there was one, kept from entering at Allenby Bridge/Jordan. Do you know what is happening to Israel? Only in Hebrew so far, at Haaretz. Tragic.
Update. Ynet now has the story: "According to [Mustafa] Barghouti [hosting Chomsky, 81, at Bir Zeit U. in Ramallah], security sources at Allenby Bridge told Chomsky that he would not be allowed to enter Israel following an order issued by senior Israeli Interior Ministry officials due to his political opinions." Oh and here is Amira Hass in English, she broke the story.
"When you have to resort to denying entry to 'the most important intellectual alive' it really says something about what is happening and what his message is." -- Craig Speers.
Didi Remez picked this up first.
'Haaretz' covered Berkeley BDS struggle while 'NYT' turned a deaf ear
Posted: 16 May 2010 07:24 AM PDT
One might think that the so-called paper of record, The New York Times, would find the landmark UC Berkeley student campaign to divest from weapons manufacturers that profit from Israel's occupation and war crimes worthy of coverage. However, the Times has yet to print one word on the topic.
In contrast, the Times ran stories about UC Berkeley and other campus anti-South African Apartheid campaigns as far back as 1978, at a time when they were at an arguably less-evolved stage of development than today's campaigns. See for example this 1978 article (full text behind paid firewall), which showed up in a search for the words Berkeley, divestment, and South Africa.
Of course, the Times' blackout of Israel-related divestment is consistent with their long-standing pro-Israel bias, as documented here: I submitted to the Times an oped fairly similar to one I wrote that Haaretz printed. Haaretz said yes, and after three inquiries, the Times said no, once again demonstrating that criticism of Israel is more acceptable in the Israeli press than the U.S. press. Here's what the Times wouldn't print:
Students Spark Momentum to End Israel's Oppression of the Palestinians
By Matthew A. Taylor
At one time South Africa's apartheid regime seemed immovable. This is the case again today with Israel's rule over the Palestinians -- described accurately, in my view, as apartheid-like by former President Jimmy Carter. But on March 18th of this year, University of California, Berkeley student senators voted to recommend that the UC Board of Regents divest from General Electric and United Technologies, two companies that have profited from Israel's occupation of Palestinian land. The student president subsequently vetoed the bill, and student senators fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds needed to overturn the veto. However, the bill's eventual passage seems inevitable, given Israel's ever-tightening grip on the Palestinian territories and increasing student outrage.
A majority student vote in favor of a divestment recommendation would have been unimaginable on the Berkeley campus just five years ago. But the evidence of Israel's war crimes in Gaza as documented by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International changed many minds.
Even high-ranking Israeli government officials are acknowledging the country's descent into an apartheid-like state of affairs. In a speech at a national security conference this past winter, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak stated that if Israel does not end the occupation, and millions of Palestinians living under occupation continue to be barred from voting in Israeli elections, "That will be an apartheid state." In such a scenario, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that Israel's American Jewish organizational supporters, "which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."
At Berkeley's three senate hearings on the divestment recommendation, Olmert's prediction came to life before my very eyes. Proponents of the bill represented a diverse multitude of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular speakers; Israelis and Palestinians; white Americans, African-Americans, and Americans from all races and backgrounds. Five Nobel Peace laureates endorsed the bill, and hundreds of prominent Israeli and American Jews signed petitions and letters of support, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's sister-in-law Ofra Ben-Artzi.
Many American Jews are becoming increasingly disenchanted with an Israeli state that does not reflect Jewish values of justice and fairness in its conduct toward the Palestinian people. This is especially true of young Jews. We who voted for and advocated for this divestment bill are the same young college students who elected Barack Obama on a platform of hope and change.
AIPAC, the campus Hillels, and the ADL peddle propaganda that those of us in the younger generation no longer accept. Many of us have traveled to the occupied territories and witnessed the oppression of Palestinians. We find it intolerable.
Time is rapidly running out on the two-state solution -- if it hasn't already. With every settlement expanded by Prime Minister Netanyahu, the end of the militarily enforced Jewish-majority state is hastened. University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer recently predicted that Israel's intransigent attachment to settlements and lack of political motivation to end the occupation of the West Bank will doom the two-state solution, and a binational state with equal rights is the only realistic outcome.
Three decades ago, students led the charge to divest from South Africa's apartheid. "We could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime," Archbishop Demond Tutu wrote in a letter to Berkeley's student senate endorsing the current divestment bill.
Influenced by student-led divestment campaigns, in 1986 the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. Just as with South Africa, U.S. government officials must eventually follow the students' lead and take action to secure Palestinian human rights. The Obama administration and Congress should cut off $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel, or at least condition it on Israel ending its occupation of Palestinian land.
Matthew A. Taylor is a UC Berkeley Peace and Conflict Studies student on leave, and co-author of "The Road to Nonviolent Coexistence in Palestine/Israel," a chapter in the book "Nonviolent Coexistence."
Englander short story in 'New Yorker' says Holocaust legacy gives Israel a pass to do anything
Posted: 16 May 2010 06:01 AM PDT
In the May 17th New Yorker there is a beautifully written, touching short story by a 40-year old Jewish American author, Nathan Englander, entitled "Free Fruit for Young Widows." It is yet another Holocaust story, this time not by someone who experienced it but by someone who was born during the Vietnam War.
The story begins in the Sinai with an imaginary and most unlikely incident following the 1956 invasion of Egypt by France, England and Israel in which both Israeli and Egyptian soldiers happened to be wearing the same uniforms, provided by the French to both armies at different time. Shimmy Gezer ("formerly, Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland") sits down to eat lunch at an outdoor table and four armed commandos sit down with him and exchange grunts. They are joined by Gezer's buddy, Professor Tendler ("who was then only Private Tendler") who after placing "the tin cup he was carrying on the edge of the table, taking care not to spill his tea," proceeds to shoot each of the armed commandos in the head.
Gezer, "shocked by the murder of his four fellow soldiers," tackles his friend, who screams back to him in Hebrew. "Egyptians!, Egyptians!" And then, in Yiddish, "The enemy has joined you for lunch." How it is possible that enveloped Egyptian soldiers would still be armed we are left to ponder? Rather we find the humanist, Gezer, telling his friend, Tendler, that "You should have taken them prisoner," and with his "tears streaming and fists flying," crying, "You didn't have to shoot," he attacks the much larger Tendler, who gives him a bloody beating.
Much later, after the war, Tendler has become a professor and Gezer the owner of a fruit and vegetable stand in Jerusalem's ultra-religious Mahane Yehuda market, and Gezer explains to his son, Etgar, why he never allows the professor to pay for his groceries (nor the widows of Israeli soldiers fallen in battle). It goes back, of course, to the Jewish Holocaust, in which young Tendler is liberated from an unnamed "death camp" by two large American soldiers who faint on seeing this scrawny boy crawl out from under a pile of emaciated corpses that had been scheduled for the ovens. It turns out that Tendler has been living beneath the pile for some days, kept alive by crumbs of food provided by the Sonderkommando who Englander does not identify but who were prisoners themselves.
Now liberated at age 13, his family dead, Tendler makes his way slowly back to his home in Poland where he is given a warm welcome by Fanushka,"his nurse, their maid," and her husband and children who have been living in the Tendler family home. But things are not as they appear. Going outside to take a leak, and standing just underneath the kitchen window, Tendler overhears the nurse lamenting, but not that Tendler's family had been destroyed.
"He will take everything," is what she said. "He will take it all from us--our house, our field. He'll snatch away all we've built and protected, everything that has been--for so long--ours..
..He will steal it all away. Everything. He has come for our lives." And Tendler hears her say. "We will eat...We will celebrate. And when he sleeps we will kill him." It is not to be. Tendler has managed to obtain a revolver and using a pillow as a silencer, he goes about killing, one by one, Fanushka, her husband and both their sons. On hearing the story from his father, "Etgar decided Professor Tendler was both a murderer and, at the same time, a misken. He believed he understood how and why Professor Tendler had come to kill that peasant family, and how men sent to battle in uniform--even in the same uniform--would find no mercy at his hand. (That Englander uses the term misken without defining it shows that he knows his targeted audience. From what I have been able to tell from the internet it might mean someone who is to be pitied but, according to Rabbi Yaacov Yisroel Bar-Chaim, "it conveys a piercing overlap of spirit; an abiding kinship; a mutual commiseration that leaves each feeling a little lighter, a little holier.")
At the end of the tragic story, the reader is left with the message that Israel and its supporters have sent to the world: What happened to Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany was so horrible, so unique, that it justifies any action, no matter how heinous, that Israel takes in its defense, even when those actions are considered despicable in the eyes of the non-Jewish world and do, in fact, constitute war crimes.
Since a significant portion of the New Yorker's readers are liberal Jews in their sixties and seventies, many of whom by this time have begun to question's Israel's behavior, this appears to be Englander's way of shutting them up, by artfully implying that had they not been lucky enough to have been in America during WW 2, they would have shared the fate of Europe's Jews. In essence, it is the same Old Testament message that resonates from the throats of Israel's ultra orthodox rabbis, "We must kill or be killed." Unlike the shrill proclamations from those racist rabbis, which will shock anyone not caught up in their insanities, this is a well crafted piece of Israeli propaganda.
Posted: 16 May 2010 05:55 AM PDT
Missed this. At the annual award dinner of the American Enterprise Institute on May 6. Petraeus did not depreciate the mention of him by Bill Kristol as a possible candidate for president. (Christian Science Monitorcoverage, ABC News.) Calculation: if they draft and bankroll this man, they can get him off Netanyahu's back. Not a word of it in the Times.
Barghouthi: Until Congress listens to Palestinian-
Americans, forget about two state solution Posted: 16 May 2010 05:40 AM PDT
I think of Mustafa Barghouthi as the MLK Jr. of this struggle. He is restrained, mature, morally completely dedicated. For years he tried to interpret the news in a moderate manner (power politics), but the facts on the ground convinced him to call for BDS and the civil society route. Here he is in The Hill of all places (someone must explain this to me) telling Congress that the window on the two-state solution is basically over. Now this is the part I don't understand. If you believe in Partition, then why are you not trying to recruit Barghouthi and Mearsheimer to your side right now? Most days I'm for a binational state, but it is not as if either path is an easy one. And it seems to me that the only conclusion one can draw from recent events is this: out of the delusion that power politics will somehow continue to supply benediction to all its disastrous and racist choices in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Israel is committing national suicide before our eyes, and her American friends, suffering from the same delusion about history, are enabling it.
Oh but you came here to read Barghouthi. He is so clearthinking. In his last paragraph, I believe he is talking about Americans such as Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah.
Congress, however, could play a responsible role in expediting a just settlement to the conflict. First, tax-deductible contributions to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories should be halted. Settlers are violently implanting themselves in our midst in violation of international law and private property rights. The most extreme among them attack us, intimidate Palestinian farmers, uproot olive trees and, most recently, set fire to mosques. They are very rarely prosecuted. American tax policy should not facilitate settlers' efforts to wreck the prospects for regional peace and to destroy the last chance for the two-state solution.
Second, a congressional resolution could back President Obama's June call in Cairo for nonviolent Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Such a resolution would insist Israel cease its violent repression of a growing nonviolent protest movement. We are in the midst of vigorous advocacy for nonviolence and have created informal coalitions including Palestinians, Israelis, and international citizens intent on peacefully resisting Israel's West Bank land grabs. American calls to end violence would resonate more strongly here if members of Congress were staunchly upholding the right of Palestinian and Israeli peace activists to protest nonviolently against decades of oppression.
Third, Congressional hearings ought to be called that feature a wide range of Palestinian-
American experts. The United States has enormous expertise it can tap into, but the exclusion of most Palestinian- American voices results in members of Congress not being exposed to important viewpoints on the conflict. The failure to hear a range of voices risks congressional shock when Palestinians and others give up on the two-state solution and declare support for a South Africa-like struggle for equal rights and one person, one vote in one democratic state. This day is drawing nearer. Congress, if it wants to help the president achieve the two-state solution more than it wants to placate AIPAC, should take up these three moderate proposals – rule of law, support for nonviolence, and open debate – that Palestinian democrats have advocated for years.
P.S. Didi Remez has the same story really, from the European perspective, and it appeared in Maariv. The world hates Israel right now, doesn't want to hear anything about Iran until you deal with your Palestinian oppression.
Posted: 16 May 2010 05:30 AM PDT
One more thought about the oil industry's role in American politics. Right now Barack Obama is beating up on an oil company, BP, and implicitly I guess on Halliburton too (when there's a lot of blame to go around--including on the American people). It's good politics to beat up on an oil company. But Obama has never said one critical word about Gaza. He was silent throughout the onslaught, which did more damage to Gaza than BP has done to the Gulf coast, and he's sandbagged the Goldstone report. If corporate interests are so determinative of US policy, then how come a president can bash the corporations all day long? Obama's silence on Gaza completely echoes my own experience in another precinct of the discourse, mainstream media: we can't go near this, we can't criticize Israel. Our politics are broken on this question.
Posted: 15 May 2010 12:46 PM PDT
Susan Johnson just completed a roadtrip through Illinois and Iowa talking about Gaza. Some more of her notes:
Des Moines. People were very concerned about condition of children, especially children's trauma. Wanted to know what was and could be done to help them. Bombing of schools, hospitals, mental health facilities which denies services to children and adults. question: "Where can children be treated? Those places weren't supposed to be targeted." reply:"Gaza is doing the best they can under the circumstances.
They are determined, especially when it comes to their children" children's centers we visited and their programs. Audience was moved, shocked, sad, angry when pictures from Qattan's art therapy program were shown.
They pointed out and discussed how awful it was for children to witness the things they had seen. Comment: "The children had to have seen those terrible sights; they are too young to make up those vivid pictures."
Remote control machine gun tower. Explained how it operates, opening like a flower, machine guns appearing, shooter is located in Israel and uses "joy stick" to shoot.
Comment: "Unbelievable! And how do they get away with taking that land?"
Reply: "I believe they just take the land they want while other countries pretend they don't know about it. Often they take and use Gaza"s best farm land. They shoot at farmers as they try to harvest their crops and tend their fields. Keep in mind the shooter only sees a person's shape they can't identify the person they're shooting, yet they claim they are terrorists.
Comment: "I doubt you can prove that civilians are targeted."
Reply: "It's impossible for the soldier to see exactly who she's targeting. She shoots at an image and the victim can't be identified until after the after the incident... Farmers [are] a prime target."
Ames. Held at Ames Friends Meeting, pot luck supper, yummy. Audience 16-18 people. Quite a mix of people, Christian denominations. Much discussion about their denominations' action or lack of action on Gaza. Action is taken at the top, little input from individual churches and they don't seem to follow the leaders.
After my presentation, great deal of time spent discussing "difficulties they are having with the Jewish Community" (their words). Groups met with a mediator with no success, sounded more like a facilitator than a mediator. Almost all problems were the Jewish community's lack of cooperation.
My input: First, identify and work on your individual and group weaknesses. (The only person you can change is yourself).
Next: Some people in the peace group are very angry...it's quite visible. (Who wants to talk with an angry person?) I mentioned to a woman that she sounded angry..."You'
re right I'm very angry!!" "People hear your anger, not what you're saying, even when you make a valid point" The rest of the evening she kept repeating "I guess I am angry." But began thinking about it. If they want to have honest, open discussions with the Jews in Ames they need to "clean house;" have spokespeople who aren't angry; find things you both agree on (not necessarily about the issue). When pushed, don't take the bait; meet in neutral territory; keep your voice low; be respectful of the other person...you don't have to agree with their opinion; don't try to change their minds....concentrat
e on your opinion, ideas and beliefs. 
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