Here are the headlines from Mondoweiss for 01/04/2011:
Gaza Two Years Later: The roof of my house
Jan 04, 2011 04:32 am | Sarah Ali I used to love the roof of my house. Well, not anymore. There is a bunch of kids in the middle, all gazing at some round glittering objects. Appointing himself as the referee of the game, my little cousin declares the beginning of the match. A young boy starts. His pupils start to get bigger and sharper as he measures the angle. His looks are focused on his target. He professionally flicks the little marble out of his fist with the tip of his tiny thumb. "YES," he shouts. And the scuffle commences. His competitor, making an oath of divorce, claims that he who won had cheated. Then trying to accept the fact that he lost, he swears it was noting but a fluke by an amateur. Enraged, he quits the game and promises he would be taking revenge the next time they assemble to play. The kids of the neighborhood always wondered why this group preferred the roof over the street. "The roof is much nicer," my cousin used to simply reply. That's one reason why I loved the roof. I loved the spirit, and I loved the marbles. A year has passed. The kids don't come over much often these days. The place no longer sounds like their warmhearted spot, let's say. Had he survived the war, my cousin would have been 12 years old by now. And here I am, selfishly mourning over my stupid roof while others had lost their lives! There in the corner stands a pigeons' chamber. My parents have always argued whether to keep it or not. My mother used to complain about the "bad smell" and the "filth" the chamber caused. She, however, was fair enough to always praise the beauty of the doves. At that day, we all cried, mom included. There was too much blood to bear. We came to conclude that not only humans' but also birds' blood can be aching to see or to smell. Though the place is pretty dark in here, but now I can clearly see some feathers blowing here and there each time the puff hits what remained of the chamber. I only wish I could touch the feathers. I don't know how they get water to reach houses in other countries, but in Gaza, you have a tank on the roof supplying your house with water. Our tank has been leaking for ages. The plumber is always busy (don't get surprised, for in Gaza, everyone is busy all the time), so we had to live with the water leaking from the barrel. Well, that had its advantages no doubt. The withered lawn under the tank began to get green when the leak first started. No wonder why my brother was sluggish and didn't want the plumber to come take a look; he must have loved the green lawn. BANG..BANG.. the tank is not leaking anymore. It's not even there. The lawn slowly dies. I desperately need to go irrigate it. I used to study on the roof when I was a school-student. I can see my handwriting all over the place: on the water tanks, on the chamber's wall, on the railing of the roof. One year passed, and the handwriting started to fade. The things on which I used to write are no longer there. I eagerly want to go scribble something. I wish I could do so. I wish I could one day go up to sit in the roof and to find that nothing had changed. I am waiting for the day when I go up to find my cousin and his fellows playing marbles. I am waiting for the day when I find the tank leaking and the lawn under it getting green. I am waiting for the day when I find the pigeons' chamber standing where my father had once built it. I believe I will one day find the roof as lovely as it has always been. I don't know how or when, but I feel it's coming, and I know how naïve this sounds. I can't but love the roof of my house. I didn't survive the war, but I believe in miracles. I am praying those who survived would witness one. Sarah Ali, 19, is a second-year student of English literature at the Islamic University, Gaza. Gaza Two Years Later is a series of posts by Gazan bloggers and writers reflecting on the two-year anniversary of the Israeli attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008/09. You can read the entire series here. 
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IDF pushes claim that 'Palestinians lied' about Jawaher Abu Rahma's killing
Jan 04, 2011 04:00 am | Philip Weiss The Jawaher Abu-Rahma case is taking on huge political significance, the international attention given to the 36-year-old woman killed by teargas in occupied Bil'in on Friday, a year and a half after her brother Bassem was struck and killed by a teargas canister fired by the Israeli army in another demonstration against the wall. The Israelis are now actively trying to undermine the story. The human-rights attorney Michael Sfard has responded with this statement: Lawyer Michael Sfard who represents the Abu Rahmah family rejects these claims categorically. According to him, "Jawahir went a week ago for an examination for a common winter illness. According to people with whom I spoke, she was at the protest on Friday, but not in the first line of demonstrators, and after she was injured by the gas, she was removed to the area of the village houses, and from there was moved to the ambulance. The operational investigation cannot uncover reliable data, and therefore we are demanding a criminal investigation by the military police" What are these claims? First from Muqata: Senior IDF military sources briefed an exclusive group of bloggers this evening on the events surrounding this past Friday's Bilin demonstration and the "alleged tear gassing to death" of a Palestinian woman, Jawaher Abu Rahma.
IDF: We have reason to believe that the death 2 days ago was because of another reason than what the Palestinians are claiming (tear gas inhalation). And this from Ynet's Hanan Greenberg: Did Palestinians lie about death of Jawaher Abu-Rahma? Two days after reports that an anti-fence protestor died after inhaling tear gas fired by IDF troops, the army says medical information handed over to Israel raises fundamental question marks about the story. According to IDF officials, Abu-Rahma may have not even participated in the protest in question. Sources familiar with the material said that unlike similar incidents in the past, the report about Abu-Rahma's injuries arrived late and contained puzzling details. According to the medical report, there was no clear cause of death, the burial was undertaken via an accelerated procedure, and no post-mortem was performed. The information also reveals that Abu-Rahma was administered an unusual quantity of drugs, used to offer treatment against poisoning, drug overdose, or leukemia. Moreover, her family's report that she was "hurt by Israeli gas" was not corroborated by any other source. One of the Israeli claims is that not much teargas was used. But Jewish Voice for Peace's twitter feed clearly contradicts that claim-- it was "raining" gas--as do Lisa Goldman's feeds posted here the other day. We're awaiting updates on the case.
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Gaza Two Years Later: From beneath
Jan 04, 2011 03:30 am | Rawan Yaghi I didn't even know if my eyes were open. After a big mess everything seemed so calm I could sense the dust covering my face, the only part I could feel. I could feel my breath hitting one of the bricks of my room's floor. Air found its way through everything surrounding my body. Silence was all I could hear. My arms trapped somewhere under the wooden edges of my bed, my toes, my legs, my hair, they all were jailed and penalized not to move. I was afraid. I waited and waited trying to recall all the joyful events in my life, as my mother once advised me to do so when I'm afraid, though they were few: My elder brother's big wedding, my grandmother coming from Hajj and bringing me a doll singing, the last Eid when I got my biggest Edeyya ever, my mother bringing us home a new baby after me. I wonder if that was a happy event for me, but I could certainly see the joy my parents had looking at that little thing. My breath firmly came back to my face touching it as to comfort me and tell me that everything will be ok. A minute later I started crying, though. And only then I realized that my eyes were closed, for I could feel my wet eyelashes. It did not matter; opening them and closing them were thoroughly the same. I cried so much that my tears mixed with the dust on my face felt like mud at the edges of my face. I must have been bleeding, since a killing pain started growing in my chest with the growing of my weeping. I tried to move in order to stop the pain. Only one muscle, I found out that something very sharp, extremely strong, calmly was standing through my skin. I stopped crying. I waited. I bled. Rawan Yaghi, 17, is a secondary school student in Gaza. She blogs at http://rawan-hp.blogspot.com. Gaza Two Years Later is a series of posts by Gazan bloggers and writers reflecting on the two-year anniversary of the Israeli attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008/09. You can read the entire series here. 
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Gaza Two Years Later: I waited 23 days to cry, and two years to write
Jan 04, 2011 03:15 am | Fidaa Abu Assi What a miracle! Two years elapsed and I am still capable of taking another breath of life! Who ever expected I would be writing this right now in the same Gaza, the very same place that was being entirely knocked down two years ago? Do I have to be grateful? Am I lucky enough to survive such a gruesomely unforgettable war to keep recalling it each year? Or would I be luckier if I was among the dead –definitely not the wounded- in order to be spared the torture of living its horrible memories over and over again? I expected a relieving answer from none. If I happened to be asked to chronicle its events, I wonder what I would probably have to write about. Would it seem weird if I said I had seen nothing of most what I heard? Yet, I still insist I witnessed it all; every single second I had to suffer. How ironic! Yes I know. We underwent 23-relentless days of intensive punishments and collective genocide; days of heavy bombardment and white-phosphorous shelling; and days of tight restrictions and grave aggression. No electricity. No television. No connection. No contact. Our cries, our screams, our pleas couldn't be heard in a such abandoned warzone-like area. The whole world seemed to suddenly turn its back on us. As our cellphones were almost out of power, the only connection to the outside was the transistor radio. The shelling was targeting every living thing but we couldn't figure out who and what the target was. The radio helped in updating us only with the death-toll, giving the number of the dead bodies. With everything based on anticipations, nothing was certain. Since the hell had broken loose in Gaza, we were locked in our house, actually crammed only in one room, the smallest and the middle, leaving the largest and avoiding the wall-to-wall rooms which could be of a dangerous exposure to the explosions. Actually, that was my dad's suggestion, thinking we would be protected this way from any harm and that we could all be altogether, offering support & warm to one another since each one of us, while holding each other's arms, seemed to be shivering, either out of cold or out of fear. Israeli bombs and shells came from every direction in a frenzy of violence. With each astonishing sound, one would close the eyes and say" God God! Am I the target?" Our ears were functioning very attentively. I wished I were deaf. I couldn't bear the roaring sounds of helicopters overhead which it seemed it would never leave the sky. I couldn't stand the constant barrage of explosives which I thought would be the cause of my imminent deafness. Our eyes could peek out of the windows to see the air was full of fire, smoke and debris. We didn't know what happened there. We heard tens and dozens were killed but we had seen none. We heard people screaming in panic but we could hardly know who the deceased was. We were prisoners in our houses. We couldn't even run for our lives since every single spot and creature were targeted. No place was safe even at home. With much fear that we would be the next victims, we waited anxiously our turns to finally come in so the effects of such traumas would wear off the moment we died out. Out of my scattered and shattered memories, one thing I remember very well is that I wasn't told that the war was over; I just had the feeling it was. I spent the 23-days in total silence which was constantly broken by the sounds of the Apache or F-16. But I myself was completely silent, lost in thoughts, wishing not to be the only survivor among my beloved family. The very thought of it chilled my blood within me. Whosoever saw me thought I was resilient and strong enough to bear all of its atrocities with a deafening silence. In fact, I wasn't. I was coward enough to having wished to be dead as soon as possible so I could rest in peace in my grave if I couldn't find peace at my home. Twenty-three days and I shed no single drop of tears. This sent my dad into a series of questions. "Is she alright?", my dad implored my mum, "why doesn't she look affected?" My mum kindly thought I wasn't afraid. To their great disappointment, I was. Fear tightened around my chest and it almost killed me. I was frightened by the thought of losing you, mum. I was selfish enough to pray not to be tormented by the loss of my mum and it didn't cross my mind that she would even be more tormented by my loss. I should have prayed that we should all die together. When it was over, I could fake my resilience no more. I do remember that two nights after the war, I woke up to find myself crying heavily. That time I hadn't fought back my tears. I simply couldn't. I wanted to release all my pent-up emotions so I broke down in tears. I could no longer contain myself. My mum was awakened by my pathetic sobs. So anxious was she that she didn't know what she had to do. She took me in her warm lap trying to soothe away my fear. Clutching her arm, I bitterly wept. With bated breath she asked "have you waited 23-days to cry?" I didn't know under what categories I should have classified my tears. Tears of survival? Tears of suppression? Tears of injustice? Tears of negligence? I didn't care. I became better off since then, however. As my mum once wondered if I waited 23 days to cry, I am now wondering whether I've been waiting 2 years to write. Perhaps I didn't want to keep the memory of this tragedy alive; I wanted to forget to help me move on, but the world, in order to move on, shouldn't forget this. Not only does this date mark the genocidal Gaza war but it also debunks the international conspiracy of silence. Fidaa Abu Assi, 22, is an English Literature graduate from the Islamic University of Gaza. She blogs at http://fidaa.me/. Gaza Two Years Later is a series of posts by Gazan bloggers and writers reflecting on the two-year anniversary of the Israeli attack on Gaza in the winter of 2008/09. You can read the entire series here. 
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Israeli spoof of brainwashing — in kindergarten
Jan 03, 2011 10:15 pm | Pamela Olson This is adorable. And telling. And hilarious. Not the salmon! 
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Habibi Chomsky
Jan 03, 2011 10:07 pm | Seham Noam Chomsky on "delegitimation" at truthout: While intensively engaged in illegal settlement expansion, the government of Israel is also seeking to deal with two problems: a global campaign of what it perceives as "delegitimation" – that is, objections to its crimes and withdrawal of participation in them – and a parallel campaign of legitimation of Palestine. The "delegitimation," which is progressing rapidly, was carried forward in December by a Human Rights Watch call on the U.S. "to suspend financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel's spending in support of settlements," and to monitor contributions to Israel from tax-exempt U.S. organizations that violate international law, "including prohibitions against discrimination" – which would cast a wide net. Amnesty International had already called for an arms embargo on Israel. The legitimation process also took a long step forward in December, when Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil recognized the State of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), bringing the number of supporting nations to more than 100.   
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Baby steps (State Department is 'aware' of killing involving tear gas at protest)
Jan 03, 2011 10:03 pm | Philip Weiss From the State Department today: QUESTION: Were you aware of this protest that happened at Ambassador Cunningham's house? At his residence in Tel Aviv over the weekend, a bunch of protestors tried to, quote-un-quote, "return teargas canisters" that were fired at them that led to the death of a protestor. MR. CROWLEY: I'm not, actually. QUESTION: Okay. The reason I ask is that the Israeli police say that some of the teargas canisters were still active and that they were treating it as an attack on a diplomatic facility. MR. CROWLEY: And -- QUESTION: Can you -- MR. CROWLEY: -- we certainly support the investigation. I mean, I am aware of the episode in terms of the teargas, but I'm not aware of the protests. But I'm – we understand it's being investigated. QUESTION: Do you – so you – I'm sorry, you're aware of the protest at the Ambassador's residence or -- MR. CROWLEY: No, I do understand that there was teargas that was led off in conjunction with a protest – I didn't know the location of the protest – and that I believe at least one person was killed as a result of that. And I believe it's being investigated. QUESTION: Well, this was – this is – there are two separate incidents. MR. CROWLEY: Okay. QUESTION: There's the one where the teargas was fired and then there was this one in front of – can you -- MR. CROWLEY: I did not know anything about the other -- QUESTION: Okay. Can – is it possible to check to see if you guys are treating this as an attack on one of your diplomatic facilities? MR. CROWLEY: Okay. 
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Signposting the occupation
Jan 03, 2011 03:16 pm | Eleanor K  My senses let me down. On Friday 31 December – the day Jawaher Abu Rahmah was murdered by the Israeli army – I thought I smelt manure in the village of Bil'in, but it was the skunk truck (The Boesh), used by the Israeli military to crush peaceful protest. Back in 1994 I thought I lived in one nation called Israel, with an Arab minority – no one had told me about the military occupation and I failed to see it. That year I witnessed one minor and one major event: on a Saturday morning near the Damascus Gate (Bab al-Amoud) in East Jerusalem, a jeep brakes abruptly as a young Arab man jumps out of the back; two soldiers give chase, hit him with a blunt weapon and drag him back into the vehicle, which then drives on. I watched it happen and I didn't like it, but I didn't know what it meant. On 25 February that year, newspaper vendors near and within the Old City thrust images of a massacre into my face; I learn that a Jewish settler and medical doctor Baruch Goldstein has entered the Ibrahim mosque in Hebron and opened fire on worshippers before being beaten to death. I looked at the gruesome photos and winced, feeling sorry for the Arabs, but I still didn't understand. What I could not see with my own eyes did not occur to me at 18 years old: that I was witnessing a brutal occupation of an indigenous people called the Palestinians. The term 'ethnic cleansing' was entirely alien to me, and 'occupation' was only familiar to me from history lessons on the Nazi occupation of France. The family I worked for in Tel Aviv certainly did not tell me. Instead, they only warned me each weekend to be careful in Jerusalem because "it is full of Arabs" and "they are like animals". As the child of British liberal, middle class parents, I dismissed this as the vulgar racism and populist sentiment of the barely educated lower middle-class. The year 2010/11: "Look over here, I want to show you, can you see the settlement of Har Gilo, can you see the Israeli-only road and tunnel; can you see the new construction of the wall just below?" M. always insists on pointing out all the signs of the occupation during our walks through Beit Jala, and sometimes I think it's unnecessary, yet I have missed so many signs before. Last week during my bespoke tour of West Jerusalem, O. asked me if I had seen The Russian Compound leased by the Israeli state, also used as a detention and GSS interrogation centre holding many Palestinian political detainees. I had walked past, around it, perhaps sensed the rings of barbed wire in the periphery of my vision, but I had not been told its purpose, so no, I had not really seen it. T, a Jewish Israeli activist now in her 60s who was born in Tel Aviv, tells me she used to walk to school with a group of friends through a ruined Palestinian village and not ask who had lived there before. Present-day Tel Aviv has been cleansed of almost all obvious signs of Palestinian presence and dispossession except for the omnipresent young Israelis in military fatigues who serve the occupation but whose olive green uniform signals to most of the public, simply – and absurdly – benign, patriotic duty. Traveling to Bil'in from Tel Aviv, or leaving al-Quds to visit surrounding areas I see other signs – ordinary road signs in Hebrew, transliterated into English and Arabic. They are signposting war crimes: the illegal settlements beyond the 1949 armistice 'Green' line that proliferate, indeed flourish. What kind of criminal signposts his or her own crime? Where a hand-made sign or a placard would have little legitimacy in the eyes of a public distrustful of amateurishness and the absence of recognizable branding, mass produced government ministry signs with the purported mandate of informing the public give comfort to the Israeli and foreign driver and pedestrian. Today, as I write this, the signs of occupation are too clear to me; I want to go to al-Quds for the afternoon but I would have to take a bus through a military checkpoint and I need a day without seeing an Israeli military uniform and without witnessing further outrages to human dignity: outrages and war crimes that are perpetrated so casually and defended so unthinkingly by a coalition of the willfully ignorant and defiantly racist. At the Tel Aviv protest against the murder of Jawaher on Saturday, I hold up a borrowed sign: 'Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, killed by Israel', a driver shouts back: 'She shouldn't have been demonstrating'. We need to be educated before we can read the signs of Israeli occupation. I fantasize about how an illegal settlement might be signposted if the Israeli state were not the driving force behind the settlement of Palestinian land – a war crime under International humanitarian law. Perhaps it would be black spray on cardboard and it would read: 'Come and live here – it belongs to us, not the Arabs. Tell your friends too. We have called it 'Holy Mount of Ancient Something Beautiful' ". Visually suspect as well as recognizably criminal. 
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Goldberg's next war sure sounds a lot like his last one
Jan 03, 2011 03:00 pm | Philip Weiss Four months back, Jeffrey Goldberg published a long piece in the Atlantic called "The Point of No Return," making the Israeli case for the United States to attack Iran in Never-again terms: Iran is threatening the existence of "the Jewish people," Israel is bound to act if the U.S. fails to, the U.S. will do a better job. The piece has stirred a lot of discussion. Goldberg has gone on national media and panels at thinktanks to promote these bellicose ideas. But no one has pointed out that the piece makes the same argument Goldberg marshaled eight years ago for the U.S. to attack Iraq, that time with an article in the New Yorker magazine under the headline, "The Great Terror." Iraq too was bent on the destruction of the Jewish people, and was developing a nuclear weapon to do so. The language in the pieces is eerily similar. The last time the concentration camp Goldberg invoked was Bergen-Belsen. This time around it's Auschwitz. Both times the enemy is "three years" away from going nuclear. Last time: He [August Hanning of German intelligence agency] does not equivocate. "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years," he said. This time: Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so). The last time round Goldberg was flat wrong. "The Great Terror" stated that Saddam had links to Al Qaeda, and the article was cited by both Bush and Cheney as proof of the threat posed by Iraq (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has told me). As it turned out, Saddam Hussein didn't possess weapons of mass destruction and didn't attack Israel and wasn't making a nuclear warhead or an aflatoxin/chemical/biological one and wasn't importing canisters of mysterious nerve gases, as Goldberg had affirmed. But meantime, the U.S. was at war with Iraq, in some measure because of the bad ideas that Goldberg proliferated, and we and the Iraqis and its neighbors are still suffering the consequences. This time around, the question is, Why is anyone listening to Goldberg? Why are prestige news organizations giving him the microphone? But let's compare similarities in the casus belli pieces. In both cases, Goldberg turned Koran scholar to support his views. Last time, Saddam's rage against the Kurds was based in part on a chapter in the Koran that allows conquering Muslim armies to seize the spoils of their foes. It reads, in part, 'Against them'—your enemies—'make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah…' Now Iran is the problem, Goldberg writes that "the depth of official Iranian hatred of Israel and Jews" can only be explained by looking to a line of Shia Muslim thinking that views Jews as ritually contaminated, a view derived in part from the Koran's portrayal of Jews as treasonous foes of the Prophet Muhammad. In both cases, Goldberg alarms readers with Holocaust-tinged fears that a Muslim country is planning to wipe Jews out. [T]he experts say, Saddam's desire is to expel the Jews from history That was last time. And this time— [A] nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The last time Saddam was the first leader since "the Holocaust" to use poison gas to "exterminate" women and children, and Goldberg cited an expert on Iraq with Holocaust fears. as a child she lived in Germany, near Bergen-Belsen. "It's tremendously influential in your early years to live near a concentration camp," she said. In Kurdistan, she heard echoes of the German campaign to destroy the Jews. This time around it's the Shoah, and the camp is different, but the lesson of destruction is the same: Many Israelis think the Iranians are building Auschwitz... "Iran represents a threat like the Shoah," an Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me.... "In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation." All the talk of annihilation from Israelis. In fact, Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf has shown here, Goldberg echoed the hysteria of one element of Israeli society to justify the idea of the U.S. going on another Middle East joyride so as to forestall the Israelis from doing so. The views of Israeli generals and senior officials in the Defense Department on Iran are of great interest, but they should be put in the right context. There are many in Israel who don't see Iran as an existential threat, or, more precisely, they don't see it as a different threat than those Israel faced in the past. There are even more who think that the risk in attacking Iran is far greater then the possible benefits. Israeli Generals have a tendency for creating mass hysteria. The seamless stoking of hysteria is the most obvious impression one gets from reading Goldberg's two casus belli pieces in sequence: Goldberg's paranoia exists out of time; the very same themes and lines about the destruction of Jews appear several years apart, shifted from one enemy to the other (much as the State Department 60 years ago was the anti-Semitic enemy in his book Prisoners...). Why is Goldberg still taken so seriously? The answer has to do with the strength of the Israel lobby inside the American establishment. That is how a former Israeli soldier--Goldberg immigrated to Israel in the 80s then came back a few years later-- hops from one prestige magazine to another. Indeed, Goldberg's core concern, which also extends seamlessly eight years from the first piece to the second one, from Iraq to Iran-- is not the fear of destruction, but of Israel losing hegemonic power in the Middle East. I have held out the two most similar and important phrases in the pieces for last, the phrases that reflect this root concern: [T]here is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them [nukes] soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East" Goldberg warned the last time. And this time: The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me...."You'd create a great sea change in the balance of power in our area". Does America want to go to war to preserve Israel's power edge in the Middle East? 
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J Street asks: 'What if Israel Ceases to be a Democracy?' (Pssst…it never was)
Jan 03, 2011 02:50 pm | Matthew Taylor Another J Street fundraising pitch lands in my inbox: Matthew -- "What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?" was the provocative headline of a must-read Monday blog post by the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg imagining the unthinkable in Israel... His concern? What if Israel's citizens, in the face of failing peace efforts, the march of settlements, growing anti-democratic trends and religious extremism, choose its Jewish character over its democratic values? But Israel is not now, and never has been, anything other than a pretend democracy. Apparently J Street is worried that the pretense will come to an end (and for some reason wants me to give them money, to help stave off the impending public relations disaster). But it's too late: Haaretz reports that only 17% of the Israeli public prioritizes "democracy" over "Jewish state." Oh, and J Street opposes free speech calls to cut off Israel's taxpayer-funded supplies of U.S. guns: J Street Seattle calls on the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign to reconsider its advertising campaign that will run later this month. The ads accuse Israel of utilizing U.S. aid to commit war crimes. This only serves to inflame tensions and promote division and confusion, rather than to point the way towards a productive resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it's true! Israel does use U.S. aid to commit war crimes! These guys are like the annoying family member who says, "Oh, yeah, we really should get Uncle Larry into rehab, he's drinking too much," and then hands Uncle Larry a blank check to go get drunk at the bar. Instead of insisting on rehab! And then blocks the rest of the family's efforts to cut off Joe's supplies! Dear Jeremy Ben-Ami: The day you start saying we should end Israel's supply of land confiscation-enabling armaments is the day you have my support. Until then, your emails go to "spam." 
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