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#1747 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Sun Jul 4, 2010 5:04 pm
Subject: Peace talks: a sort of blind-man's bluff
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Peace talks: a sort of blind-man's bluff

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/peace-talks-sort-of-blind-mans-bluff.html

 

by Neville Teller

Sunday, 4 July 2010

Next Tuesday, 6 July, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is due to visit Washington.  His previous scheduled date with President Obama. inconveniently coinciding as it did with the Gaza flotilla debacle, was hastily cancelled.  The last time the two actually met the climate was frosty, as the US President presented the Israeli PM with a list of required actions aimed at restoring sufficient confidence on the Palestinian side to allow the proximity talks initiative to go ahead.

Those, by and large, Netanyahu met, and indeed the US special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, was able to set up and subsequently maintain the arm's-length negotiations that have been dubbed "proximity talks".  The process even survived the Gaza flotilla incident, and Mitchell returned to the Middle East last week to initiate the fifth round. 

This, according to a report in yesterday's (Saturday's) edition of the London-based Arab language newspaper, Al-Hayat, has yielded an unexpected outcome.   The report, not as yet officially confirmed, is that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has handed  Mitchell a list of firm proposals for reaching a peace agreement with Israel.   

Abbas is said to have proposed the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but with a land swap encompassing 2.3 per cent, which would leave larger Israeli settlement blocs, such as Gush Etzion, Pisgat Ze'ev and Modi'in Ilit, in Israel's hands, along with a swathe of land overlooking Ben-Gurion International Airport.  In return, the Palestinians would get land bordering the southern West Bank in addition to land for a passageway between the West Bank and Gaza.

Abbas is also reported to have presented a softened stance on East Jerusalem, which would become the future capital of the Palestinian state.  Abbas reportedly proposed that Israel should retain control over the Old City's Jewish Quarter and Western Wall. The rest of the Old City, while under Palestinian sovereignty, would be open to worshippers of all religions.

Included in the scheme are suggestions on borders and security arrangements.

This package, if the reports are accurate, must be regarded as a good opening gambit on Abbas's part.  While certainly unacceptable to Israel as it stands, it undoubtedly contains more accommodating elements than previous negotiations have yielded.  And once the concept of a land swap is on the table, there is room for manoeuvre, discussion and agreement.  The concept of a roadway of some sort linking the West Bank and Gaza has been contained in previous Israeli proposals, notably in the last set offered by Ehud Olmert, when prime minister, and never formally responded to by Abbas.

The sticking point, of course, lies in the final status of Jerusalem.  The most far-reaching of previous Israeli suggestions – those sponsored by Ehud Barak, currently Defense Minister, and Ehud Olmert – envisaged the capital of a Palestinian sovereign state as being in a new municipality, perhaps to be called Al-Quds, created from current Arab-occupied districts of East Jerusalem amalgamated with adjoining areas containing a number of Arab-occupied towns.  This concept may indeed still be negotiable within the terms of Abbas's new proposals.  A real intractable – though perhaps not insoluble – problem will be sovereignty over the Old City and access to the holy places.  This is where the hard bargaining will eventually be required.

Whether Netanyahu will respond immediately is doubtful.  Last Friday, in an interview on Israel's TV, he called on Abbas to enter direct negotiations.  “I’m ready anytime,” he said. “Let’s not waste another 15 months before we sit down together.”  He added that he was willing to discuss the end of the Israeli government's West Bank building freeze, set to end in September, and that he was prepared to go to Ramallah to negotiate with Abbas if the PA President would come to Jerusalem.

"Willing to discuss" the end of the settlement freeze he may be, but here Netanyahu is caught in something of a pincer.  On the one hand four ministers in his fragile coalition cabinet – Avigdor Lieberman, Moshe Ya'alon, Benny Begin and Eli Yishai – want construction on the West Bank to be resumed as soon as the official moratorium expires.  On the other, in discussions with President Obama next week, Netanyahu is likely to be questioned closely about the possibility of extending the moratorium on West Bank construction in one form or another.  Obama is expected to suggest this to Netanyahu in order to enable direct talks to take place, for American officials are pressuring Abbas to start talking face-to-face with Israel.

 

This coming week, if Netanyahu is capable of demonstrating just a touch of statesmanship, he has the chance of bringing the US President alongside a joint vision of where the peace process should lead.  The question is: does Netanyahu in fact, have a clear vision to impart?  What sort of future does he envisage for the region?  Does he have a destination he wishes to reach, or a clear direction on how to get there?

 

As noted columnist, Aluf Benn, wrote last week:  "Instead of citing hostile statements from the archives of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Netanyahu needs to present Obama with a practical proposal that can be neatly packaged and marketed. His current formula a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state - is yawn-inducing… Compare that with phrases like the ingathering of the exiles, peace, an end to the conflict, and disengagement, as enunciated by his predecessors. These messages electrified the public and tilted world governments toward Israel."

 

Meanwhile, Palestinian sources close to Abbas are quoted as saying the Palestinian leader expects more effective US participation in peace talks, with some suggesting that Abbas wants the Obama administration to impose a settlement if negotiations fail. 

Nor is he the only one.  Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, present at a meeting in Paris last Thursday attended by the PA Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, said that if the arm's-length negotiations do not make progress by September, Arab leaders would begin to push the UN for the unilateral creation of a Palestinian state.

"The Arab League foreign ministers," he said, "would agree on the need to act in the Security Council.  The state should not be delayed beyond this year. Who should decide? The Quartet is not enough.  The Security Council is the venue."

Yet all these statements and discussions, actual and potential, are perpetuating a sort of fictional drama in which all the parties involved appear willing players.  Who questions the presumption that Mahmoud Abbas is negotiating on behalf of  the whole Palestinian people?  But is he?  Is the reality not that he speaks only for those resident in the West Bank?  Does George Mitchell, or President Obama, believe that a "successful" end to the negotiations, even if achieved at face-to-face talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, would be acceptable to Hamas – let alone Iran or Syria?  Would Hamas, the de facto (though not the de jure)  government of the Gaza Strip, feel bound by agreements reached in its absence from the negotiating table (not that Hamas would agree to sit down with Israel in the first place)?  it is as if all parties have willingly put on blindfolds in order to play a game of blind-man's bluff.

And the game would continue, even if the talks ended in failure.  Far from Ahmed Aboul Gheit's dire last-ditch scenario solving anything, the reality is that Hamas has set its face against endorsing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and there seems little softening of their attitude.  The sort of response from Hamas that would follow a two-state solution imposed by diktat of the Security Council requires little imagination.

The truth is that the regional problem requiring the most immediate attention in the Middle East is the bitter and bloody inter-Palestinian feud between Hamas and Fatah.  Until that is resolved – and resolved in a way that brings Hamas willingly alongside Mahmoud Abbas in his peace negotiations – any "settlement" of the Israel-Palestinian issue could be only partial and unstable. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Copyright 2010 by the author. This work is posted at http://www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/. Please do link to it, quote excerpts and forward it by email with this notice. Distributed by ZNN. To subscribe send email to znn-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 


#1748 From: Vic Rosenthal <vic@...>
Date: Mon Jul 5, 2010 11:39 pm
Subject: Presbyterian report could not be more one-sided
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Presbyterian report could not be more one-sided

<http://fresnozionism.org/2010/07/presbyterian-report-could-not-be-more-one-sided/>
July 5th, 2010
Anti-Israel extremist Avraham Burg speaks at PCUSA General Assembly

Anti-Israel extremist Avraham Burg speaks at PCUSA General Assembly

The Middle East Study Committee of the Presbyterian Church of the US  (PCUSA) recently issued a report that was so one-sided that even J Street protested.

The 179 pages of the report positively reek with self-righteous pomposity, and include quotations from the Tanach and even the Talmud! It’s impossible to deal with this bizarre document systematically, but here are some random notes.

The authors’ historical vision comes entirely through the eyes of Arab and extreme left-wing commentators, like Ilan Pappé and Avraham Burg, as well as anti-Israel NGOs. For example, they portray the creation of the Arab refugees as entirely Israel’s fault:

One of these psycho-traumas is the Holocaust in which 6 million European Jews were annihilated at the hands of the Nazi party, its state apparatus and allies. The other trauma is the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 from their ancestral homeland by the Israel Haganah [the pre-state militant force that was the precursor of the Israel Defense Forces]. [p 30]

The report ignores the actions of the Palestinian and Arab leadership before, during and after the 1948 war, the repeated attempts at reconciliation by Israel, etc. The Nakba story is repeated over and over, and compared with the Holocaust several times.

There’s a creative take on the 1967 war, too:

In June 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. At the end of six days, Israel had taken the Gaza strip and the Sinai from Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan from Syria. The United Nations Security Council passed resolution 242 that requested the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 war and emphasized the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area could live in security. [p 64]

Interesting. “Israel attacked,” and Nasser’s closing the Strait of Tiran, massing troops on the border and threatening genocide had nothing to do with it! The interpretation of resolution 242 is funny, too, leaving out the “secure and recognized borders.”

They don’t do much better with more recent events. They actually wrote this sentence to describe the bloody 2007 coup in which Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza:

Violence erupted, thought by many to be aided and abetted by the United States and Israel, within the Palestinian territories with the end result that in 2007 Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority and Fatah the West Bank. [pp 97-98]

Violence erupted! Shooting Fatah operatives in the knees and throwing them off tall buildings erupted! Setting people on fire erupted! And the US and Israel were responsible! I couldn’t make this stuff up.

And here’s their analysis of the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons:

While this growing fear [of the Iranian bomb] is a deep concern, an equal concern is the number of nuclear warheads that Israel currently stockpiles and thus the growing sense of Iranian vulnerability and insecurity. While Israel will not confirm its possession of nuclear weapons or the number held, it is generally agreed that Israel has stockpiled close to 100 nuclear weapons.

The only just and peaceful solution to this growing concern is to work for a nuclear-free Middle East in both Iran and Israel. [p 36]

Really? It’s “an equal concern?” The Israeli nuclear capability is the reason that it hasn’t already been attacked with chemical weapons, and may well be one of the main reasons that there still is a Jewish state. Israel has never, ever brandished its weapons offensively. Iran would have nothing to feel ‘insecure’ about if it were not developing nuclear weapons and threatening to destroy Israel every other day.

Should the Palestinians be criticized for resorting to terrorism?   The Presbyterians see it as a response to violence by Israel’s army and settlers, and  it’s presented as entirely understandable even if ultimately not “acceptable”:

Inexcusable acts of violence have been committed by both the powerful occupying forces of the Israeli military and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, as well as, the Palestinians, of whom a relatively small minority has resorted to violence as a means of resisting the occupation. Violence is not an acceptable means to peace, regardless of its rationale. [p 37]

There’s no distinction between terrorism and self-defense, either:

Distressingly, all too often violence is used as a means of reacting to injustice or as a means of inflicting a country’s will on another people. Violence, whether by tanks, attack helicopters, F-16 fighter jets, rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, antipersonnel bombs, white phosphorous, rockets, bombs of any kind including suicide bombs, is reprehensible and is a crime against humanity. [p 70]

The writers choose their facts selectively:

Consider the case of Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian journalist, novelist, and short story writer, who was assassinated along with his young niece, Lamis, on July 12, 1972, by Israeli agents in a car bomb explosion in Beirut. By the time of his early death at the age of 36, he had published eighteen books and written numerous articles on the culture, politics, and the Palestinian people’s struggle. His works have been translated into seventeen languages. A collection of short stories about Palestine’s children was published in English in 1984 and was titled Palestine’s Children. Kanafani’s untimely death deprived the Palestinians of an eloquent voice. [p 71]

Oh, the humanity! But CAMERA points out that Kanafani was the right-hand man of George Habash, head of the ultra-violent PFLP, a group responsible for numerous murders and hijackings. Kanafani met with the Japanese Red Army who perpetrated a vicious attack at Lod airport, killing 26 and injuring 80. Who says that intellectuals can’t also be men of action?

So why is Israel so evil? According to the report, Israelis have been morally damaged by the trauma of the Holocaust:

This sense of historical victimization creates for some Israelis a compensatory reflex to choose power and armament; to reject the claims and critique of others; and the adoption of a philosophy that the “end justifies the means,” even if that means the loss of human rights, life, and the dignity of others.  [p 31]

Of course Israel’s choice to arm itself could not have anything to do with the fact that the country has been under continuous attack from both regular armies and terrorists since its inception, right? Nope, they just don’t care about anyone else.

In addition, despite dozens of references to Israeli policy as ‘immoral’, there doesn’t appear to be a single mention of the policy of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to educate their populations, especially children, to hate Israel and Jews in the crudest antisemitic terms.

Indeed, the report describes Hamas — an organization whose charter preaches the violent destruction of Israel and exhorts Muslims to murder Jews — as follows:

The United States, European Union, and Israel governments consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel, while most Gazans see Hamas as an organization formed to resist the occupation by Israel and to recover their lost lands in Palestine. Hamas is an Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama alIslamiyya, or Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas is a militant organization; however over 90 percent of Hamas’ resources are spent on social services to the Palestinian refugees.

The implication seems to be that resisting the occupation and recovering lost lands applies to the occupation of 1967. But of course, for Hamas, the occupation started in 1948. So “most Gazans” and the Western governments don’t disagree about Hamas’ intentions! The statement about Hamas’ resources is ridiculous and is unsourced.

Overall, the report could not possibly be more one-sided. It is a sustained indictment of Israel. When it mentions Palestinian terrorism and violence (which it does only rarely), it’s always explained as springing from the trauma of the Nakba or the horrors of occupation.

This historically and morally upside-down, hateful document will be considered by the PCUSA’s General Assembly this week.

-- Vic Rosenthal
http://fresnozionism.org


#1749 From: "David Frankfurter" <david.frankfurter@...>
Date: Tue Jul 6, 2010 6:30 am
Subject: Red Cross hosts Hamas deportees
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Red Cross hosts Hamas deportees
http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/121951.html

The Red Cross has always been grudging in its attitude to Israel. Its decades of reluctance to accept Israel's Magen David Adom into its fold until the US Red Cross withdrew funding was a prime example. For many years, the Red Cross had pretended that its hands were tied, as Israel's Star of David emblem did not conform to its standards (while the Palestinian Red Crescent was fine).

And today, the Red Cross says it is pressuring Hamas to allow access to captured soldier Gilad Shalit. Somehow, in a perverted way, the Red Cross claims some sort of victory in its activities in the region:

"One of our main achievements is that we have been able to visit nearly everyone detained in connection to this conflict, with the exception of Gilad Shalit," Pierre Dorbes, deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Israel and the Occupied Territories, told Haaretz on Tuesday.

Dorbes conveniently forgets Ron Arad, or in fact any Israeli who has been captured in the past by Arab armies or militias. Of course the Red Cross has had access to all Israeli prisoners. Israel acts within the norms of international law and morality even toward terrorists. And the Red Cross claims the credit!

Of course, the Red Cross is powerless against rogue regimes, like Hamas - isn't it? Academic Israel hater Noam Chomsky tells us in "Turning the Tide: US intervention in Central America and the struggle for peace" that the Red Cross "in July 1982... threatened to leave El Salvador because of human rights abuses by the armed forces...". 

So in Gaza, has the Red Cross ever taken such a strong stand - if not for Gilad Shalit, then for the citizens of southern Israel who were subjected to barrages of rockets and missiles? For the daily abuses of human rights in Gaza as Hamas attacks its own citizens, steals their aid, uses them as human shields, implements kangaroo court death penalties, and much more?

How does the Red Cross pressure Hamas?

In East Jerusalem, the answer is clear - although the only media to have carried the story so far is the print edition of Israel's Hebrew language Yediot Aharonot and the website of the Muslim Brotherhood. (I leave you to ask your local media why this story is of no general interest.)

To quote Yediot Aharonot "Hamas does not allow Red Cross representatives to visit captive Gilad Shalit, but it doesn't stop the international organisation from granting asylum in its East Jerusalem offices to Hamas leaders."Israel has issued deportation orders for subversive activity against four Hamas leaders. One is in an Israeli jail, waiting the outcome of a high court appeal against the order. The others are photographed being served drinks by a Red Cross employee at a table laden with refreshments in the Red Cross East Jerusalem offices, which has granted them asylum and advised the Israeli authorities that they are under Red Cross protection.

Israel has warned that they are not protected there...but if they are arrested, I can just imagine the sudden media interest and outcry.

 

 

Please post comments to http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/121951.html.  I read them all.


#1750 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Wed Jul 7, 2010 12:35 pm
Subject: Bibi and Barack straighten out a few things
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Bibi and Barack straighten out a few things

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/bibi-and-barack-straighten-out-few.html

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

Wednesday, 7 July 2010

 

 

When Israel's Prime Minister met US President Obama in Washington yesterday, the atmosphere was described as very friendly, and the discussions went well.  Later, both men were adamant that the relationship between the USA and Israel was not only strong but unbreakable.  Obama called the meeting "one more step in the extraordinary friendship between the US and Israel, which has grown closer and closer as time goes on."

 

This cordial outcome might suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu (generally known within Israel as "Bibi") had brought to the White House a vision for the future of the Middle East that Obama could sign up to.

 

The President's immediate and longer-term aspirations for the Israel-Palestine issue seem clear enough.  Having invested a good deal of effort in promoting negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel – indirect in the first instance –he is now seeking direct face-to-face talks between the two parties. And the objective? That, too, is clear – a peace agreement leading to a the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

 

Netanyahu does not demur from either proposition, though – as they say – the devil is in the detail.  He reiterated his call, delivered in Israel before he left for the States, for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to meet him and move to face-to-face negotiations on Palestinian statehood.  It was "high time," Netanyahu said, to begin direct talks.

 

Several obstacles lie on the road to total agreement between Netanyahu and Obama – for example, Israel's 10-month freeze on construction in the West Bank, imposed in November 2009 and due to expire in September.  Or, even more fundamental, the question of how many of the settlements would remain within Israel's sovereignty as part of a peace settlement.  That some would, as part of a "land swap" agreement, has already been acknowledged by Abbas himself, Arab-language newspaper Al-Hayat recently reported.

 

Abbas is said to have proposed a land swap involving some 2.3 per cent of West Bank territory, which would leave larger Israeli settlement blocs, such as Gush Etzion, Pisgat Ze'ev and Modi'in Ilit, in Israel's hands, along with a swathe of land overlooking Ben-Gurion International Airport.  In return, the Palestinians would get land bordering the southern West Bank in addition to land for a passageway between the West Bank and Gaza.

 

In the press conference following their meeting, Netanyahu endorsed Obama's hope that direct negotiations would get under way "well before" the 10-month Israeli freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank expires.  But Israel's senior English-language newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, claims to have learned of a proposal under which Obama might hint at the US accepting Israeli control over the major settlement blocs, if Netanyahu extends the settlement freeze in the West Bank.  This idea was originally part of former US president George W. Bush's 2004 agreement with Israel's then-prime minister Ariel Sharon.

 

However If the Palestinian Authority remains unwilling to enter direct talks, Netanyahu is likely to come under heavy internal pressure to re-commence construction in the West Bank. If he accedes to it, then the Arab League support for the continued PA participation in peace talks is almost certain to be withdrawn. 

 

Both Obama and Netanyahu were complicit – as so many parties to discussions about the Israel-Palestine issue are – in pretending that the peace talks, indirect or face-to-face, can somehow incorporate the Gaza Strip, even though it is under the control of Hamas, a terrorist Islamic régime supported by Iran and Syria, and resolutely opposed to any accommodation with Israel.  How to square that particular circle is a problem that has been resolutely ignored so far, but will eventually have to be faced.

 

The Gaza flotilla episode and its aftermath – a relaxation of Israel's land and sea blockade – featured in the discussions between Prime Minister and President.  Netanyahu had brought with him to Washington a detailed list of goods Israel will not allow into the Gaza Strip. Originally negotiated by Tony Blair, the Quartet's special Middle east envoy, this "negative" list, setting out a catalogue of prohibited imports, replaces the system operating so far of a list of permitted goods, and was welcomed by the US administration.

 

The two nations seem eye-to-eye also on their reaction to the establishment of a committee, on behalf of the United Nations Human Rights Council, to investigate the storming of the Mavi Marmara by Israeli commandos, and the subsequent death of nine Turkish citizens.  Headed by a former president of the International Criminal Court, Canadian Philippe Kirsch, the committee begins work today, after its full membership is announced.

 

The US, which had welcomed the formation of an independent committee of inquiry in Israel under former justice Jacob Turkel, is opposed to an international probe into the events.  France and Britain are reported to share Washington's view on the issue.  A US diplomat in New York is reported to have said: "As far as the US administration is concerned, at a time when it is trying to resume the peace process, the investigation into the events of the flotilla … could not have come at a worst time."

 

Turkey persists in demanding an apology from Israel for the attack, but evidence is mounting of Turkish government complicity in conceiving, assisting and involving itself in an enterprise, pre-planned and carefully designed, to provoke a violent encounter with Israel.  Fronted by a Turkish non-governmental organisation – the IHH – and concealing its intentions under the cloak of delivering humanitarian aid, the plan appears to have involved the smuggling on board the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, which itself carried no humanitarian aid at all, of 40 armed and dangerous thugs who subsequently took over control of the ship from its unsuspecting captain. 

 

How deep will the UN Human Rights Committee probe in its investigation?  If it confirms the growing evidence that the whole Gaza Freedom flotilla enterprise was an operation specifically designed, and carefully planned, to induce a violent confrontation with the Israeli military, it may be difficult to determine whether it is Israel or Turkey that is the more deserving of an apology. 

 

Copyright 2010 by the author. This work is posted at http://www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/. Please do link to it, quote excerpts and forward it by email with this notice. Distributed by ZNN. To subscribe send email to znn-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

 


#1751 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Sat Jul 10, 2010 5:56 pm
Subject: A peace deal by 2011?
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A peace deal by 2011?

 

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/peace-deal-by-2011.htm

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

 

On Thursday 8 July, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Council of Foreign Relations in New York

 

The good news is that he said a peace deal with the Palestinians could be signed by next year.  He stressed his own willingness to engage in the process, and repeated his call for direct negotiations with the Palestinians. 

 

The bad news is that, though he stressed that a partner was needed in order to make this happen, he did not specify the main obstacle to a comprehensive agreement – the fact that Hamas rules in the Gaza Strip, and that Hamas is dead set against an accommodation with Israel 

 

The speech to the Council of Foreign Relations was the concluding engagement in Netanyahu's trip to the US, and he returned to Israel that evening.  During the day Netanyahu gave interviews to CNN, ABC and CBS news networks.  In all his speaking engagements, Netanyahu reiterated his call for direct negotiations between Israel and the PA.

 

Netanyahu's visit to the US is generally considered successful in burying the strains of the past few months and re-establishing cordial relations between Israel and the USA.  What remains uncertain is whether differences will eventually re-emerge over, for example, the issue of the settlement freeze. 

 

Relying on hope rather than probability, in his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations Netanyahu dismissed the idea that an extension of the freeze should be a precondition for continued negotiations.  The 10-month settlement freeze is due to expire on 27 September, and he hinted that the moratorium on West Bank construction would not be renewed,  The likely impact of a renewal of settlement building on Arab opinion in general, and Palestinian opinion in particular, does not require much imagination.

 

The subject came up during an interview Netanyahu gave to Larry King on America's top-rated talk show. Asked if he would extend beyond September the 10-month moratorium on housing starts in settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu said it was time for the Palestinians to drop preconditions for face-to-face talks.

 

"Let's just get into the talks," he said, "and one of the things we'll discuss right away is this issue of settlements and that's what I propose doing.  I put on a temporary freeze – seven months passed by but the Palestinians didn’t come, and now they need another extension.  It requires courage on the Palestinian side to stand up and do what the late president of Egypt Anwar Saddat did – to say 'It’s over, enough with the bloodshed.'"

 

Wisely, perhaps, Netanyahu did not spell out the fatal price Sadat paid for his courage.  It is, perhaps, going a little far to ask someone to put his neck willingly on the chopping block.  No doubt Netanyahu also has the fate of his predecessor as Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in mind from time to time.

 

Asked if he would sit down at the negotiating table with Hamas, Netanyahu said he "would sit down with anyone who recognizes our existence and is not calling for our destruction."   Is that, King might have asked, a "yes" or a "no"?  Of course what it represents is an invitation to Hamas to modify their unyielding approach to the idea of the two-state solution – and, incidentally, to their objection to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.  This they oppose because the idea carries in its train recognition that Palestine must live alongside Israel – and it is to Israel's destruction that Hamas, alongside its sponsors Iran and Syria, and its brothers-in-arms Hezbollah, is dedicated.

 

Following his return to Israel, Netanyahu will, reports indicate, apply himself to taking the political steps necessary to have Kadima join his coalition government. Natan Eshel, the director of the Prime Minister's Bureau, met a number of days ago with a senior member of Kadima and passed on to him an itemised proposal for joining the coalition. According to a report in Israel's Ma'ariv newspaper yesterday, Netanyahu's offer would give Kadima head, Tzipi Livni, the role of Israel's chief negotiator in talks with the Palestinians.  The presumption is that the PM does not intend to restructure his coalition or redraw its guidelines.

 

PA President Mahmoud Abbas was reported on Wednesday in the official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida  as supporting negotiations with Israel at present because it is the only option. However, the newspaper quotes Abbas as saying: "If you [Arab states] want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favour. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don't have the ability to do it."

 

Some might find this comment dispiriting.  Personally, I find it quite hopeful.  Whatever the motive for talking peace, let the two parties only talk it.  As regards the proximity talks, and even the face-to-face negotiations that might follow, it is almost certain that they are seen by a significant proportion, perhaps even a majority, of Arab opinion as a step towards the ultimate goal of a Middle East somehow shorn of Israel

 

My reaction?  Let’s have the peace, and Israel will then have the task of defending the subsequent status quo.  After all, on the other side of the fence, hard-line Israeli settlers may have a parallel ultimate objective somewhere in mind regarding the Arab population of the West Bank.  Let both parties dream their dreams, but let realpolitik rule in the political sphere.  The important thing is a peace agreement – the only way to achieve some sort of accommodation and stability.  Who knows what benefits a period of peace might not yield for the region in the long-run?  An unprecedented economic, financial and trade boom on the lines of Hong Kong or Singapore, through an  Israel-led confederation including Jordan and Egypt, and even Lebanon and Syria, is not way outside the bounds of possibility.

 

Copyright 2010 by the author. This work is posted at http://www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/. Please do link to it, quote excerpts and forward it by email with this notice. Distributed by ZNN. To subscribe send email to znn-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

 


#1752 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Wed Jul 14, 2010 4:25 pm
Subject: "Face-to-face talks - a problem or two"
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Face-to-face talks – a problem or two

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/face-to-face-talks-problem-or-two.html

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

Improbable as it may have appeared over the past six months – given the succession of events that have tested the peace process almost to its limit – direct talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel are becoming more likely by the day.

 

Following the visit of Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington last week, the US administration has, it appears, been putting PA President Mahmoud Abbas under intense pressure to agree to move from the proximity phase of the negotiations to face-to-face discussions.  Abbas has been cautious about entering direct talks until now. Following a successful visit to Washington last month, though, the Palestinian President may now be more willing to enter direct talks, feeling greater confidence that US backing will mean this round of talks will produce results.

 

And indeed in Ramallah a few days ago Palestinian Authority officials said that direct talks with Israel were not ruled out, but that the PA was waiting for US special Middle East envoy George Mitchell – who is scheduled to return to the region shortly – to see if he has replies to a number of questions presented to him by the Palestinians.  These include whether Israel would be willing to freeze construction in all West Bank settlements and in east Jerusalem, and to recognize the "4 June 1967 lines" as the future borders of a Palestinian state.

 

As for the settlement freeze, during his visit to Washington Netanyahu was asked repeatedly whether he would extend the 10-month building moratorium that expires on 26 September.  All his responses indicated that he wanted this issue to be on the table as an element in direct negotiations, but that he did not intend to provide an unequivocal answer in advance.

 

The other substantive issue in the minds of PA President Abbas and his officials is whether the borders of the future sovereign state of Palestine – and therefore of the future Israel – are to be a return to the status quo on the day before the Six-Day War, which began on 5 June 1967.

 

The phrase "the line of 4 June 1967" has been part of the Arab-Israeli peace process lexicon for over five years.  During a visit to Bahrain on 4 February 2010, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: "we believe that the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders."

 

This was an error in terminology that she subsequently corrected.  For the fact is that in 1967 there was no recognized international border between the West Bank and Israel.  What existed was the 1949 Armistice Line – basically where Israeli and Arab forces found themselves at the formal end of Israel's first battle against the combined Arab armies that surrounded it.

 

On the Egyptian and Syrian fronts there had been a history of international boundaries between the British Mandate and its neighbours.  But along the Jordanian front the armistice line was the position on the ground when the fighting stopped.  In fact, Article II of the Armistice with Jordan explicitly specified that the agreement did not compromise any future territorial claims of the parties, since it had been "dictated exclusively by military considerations." 

 

As Dr Dore Gold, the renowned expert on Middle East affairs, has pointed out, after the Six-Day War the architects of UN Security Council Resolution 242 insisted that the old armistice line had to be replaced with a new border. Thus US Ambassador at the time, Arthur Goldberg: "historically, there have never been secure or recognized boundaries in the area"; adding that the armistice lines did not answer that description. 

 

"Which is why," Dr Gold writes, "Resolution 242 did not call for a full withdrawal from all the territories that Israel captured in the Six Day War; the 1949 Armistice lines were no longer to be a reference point for a future peace process."

 

President Lyndon Johnson made this very point  in September 1968: "It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure and there must be recognized borders."

 

This issue, interesting historically though it is, is far from an insuperable difficulty to achieving a final PA-Israeli peace agreement.  The Arab call for a return to the pre-Six Day War situation is as much an emotional attempt to erase the humiliation inflicted on the combined Arab forces at the time, as a requirement to be scrupulously observed.  Although the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative refers to the 1967 lines, and the 2003 Road Map speaks of ending "the occupation that began in 1967," all sides acknowledge that a final agreement will incorporate land swaps aimed at ensuring secure borders for both Israel and the future Palestine.

 

When might the direct face-to-face talks begin?  Chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat has confirmed that President Obama has urged the PA to agree to direct negotiations, but said he was unaware of reports suggesting that they could commence by the end of this month (July).  Other reports, also unconfirmed, have said that Obama wanted to kick off the talks at a trilateral meeting between him, Netanyahu and Abbas on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September.

 

Netanyahu was due to be travelling to Sharm-el-Sheikh this week to discuss the question of direct talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.  President Abbas is expected to meet with the Egyptian leader shortly afterwards. Abbas has made it clear that, just as occurred before the start of the proximity talks, he would require backing from the Arab League foreign ministers before agreeing to launch direct negotiations with Israel.   The question of Arab League approval will doubtless feature high on the agenda in Netanyahu's meeting with President Mubarak.

 

So despite setbacks, obstacles, the odd problem or two, we continue to inch our way forward.

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

 

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#1753 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Mon Jul 19, 2010 6:18 pm
Subject: The False Summer of U.S.-Israel Relations
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The recent triumphal U.S. tour of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has generated a flood of hopeful commentary about U.S.-Israel relations. We were reminded once again of the "unbreakable bond," and the close security cooperation. Obama sobers up" gushed Israel Harel in Haaretz. Isi Leibler, writing in the Jerusalem Post, was a bit more cautious.

Still, Leibler wrote:

...Obama administration's belated sanctions against Iran heightened its concern about the nuclear threat which poses the greatest danger facing Israel...Obama went beyond any previous US leader in providing public endorsement for Israel's nuclear policy. He explicitly told Netanyahu that "the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine its security interests" and until such time as a comprehensive regional peace settlement had been achieved, would resist pressures from those seeking to force Israel to abandon its nuclear capabilities.

... the prime minister publicly conceded nothing beyond reiterating his willingness to negotiate with the Palestinians. Nor was there evidence of pressure on him to extend the settlement freeze after September.
It is quite possible that..Obama realized that his strategy was counterproductive. He may have decided to utilize carrots rather than sticks and cooperation as an ally rather than an adversary.

But Leibler also understood that:

One need only observe the precedents of Obama's zigzagging in relation to Israel during the course of the presidential elections to appreciate how fickle (or pragmatic) he can be to garner votes...[W]e must be prepared for the possibility that Obama could resume his previous posture after the congressional elections and revert to beating up on Israel...

That is closer to the mark. The Iran sanctions resolution was achieved in part by softening the sanctions to the point where they are relatively meaningless. At the same time, the Russians became alarmed by the specter of Turkey snuggling up to Iran, and perhaps began to think that the old Ottoman - Russian rivalry might be revived and backed by nuclear weapons.

The statement that "[T]he United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine its security interests" is not beyond what any other President ever said. In 2005, Bush's Press Secretary Stephen Hadley told the AIPAC policy summit:

As you know, President Bush is a dedicated friend of Israel. He has pledged to Prime Minister Sharon that he will never ask Israel to take risks with its security to suit U.S. purposes or to suit U.S. politics - and he never will.

The Bush administration said it, and probably the Clinton administration and others. It is evidently part of the more or less meaningless sacred rite of the "special relationship." The promise has been made and broken more than once. The United States under Bush forced Israel to allow Hamas to participate in Palestinian elections for example. The Bush administration also pressured Israel not to react to the "Second Intifadah" for over a year and a half. Both policies were obviously harmful to Israel's security interests.

The tendency of Israelis to blame U.S. policy on Obama is in part self-delusion. Obama's approach to U.S.-Israel relations may be heavy-handed, amateurish, unpredictable and inconsistent. But the underlying principles are not those of Obama or this administration. The U.S. never recognized Israeli rights in East Jerusalem. They don't recognize any part of Jerusalem as part of Israel. The United States never supported the building of any settlements in the West Bank. Policies that have been in place at least since 1975 did not change overnight and will not change quickly. Likewise, George Mitchell was appointed by President Clinton to "investigate" the violence that began in 2000 and he reported to President Bush, in the Mitchell Report. that Israeli settlement construction was the main problem. He didn't change his opinion. His appointment as mediator by Obama demonstrates continuity in unchanging policy and viewpoints, not a departure from policy. Other administrations may have spoken more softly, but they carried the same size stick.

Despite all the feel-good verbiage, it is probable that Israel is still not getting the bunker-buster bombs it requested or the refueling aircraft it had requested for a certain well known purpose. Nothing substantive was said directly about the settlement construction freeze. That is not necessarily a good sign for those who want the settlement freeze to end. The usual lip service was paid to the problem of Palestinian incitement. However, no concrete steps to combat it were announced. We can be sure that nothing will be done about it, even though much of that incitement is financed by the massive aid to the Palestinians provided by the United States.

Israel Harel rightly points out the political benefits of this reconciliation for Benjamin Netanyahu: The Kadima party can no longer make a case that Netanyahu's policies are harming relations with the United States. Two politicians needed each other for internal political purposes. Both Obama and Netanyahu were anxious to generate "good vibes" and paper over real differences.

Israel Harel, however, is already busy building settlement empires in his imagination. He needs to calm down a bit. Nothing was said about extending the settlement freeze. Obviously, however, the U.S. "expects" that there will be progress in the negotiations and that this will lead to an extension of the settlement freeze.

U.S.A. administration policy has not changed. The ink was not dry on the all-smiles press releases when the State Department began protesting house demolitions in Jerusalem. An unnamed U.S. official also condemned the announced plans to build 32 housing units in Hizma in East Jerusalem, though there has as yet been no "on the record" statement.

Israeli leaders must take into account that U.S. policy has not changed. There will almost certainly be a renewal of the confrontation over the settlements, if not in September then in December or January, after the elections. Israel will be held culpable if the negotiations fail. The problem will not go away if it is denied or evaded. A disaster is in the making. Both U.S. and Israeli leadership should be thinking very hard about how to confront the issue, rather than how to manufacture confrontations with each other.

Ami Isseroff


Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000749.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only


#1754 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Wed Jul 21, 2010 4:17 pm
Subject: No willing peace partner: Iran vs Israel-Palestine
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No willing peace partner: Iran vs Israel-Palestine

 

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/no-willing-partner.html

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

 

Yesterday (Tuesday, 20 July) David Cameron made his first journey to Washington as Britain's new prime minister.  After an unprecedented three-hour visit to the White House, and a private face-to-face discussion lasting a full hour, the two leaders emerged to face a joint Press conference dominated by two issues.  The first was the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, from a Scottish jail eleven months ago on humanitarian grounds and any role that America's current hate-figure, BP, may have had in it. The second was the situation in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal process for US, British and NATO forces.

 

Scour the internet and the press as you may, and you would be fortunate indeed to find references to any interchange the two men may have had on current issues in the Middle East

 

But, swamped by matters of more immediate interest, both the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and Iran's nuclear development programme did come up for discussion.  The President and the PM agreed on the necessity of starting direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians. On that issue, according to a White House press statement, Cameron said: "We desperately need a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians that provides security, justice and hope. It is time for direct talks, not least because it is time for each, Israel and Palestine, to test the seriousness of the other."

 

On the topic of Iran, President Obama said that he was united with Prime Minister Cameron on the threat posed by Iran's nuclear programme, and warned that further defiance by Iran will lead to further isolation of the Islamic regime. 

 

During the joint press conference Cameron reiterated this message: "America and Britain, with our partners, stand ready to negotiate, and to do so in good faith. But in the absence of a willing partner, we will implement with vigour the sanctions package agreed by the United Nations Security Council, and in Europe we will be taking further steps as well."

 

Odd that the question of a "willing partner" should feature so strongly in considering possibly delicate negotiations with Iran on nuclear matters, but should be conspicuous by its absence when discussing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.  For the fact of the matter is, as distinguished Middle East commentator Barry Rubin recently observed: "There is a partner for talks and shorter-term cooperation (ie the Palestinian Authority) but no partner for full peace.  Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah are not amenable to diplomacy."

 

And there, as Shakespeare has it, is the rub – which the Concise Oxford dictionary defines as a difficulty or impediment.  Indeed.  The opening of direct discussions, if or when they come about, may encompass all manner of outstanding issues, but the one issue they cannot resolve is the indisputable fact that the Gaza Strip is in the hands of an Islamist terrorist organisation that is viscerally opposed to any accommodation with Israel.

 

As Barry Rubin points out, revolutionary Islamism is advancing and the US, given its current policy, isn’t exactly a bulwark battling against it.  He points to the need for the US to have a worked-out strategy in place to contain Iran when – not, he says, if – it gets nuclear weapons, and even more with how to deal in the Gaza Strip with Hamas, a repressive revolutionary Islamist dictatorship and a client of Iran.

 

Not that the leaders of Fatah in the Palestinian Authority do not themselves recognise the problems that Hamas poses.  "The worst thing that has happened to us,"  is how the PA chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, characterised the Hamas coup d'état in Gaza in a recent TV interview

 

But wringing one's hands over an unsatisfactory state of affairs goes no way towards solving it.  Either Hamas must be driven out of Gaza by fair means (ie democratic elections) or foul (ie militarily) – or the organisation must be induced to come to terms with its internecine rivals, Fatah, and accept the outcome of peace negotiations.  This would require Hamas to agree to a two-state solution – the only feasible option currently on the table – and therefore, by implication, the existence of Israel within secure boundaries alongside a sovereign Palestine.

 

The leaders of the Western world, and the organisations closely involved – the UN, the EU, the Quartet – never seem to approach this fundamental issue in their many interventions.  It is as if all the parties concerned had voluntarily donned blindfolds so as to avoid seeing what was in front of their noses –  that Islamist terrorism, wreaking havoc across the world, the reason for major commitments of forces and resources in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the continued imposition of UN sanctions on Iran and its nuclear ambitions, is the same Islamist terrorism at work in southern Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip. 

 

There is a community of interest, which would involve also many "moderate" Muslim countries, in combating fundamentalist Islamism, a movement totally ruthless in pursuing its objectives, sacrificing not only the lives of its own adherents by supporting and celebrating its suicide bombers, but also slaughtering innocent people in droves.

 

Joined-up thinking is called for.  One fears the call will go unheeded.

 

 

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

______________________________________________________________________

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#1755 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Thu Jul 22, 2010 2:37 pm
Subject: Israel-Palestine: The one-state solution returns
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I really thought everyone had written enough about the one-state "solution" for Jews and Arabs. "Everyone" includes me. See for example, Book Review: Benny Morris, One State, Two States, Palestine & Israel: One state and binational state 'solutions' are frauds, One state for Israelis and Palestinians is 'utopian', Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion: The Palestinian 'one state' threat is back.

It seems, however, that we can always get too much of a bad thing, and generally we do. The Arab one-state solution has returned from the land of the dead, and has now morphed into a Jewish one-state "solution" proposal, initiated by figures of the Israeli right, as presented recently in a Haaretz article.It sounds really attractive at first:

It's an idea for solving the conflict that sounds like a vision of the end of days: Grant Israeli citizenship and equal rights to all the Palestinians in the West Bank. And who is proposing the one-state solution? Right-wingers and settlers.

When you read the fine print however, it seems quite a bit like the Israeli Hell described in the old joke: The citizenship won't be citizenship and the rights won't be rights exactly and the one state will not be one state. Sure enough, Uri Elitzur, former chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements, told Haaretz: "I want us to look for the solutions on the other side of the scale, which lies between the existing situation and the annexation and naturalization of all the Palestinians." Not exactly one state, not exactly citizens. Haaretz adds regarding the group proposing this idea:

They talk about a process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete, at the end of which the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but in a country whose symbols and spirit will remain Jewish.

Not exactly "full personal rights." "A process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete" means "never." Being an Arab citizen in a country in which the symbols and spirit will remain Jewish means there will not be "full personal rights." Some people will be more equal than others. "Full personal rights" means everyone's vote is equal. If a majority vote to put a green crescent on the flag and change the national anthem to "Biladi, Biladi" then that becomes law. "Full personal rights" means that if Abdullah from Nablus or Fathi from Nazareth marries Nisreen from Damascus, Syria, Nisreen can become a citizen of Israel. There are a lot of Nisreens and Fatimas in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. There will be a lot of relatively prosperous Abdullahs in Israel. Inevitably, most of the newlyweds will make their home in Israel. The Arab population will grow and one day they will be a majority. That is clearly not what Reuven Rivlin or Tzipi Hotoveli or Uri Elitzur have in mind.

Proponents of the scheme argue that Jewish birthrate is now higher than that of the Arabs in the West Bank, according to their own special right wing demographic figures (see here for example). That may be true temporarily. The Jewish "one staters" forgot that their solution is supposed to be permanent. Can they really predict the demography trends 50 or 100 years from now? Are they certain there will not be an Arab majority? There are a lot of ultraorthodox (Haredi) Jews right now, and they have children in large numbers. But history shows that the children of Haredim are usually no longer Haredim. If they remain Haredim then Israel will eventually consist only of Arabs and Haredim in any case, and would not be viable as a Zionist Jewish state.

The economy of the West Bank is not doing well. The Arab birthrate in the West Bank may increase if prosperity returns. The same demographers claim that the Palestinian population figures are swollen by false reporting and by counting Palestinian Arabs who live abroad. That may be so, but if Israel gives Palestinians citizenship rights, those Palestinians living abroad may return. What is true now may not be true in 50 years. A constitution cannot be based on temporary demographic trends or the current proportion of various groups. That mistake was made in Lebanon. Even if the Arab population of Israel is "only" 30 to 40% of the total, it is difficult to imagine that such a large minority would acquiesce in a Jewish state that allows only immigration of Jews and does not taken account of Palestinian Arab national aspirations in any way.

The "equal" Palestinian Arab citizens of the new state will flock to live in green line Israel, to live where their memories are and to be in the more prosperous areas of the country. They will flock to the cities, to Haifa and Beisan (Beit Shean to you) and Majdal (Ashkelon to you) and Isdood (Ashdod to you) to reclaim their lost lands.

When describing the harmonious idyll that will obtain in the Jewish one-state solution, its proponents conveniently forgot about the history of internal Arab-Jewish violence in Israel. That history goes back to the Ottoman Turkish mandate, before there was Israel, before there was Palestine. It is no secret that Israeli Arabs and Jews do not dwell together in peace and harmony. There are not many integrated schools in Israel.. In the Galilee and elsewhere, Bedouin and other Arabs are reportedly busy encroaching on Jewish land and stealing farm equipment and animals. That activity is bound to intensify in the Jewish one-state "solution. It is a convenient way of combining profitable theft with "nationalism." The unequal "equality" in that state will certainly provide a good excuse.

Two years ago there were riots in Acco on Yom Kippur. Three years ago there were Druze riots in Peki'in. The history of Arab violence in Palestine during mandatory times and Ottoman times is well known(see for example: Safed plunder of 1834,Arab uprising). Everyone in Israel is aware of these unpleasant facts. Even the right-wing politicians like Tzipy Hotoveli and Reuven Rivlin certainly know about them. How will the one-state "solution" produce an idyll of peaceful coexistence? They claim that the process will be slow, and that Israeli Arabs must be integrated first. But the Arabs of Israel have not been integrated in 62 years. It is unlikely that they will be integrated in 10 years or 10 decades, and the situation is getting worse, not better.

The proponents of the one-state "solution" also forgot about Gaza. Gaza will not go away. It is impossible to imagine that one million or 1.5 million Arabs will stay pent up in a kind of limbo territory, and that their friends and relatives, free citizens of Israel, will show no interest in helping them join their prosperous state, where the per-capita GDP is perhaps 30 times larger than that of Gaza.

The Jewish one-state "solution," like the Arab one-state "solution," is an attempt to square the circle. These people are either fooling themselves or trying to fool everyone else. One state solutions are always going to cheat Jews or Arabs or both of their rights. They must end in one of several undesirable solutions: A state that belongs to a new joint nationality, depriving both the Jewish people and the Palestinian Arabs of their right to national self-determination, an Arab one-state "solution," such as the genocidal Arab state advocated by the Hamas groupies of the MSU in Irvine and San-Diego, California, or a real apartheid state dominated by the Jews. In the Arab state, the Jews will presumably "go back to Poland (Auschwitz)" as Helen Thomas put it. If we don't, then something similar may be arranged locally. In the Jewish one-state "solution," the Arabs will not remain silent forever.

Ami Isseroff


Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000751.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.

 


#1756 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Sun Jul 25, 2010 3:44 pm
Subject: The Friends of Israel Initiative
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The Friends of Israel Initiative

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/friends-of-israel-initiative.html

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

 

 

To coin a thought – people possess an infinite capacity to amaze and astound.  Who could ever have predicted that in the middle of 2010 considerable numbers of well-respected figures, virtually all of them non-Jewish, from countries all around the world, would come together to defend Israel against the insidious and growing campaign to delegitimize her waged by her enemies and supported by numerous international institutions.

 

Who are these people, prepared to take so unfashionable and therefore so courageous a stand? 

 

The "Friends of Israel Initiative" is led by former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar.  The list of members includes Peru's former president Alejandro Toledo, former Italian Senate president Marcello Pera, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, British historian Andrew Roberts, Northern Ireland's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lord Trimble.  With a working budget of almost £1 million a year, FII has been funded by a dozen private donors from Spain, America, Israel, France, Italy and Britain.  

 

It was in May 2010 that José Maria Aznar brought together a high level group in Paris to launch a project aimed specifically at asserting Israel's position as a legitimate democratic sovereign nation, an integral part of the Western world and of fundamental importance to its future,  Although the FII acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is important, the members of the group are even more concerned about the rising tide of radical Islamism and the prospect of a nuclear Iran, both of which threaten the entire world.

 

The Mexican newspaper El Financiero defines the purpose of the Initiative as to "reaffirm Western values," and counteract "anti-Semitic criticism of Israel."  According to Spain's ABC News Internacional , the Initiative is founded on the conviction that "the campaign against Israel corrodes the international system from within, beginning with the United Nations."

 

The Friends of Israel Initiative is committed to act consistently and diligently in its effort to disseminate its members’ vision of Israel as a democratic, open, and advanced nation like any other, and that it should be perceived and treated as such.  Israel, the organisation maintains, is a sovereign democracy which like all the others is, of course, capable of making mistakes.  Nonetheless, it asserts, this should not be used as an excuse to question Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, or its basic rights as an independent state. "Israel is an inextricable part of the West." they maintain; "we stand or fall together."

 

Earlier this month (July) José María Aznar wrote:  "It is easy to blame Israel for all the evils in the Arab world, and some are even ready to sacrifice the future of Israel if a new understanding with the Muslim world were to be achieved in return. However, to weaken Israel is a serious mistake since it is our first line of defence in the region; if Israel fell into the hands of its enemies, the West as we know it would cease to exist.

       

"To defend Israel’s right to exist in peace and within defensible borders requires a moral clarity that has mainly gone lost in Europe - this spectre is also looming over the United States. The West is what it is, thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots.  If the Jewish part of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Today, to defend Israel is to defend the West.  With this initiative we aspire to make that reality ever more patent."

 

Last Monday (19 July) saw the Initiative open a front in the UK.  At the invitation of the Member of Parliament Robert Halfon, and hosted by the Henry Jackson Society, the FII was launched in Britain's parliament building, the Palace of WestminsterThe next launch will be in Washington in September, followed by Rome and then another event in Paris.

 

In advancing its campaign the group is casting its net wide.  It appears to recognise that radical Islamism poses as great a threat to the moderate Muslim world as to the West.  The group is considering visiting Arab countries in the coming year, as well as addressing the United Nations and the European Parliament. There has already been contact with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The reach will then be widened to embrace entertainment (including a possible visit to Hollywood, science, and other areas beyond politics.

 

Yes, a strange phenomenon indeed, when liberal opinion throughout the western world seems determinedly blinkered about the threats posed by rampant Islamism, a movement dedicated to eliminating the western way of life, and not least its democratic foundations.  And even if more moderate liberal opinion acknowledges something of this, it seems incapable of taking the next logical step of acknowledging that Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, supported and supplied by Iran and Syria, are part and parcel of that Islamist front, that Israel is a first line of defence against it, and that the Western world as a whole – including Israel as an integral element of the West – should oppose it wherever it exists.

 

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book "One Man’s Israel" was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog "A Mid-East Journal," http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/)since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

______________________________________________________________________

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#1757 From: "David Frankfurter" <david.frankfurter@...>
Date: Fri Jul 23, 2010 2:22 pm
Subject: Join the BUYcott
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Join the BUYcott

http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/122313.html

 

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement is becoming increasingly strident, using every conceivable tactic to delegitimise Israel in every forum. Academic, trade and industrial boycotts are called - often using tricks and lies that we are all sick of hearing.  Generally, the impact in economic terms is small. But often, the campaigns and counter-campaigns surrounding each proposed boycott generates so much publicity, that even unsuccessful campaigns generate significant damage to Israel's standing in the world court of public opinion.

Letters to the editor, to academic institutions or shop owners targeted, and all the "usual" activities are important.  But friends around the globe who have been faced with boycotts in their local communities have told me from personal experience that there is one tactic that has consistently proved a winner.  A Buycott. 

Wherever a boycott is announced or threatened, local supporters go out and BUY the product involved.  They let their friends know and ask them to help.  And then they let the store owners know how pleased you were with the purchase. And after the boycott has failed, go back and buy again.  Make the boycott a long term a bonus for the store and for Israel!

Faced with failure, Palestinians have resorted to exaggeration and barefaced lies to encourage their activists around the world to keep up the program.

Here's the latest example from the 
Palestinian Maan News Agency, which reports a claim by the Palestinian responsible , Omer Qabaha, that one such success of his BDS activities is that the Israeli dairy Tara has moved its manufacturing plant from "occupied" Katzrin in the Golan Heights.

So I checked, and got the following reply:

Dear David,

Tara has no factory on the Golan Heights and there were never any products marketed under the name Tara processed at the dairy processing plant on the Golan
Shabbat Shalom

Ralph Ginsberg
Israel Dairy Board


So there! 

Join in a successful campaign for Israel!   Ask your stores to stock Israeli products, look for them, buy them, talk about them and encourage your friends to buy them.  If you are in business, look for ways to promote Israeli products in your product range or include them in your manufacturing processes.  If you need a starting point, I would be pleased to help you source Israeli inputs.  Then, if you are really lucky, someone will declare a boycott and help promote your business.

David Frankfurter

Please post your comments here: http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/122313.html. I read them all.


#1758 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Wed Jul 28, 2010 8:19 pm
Subject: Israel as the Ram in the Thicket
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In the course of my work, I have become increasingly worried about the message offered by mainline Protestant churches (and some quarters of the Roman Catholic Church) about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Not only is the narrative offered by these institutions distorted, it has a negative impact on the safety of Jews throughout the world.

My concerns, which are still coalescing, can currently be summarized as follows:

1. There is a continuum of anti-Israel rhetoric. One end of the continuum is marked by hate toward Israel and Jews rooted in deeply hostile beliefs about the nature of the Jewish people. The other end is marked by polite de-legitimization through an obsession with Israeli policies and silence about the behavior of its adversaries.

The hateful end of the continuum is occupied by anti-Israel extremists in the Middle East and their supporters in the West who portray Israel as a cancerous entity that prevents the Muslim and the Arab peoples in the region from reclaiming their rightful place in history. Under this logic, Israel must be destroyed. Jewish sovereignty is a bad thing because of the nature of the Jewish people.

This brand of anti-Zionism is largely fueled by Muslim teachings regarding the Jewish people and the land. Under these teachings, Jews are enemies of God and Islam who should be subject people. Muslim tradition also states that land previously governed by Muslim rulers should never be relinquished to non-Muslims.

Put these two teachings together and the very notion of a Jewish state is a humiliating violation of the Islamic nomos or sense of order rooted in Muslim scripture. Writers such as Sayyd Qutb have retrieved the notion of the Jews as enemies of God evident in the Koran and the Hadiths and applied them to the state of Israel with lethal effect.

Also at this end of the continuum is the hard left in the U.S. and Europe. These activists, who oftentimes co-operate with the Islamists described above, portray Israel as a unique and enduring threat to peace and human rights in the world. To these activists, Israel is guilty of genocide and its supporters in the West are enemies within. These activists regard violence directed at Israel and its supporters as justified. The logic is that only a monstrous people could defend such a monstrous nation. Jews who support Israel support genocide and apartheid and cannot be trusted. They are the enemy within.

In the middle of the continuum are activists who depict Israel and its status as a Jewish state as an obstacle to the causes of peace and the advancement of human rights in the Middle East. Under this narrative, Israel should not be destroyed but dismantled and converted into a bi-national state in which Jews would by definition, be a minority. It is the consequences of Jewish sovereignty that trouble this group.

Most of the time, adherents of this viewpoint speak in less hateful tones than the extremists I just described, but the implications of their narrative are the same: Minority status for Jews in an Arab and Muslim country. Adherents of this narrative regard violence against Israel as understandable and unavoidable. Ostensibly, they are motivated by the suffering of the Palestinian people. (As described below, adherents of this viewpoint oftentimes shift to the more hateful end of the spectrum.)

At the opposite end of the spectrum from those who call for Israel’s outright destruction and express contempt for Israel, are those who explicitly affirm Israel’s right to exist, while subjecting it actions, and in some instances its Jewish identity, to extremely harsh and unreasonable scrutiny. Adherents of this narrative point out Israel’s failings but are reluctant to point out the misdeeds of its adversaries. They acknowledge that indeed Jews were the victims of genocide in Europe, but fail to acknowledge the frankly genocidal hostility toward Jews and Israel in the Middle East. When they criticize Israel, they speak as if they are motivated by feelings of mournful sorrow about Israel’s failings and hope that someday, Israel will get its policies right and that Jews will come to a better self-understanding and be able to live in peace with its neighbors.

2. One’s presence at the more benign (and less hateful) end of the spectrum does not guarantee that one will stay there.

Activists and commentators who “hang out” so to speak at the softer, less hateful end of the anti-Zionist continuum can move toward more hateful territory. (They often do.) They do not embrace the Islamist narrative, but instead embrace secular notions of Jews as enemies to world peace and well being.

As time passes, they start to attack Israel’s Jewish supporters in the West as monsters whose mere presence represents a threat to human rights and democracy. People who obsess about the effects of Jewish sovereignty on the Middle East, (as if Palestinian suffering is singular and without parallel and caused solely by Israel) will eventually come to unreasonable conclusions about the nature of Jews and their state. Through this process, the people who are motivated by a legitimate concern about the Palestinians begin to mimic the anti-Zionist rhetoric offered by the people on the more extreme end of the continuum. And once they embrace anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism is just the next step down the road, so to speak.

3. Efforts to de-legitimize Israel contribute to insecurity for Jews throughout the world. (Israel gets attacked in the Middle East and Jews are threatened in the West).

Over the past few years, there has been a measurable and observable increase in hostility toward Jews throughout the world, particularly in Europe, South America and sadly enough, in some quarters of North America. This was particularly evident during Israel’s fight with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. The Community Security Trust, (a Jewish group in Great Britain similar to the ADL in the United States), linked this hostility toward media coverage of the conflict. According to the CST, anti-Semitic attacks were down during the first six months of 2006 from the year before.

But anti-Semitic incidents rose sharply during the summer of 2006 largely as a consequence of “the war between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon that took place in July and August.” And once a ceasefire was instituted in mid-August, attacks declined. The European Jewish Congress reported similar findings in a report of its own about hostility in the rest of Europe.

A few other examples of this problem include:

The atmosphere outside the United Nation’s “anti-racism” conference that took place in Durban South Africa in 2001. At this conference, Arab and Muslim extremists from the Middle East and their allies from the radical left in Europe and the U.S. were able to convince the gathered assembly to affirm an amalgam of ritualistic charges of genocide, racism and ethnic cleansing targeted at Israel. Jews were singularly denied the right to participate in the proceedings at the conference because they could not be "objective." Security officials told representatives of Jewish groups that their safety could not be guaranteed. Protesters carried signs stating that if Hitler had finished the job there were would be no state of Israel and no Palestinian suffering. During the conference a Jewish doctor was beaten by people wearing checkered keffiyehs – the symbol of the Palestinian cause – who said Jews were the cause of all the problems in the Middle East. Local Jewish leaders attributed the attack to the atmosphere at the UN Conference.

The murder of a French Jew, Ilan Halimi in Paris in 2005. Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew, was kidnapped, tortured for three weeks, stabbed and left to die at a train station on the outskirts of Paris by Muslims who had anti-Israel literature in their apartments. His torture took place in the basement of a public housing project. People knew of his suffering and did not call the police.

The murder of Pamela Waechter, an employee of the Jewish Federation in Seattle in 2006. Waechter was shot to death at the height of the Hezbollah War by a man describing himself as a Muslim-American “angry at Israel.” The killer was later discovered to be suffering from mental illness, but just as John Salvi who killed two women at an abortion clinic in Boston in 1994, was encouraged by the highly-charged atmosphere surrounding the debate over abortion in the U.S., the anti-Jewish fringe is energized by hostile rhetoric coming out of the Middle East.

The plight of Jews in Malmo, Sweden. Jews are fleeing Sweden in droves as anti-Semitic attacks, perpetrated mostly by Muslim immigrants have increased substantially. Malmo’s mayor has failed to stop the attacks, stating they are merely a consequence of Israeli policies in the Middle East.

The display of anti-Semitic imagery at anti-Israel rallies in the U.S. during Israel’s fight with Hamas in the Gaza Strip during the winter of 2008-09. Protesters carried signs equating the Star of David with the Nazi Swastika, a clear expression of anti-Semitism.

The recent admission by a young Muslim woman at the University of California San Diego that she supports genocide against Jews in Israel.

The recent stoning of a Jewish dance troupe in Hanover, Germany.

4. One’s presence at the “softer” end of the continuum described above makes it unlikely that one will challenge the extremism of people on the other, more hateful end of the continuum. People who root the continued existence of the Arab-Israeli conflict solely in Israeli policies have a difficult time seeing the motivation and actions of Israel’s adversaries for what they are.

Nowhere is this reality more evident in the activism about the Arab-Israeli conflict offered by mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. that have offered little if any criticism about the rising tide of hostility toward Jews and Israel throughout the world.

Since the Second Intifada, mainline Protestant churches (the Methodists, Lutherans, Congregationalists (also known as the UCC), Presbyterians and Episcopalians) have attacked Israel, portraying it as solely responsible for the conflict. The narrative told by these churches is that Israel can bring a unilateral end to the conflict through a magical combination of peace offers and territorial withdrawals. Israel’s failure to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve peace is depicted as a consequence of some flaw in Israel’s national character. Examples of this narrative abound:

a. In 2004, the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly passed an anti-Israel divestment resolution stating the occupation was at the root of violence against innocents on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It made no mention of the ideological hostility toward Israel espoused by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

b. In 2005, the general synods of both United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ passed a resolution that called on Israel to take down the security barrier, without asking Palestinians to stop the terror attacks that preceded its construction.

c. Mainline Protestant denominations have published numerous books portraying Israel in an unfairly harsh light. Some of the language in these texts borders on the hateful. For example, one Presbyterian commentator has likened Zionist settlement in Palestine during the 20th century to a “killer-vine” that had attacked a prize rose bush in his back yard. (This is just one example.)

d. In embracing this narrative, mainline churches have demonstrated a fundamental inability to think clearly about the strategic and moral challenges Israel face in the Middle East. Instead encouraging their parishioners to embrace a comprehensive understanding of the ideological and physical threats faced by the Jewish people, these churches have encouraged people to embrace an understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict that places Israel under intense scrutiny and which gives its adversaries a pass. They offer little, if any, criticism of Hamas and Hezbollah while intensely interrogating Israeli policy and Israel's status as a Jewish state.

5. This is not the first time mainline Protestant institutions have engaged in this type of behavior. For example, in the 1930s, Christian Century, the house organ for mainline Protestantism in the U.S. exhibited a troublesome hostility toward Jews and their desire for a state of their own and to expressions of Jewish identity. The publication gave prominent and laudatory coverage to anti-Zionist Jews and attacked Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent Zionist in the U.S., for bringing the Holocaust to the attention of the American people in 1942.

Coverage like this was emblematic of a larger reality. Prior to World War II, Jews were regarded through the lens of potential conflict. As the first targets of Nazi hostility, Jews were regarded as the cause and not the victim of the violence and hostility directed at them. Nazi anti-Semitism was condemned in the abstract, but when it came time to speak about issues in concrete terms, anti-war commentators were much more willing to condemn Jews as opposed to their enemies.

In both the 1930s and today, the contempt for the Jewish people and indifference to the threats to their safety can be linked to a refusal to take threats by totalitarianism seriously. Just as it was more convenient to abandon the Jewish people to the threat posted by fascism in Europe the 1930s and 40s, it is easier to ignore the threat posed by fascism in the Middle East. Here a phrase used by Paul Berman to describe the anti-war socialists in 1930s France seems appropriate: “They were eager, they were desperate to find a description of reality that did not point to a new war in the future.” (Terror and Liberalism, page 124). This applies readily to the so-called peace activists in mainline churches. They desire peace. This desire is legitimate. But in the course of searching for peace, they have abandoned reality and the Jewish people as well.

6. Part of the problem is that many people in mainline churches have embraced a view of history that portrays Western civilization as the dominant, if not unique source of suffering in the world today. Given this understanding, and the self-hate it engenders, members of these churches feel as if they deserve punishment.

In this sense, the members of mainline churches are like Abraham’s son Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah. They see the wood and the fire and have a vague sense that an immolation is going to take place, but hope desperately that they will not be the victim of this sacrifice. They feel on one level that if it weren’t for their exquisite moral sense, that they would deserve to be immolated.

And how do they demonstrate and give voice to their exquisite moral sense?

By condemning Israel.

Israel, for these folks, is the ram in the thicket on Mount Moriah. Israel is the entity that they can thrust into the fire of moral judgment.

In sum, what we are witnessing is an intellectual process by which people are preparing themselves to justify the re-abandonment of the Jewish people. If we continue with this process, it will have great consequences for the Jewish people in particular and Western civilization in general.

Dexter Van Zile



Originally published at: http://mfnklst.blogspot.com/2010/07/israel-as-ram-in-thicket.html as Israel as the Ram in the Thicket. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved to the author.



Dexter Van Zile is Christian media analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. His writings have appeared in numerous American Jewish newspapers as well as the Jerusalem Post, Ecumenical Trends, and the Boston Globe. He has a BA in politics and government from the University of Puget Sound and an MA in political science/environmental studies from Western Washington University. He is a Massachusetts native

 

#1759 From: David Frankfurter <david.frankfurter@...>
Date: Wed Jul 28, 2010 5:27 pm
Subject: Gaza: Open Air Prison?
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Gaza: Open Air Prison?

http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/122589.html

 

British Prime Minister, David Cameron, exploited his visit to Turkey to curry favour with his hosts, using Palestinian propaganda hype, saying that Israel’s blockade turned the Gaza strip into a “prison camp”. 

Every last Israeli left Gaza long before Hamas' bloody take-over. Closing the borders and even war has not stopped the incessant rockets and terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens and border checkpoints. More than 30 terrorist attacks come out of Gaza each month.  

Applying international law, Israel inspects the constant flow of goods through its borders into Gaza, in an attempt to exclude war material. Propagandists (and it seems European politicians) conveniently ignore the rules of war and international law, and claim these actions to be a form of occupation. They declare that Israel ruthlessly keeps Gazans in poverty.

Visiting international politicians and aid agency representatives are taken to view the deliberately unrepaired damage of the war Hamas provoked. Poverty stricken areas, including families living in plastic tents since their houses were destroyed in the war, are all on the carefully pre-arranged agenda. Israel is obligingly condemned. And more western tax payer money is pledged to the highest ever per capita aid program. 

Although of little interest to the mainstream media, Gazan "poverty" is strongly questioned in the blogosphere. No accumulation of facts seems to be able to stop the constant flow of lies, cynically manipulated into very effective anti-Israel (and often anti-Semitic) propaganda.

Even the Palestinian media reports a very different picture. There is an abundance of both basic and luxury goods. It is not clear if it comes via the Egyptian border, underground tunnels, or the thousands of trucks that the Israelis officially allow to stream through their border crossings. But the fact is that there is plenty, and often at very attractive prices. 

Ordinary Palestinian citizens say that there is enough to go around - but the Hamas apparatchiks steal it.  

And what of building materials to house those wretched families? Somehow, they don't seem to rank in the Hamas list of priorities. A brand new shopping mall replete with luxury goods, aluxury hotel, a  fancy restaurant, an olympic size pool and a fancy jail  to lock up prisoners accused of crimes such as "passing information to the Palestinian Authority" all make it into the list of latest completed projects, though.

Electricity shortages? Also an internal problem. Seems that Hamas collects electricity bills from the end user & then steals the money - expecting the Palestinian Authority and international donors to pay the Israeli suppliers. When the suppliers want their overdue money before providing more goods, who do you guess is blamed?

But those wretched Palestinians are suffering. Then again, life expectancy, infant mortality, and even cell phone penetration statistics show Gaza to be better off than other Muslim countries – and in many cases better than most places on earth!

Forgotten is the Economist report of 2004 that the West Bank and Gaza rank amongst the most obese populations in the world. 

Clicking on the links embedded above will bring you to lots of reports and pictures showing the truth.

But what about the charge that Israel has turned Gaza into a large open-air jail? We all value freedom of movement. We want to be able to leave our country of residence either permanently or temporarily for vacation, to receive better medical care, to advance our education or business. But of course, we all know that no-one can get in or out. Don't we?

Israel can be forgiven for being very cautious about allowing enemy aliens through its territory - after all Hamas has officially and openly declared its intent to wipe Israel off the map and sends regular rockets across the border to remind us all. Nevertheless, many people do cross the border - usually for humanitarian reasons, often to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

But what everyone seems to forget is that Israel is not Gaza's only border. Fellow Arab country Egypt, which has supported the Palestinian cause since it was first invented, is linked to Gaza with a little more than 11 km of border, and an official crossing at Rafah.

So why an open air prison? The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) regularly exposes the real problem in its monthly reports. Here it is from this month's bulletin:

Violations of the Right to Travel and Movement 

Gaza residents are still suffering from the unavailability of passport books since November 2008 until the end of this current month. According to ICHR information obtained from officials from the Ministry of Interior of the Deposed Government, the MOI in the West Bank does not send passport books for citizens in Gaza Strip which entails depriving them from the right to travel and movement. In addition, it affects most of those in urgent need for traveling abroad for seeking medical care, university education, students and thousands of expatriates whose passports have expired and require renewal.

International travel, even via Egypt, requires a passport. The PA won't issue Gazans with passports. Gazans can't travel. That's Israel's fault. Clear?

 

David Frankfurter

 

 

Please post your comments here: http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/122589.html - I read them all.


#1760 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Sun Aug 1, 2010 11:06 am
Subject: Israeli-Palestinian non-negotiations: Position report
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Israeli-Palestinian non-negotiations: Position report

 

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/07/july-reviewed.htm

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

David Cameron, Britain's prime minister, approves of blunt speaking, so let's be blunt.  His remarks in Turkey on Monday (26 July) about Gaza, compounded by his comments in India later in the week concerning Pakistan, were gaffes    little more than simplistic headline seekers, devoid of context. 

 

The phrase he uttered in Turkey that has gone round the world is "Gaza is a prison camp" – the underlying assumption, understood even if not spoken, being that Israel is the prison guard.  But as Ephraim Sneh, the former Israeli deputy minister of defence, has said:  "Cameron is right – Gaza is a prison camp, but those who control the prison are Hamas. I'm totally against the double standards of a nation which fights the Taliban but is showing its solidarity with their brothers, Hamas.  It's very regrettable that the British PM doesn't understand that. It reflects a lack of understanding and is a very bad sign. Cameron doesn't understand that 1.5m people live in Gaza under the repressive regime of Hamas – and yet he blames Israel."

 

In his references to Gaza, David Cameron did not once mention Hamas. 

 

And speaking of prison camps, Gaza has certainly been nothing less for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier snatched by Hamas and held hostage for more than four years, despite the most intensive efforts of mediators, both Egyptian and German.

 

Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, approves of Hamas and calls the Iranians "our friends, our brothers".  David Cameron, in urging Turkey's acceptance into the EU*  extolled Turkey's unique position in facing two ways, East and West, because it could act as a bridge between Europe and Islamist states such as Iran.

 

Two days later he was condemning Pakistan for facing two ways, and allying itself both with the West and the forces it was opposing.  The inconsistency is glaring.  Did he, one can't help speculating, stop to consider that what is sauce for the Pakistani goose is sauce for the Turkish gander? 

           

Putting Cameron's gaffes to one side, July has been dominated by a single, simple issue  –  when and how can the current arm's-length "proximity" talks between Israel and the Palestinians be upgraded to direct face-to-face negotiations.  Both the principals – PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, face dilemmas over the matter.

 

Diplomatic activity around the question has been intense.  In his visit to Washington early in July, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, took care to restore the cordial relations with the US that had been badly damaged earlier in the year.  Knowing that President Obama has invested a deal of personal capital in achieving a Middle East accord, Netanyahu played along.  Even before leaving Israel, he was calling on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to enter direct negotiations, declaring himself ready to do so at any time and in any location.  This call chimed in nicely with the pressure already being applied by Washington on Abbas to come to the table  –  so nicely that Netanyahu made a point of repeating it while in the States, not once but several times.

 

Abbas, while certainly not wishing to appear to the world as rejectionist, laid down certain pre-conditions  –  and he has stuck to them, right up to 29 July, the day the Arab League met to discuss the possibility of direct talks.  Abbas has been demanding that Israel agrees to a complete halt in settlement construction and  –  while allowing for land swaps and adjustments  –  accepts a Palestinian state in territories overrun by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War, namely the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.  He is quoted by Egypt's state-owned news agency as saying that when he receives written assurances on those matters, "I will go immediately to the direct talks,"

 

For his part, Netanyahu has consistently refused to commit himself to any pre-conditions.  "Let's just get to the talks," he said in a TV interview in the States, "and one of the things we'll discuss straight away is this issue of settlements."

 

Abbas held off responding to the diplomatic pressure exerted on him from Washington until the scheduled meeting of the Arab League on 29 July.  Already regarded with suspicion by more extreme Palestinian and Muslim opinion, Abbas had needed the cover provided by the Arab League before even commencing the proximity talks.  How much more would he need it when the prospect of talking face-to-face with Israel's prime minister was being mooted?

 

And then, in the last week of July, an internal Palestinian document was leaked to the Associated Press.  It revealed the type of argument that the US has been using in its efforts to drag Abbas to the negotiating table.  The document apparently revealed that President Obama's special peace envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, warned Abbas that if he does not agree to direct talks, President Obama will not be able to help the Palestinians achieve a state of their own.

 

In response, the Palestinian president seems to have reiterated the line he has been following for some weeks, namely that he first wants to see progress on the issue of the borders of a future Palestinian state. The internal Palestinian document warned Abbas that to give up on those demands would be political suicide.  The thought arises that to do so could, perhaps, amount to literal suicide, too  – a dilemma indeed for the PA president.  But even so, it is surely not necessary to make these matters a pre-condition for entering negotiations.  Direct talks would almost certainly start with an assumption that most of the West Bank and certain Arab-occupied neighbourhoods in and around Jerusalem would indeed be included within a new sovereign Palestine.  As for Gaza, it has already be evacuated by Israel, and it would be up to Abbas and the PA to sort out its governance and their relationship with Hamas, its de facto rulers. 

 

All of which doubtless explains the somewhat equivocal outcome of the Arab League meeting.  For the Arab League foreign ministers authorised the Palestinian Authority to enter into direct negotiations with Israel, but left it up to PA President Mahmoud Abbas to decide on the timing.

 

The timing is all-important, for Israel's moratorium on building in the West Bank settlements is due to expire in September, and there are fears in Washington and Jerusalem that Abbas will play a waiting game right up to the wire  –  creating a real dilemma for prime minister Netanyahu.  Abbas is well aware that Netanyahu is himself under intense pressure from within his cabinet to authorise the resumption of West Bank construction the instant the moratorium expires.

 

Danny Danon, a Likud member of the Knesset, knows the exact moment the 10-month freeze on new settlement construction will end  – 6:06 p.m. Tel Aviv time on September 26.  Danon has said that he and opponents of the freeze were not planning to let it last any longer than that.  “When the sun sets," he said, "people will start to build.”  He told the press that opponents of the freeze are already planning a large ceremony for that moment, complete with tractors that will break ground for new homes.

 

Abbas wants to put Netanyahu through the painful dilemma of either going along with the hard-liners who are demanding an immediate restart to West Bank construction, or facing them down and continuing the negotiations.  If he chooses to go along with them and finally authorises the restating of construction, then he will have been wrong-footed in the eyes of the USA and world opinion.  If he does face them down, then Abbas will be perceived to have won his point by sheer persistence. 

 

This is why officials in Jerusalem believe that Abbas will attempt at all costs to delay the beginning of direct peace negotiations with Israel, probably waiting until the temporary settlement freeze expires, before declaring his own decision on the matter. They also assume that the Palestinian president, waving the impending dilemma in front of Netanyahu's nose,  will use the time to try to convince him to continue the freeze or at least to take other "equal" measures in respect of West Bank construction.

 

How will things pan out?  There's the whole month of August to get through first – and on the basis of precedent, almost anything can happen in that time, and probably will. 

 

 

*Note on Turkey's application to join the European Union

First made in 1987, it has been outstanding largely on account of Turkey's 1974 invasion and seizure of northern Cyprus, and its continuing  stand-off with Greece ever since.  France and Germany also fear the uncertain role a large and predominantly Islamic society might play within a European political and economic bloc.  In May 2009 French President Nicholas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel jointly questioned the wisdom of Turkey seeking full membership of the European Union.  They emphasized their objection to the EU's enlargement to include Turkey, argued that any misguided expansion might endanger its operational effectiveness, and instead reiterated their support for "privileged partnership" as an alternative framework to regulate Turkish-EU relations  –  an offer immediately and robustly rejected by Turkey.

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

______________________________________________________________________

Copyright 2010 by the author. This work is posted at http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/. Please do link to it, quote excerpts and forward it by email with this notice. Distributed by ZNN. To subscribe send email to znn-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

 

 

 


#1761 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Wed Aug 4, 2010 10:02 pm
Subject: Blue Washing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism
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You've probably heard of pink washing. "Pink washing" is the label breast cancer activists use for spin by cosmetics firms that pretend they are joining the fight against breast cancer, but are in fact marketing carcinogenic products.

Activists for different causes have used the "blue washing" label. However, it perhaps best fits governments, political analysts and groups that claim their intentions are benign or friendly, while in fact they favor anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic policies.

A case in point is the Olympia Coop, which initiated a boycott against Israel, but disingenuously claimed that:

Criticizing US foreign policy is not anti-American and Israeli supporters of BDS are not anti-Israel.

Supporting BDS is no more anti-Israel than boycotting South Africa is anti–South Africa or anti-White or boycotting China is anti-Chinese. Boycott is a nonviolent people-powered tool for change. This is about working for peace and justice in the region.

When BDS was leveled on South Africa, the goal wasn’t to “delegitimize” South Africa, to eliminate white South Africans, or to destroy South Africa. The goal was specific: To end Apartheid and the human rights abuses associated with it. That was the goal. BDS was the tactic.

Of course, nobody in the US would really boycott China. And of course, comparisons of Israel to South Africa delegitimize Zionism and are inherently anti-Israel. Israeli and American supporters of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) are anti-Israel however. Many BDS coalition member groups are quite explicit about their advocacy of a one-state "solution," their opposition to "colonialism, imperialism and Zionism," and some BDS supporters. even openly support genocide. Ending what they call "Apartheid" would end Jewish self-determination.

Among those to join the blue washing team is Professor Walt. Along with Professor Mearsheimer, he wrote a book, "The Israel Lobby." The book contends that U.S. policy with regard to Israel is determined by a mysterious "Israel lobby" that controls the U.S. government and press. The "Israel Lobby" of Walt and Mearsheimer bears a suspicious resemblance to the Jews of classic anti-Semitic propaganda. Walt and Mearsheimer advocate greatly weakening or withdrawing U.S. support of Israel. That would very likely result in the end of Israel. Professor Walt must be aware of that fact. Walt was also happy to defend Hezbollah supporter and former CNN employee Octavia Nasr, who mourned the passing of Sheikh Fadlalah. Yet Walt insists that he is not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, just voicing "legitimate criticism."

Rabbi Lerner of Tikkun Magazine and Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street have outdone both Professor Walt and the Olympia Coop for sophisticated blue washing. Lerner hosted a "roundtable" on the question, "Is BDS the Way to End the Occupation?" Note that Lerner didn't bother to ask if BDS is the way to bring about peace. That is not an interesting issue for him. He selected three avid supporters of BDS and Jeremy Ben-Ami for his roundtable discussion. Ben-Ami insisted that he has nothing against BDS and its Hamas groupie supporters. He is only opposed to boycotts because he thinks they are not a good way of ending the occupation.

The blue washing prize, however, just might go to the Obama administration. The others are not to be faulted. They made valiant efforts at hypocrisy. Nobody beats Jeremy Ben-Ami and J Street at the subtle art of "pro-Israel" Israel bashing. But they could not possibly have the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth. First President Obama celebrated U.S.-Israel friendship and the unbreakable bond with Israel in a gala spin event with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. A few days after the big celebration, the U.S. quietly announced that it was upgrading the Palestinian mission to the United States, though the Palestinians had done nothing at all to advance the peace process.

Ami Isseroff


Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000753.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.


#1762 From: "David Frankfurter" <david.frankfurter@...>
Date: Wed Aug 4, 2010 8:03 am
Subject: Israeli Officers Ambushed on Northern Border
dfrankfurter
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Israeli Officers Ambushed on Northern Border

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/israeli-officers-ambushed-on-northern-border/

Posted By Richard Landes On August 3, 2010 @ 2:37 pm

At around 1:30 pm Israel time today (August 3), an exchange of fire took place between Israeli and Lebanese forces along the border. (This map [1] reflects the exact location of the incident.) According to Lebanese sources, the Israelis had gone over the fence and were cutting down a tree growing on Lebanese soil. Lebanese soldiers allegedly fired warning shots in the air and then at the soldiers.

Michel Suleiman, the Lebanese president, issued his own statement [2] denouncing the clash as a violation of UN Resolution 1701 and calling on the Lebanese army to “confront any Israeli aggression, whatever the sacrifices.”

Israeli military sources [3] assert that the work they were doing was routine; that UNIFIL was warned; and that in that place (and many other ones) the fence was deliberately placed inside of Israeli territory so that work on the other side can be conducted without trespassing into Lebanese territory.

Clearing brush is a high priority for Israel because it was precisely by using brush for cover that Hezbollah fighters were able to kidnap Israeli soldiers in the incident that started the hostilities in the summer of 2006.

But today, according to Israeli sources, there was an ambush. Rather than fire in the air and then at the allegedly trespassing soldiers, Lebanese troops fired at a group of officers standing off to the side of the incident and not even over the fence. They killed a reserve lieutenant colonel and badly injured a reserve captain.

Israel responded with light weapons fire, artillery, and a helicopter gunship, killing three Lebanese troops and one journalist. When the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) asked for a cease-fire to evacuate their dead, which Israel granted, they took advantage of the lull [4] to fire an RPG at an Israeli tank.

The journalist, according to the Italian paper Corriere della Sera [5], worked for the newspaper al-Akhbar. According to Lee Smith, al-Akhbaris a pro-Hezbollah paper whose editor, Ibrahim al-Amin, is generally considered a Hezbollah spokesman.

The presence of a large number of photographers as well as this journalist at the outbreak of the incident suggests that it was prepared in advance, and firing on officers away from the site of the alleged breach further indicates that this was a deliberate act of aggression. IDF sources declined to speculate but said that they were looking into this possibility.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has issued a strongly worded statement: “Israel views this attack on IDF soldiers [6] with utmost gravity.  This was a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution #1701 [7]. I hold the Lebanese government directly responsible for this violent provocation against Israel. Israel responded aggressively, and will do so in the future against any attempt to violate the quiet on northern border, and attack residents of the north and the soldiers who are protecting them.”

When asked about the possibility that the Lebanese soldiers involved were Hezbollah, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich of the spokesman’s unit declined to speculate. Leibovich did, however, grant that certain units with the Lebanese army have been strongly influenced by Hezbollah. One blogger noted that the dead were older and heavier than the normal Lebanese army [8]recruit, and Lee Smith remarked that “it is perhaps more accurate to say that the LAF have been entirely penetrated by Hezbollah.”

The role of UNIFIL in the events in question remains cloudy. Several photos [9] show them side by side with RPG-toting Lebanese troops. IDF sources emphasized the close cooperation with them and wondered about the date of the photographs. On the other hand, if they were involved, then Israeli notification of activity may have served as important intelligence in Lebanese planning of the attack.

The possibility that Lebanese troops involved were trained by the U.S. [10], and that the weapons they used were American [11], further complicates the picture.

Barry Rubin notes [12] that the mainstream news media, in their typical style, as, for example, the New York Times, presented the event as a “he said, she said [13],” with the overall effect of reinforcing Lebanese claims. AFP, as if to bolster the Lebanese claims, published a photo of the tree-cutting equipment with the soldier over the other side of the fence and the following caption [14]:

Israeli soldiers use a crane as they appear to cut a tree on the Lebanese side of the border in the southern village of Adaisseh, Lebanon, Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2010. Lebanese and Israeli troops exchanged fire on the border Tuesday in the most serious clashes since a fierce war four years ago, authorities said. A Lebanese officer spoke on condition of anonymity under military guidelines, said the clash occurred as Israeli troops tried to remove a tree from the Lebanese side of the border.(AP Photo/Lutfallah Daher)

Note the use of “appear,” which refers either to the cutting of a tree or “on the Lebanese side of the border,” an implication repeated by quoting a Lebanese officer claiming it was on their side of the border. This, of course, follows in the wake of the MSM’s almost total lack of interest in Israel’s revelations several weeks ago [15] that Hezbollah has dug into civilian areas with their military and their arsenal.

A comparison [16] of the IDF and UNIFIL statements, however, suggests that the Lebanese case of Israeli violations and Lebanese warning shots does not stand up to scrutiny. UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti mostly sounds evasively vague [17].

Some of the best coverage has come from blogs [18]. In particular, Israellycool [19] and the Muqata [20] have live-blogged events.

Speculation on why this occurred today runs the gamut. Some believe that it’s an effort to sabotage the direct negotiations to which the Arab League gave the green light last week and should be seen in the context of yesterday’s rocket attacks [21] from Sinai. Others think it’s an effort by Hezbollah to distract attention from the latest revelations that they were involved in the Hariri assassination. Still others argue it’s related to the latest visit of the Saudis and the Syrians to Lebanon.

In any case, the incident is a reminder of the volatility of the region, how easily it is subject to sabotage, and how readily the MSM will play its role in enabling the most belligerent players.


Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/israeli-officers-ambushed-on-northern-border/

URLs in this post:

[1] map: http://idfspokesperson.com/2010/08/03/aerial-photograph-of-location-of-incident-along-lebanese-border-3-aug-2010/

[2] issued his own statement: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/08/20108310240207599.html

[3] Israeli military sources: http://idfspokesperson.com/2010/08/03/laf-opens-fire-at-idf-force-on-northern-border-3-aug-2010/

[4] took advantage of the lull: http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2010/08/report-confirmed-idf-officer-killed-on.html

[5] Corriere della Sera: http://www.corriere.it/esteri/10_agosto_03/israele-libano-scontri_4263ebe4-9ee6-11df-ad0c-00144f02aabe.shtml

[6] attack on IDF soldiers: http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/News/today/10/08/0302.htm

[7] UN Security Council Resolution #1701:http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Behind+the+Headlines-+UN+Security+Council+Resolution+1701+12-Aug-2006.htm

[8] older and heavier than the normal Lebanese army : http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2010/08/fighting-on-israels-northern-border.html

[9] Several photos: http://www.nowlebanon.com/BlogDetails.aspx?TID=418&FID=6

[10] possibility that Lebanese troops involved were trained by the U.S.: http://www.mererhetoric.com/2009/05/18/us-security-assistance-to-lebanon-already-being-turned-against-israel/

[11] weapons they used were American: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-lebanon-intelligence-20100801,0,1293515.story

[12] Barry Rubin notes: http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/08/todays-example-of-ridiculous-media-bias.html

[13] he said, she said: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/world/middleeast/04mideast.html?ref=middleeast

[14] following caption:http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//100803/481/urn_publicid_ap_org_b0bd699b5abd4b61b0c6f0947cd2348d/?.src=news

[15] Israel’s revelations several weeks ago: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hezbollah-takes-southern-lebanon-hostage/

[16] comparison: http://www.justjournalism.com/media-analysis/view/lebanon-border-clashes-just-journalism-speaks-to-idf-and-unifil

[17] sounds evasively vague: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100803/lebanon-israel-troops-100803/

[18] has come from blogs: http://muqata.blogspot.com/2010/08/attack-on-northern-israel.html

[19] Israellycool: http://www.israellycool.com/

[20] the Muqata: http://muqata.blogspot.com/

[21] attacks: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/missile-attacks-rock-red-sea-resorts/

Copyright © 2010 Pajamas Media. All rights reserved.

 


#1763 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Wed Aug 4, 2010 3:25 pm
Subject: Eilat rocket attack - too clever by half?
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Eilat rocket attack – too clever by half?

 

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/08/eilat-rocket-attack-too-clever-by-half.html

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

 

The pattern is so unvarying that it has become predictable.  Every so often the Israeli-Palestinian kaleidoscope gets a good shake, and the pieces assemble themselves into a design suggesting the possibility of an accord.  No sooner does this happen than forces opposed to compromise unleash some act of violence calculated to inflame public opinion and frustrate such an outcome.

 

Last Thursday (29 July) Arab League foreign ministers gave PA President Mahmoud Abbas the green light to proceed to direct face-to-face peace talks with Israel as soon as he deems it appropriate to do so.  After months of indirect talks and relative lack of progress, there is now a broad international coalition backing the US call for the resumption of direct talks.  Britain, France, Italy and Germany have been working actively behind the scenes to push the Palestinians back to direct negotiations.  In addition it was only a few weeks ago that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres met with Egyptian and Jordanian leaders, and received their support for direct talks.

 

With the Israeli settlement moratorium set to expire in late September, and demands from hard-liners growing on Netanyahu not to renew it, there is an increasing desire on all sides to avoid a new crisis and ensure that progress is made ahead of the critical moment.  The next possible step is a possible trilateral meeting in Washington next week between Israeli, Palestinian and American negotiators. This is a Palestinian initiative to which the Obama administration is attempting to win Israel's agreement  –  its aim: to set the terms of reference, agenda and timetable for direct negotiations.  If Israel agrees to the meeting, it will be the first significant direct talks with the Palestinian Authority since Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister last year.

 

 This positive and gathering momentum towards peace has proved too much for the visceral Islamist rejectionists that abound in Hamas-dominated Gaza.  The result:  a barrage of rockets fired pretty indiscriminately towards Israel's Red Sea resort of Eilat, but in the event wreaking death, casualties and destruction in the adjacent Jordanian resort of Aqaba.

 

"Preliminary information,"  reported Egypt's official news agency, "indicates that Palestinian factions from the Gaza Strip are behind that operation."  A number of terrorist groups with links to Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and other global Jihadi bodies, are known to be operating in the Sinai peninsula, engaged in smuggling arms into the Gaza Strip and attempting to penetrate into Israel  – which is why Israel's Counter Terrorism Unit recently issued a serious travel warning to tourists contemplating travelling to Sinai and Egypt.

 

But today (Wednesday, 4 August) Cairo security officials told the Egyptian news daily al-Youm al-Saba'a  that Hamas was responsible for the rocket attack.  According to the report, Hamas operatives infiltrated into the Sinai Peninsula from Gaza to fire the rockets, so that it would appear as if they had been fired by an Egyptian terror group.
           

Hamas have denied responsibility.  Their spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri criticized Egyptian security sources' allegations, calling them "politically motivated".

 

People who launch rockets randomly into civilian areas simply in order to create terror and stir up conflict are not usually very sophisticated in their thinking.  They cannot be expected to consider carefully the possibly unanticipated results of their actions.  This latest rocket attack may prove to be a case in point. For one outcome appears to be a closing of ranks between Israel and Jordan in opposing the extremists.

 

On Monday, shortly after the rocket attack, Israel's President, Shimon Peres, said that Israel and Jordan were now working together in the fight against terror.  Fears in Amman about the increasing influence of the Iranian-led axis, with its connections to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, had already led to stronger defence ties between the Israeli and the Jordanian armed forces. The Katyusha rockets that struck in Aqaba were likely meant to hit Eilat, but they did make clear that the terrorists who are moving freely throughout the Sinai Peninsula threaten not only Israel, but also neighbouring Jordan

 

The end result  –  a more concentrated and concerted move against them  –  may be far from what the terrorists intended.

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Copyright 2010 by the author. This work is posted at http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/. Please do link to it, quote excerpts and forward it by email with this notice. Distributed by ZNN. To subscribe send email to znn-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

 

 


#1764 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Fri Aug 6, 2010 4:40 pm
Subject: Lebanon: Predictions of war and vain hopes
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Elias Bejjani is a Lebanese Christian patriot and a good friend of Israel. Bejjani thinks that war between Israel and the Hezbollah is inevitable. He may be right.

However, what seems inevitable in the Middle East is often not so at all. I remember when we all believed that Lebanon would be the second country to sign a peace accord with Israel, and I remember when we all believed that King Hussein of Jordan would not last another year on his throne because he would be wiped out by assassins. We said it every year for a very long time, until King Hussein died in his bed, after having concluded an amicable peace with Israel.

All of us can remember when Turkish-Israeli friendship was taken for granted, and many of us can remember when Iran and Israel were active and close allies. Even in the unchanging Middle East, things change all the time.

I also remember when the goal of Israeli policymakers regarding Lebanon was to get the Lebanese army to deploy in South Lebanon in order to secure the border. The goal was achieved. The Lebanese army deployed in South Lebanon. On August 3, the army that was supposed to secure the southern border of Lebanon fired on our soldiers for no reason, and then the Lebanese government accused Israel of aggression. Instead of grasping at UN Security Council Resolution 1701 as a means to rid themselves of the Hezbollah and bring peace to Lebanon, the Lebanese government has made a mockery of that resolution.

Bejjani also hopes that Israel will oust the Hezbollah as it ousted the PLO in 1982. He is probably not alone. It seems to me that many Lebanese hope that someone, anyone, will stand up for Lebanese freedom: Israel, France, the United States - anyone but themselves.

If they hope for Israeli intervention, they hope in vain. Many things changed since 1982. The first is that Israel learned the bitter lessons of two wars in Lebanon. In the first, Israel did free Lebanon of the PLO. But what did the Lebanese do with their freedom? They massacred some Palestinians, for which Israel took the blame, and then they proceeded to tear their country apart. After that, to stop the chaos of the civil war, they let "sister" Syria take over Lebanon.

For a brief time after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, it looked as though Lebanese patriots of the March 14 movement just might unite and kick out Syria and the Hezbollah. But the Lebanese are Lebanese. You never know when they will stick to the plan, and when they will go back to being Lebanese. The hopes that so many of us had for Lebanon were dashed.

Hezbollah flexed a few muscles and Lebanese patriots scuttled away to huddle under the banners of "unity" and "national dialogue." They united, as usual, behind the slogan of "edbach al yahood" - murder the Jews. Not only the relatively reasonable Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, embraced the cause of Hezbollah, but even the Christian Michel Aoun vowed his loyalty to "sister Syria" and its Islamist ally, the Hezbollah. The Christians and the Druze joined in the Islamist cries of "Murder the infidels," without stopping to think, "Hey wait a minute, that's us." Lebanese politics are Levantine. The term "Levantine" was coined because the term "Byzantine" was not sufficient to describe the illogical, contradictory, convoluted and confounded nature of Lebanese politics.

In the second Lebanese war, Israel learned that the elected government of the Lebanese stood foursquare behind the Hezbollah war criminals and supported both the kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers and the murderous rocket fire on northern Israel. Israel also learned that the great powers, through the United Nations, would never allow Israel to do what is needed in Lebanon, and that the Lebanese people were happy to shield the Hezbollah with their lives. Almost nobody in Lebanon protested. Hardly any politicians spoke out. Israel was roundly condemned both in Lebanon and around the world for a war it did not start and did not want - a war that began only because Lebanon shields the terrorist and genocidal Hezbollah organization, and because no Lebanese of any confession or political persuasion will lift a finger to stop them. Many may want to remove the Hezbollah, but they seem to be waiting for some external deus ex machina to float into the stage of history and save them.

The Lebanese government made it clear time and again that it supports the Hezbollah, and so have leading Lebanese journals. When it still could have done so, the Lebanese government did not lift a finger to disarm the Hezbollah, as was required both by the Taif accords and UN Security Council resolution 1559 The Lebanese were unwilling or unable to raise an army, so they subcontracted the defense of their country to the Hezbollah. Even their French allies gave up on them.

The Second Lebanon war cost the lives of about 150 Israelis and many times more Lebanese. A war to eliminate Hezbollah would exact perhaps ten times as many casualties on both sides. How can any Lebanese expect Israel to make such a sacrifice to free Lebanon, when they themselves were unwilling to do anything? If the Hezbollah start a war, Israel will defend itself and no more. It is not realistic to expect that we will try to eliminate the Hezbollah, to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers and civilians if it is not necessary to do so for the defense of Israel. As for the rest of the world, it may be too much to hope that they will even allow us to even do what is necessary to defend ourselves.

Suppose there is a war with Iran, and suppose that as Bejjani thinks, Israel and the U.S. and the rest of the Western countries will all be fighting on the same side, an unlikely occurrence. Israel will have its hands full coping with Iran. In any case, that coalition will need the support of the Arab states and of Turkey. The latter will hardly be likely to support the war if Israel starts a war with Lebanon as well.

And suppose Israel could do as the Lebanese dreamers ask, and remove the Hezbollah. For how long will Lebanon remain free after that, if its people will not agree among themselves even on the vital issue of defending their freedom? How can Lebanon function as a nation, if there is an unending supply of Lebanese politicians willing to sell themselves to Syria, to Iran or to the Devil himself for the right price, while the Lebanese do nothing except try to enjoy the "good life" and pretend there is no problem? Nobody can free Lebanon unless the Lebanese people are willing to unite and free their own country.

Ami Isseroff


Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000754.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.


#1765 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Mon Aug 9, 2010 3:51 pm
Subject: The Lebanon incident - an opportunistic confrontation
nevilleteller
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The Lebanon incident  –  an opportunistic confrontation

 

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/08/lebanon-incident-opportunistic.html

 

 

Sunday 8 August 2010

 

by Neville Teller

 

 

Enemies of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority abound.

 

In the Middle East the Iran-Syria-Hamas-Hezbollah axis also embraces extreme Islamist organisations world-wide to form what is coming to be known as "global jihad"  –   a combination of groups and bodies intent on waging war against non-Muslims in general, but directing their terrorist activities especially against Christians, Jews and western-style democracies. 

 

These organisations, and the individuals who are sympathetic to their aims, have a long list of reasons for confronting Israel at any time – and have no hesitation in inventing more as opportunity presents itself.  At the moment Israelis and Palestinians seem to be edging towards direct peace negotiations.  This would certainly not suit the agenda of global jihad, and the traditional way of undermining such moves is to mount some sort of terror attack calculated to result in retaliation.  The rocket attack on Israel's southern city of Eilat last week was just such a move  –  a move that went disastrously wrong when it resulted in death and damage in the adjacent Jordanian city of Aqaba.

 

At the moment a new confrontation with Israel might divert attention from the fifth set of United Nations sanctions about to be imposed on Iran; or it could serve to turn the world's gaze away from International Court of Justice indictments that seem about to be issued against senior Hezbollah figures over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. 

 

Iran's President Ahmadinejad has even chosen this moment to repeat his denial of the Holocaust and his claim that the events of 9/11 were a conspiracy engineered by the United States.  Yesterday  – Saturday 7 August –  according to a report by the official Iranian news agency IRNA, he again asserted, as he has in the past, that the attack on the Twin Towers was a “big fabrication” used to justify the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Speaking at a Tehran conference, Ahmadinejad said there was no evidence that the death toll at New York's World Trade Center, destroyed in the attacks, was as high as reported and said "Zionists" had been tipped off in advance. No "Zionists" were killed in the World Trade Center, according to Ahmadinejad, because "one day earlier they were told not go to their workplace".

 

"They announced that 3,000 people were killed in this incident," he told a gathering of the Iranian news media, "but there were no reports that reveal their names. Maybe you saw that, but I did not."

 

In point of fact there is available online a published list of all those killed on 11 September 2001.  According to official US figures, 2,995 people from more than 90 countries were killed in the attacks, including 19 hijackers and all passengers and crew aboard four commandeered airliners.

 

In this febrile atmosphere, the incident on the Lebanese-Israel border last week assumes some sort of context.

 

What are the facts?

 

At 9 am last Tuesday (3 August) following standard procedure, the officer commanding a unit of the Israel Defense Forces on the Lebanese border, not far from the Israeli kibbutz of Misgav Am, informed the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) that the army planned to prune several trees within Israeli territory in order to remove branches that were interfering with electronic detection devices.

 

Where were the trees? 

 

Next day (Wednesday) a UNIFIL spokesman said that the organization had established that "the trees being cut by the Israeli army are located south of the Blue Line on the Israeli side."

 

And what is this "Blue Line"

 

The blue line is a UN-drawn recognised international border between Lebanon and Israel, established in 2000 following the cessation of hostilities. To be crystal clear, stretching behind the blue line towards Israel there is an enclave, the edge of which is marked by a security fence.  Both enclave and fence are in Israel proper.  Since the Second Lebanon War four years ago, Israel has frequently operated inside the enclave. In some places the "blue line" is very close to the fence, while in others the enclave is as much as 800 metres wide.

           

To return to Tuesday morning.  The pruning work on the trees was scheduled to begin at 9 a.m., but Israel accepted UNIFIL’s request to delay the action for two hours. In the meantime, in accordance with standard operating procedure, UNIFIL informed the Lebanese army of what was planned.

           

What happened in those two hours?

 

That is a matter of some speculation.  There is some evidence that a Lebanese army officer with Hezbollah sympathies decided to exploit the situation.  A sniper was briefed and a unit put on alert.  The Lebanese media were tipped off, and a TV crew arrived near the scene to film the attack.  A Lebanese marksman fired two or three shots, one of them at the head of a senior IDF officer, who was killed, and the other in the chest of a junior officer, who currently remains in a serious but stable condition.  Lebanon says that at least three of its soldiers and a journalist were killed in the resulting exchange of fire.

           

What else has emerged about this incident?

 

Well, a Lebanese military spokesman told the Lebanese newspaper A-Nahar on Wednesday that the Lebanese Army was first to open fire  –  adding, however, that it was their right "to defend Lebanon's sovereignty."   Subsequently the UN peacekeeping force has confirmed that the tree whose branches were being cut back was indeed in Israeli territory.  Finally a chief UNIFIL official confirmed on Wednesday that Israeli soldiers did not cross the border with Lebanon before the clash.

 

Immediately following the incident urgent messages flew from western capitals to Jerusalem and Beirut urging de-escalation and restraint, while the UN Security Council held a closed-door session which resulted in nothing more incisive than a short statement reiterating the call on both sides to show restraint.

 

Restraint is indeed the only response likely to spike the guns of those who are intent on stirring up the maximum trouble in the region.  For the moment Israel has contented itself with official letters to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Vitaly Churkin, President of the United Nations Security Council, explaining that the attacks by the Lebanon army threaten stability, peace, and security in the region, and that "in response to this grave incident Israel exercised its right of self-defense, responding with the appropriate measures on LAF positions in the area."

 

What moral can be drawn from this incident?  That the war waged by the enemies of peace is opportunistic and relentless, and that only steadfastness of purpose will overcome them.

 

On Wednesday morning, Israel Defense forces returned to the site and uprooted the trees without interference.

 

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

______________________________________________________________________

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#1766 From: DrMike <drmikeh49@...>
Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:59 pm
Subject: American Friends Service Committee-- We Support BDS But We're Not Anti-Israel
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As any reader of this and similar sites is certainly aware, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is simply the latest venture of The People Who Hate Israel. The fact that it's packaged in soft pastel colors and bedecked with the flowery language of human rights can't hide the stink that emanates from its core-- the insistence on the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel as a precondition to the exercise of Palestinian national rights. Nothing different than what the PLO was promoting in 1964 (when the West Bank was occupied by Jordan and Gaza by the Egyptians, occupations that did not arouse the ire of the international human rights community). Nothing different than what Hamas and its Iranian masters suggest, though certainly without the more bloodthirsty aspects of their rhetoric.

Some organizations try to straddle the line of this, and claim that they support BDS but aren't really anti-Israel. The American Friends Service Committee office in San Francisco is trying to peddle this line; its director, Allan Solomonow, still publicly denies that AFSC is anti-Israel (see the last letter in the July 29 edition of J Weekly, the Jewish community newspaper in San Francisco).  (For those outside the US, the AFSC is the "social justice" organization of the Religious Society of Friends-- the Quakers.  Those in the UK might recognize the Quakers as the same group that, despite its stated commitment to nonviolence, has repeatedly hosted meetings of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir that openly supports jihad.)

Yet the Pacific Mountain Region of AFSC (which includes the San Francisco office) has publicly attached its name to a flyer supporting BDS , and in private correspondence with Mr. Solomonow he has consistently refused to dissociate himself and his office from that flyer (though he did state that the national AFSC has not yet taken a position on BDS). If I have misinterpreted our exchange of e-mails, I invite Mr. Solomonow to post a response here.

Proponents of BDS are busily trying to promote the fiction that they aren't anti-Israel (though I have yet to read the "some of my best friends are Israeli" line). Over at DivestThis! one can read comments from some who support the boycott recently enacted by the Olympia Food Cooperative who strongly deny that they, or the boycott movement itself, are anti-Israel-- in fact they consistently claim that they support "peace". Yet none of them suggest in any way that their vision of "peace" would be one between a Jewish state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. And the principal spokespeople for the BDS movement are very, very clear that this is NOT what they are promoting: (see the video posted here)


BDS is just the same old hate in a new package. Confront those who are selling it and make them reveal what's inside.

 

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#1767 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Sun Aug 22, 2010 11:36 pm
Subject: Direct talks: a triumph of hope over optimism
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Direct talks: a triumph of hope over optimism

 

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/08/direct-talks-triumph-of-hope-over.html

 

 

 

 

by Neville Teller

 

Will Friday 20 August 2010 go down in the history of Israel, to say nothing of a putative future Palestine, as a seminal date  –  the day when the objective of secure, peaceful co-existence moved from mere aspiration to the start of practical achievement?

 

Do any factors of significance mark 20 August out from literally scores of dates, strewn across the recent history of the Middle East, marking the inauguration of well-intentioned efforts to reach a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?  To list only a few, there were the Madrid  Conference in 1991, the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993, the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, the Camp David Summit in 2000, the Taba summit in 2001, the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, the Road Map for Peace promulgated by the Quartet, and the Geneva Accord, both in 2003, and the Annapolis process in 2007.

 

What are the bare facts about this newest bid for a settlement?

 

At a press conference held on 20 August, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, have been invited to begin direct peace talks in Washington on 2 September.  The meeting is intended to "re-launch direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues, which," according to Clinton, "we believe we can complete in one year." Clinton said she herself would host the first direct Israel-Palestinian negotiating session on 2 September, and that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan have also been invited to join that first discussion.

On the day before, namely 1 September, US, the UN, the EU and Russia.

 

To return to the events of 20 August, it is significant that, in addition to Clinton’s announcement,the Quartet issued a statement endorsing the direct talks and urging the two parties to accept the forthcoming US invitation.  In their statement the Quartet expressed support for “the pursuit of a just, lasting and comprehensive regional peace as envisaged in the Madrid terms of reference, Security Council resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.”

 

It is pretty clear that complex political machinations lay behind this duplication of events – the press conference invitation and the Quartet endorsement of it.  The significance  becomes clear when one examines the terms in which each party accepted.. 

 

The response by Netanyahu's office mentioned only the US invitation to direct talks.  “The prime minister has been calling for direct negotiations for the past year and a half,” his statement said. “He was pleased with the American clarification that the talks would be without preconditions.“ Jerusalem has been silent in relation to the Quartet's statement.

Palestinian Liberation Organization leaders, however, gathered overnight on Friday and voted to accept the US invitation in these terms: "The PLO executive committee announces its acceptance of a resumption of direct negotiations with Israel, in accordance with the statement by the international Middle East Quartet and the invitation by the United States."

 

In effect the two sides have accepted different invitations to the same talks.  The reason is clear.  The documents explicitly mentioned in the Quartet's statement are filled with equivocal requirements, many of which are precisely the major issues needing resolution in the forthcoming talks.  In particular, embedded in the Quartet's position is a call for a complete freeze on building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and at least an implied assumption that the borders of a new sovereign Palestinian state would be the boundaries that Israel crossed during the Six Day War.

 

PA President Abbas has been under intense pressure for several weeks to resume direct talks.  He has consistently stonewalled, first demanding that talks continue from where they left off with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in November 2008, then maintaining that any future agreement must be based on the 1967 borders, and throughout that Netanyahu's freeze on settlement building in the West Bank apply also to East Jerusalem.  Without any of the above demands being fulfilled, he reckoned that entering into direct talks with Israel would open him up to criticism from Fatah loyalists in his own party, to say nothing of the condemnation that would be heaped on him by his Hamas rivals and their patrons, Iran and Syria.

 

All preconditions for starting direct talks were rejected by the Israeli government, and in recent days Abbas has been saying that he would be prepared to enter direct talks without the assurances from Israel, if instead assurances came from the Quartet.  Hence their pre-press conference statement.

 

The resumption of direct talks is undoubtedly a victory for the US administration's diplomatic efforts.  US Middle East envoy Mitchell, who has been shuttling back and forth to the region since early 2009, succeeded in brokering the proximity talks between the two sides, a valuable precursor to the current outcome..

 

Israel, too, will view with satisfaction the renewal of direct talks, especially since they are explicitly starting without preconditions.  Netanyahu has repeatedly called for the resumption of direct negotiations in recent months, and made this a central theme during his visit to Washington in July.  This new initiative is likely to mitigate the political backlash from his right-wing coalition members when he seeks to extend the settlement freeze, as he surely must.  Indeed, with the construction moratorium deadline only three weeks after the first meeting on 2 September, this issue is likely to prove the first hurdle to be cleared if the whole initiative is not to fail.

 

Israelis and Palestinians stand shoulder to shoulder on one issue at least – cynicism about Middle East peace initiatives.  The efforts to bring about a resolution of the conflict have been many and various; the obstacles formidable and indeed, to date, insurmountable.  Optimistic it is impossible to be about this latest well-intentioned effort.  Who – barring perhaps George Mitchell, President Obama's dogged special Middle East envoy – could put his hand on his heart and say that a peace agreement between Israel and the PA on or before 20 August 2011 is a realistic possibility? 

 

Optimism may indeed appear unrealistic, but there is one thing that cannot be killed off so easily – hope.

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

________________________________________________________________________

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#1768 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:24 pm
Subject: Hamas - a fly in the ointment
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Hamas – a fly in the ointment

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/08/august-reviewed.html

 

by Neville Teller

 

 

 

Until the 20th, August seemed, with a slight variation or two, to be "business as usual" on the Middle East scene.  True, in their meeting on 29 July the Arab League had given a green light to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to enter direct peace talks with Israel – but their green light cast a flickering and uncertain beam in his direction.  He could do so, the League indicated, if and when he wanted to.  "Less than a full-hearted endorsement" was the general verdict.

 

Behind the scenes, and certainly not on public view, the fast and furious political, diplomatic and organisational activity can only be the subject of wild surmise.  First and foremost, intensive negotiations between the US, the PA and Israel were under way to satisfy the two principals that each would be surrendering nothing of their starting positions if they were actually brought face to face under US auspices.

 

Abbas needed cover from Arab leaders for the action he would be taking – action vehemently opposed by a substantial proportion of Arab public opinion.  So as part and parcel of the deal being assembled, Washington succeeded in persuading Egypt's President Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah to associate themselves with the initiative to restart face-to-face talks between Israel and the Palestinians.  Both were invited, and both agreed, to attend an opening session in Washington.  Abbas would not be facing Israel alone.  Two major Arab nations would be at his side, endorsing his decision to talk peace.

 

Abbas had selected two issues as his bottom line for entering new talks with Israel, and he had stuck with them through thick and thin, despite the blandishments and pressure from the US.  He wanted Israel to undertake that the borders of a new, sovereign state of Palestine would be essentially the boundaries that Israel crossed during the Six Day War in 1967 –  although he had already indicated that these were not sacrosanct, and could be subject to agreed adjustments and "land swap" arrangements.    His second requirement was that Israel agree to cease all new construction both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.

 

For his part, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been proclaiming for several weeks, in Washington and in Israel, that he was not only willing, but eager to enter into direct peace talks with the PA – provided there were no pre-conditions.

 

Washington was presented with a dilemma.  Keen as the Obama administration was for the major political coup that an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord would provide, here they had one of the parties demanding two preconditions before agreeing to talk, and there they had the other demanding no preconditions before agreeing to do so.  Diplomatic ingenuity of a high order was called for.

 

The solution?  Two separate calls to the parties to participate in the opening events.  The first would be a direct invitation by US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, at a press conference in Washington, during the course of which she would say that the parties would enter the talks with no preconditions.  The second would be a statement issued by the Quartet (the US, the EU, the UN and Russia), urging both principals to accept the US's invitation and restating the Quartet's support for “the pursuit of a just, lasting and comprehensive regional peace as envisaged in the Madrid terms of reference, Security Council resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.”  But the documents quoted by the Quartet indeed call for a sovereign Palestine within pre-1967 boundaries and for a complete cessation of all construction in areas beyond the "Green Line" – which includes East Jerusalem.

 

Thus by clever sleight-of-hand Israel was able to respond affirmatively to the US's formal invitation, while the PA's response referred specifically to the Quartet's statement as the basis for their acceptance.  The circle squared!

 

But with this type of juggling necessary as its opening gambit, one cannot help speculating about the chances of a positive outcome to the process as a whole.  And of course the usual suspects are at work intent on undermining any move towards an end to the dispute, and even to a new sovereign Palestine if it means living alongside Israel with peace and security for both.

 

No sooner had the Arab League nodded in the direction of peace talks than a rocket attack was launched at the Israeli Red Sea resort of Eilat.  In the event the one or two that fell in Eilat caused little damage, but death and damage was wreaked on the neighbouring Jordanian resort of Aqaba.  The most likely explanation of where responsibility lay was provided by the Egyptian news daily al-Youm al-Saba'a, which reported Cairo security officlals' belief that Hamas operatives infiltrated into the Sinai Peninsula from Gaza to fire the rockets, so that it would appear as if they had been fired by an Egyptian terror group. 

 

The next day came the extraordinary attack from the Lebanon side of the border separating that country from Israel.  A Lebanese army officer with Hezbollah sympathies  took it upon himself to fabricate an incident – and make sure that the media were there to record the event.  He took advantage of a two-hour delay to a planned Israeli tree-pruning operation, requested by the UN monitoring teams, to brief a sniper. put a unit on alert and tip off the Lebanese media.  A TV crew duly arrived near the scene to film the attack. A Lebanese marksman fired two or three shots, one of them at the head of a senior IDF officer, who was killed, and the other in the chest of a junior officer, who was seriously wounded. Lebanon says that at least three of its soldiers and a journalist were killed in the resulting exchange of fire.

 

Before the end of August UNIFIL had completed its investigation into the incident.  Its conclusionLebanese soldiers shot and killed an Israeli battalion commander earlier this month in an unprovoked attack.

 

Finally – no surprise this – the verdict of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister of Gaza, on the peace initiative: "Palestinians across the globe will not support any movement holding absurd talks with Israel."  In those few words Haniyeh managed a strike at two of his main targets – Hamas's rival party within the Palestinian world, Fatah, and the very concept of seeking peace with Israel.  It is not difficult to perceive Hamas's ultimate objectives, both internal and external.  As regards their internal struggle, they seek domination of the Palestinian people by overcoming and eliminating their Fatah rivals, thus gaining control not only of Gaza but also of the West Bank.  As for their main external aim,  it is somehow, in the words of one of Hamas's main sponsors and patrons, Iran's President Ahmadinejad, to achieve for Israel the fate of being "wiped off the map"  –  or, in another translation, "eliminated from the pages of history".   One or the other. 

 

It is against this sort of background that, on 2 September, the inaugural meeting of an initiative with the specific aim of reaching a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority within just twelve months, will take place.

 

Anyone who hopes for peace between the parties in this long-drawn-out conflict must surely wish those participating – whatever their private motives, reservations, intentions, plans –  a successful outcome to a brave, perhaps foolhardy, venture.

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book “One Man’s Israel” was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog “A Mid-East Journal” (http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  

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#1769 From: Vic Rosenthal <vic@...>
Date: Tue Aug 31, 2010 10:14 pm
Subject: A world without Baronesses
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A world without Baronesses

http://fresnozionism.org/2010/08/a-world-without-baronesses/
August 28th, 2010

News item:

PARIS — France wants the European Union to have a seat at the table during next week’s start of US-backed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Washington.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said it would be “too bad” if the EU were locked out — noting the bloc’s political involvement in the region and its role as a top contributor of financial aid to the Palestinians. — Jerusalem Post

Let’s see. We have the Obama Administration, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Now we need the EU? Let’s invite J Street, too. After all,we need someone to be ‘pro-Israel’.

Not only is the EU a ‘top contributor’ to the Palestinian Authority, it also finances numerous non-governmental organizations in Israel whose primary function seems to be to delegitimize or even destabilize the Jewish state.

And the EU doesn’t shrink from trying to directly intervene in the internal affairs of Israel. For example,

Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, an organizer of the weekly Friday protests at Bil’in of the West Bank security fence, was convicted Tuesday in an Israeli military court of inciting protesters to attack Israeli soldiers and for holding protests without a permit. He will be sentenced next month. The 39-year-old schoolteacher has been jailed since December.

EU representatives attended every day of the trial, and the body’s foriegn policy chief, Catherine Ashton, released a statement Wednesday expressing concern at the conviction, saying, “The possible imprisonment of Mr. Abu Rahmeh is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner.”

“The EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal,” it quoted her as saying in a statement. — JTA

Where to start?

The weekly protests are anything but non-violent, with Arab and international organizers doing their best to physically destroy the separation barrier, and to injure or provoke Israeli soldiers and police who are trying to defend it. One of their goals is to place international ‘activists’ in harm’s way in order to generate sympathy overseas for their cause.  In several cases — for example the recent incident in which American student Emily Henochowicz lost an  eye when she was hit by a teargas canister — they have succeeded too well.

The land that Ashton refers to is not ‘Palestinian land’. It is land that happened to be east of the line that divided Israeli from Jordanian troops in 1949, and by international law it still awaits disposition by a peace treaty between the combatants — despite the fact that Jordan decided in 1988 to give it to the PLO — a terrorist organization.

Here’s an analogy: You and I both claim to own a car. You take possession of it by force (1949), I take it back (1967), and you transfer your claim on it to the Mafia (1988). Then (2010), the EU objects to my driving it because “it belongs to those Sicilian guys.”

Our original claim, by the way, is pretty good, consisting of the original League of Nations Mandate which calls for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Clearly this doesn’t mean that all of ‘Palestine’ of the Mandate must become the Jewish national home, but it certainly doesn’t limit it to any given part (not to mention that right off the bat the British gave away a good 70% of it to their ally, Abdullah, to create the state of Transjordan).

As an aside, if the area is in dispute and you don’t want to create facts on the ground, then nobody — not Jews and not Arabs — should build anything on it. Saying that only Jews are forbidden to build looks tacky.

Some people think that the EU, being a postnational entity itself, doesn’t take kindly to Zionism. World citizens like the Baroness Ashton think that nation-states based on ethnicity or even religion — although Zionism is not essentially a religious concept, clearly Judaism has something to do with it — are passé and dangerous. Nationalism, they would say, is the main cause of war.

They are wrong. These days, the most dangerous ideology is a universalist and anti-nationalist one: radical Islam.

But note that the proposed state of ‘Palestine’ is a nation-state based on ethnicity with an established religion.

Also, I thought I’d mention that in a world without nation-states there wouldn’t be any baronesses.

-- Vic Rosenthal
http://fresnozionism.org


#1770 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Thu Sep 2, 2010 4:12 pm
Subject: Delusions of "peace:" Breaking the conspiracy of silence
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It hurts me to admit this. As a Zionist, I really wish that the much hoped-for peace was really just around the corner. I wish that Israel could give up a few square meters of real estate and obtain peace. I know it will not happen. I am compelled to admit that by every indication, the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that begin this week will be a farcical charade. They cannot be saved by any amount of Israeli concessions. I know this not just because of the impossible "peace" conditions of the Palestinians. or the needless hateful utterances of Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, nor even because of the usual, conveniently deniable, terror attack that announced the opening of the talks.

One certain indication that the peace talks must fail is the flood of mail that I have gotten of late from Palestinian peace and dialog groups, and from every Palestinian or other Arab who ever spoke out for peace or sanity. They beg me to remove this or that article or section from a Web site where they are quoted as advocating peace with Israel or coexistence. They say - not for publication - that they are subject to a reign of terror: Emails; Hints; Phone calls in the night; Officials of the '"clean-as-a-whistle" "moderate" "not-like-Arafat" Palestinian National Authority telling them they had better toe the line - or it will be bad for their organization or their personal health.

My Palestinian and Arab friends and others who have asked me to remove their Web pages and demanded that I be silent about it, can be thankful that I do not follow their wishes: Speaking out is the only way to expose state terror. My advice to all those who are threatened is to speak out, loud and clear. But it is their decision. I will not name names. I can only decide what is right for myself.

Everyone who is in any way active in peace and dialog has to have heard echoes of the whisper campaign. The Palestinian youth orchestra that was dismantled because it played for Israeli Holocaust survivors, the One Voice event that was canceled because of death threats, are public manifestations of the same terror. All this happened not in Hamas - ruled Gaza, but, embarrassingly, in the West Bank, ruled by the "moderate" Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority, Israel's "peace partners." The people who are terrorized into begging me to remove their names, their articles and their organizations from any Web site that has the remotest connection with Israel, all are from the West Bank, the land of the Palestinian National Authority, not Gaza. Think about what this means.

As for myself, I still live in a free country. I will not tamper with the record of history. I will not succumb to terror. I dare anyone of the moderate and peace-loving Palestinian National Authority to hurt my friends, the friends of peace.

I will not be quiet in order to support mistaken ideas about peace and dialog. We must not allow the "moderate" Palestinian National Authority to quietly export Soviet-style terror in the name of "peace." If we allow them to do so, what sort of peace will it be?

Ami Isseroff

Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000755.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.


#1771 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Thu Sep 2, 2010 11:25 pm
Subject: Founding the Palestinian state of deniability
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Facebook Zionism cause needs you

As I wrote previously, I have no desire to rain on the Israeli-Palestinian "peace" parade. We must all hope against all rationality that the negotiations in Washington will end the seemingly eternal state of belligerence of the entire Arab world against Israel, no matter what the cost in territory.

But Tuesday night's terror attack cannot be set aside or spun away. It has a profound significance. Not surprisingly, it is therefore being studiously ignored by fashionable opinion-makers. In the Huffington Post, Israel Policy Forum's Peter Joseph was ecstatic about the prospects for peace. Writing after the attack, he gushed:

...violence is down because security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians is at an all-time high.... With such cooperation already in place, these talks will have a distinct advantage over all other previous efforts.

The Hebron area attack of Tuesday night is very dangerous to "peace." It demonstrates at the very least that Mr. Abbas's Palestinian Authority "government" has no authority a few kilometers from Ramallah, and certainly not in Gaza. Therefore, the attack has become a non-event. It never happened. Histories of this round of negotiations will omit that terror attack,

More ominously, the earlier report that the Al Aqsa Martyrs brigades of "moderate" Fatah claimed responsibility for the attack has simply vanished. It is a non-datum. If it is not found anywhere, it never happened, right? Here it is again, so that if it wiped off the Web everywhere else, it will still remain in at least this one place:

Al-Aqsa Brigades, unknown group claim responsibility for attack

Published: 08.31.10, 22:08 / Israel News

Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Fatah's military wing, claimed responsibility for the West Bank shooting attack that killed four Israelis on Tuesday.

Fatah and Palestinian Authority senior officials estimated that the declaration was meant to cover for the true perpetrators and mainly embarrass Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as Fatah's leader. An additional group known as al-Haq also claimed responsibility for the attack. (Ali Waked)

There is an explanation, you see. The Palestinian Authority officials "estimated that the declaration of their own organization was a fake intended to embarrass them!" How very clever! It must be another "Zionist" plot. How entangled in wishful thinking about "peace" does one have to be to believe that transparent lie?

Of course, the attack has been roundly (and routinely) condemned by the Palestinian Authority (PA). But dare I suggest that these condemnations have less sincerity behind them than one might think? Before you explode with self-righteous anger at this ''right wing" "propaganda," remember how the PLO, father of the Palestinian Authority, dissociated itself from the Munich Olympics terror attacks and the Black September movement that took "credit" for them. The Palestinian Authority and the PLO have a long history of denying, and later admitting, culpability or taking "credit" for terror attacks.

Recently, officials of the Palestinian Authority mounted and attended the state funeral of Amin el Hindi one of the planners of the Munich attack. Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the official PA daily, noted that al-Hindi was “one of the stars who sparkled... at the sports stadium in Munich...” Attending the funeral were the "moderate" Salem Fayyad and the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas, who sang the praises of al-Hindi. Abbas himself has been accused of masterminding the finances of the Black September movement that "took credit" for the Munich Olympics massacre.

"Black September," was a fiction, like the Fatah al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades that took "credit" for Tuesday's cold-blooded massacre in their conveniently forgotten statement. The al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were invented as an address for the terror organized by the Palestinian Authority in anticipation of their sabotage of the 2000 peace talks. The Black September Movement was a fiction of the 70's.

The known leaders of "Black September" were Salah Khalef ("abu Iyad") who was Yasser Arafat's chief of security, Mohammad Daoud Oudeh (abu Daoud) and Amin el Hindi. They were all key members of the PLO and Fatah. Abu Daoud and Amin el Hindi died recently and were suitably honored by the Palestinian Authority.

In 1999, the Palestinian Prize for Culture was granted to abu Daoud for his book Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich, in which he describes how he planned and executed the Munich terror attack. Abu Daoud was awarded 10,000 French Francs by the Palestinian Authority for this masterpiece. In the same book, abu Daoud admitted that "Black September" was a front for the PLO and the Fatah. But he, as well as abu Iyad, had admitted all this previously, in the 70's.

In his book Stateless, Salah Khalaf (abu Iyad) a founding member of Fatah, wrote that,"Black September was not a terrorist organization, but was rather an auxiliary unit of the resistance movement, at a time when the latter was unable to fully realize its military and political potential. The members of the organization always denied any ties between their organization and Fatah or the PLO."

Abu Daoud went further. He told Jordanian police: "There is no such organization as Black September. Fatah announces its own operations under this name so that Fatah will not appear as the direct executor of the operation." A March 1973 U.S. State Department document seemed to confirm the Fateh -Black September link.( source).

The U.S. document was released only in 1981. It also implicates the Fatah and the PLO in the Khartoum massacre of U.S. diplomats. The U.S. knows, and has known for a long time, the nature of the PLO and the Fatah.

In a condolence letter to Daoud's family following his death, the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas wrote, "He is missed. He was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people's just causes."

The PLO and PA have always invented ghost organizations that could be blamed for terror attacks. But Tuesday's attack did not require the invention of a Black September fiction. It was not even necessary to resuscitate the transparent fiction of the "al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades," though the quickly scuttled statement indicates that such a revival was contemplated and discarded.

There is no longer a need to invent "dissident factions." The "moderate" Palestinian Authority now has a very convenient villain in the form of the Hamas, a group that can be blamed for every manifestation of violence and extremism, leaving the PA pure as the driven snow in the eyes of all who want to believe.

But is Hamas really the all-culpable arch-fiend? Who is behind the boycott initiatives? The Hamas? Are you sure? Who has been threatening those who have any contact with Israelis? Not the Hamas, but rather the PACBI, which is located in the land of the "moderate" Palestinian Authority, not the Hamas, surely, but officials of the Fateh and of the Palestinian Authority. Nobody else has the power to strike terror in the hearts of the West Bank residents and organizations. No Hamas organization exists in the West Bank. There is nobody to scare people, and nobody to carry out terror attacks. Only the PA, the Fatah and the organizations they permit could exist in the West Bank.

Can anyone believe that anything happens in the West Bank without the knowledge of the Palestinian Authority?

Can anyone believe that the "Fatah al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades" took "credit" for the terror attack "by accident," without the knowledge and approval of the head of the Fatah himself, namely the very same Mahmoud Abbas, who is also chairman of the Palestinian Authority? This then, is Israel's peace partner.

Can anyone really believe that the Fatah al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades took "credit" for the terror attack in order to embarrass their bosses, and if this is really true, what does it say about the chaotic nature of the state that the Palestinians are supposed to be building?

Surely all right-thinking people want peace, and share President Obama's vision of a Palestinian state living in peace, side by side with Israel.

But no decent person can stand by silently as the foundations are laid for a nightmare Palestinian terror state founded on deniability. A Palestinian state that will use its state apparatus, international recognition and resources to delegitimize Israel. A state that will allow fanatics to murder innocents and explode themselves in the public places of Israel. A Palestinian state that fools whoever wants to be fooled by enacting a farcical melodrama on the theme of "good cop - bad cop," staged with mythical villains of its own invention. That Palestinian state will not bring us peace, nor will it end the miserable epic of the Palestinian people.

Ami Isseroff


Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000756.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.


#1772 From: DrMike <drmikeh49@...>
Date: Sun Sep 5, 2010 9:32 pm
Subject: The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned (Part 1)
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The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned (Part 1)
posted by DrMike at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how-it.html

BlueTruth is proud to publish this report from the front lines of the divestment battle at the University of California at Berkeley (known locally as "Cal"). Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring, is one of the founders of Tikvah: Students for Israel, the pro-Israel student group at Cal. This is his analysis of what happened this spring when the BDS movement unsuccessfully attempted to get the ASUC (the student government at Cal) to endorse a one sided anti-Israel resolution. We hope this will be useful for students at other campuses, and community members who support them, in resisting attempts by the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to hijack student government organizations in support of their agenda of unending war against the existence of Israel.

Some of you may ask why we would want to openly publish a document that will include strategic advice for students. The answer is that once the situation is described, the strategies are relatively obvious and in large part simply utilize the same methods that the other side already uses. This story will also expose some of the vulnerabilites of the BDS advocates on campus-- but as those are an integral part of who they are and what they stand for, they will not be able to remedy them. Having this story openly available ensures that all those who need to see it will be able to access it easily.

What was initially going to be a short writeup became a 20 page paper. Therefore, we are posting this in several parts over the next few days.

Ariel's opinions and suggestions are his own. There are many approaches to such situations, but few have been written by someone who has as been personally involved as Ariel.
___________________________________________________________________
The Story of the Divestment Resolution

In the Spring of 2010, anti-Israel activists nearly managed to get an anti-Israel bill passed in UC Berkeley’s student government. This bill, if passed, would have given anti-Israel activists worldwide the opportunity to claim that Berkeley’s student body is in support of divestment from Israel. The story of how this bill came about, what the battle over it was like, and how I and my colleagues in the pro-Israel community managed to see the bill defeated is an important one, and I’d like to explain this story. I also would like to offer commentary and advice to current and future college students on how to fight and defeat anti-Israel measures in their own student governments.

It began when I heard through the grapevine that a divestment bill was being proposed in Berkeley’s student government, the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California).

My student group, Tikvah: Students for Israel (I was an executive member of the group in Spring 2010, and had been one of the group’s first members, helping shape the group’s ideology and methods, during the group’s inception back in the Fall of 2007), only heard about this at the last minute, and so several of us went to the Senate committee meetings which would determine whether this divestment bill would make it on to the general floor, with the intent of trying to stop that from happening.

It was useless; as a friend of mine in the ASUC, a Jewish student senator, told us: “There’s nothing we can really do to stop this from getting through and on to the general floor.” People’s – the Senators’ (or those Senators who were in the relevant committees) – minds had already been made up by the time we got to the committee meetings. I write “meetings” plural: Students for Justice in Palestine, the notorious, vehement anti-Israel group on campus, had actually written up two bills of nearly identical text in order that if one failed (didn’t get through the Senate committee it was being brought up at), the other, proposed at a different committee, might yet pass and get on to the general floor. As it would turn out, one of these bills did make it through.

The bills had both been written by two particularly inflammatory members of the Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine: one, Tom Pessah, is an Israeli expatriate who seemingly has made it his personal mission to spread hatred for his own state as wide as possible in Northern California; the other, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, was a newcomer to Berkeley, a new graduate student who had a track record of stirring up anti-Israel sentiment abroad at the London School of Economics and attempting (once successfully) to pass divestment there. (Huet-Vaughn’s past was even more sinister than that, I would soon find.) These two Berkeley graduate students had done ‘meticulous research’ and written up the two essentially identical bills, both extended diatribes against the state of Israel tossing in all the language typical of rejectionist anti-Israel propaganda (‘illegal occupation’, ‘war crimes’, ‘disregard for human rights’, ‘laying siege to the citizens of Gaza’, etc.). Their bill was loaded with citations from organizations which Israel advocates know to be either horrendously biased, or simply hateful and generally not credible: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in particular, belonging to the former category. (Concerning the latter group: It is worth noting that Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, had only recently publicly disowned his own organization, on the basis of its having become obsessively anti-Israel. His opinion piece in the New York Times can be found here)

The bill which ended up making it to the general floor (and which I will henceforth refer to as the ‘divestment bill’) was voted on very promptly and passed. This led to a flood of over ten thousand emails sent from around the world to ASUC members and officials, as well as to campus officials, variously praising and disapproving of the passage of the bill. Anti-Israel partisans, unsurprisingly, wrote of the ‘moral fortitude’ and ‘courage’ expressed by the Senate for approving divestment; pro-Israel individuals wrote of their shock and disgust that the only even reasonably moral state in the Middle East was being singled out for criticism and was publicly being tried and convicted, in the absence of any clear evidence, of all manner of atrocities.

The divestment bill was then vetoed by the conscientious ASUC President, Will Smelko (see herefor an interview concerning his feelings on the Berkeley divestment bill and why he didn’t support it); and then was unsuccessfully resuscitated twice in attempts to see the President’s veto overridden (the second time, through all manner of political trickery). Both resuscitation attempts failed, though both meetings where the attempts occurred lasted all night – one went, all told, from around 7 PM to 7 AM the next morning, on a weeknight (the first four or so hours were devoted to finding a suitable venue for the rapidly expanding group of spectators and guest speakers on the bill) – and were filled with a shockingly obscene level of vitriol and animus, including hate speech almost entirely emanating from the mouths of the hundreds of anti-Israel students and community activists who attended the meetings. It is worth noting that the frenzy of the anti-Israel activists, which I saw in the massive ballroom where the latter two Senate meetings were held on those fateful meeting nights, was unlike anything I’d ever seen in person before – a mass of hundreds of individuals wearing identical green ‘I am a ___ [Jew, Christian, UC Berkeley Student, Pastor, etc.] and I support divestment’ shirts, whooping loudly when people on ‘their side’ would speak and openly mocking and laughing at those of us on the ‘other side’ when we would speak, as well as shouting hateful things and curse words (at least one pro-Israel speaker was called “Nazi”) and, occasionally, anti-Semitic tropes such as ‘the Jews are Christ killers’, ‘Zionists control politics, even on this campus’, ‘the Israel lobby is yet again stifling all voices counter to it’. I remember solemnly having to assent to a pro-Israel student colleague’s observation, at the end of the very first divestment bill meeting, where the bill had passed, that the ‘other side’ of the room had cheered extremely loudly, whooped and grinned and laughed at us after their ‘victory’, not to celebrate their own ‘victory’ so much as to make us feel as bad and weak as possible – naked sadism. And I also remember feeling queasy upon the realization that the rhetorical tactics being used by the anti-Israel speakers at the various divestment bill Senate meetings were strikingly reminiscent of those used by Hitler in his infamous speeches of the 1930s: wearing a ‘uniform’ (aforementioned green ‘I support divestment’ shirt, keffiyeh) and starting off speaking slowly and calmly, but with an intensity and composure, before slowly raising the pitch of one’s voice and, ultimately, ranting at high pitch and full volume while gesticulating wildly, with passion and anger and intensity and hatred, a cacophony of hate designed to gain ‘followers’, to enthrall the audience to join the speaker in his or her hatred of his or her preferred target (in this case, we pro-Israel advocates and students, as well as the state of Israel herself). At the second Senate attempt to override the veto, these speakers, not content with having been granted a 2:1 ratio on the speakers list (in the grounds that there were more of them in attendance than us) even signed up for our speaking slots to make the scene even more one sided. Fortunately, the Senate parliamentarian caught on to this deceitful tactic fairly quickly.

Ultimately, again, we won the day, managing to convince (with a little help from the aforementioned thousands of pro-Israel individuals who emailed the Senators to protest the initial passage of the divestment bill) three more Senators after the initial four who had opposed the divestment bill not to vote for it, and thereby keeping the pro-divestment vote stuck at 13 out of 20 Senators, one less than is necessary to override a Presidential veto.

The questions I would like to examine are: “How did we win?”; and, “How can college students at other campuses learn from what we at Berkeley experienced, so they can keep anti-Israel bills from passing at their university student governments?” Indeed, it would seem miraculous, I think, to consider that in spite of spending many thousands of dollars on trying to get the bill passed (from buying the hundreds of green ‘I support divestment’ shirts which were used, to flying worldwide-known anti-Israel activists such as Hedy Epstein into the Bay Area for the event), getting thousands of emails sent to Senators approving of their (the Senators’) initial passage of the bill and urging an upholding of that passage of the bill, and getting international celebrities like Noam Chomsky and Desmond Tutu to write letters of support for the Berkeley divestment bill (letters prominently put up around campus), the anti-Israel community at Berkeley and worldwide failed to pass a divestment bill in a student senate with only three Jewish senators (one of whom is vocally anti-Israel), the student senate of the most notoriously politically radical (and therefore, as far as current politics go, anti-Israel) campus in the U.S. if not the world.

The divestment bill war raged for about half of this past Spring semester and dominated campus news and discourse. The lessons learned here will, I hope, help those who face similar challenges at their own universities.

The first matter which needs to be discussed is how anti-Israel campus groups operate – how, that is, the bill gained so much traction so quickly as it did, and how it gained such support within the student senate that if it hadn’t been for the President’s fateful (and unexpected) decision to veto it, it would have passed.

Having been one among the founding class of Tikvah: Students for Israel at Berkeley some two and a half years before this divestment bill was put forth in the student senate, I’d already learned a great deal about how the anti-Israel campus cabal operates, and I’d like to share that.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), whose Berkeley chapter was, again, the primary group behind the divestment bill, is one of several prominent, nationwide college student organizations which dedicates itself to delegitimizing Israel and spreading lies about the Jewish state. (There are other prominent anti-Israel groups on campuses in America – the Muslim Student Association, the Muslim Student Union, and various groups opposing ‘Israeli Apartheid’ – but SJP is the most prominent one at Berkeley, indeed the campus where SJP was founded in 2001) [1].The obvious question one would have is why anyone listens to them on campus, especially in light of their extremely impassioned rhetoric, often thuggish behavior and clearly one-sided view of a conflict which most Americans see as complex and multifaceted.

The answer to this question is really pretty simple: groups like SJP exist and thrive on college campuses, and specifically at college campuses, because the student culture at universities (especially at the most elite universities in America) is usually overwhelmingly progressive and left-leaning, and it’s not hard for groups like SJP to distort the history and events of the Middle Eastern conflict in order to frame it in terms that progressive-minded students can relate to [2].Specifically, the narrative of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict which groups like SJP sell to the student body and to specific student groups (more on this later) is one of Western imperialism vs. an indigenous, peaceful people: the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, SJP members insist, is a history of white European Jews having been illegitimately given the land of innocent Arab (i.e., Brown) indigenous peoples in the Middle East by colonial European powers, and then forcibly seizing this land, displacing the peaceful indigenous residents and fostering a culture (in Israel) of racism toward the Arabs while simultaneously neglecting to respect the human rights of those helpless Arabs living right next door to Israel in unspeakable squalor.

That this narrative bears very little relation to what actually happened with the founding ofIsrael and what has happened since then is obvious to anyone with an even casual understanding of 20th century Middle Eastern history, and refuting it is beyond the scope of this article [3].The reason I bring up the narrative is to illustrate how easy it is to deceive great masses of conscientious, morals-minded people committed to justice – most university students fit this description – by feeding them calculated stories which bear almost no relation to reality; Hitler famously wrote that while the masses may well question small lies and wonder if they might be lies, it is so inconceivable to most that people would manufacture and sell the public completely outrageous ‘big lies’ in a coordinated manner that no one really fathoms this possibility or takes it seriously.

Since its inception in 2001, SJP at Berkeley has taken great care to ally itself with the great coalition of progressive groups on campus: the African American student groups, the Hispanic student groups, the LGBT student groups, the women’s rights student groups, the environmentalist student groups. [4] These efforts have been very successful, to the point where SJP’s interests steer the ship of one of the two major political parties in the UC Berkeley student government as much as any other group’s interests do: it’s seemingly impossible to find even one member of the powerful far-left CalSERVE party who isn’t anti-Israel by any standard definition of that term, or at least in sympathy with SJP. As Jon Haber, a pro-Israel blogger who documents BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) activities in America at Divest This! , has noted, it is a standard, tried-and-true tactic of the anti-Israel movement to market itself such that it ends up seizing political control of organizations such as churches, unions, student governments and food cooperatives, finally using them to write and pass resolutions directed against Israel. One major reason the divestment bill at Berkeley was so immediately successful was because CalSERVE and its allies had a plurality in the Senate to begin with last year, and therefore over half the Senate votes were already guaranteed to go for divestment before discussion on the bill even started.

So SJP and similar groups market themselves as champions of justice, supporting indigenous oppressed peoples against the White Man, and manage to gain tremendous political power and influence on student campuses as a result, by allying themselves with all the other progressive and far left groups and gaining prominence in those circles. That’s one reason divestment, and SJP, nearly succeeded.

Incidentally, before moving on, I would like to bring up briefly what SJP’s ballyhooing about human rights is a smokescreen for: terrorism apologetics. Students for Justice in Palestine and groups like it routinely oppose Israel’s ‘occupation’ of ‘Palestinian lands’ and allege that the Jewish state commits human rights violations on a level perhaps unrivaled in the world today. What, then, is SJP’s solution for ending this ‘occupation’ and the ‘crimes’ committed by the state of Israel associated with it? What SJP calls ‘ending the occupation’ more rightly could be called ‘destroying Israel’: a salient and often missed detail in SJP’s outspoken goals is reversing the ‘Nakba’, the ‘catastrophe’ (how the Arabic word is usually translated) which occurred with the resolution of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the founding of Israel and the creation of the ‘Palestinian refugee crisis’. SJP, indeed, refers to ‘occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel’ as having taken place since 1948. 1948 was the year Israel was founded. SJP wants Israel to cease to exist. [5]To this end, SJP never puts on events criticizing Palestinian or Arab violent terrorism, instead framing terrorist acts such as mass murder of Israeli civilians as at least an understandable –if not completely justified – response to ‘occupation’.

Another reason why SJP is such a force on campus is that SJP itself – again, this applies in other universities, where there are other student groups dedicated to the same anti-Israel end – is chock full of what are essentially ‘professional students’ (the aforementioned Tom Pessah is one), graduate students who are taking seemingly forever (more than a decade, for instance) to finish up their studies in part as a smokescreen for being able to continue to have influence on campus and feed anti-Israel propaganda to students. SJP and the anti-Israel movement worldwide know that in order to convince college students of a point, their representatives should ideally be college students themselves, so we find various cases of 35 year old graduate students who seem to spend more time doing anti-Israel advocacy on campus than graduate work. At least several students who fit this description are among the leaders of SJP at Berkeley, and their status as graduate students (especially in fields which would lend apparent credibility to their pronouncements on the Middle East, fields such as Middle Eastern Studies, Law and, regrettably, my own field of Philosophy) lends them credibility in the eyes of impressionable undergraduates on campus who care about justice and are concerned and curious about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

A third reason SJP is so powerful on campus, and reaches so many students, is that it seems never to lack resources: every event they put on is guaranteed a hundred or more loyal, regular attendees (many of whom though are not college students but adults who live around the Berkeley area), SJP prints hundreds of fliers for their events, buys hundreds of t-shirts. In the case of the divestment bill fight, again, SJP even flew in worldwide anti-Israel activists. The question of where college anti-Israel groups get their money is a very important one which more research needs to be done into, especially in light of recent events such as the revelation that theMuslim Student Union at UC Irvine may have funneled donation money to Hamas in 2009 [6].I do not believe it would be premature to raise the question of where SJP’s money comes from, and if any of it may come from nefarious and sinister sources (one place to start poking around would be the International Solidarity Movement, an international anti-Israel group which works closely with college students and anti-Israel student groups, as I’ll go into more later). The bottom line is that SJP seems never to lack money when they need it, and can be seen to spend much more extravagantly than other student groups on campus, in general, when they put on events.

Fourth, and most shockingly, SJP at Berkeley has managed to look Jew-friendly, even Jewish itself, to the point where one pro-divestment Senator memorably told me when she and I got lunch during the divestment bill war on campus, “I know some Jews, many Jews, are against divestment, and many Jews are for it, too”, in response to my informing her that nearly all of American Jewry, the overwhelming majority, would be not only against divestment from Israel but horrified at the very notion of it. There are several ways in which SJP has successfully managed to portray itself almost as a rival Jewish group, a home for Jewish students who ‘conscientiously object to the occupation of Palestine’, and the fact of SJP’s success in selling itself to college students as representative of many American and Israeli Jews is probably the fact most worth noting of any I mention in this article.

(part 2 tomorrow: how SJP infiltrated the UC Berkeley Hillel, and some of the key arguments used to help change several Senators' votes)


[1] I do not mean to suggest that Muslims are naturally or generally anti-Israel. Unfortunately, student groups who claim to represent Muslim students on American college campuses often are.

[2] Note that I am not saying that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Left or Right issue, since I don’t believe that it is. For whatever it’s worth, I myself am left-leaning. I merely believe that anti-Israel activists and propagandists tend to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a Leftist issue in order to sell their viewpoint on it to avowed progressives and hard leftists, such as the majority of politically engaged students at campuses like Berkeley.

[3] Though many good books, as well as many websites and articles available for free online, do a good job refuting it. I personally would chiefly recommend Samuel Katz’s book Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine; another good place to start is Myths and Facts online, available for free at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mftoc.html.

[4]Of course, it is supremely ironic that SJP, who subtly champion or at least ally themselves strongly with regimes and cultures which feature institutionalized racism, sexism and great discrimination toward homosexuals, and no regard for the well-being of the environment, would be a member of a coalition of student groups championing every one of those social causes. I am not the first to notice this.

[5]The group often says that it doesn’t want Israel to cease to exist, only to cease being a Jewish state. SJP’s spoken desire is to see Israel become a ‘binational state’ and absorb all of the Palestinians, as well as dropping its own identity as a Jewish state. This would, of course, bring about an Arab-majority state like the 22 others in the Middle East, end Israel as a concept, and seriously endanger the Jewish residents of this new ‘Israel’ with mass murder through the influx of thousands of armed terrorists bent on killing Israelis. I think it’s clear that demanding Israel cease being a Jewish state is akin to demanding that France cease being a French state, or England cease being an English state, and become a state ‘open to all peoples’, not one based on the concept of being run by and for Frenchmen/Englishmen/etc. The Jews are a people like any other, and their having a state of their own is no different, in my mind, than Spaniards as a people having a state of their own.

[6]The university has since brought it to the attention of the US Department of Justice:http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=1715. The question is this: If anti-Israel groups fundraise for terrorist groups in the Middle East, who’s to say the relationship doesn’t go two ways? And even if money doesn’t come directly from terrorists, who’s to say it might not come from Arab oil money, the same source of funds terrorism in theMiddle East draws from?



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#1773 From: "Neville Teller" <nevilleteller@...>
Date: Mon Sep 6, 2010 9:41 pm
Subject: If not now - when?
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If not now – when?

 

http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/2010/09/if-not-now-when.html

 

by  Neville Teller

 

In the few days since the re-launch of direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the media has been overflowing with the direst of dire predictions about the inevitability of their failure.  None other than His Excellency the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ron Prosor, has drawn a convincing comparison between these prophets of doom and the two Muppet Show characters, Statler and Waldorf.  Up there they sit, these two thoroughly disagreeable old men, in the balcony box in the Muppet Theater, heckling every aspect of the show and flinging insults right, left and centre, at the players.

       

Of course the obstacles to achieving the ambitious objective of an accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians within twelve months are formidable – and I am certain that no-one realises the fact more than the two principals: Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.  Neither of them are fools, and yet both have signed up to this new peace initiative, and to its achievement in the space of a year.

 

"We understand the suspicion and scepticism that so many feel, born out of years of conflict and frustrated hopes," said US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton at the opening ceremony, "but by being here today you each have taken an important step toward freeing your peoples from the shackles of a history we cannot change."

 

George Mitchell, President Obama’s Middle East envoy, who joined the negotiations, said that at this first meeting the two leaders decided to begin putting together a framework agreement on all major issues – including borders, Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and security – that will "establish the fundamental compromises necessary" to flesh out a comprehensive peace deal.

 

In declaring that he believed a deal was possible within the twelve-month timeframe, Abbas said: "We're not starting from scratch, because we had many rounds of negotiations between the PLO and the Israeli government."  Netanyahu said: "Together we can lead our people to a historic future that can put an end to claims and to conflict. This will not be easy. A true peace, a lasting peace, will be achieved only with mutual and painful concessions from both sides … from my side and,” he said, addressing Abbas direct, “from your side."

 

Mitchell announced that Netanyahu and Abbas had agreed to meet again in a fortnight in the Middle East, and every two weeks after that.  Hillary Clinton and Mitchell will attend the first of those meetings on 14 September in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

 

To be realistic – indeed sceptical – about the initative and its likely success is entirely understandable, but whatever one’s reservations about the process, the motives of those participating, and the formidable problems that lie in the way of achieving a positive outcome, it cannot be denied that this was a hopeful beginning.  The parties met under the auspices of the only feasible mediating power, they shook hands, they each pledged themselves to addressing the issues in a serious and positive spirit, they agreed the objective being sought and the period within which it might be achieved. 

 

Equally serious, however, is the determination of Hamas and its fellow extreme Islamist partners to derail this new initative with a wave of terror.  Abu Ubaida,  a spokesman for the Hamas military wing has said: "We declare that the actions of resistance have gone into a new and advanced stage of co-operation in the field at the highest levels in preparation for more effective attacks against the enemy.”  Ubaida was referring to a meeting last week between Hamas and 12 other militant Palestinian groups in Gaza to plan this new terror campaign. 

 

This threatened upsurge in indiscrimate violence represents a sea change from the terror of the past, horrific though this has often been.  Hamas has claimed responsibility for two shooting attacks against Israeli cars in the West Bank last week.  Last Tuesday, they slaughtered four people, one of them a pregnant woman.  Later a Hamas spokesman designated the incident an “heroic attack.”  A spokesman for the group's military wing said that no options had been ruled out, and that suicide bombings could be used to target Israel.  The objective?  To torpedo the new drive for peace.

 

In the past, however strained their explanation, Hamas and other Islamist groups, have almost invariably justified their terrorist attacks by referring to some previous counter-terrorist action by Israel, and claiming that their attack was a legitimate response.  Not this time.  Now the threat is quite simply to disrupt the peace process, and by whatever means.  In short, they offer no justification for what was done last week, and what is threatened for the future, except their determination to undermine, disrupt and destroy any chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and to scupper the prospect of an independent sovereign state of Palestine.  Their stance is simple nihilism.

 

Of course, their campaign is directed quite as much against the Palestinian Authority and its Fatah President, Mahmoud Abbas, as against Israel itself.  The fact that the two latest attacks were carried out in the West Bank was an implied declaration that the Hamas writ runs outside Gaza just as surely as it does inside – and that, in the final analysis, Hamas seeks to dominate the entire Palestinian people, not merely those in the Gaza Strip whose governance it seized in a bloody coup in June 2007.

 

This, it goes without saying, is fully understood by the PA – which explains the immediate security crackdown by Abbas's security forces across the West Bank.  Hundreds of Hamas activists were arrested, and two suspects linked to the second attack, in which two Israelis were wounded, have been arrested.  Israeli security forces, too, have been placed on a high level of alert and have set up new checkpoints on roads in the West Bank.

 

Meanwhile, Israel’s arch-enemy, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, has been unable to resist giving the extremist pot an extra stir.  During a pro-Palestinian rally in Tehran he declared: "The nations of the region are able to eliminate the Zionist regime from the face of the earth," adding that “its life has come to an end".  He joins Hamas in asserting that Mahmoud Abbas has no authority to participate in peace talks on behalf of Palestinians.

 

One might well riposte:  “If not the elected President of the Palestinian Authority, then who?”

 

Long, slow and painful has been the journey to the present situation, where Netanyahu and Abbas can actually meet in Washington, under the auspices of the President of the United States, and in the presence of President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, and do so in a positive spirit, declaring their determination to try to reach a final accord.  Taking all this into account, one might indeed also ask:  “And if not now  –  when?”

 

Neville Teller, born in London, is a graduate of Oxford University.  A writer for BBC radio and the audiobook industry, he has also been commenting on the Middle East  for the past 30 years.  His book "One Man's Israel" was published in 2008, and he has been writing his blog "A Mid-East Journal" (http://a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com/) since January of this year.  He

was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."

 _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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#1774 From: AMI <ami-iss@...>
Date: Wed Sep 8, 2010 9:34 pm
Subject: Peace is the only option
ami_iss
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Facebok Zionism Cause Needs you!!

Shana Tova - A peaceful and successful new year. 
 
 

Peace with our neighbors is just another stage in the Zionist plan. Every Zionist should want the current peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians to succeed. Success means that Israel will at long last be recognized by the Arab states as the state of the Jewish people. We will awake from a century-long nightmare. The war that began in the time of my grandfathers will be over.

If ever peace is achieved, the railroad tracks that today end at Rosh Haniqra in Israel will run to Beirut and Cairo as they did in days gone by. The various U.N. committees and departments that support the Palestinian cause will be dismantled. The BDS movement will lose its audience, The International Solidarity Movement will be unemployed, as will all the Israel boycotters and anti-normalization committees. The greater Palestine fanatics will be out of business. The Hamas will be unemployed.

There is a chorus of foolish or evil people who are anti-Zionists, or don't know what Zionism is about, who tell us that "Zionists" or Israelis are against peace, (see Carlo Strenger and Andrew Levine for example). I am an Israeli. I am a Zionist. I am very much for peace. It may astound you to learn that I do not know any Zionist Israeli Jews who are not for peace, though they may be skeptical about the talks.

I know about Rabbi Ovadia Yossef. His obnoxious remarks, repudiated by Israeli leaders, are repeated incessantly as though they are the only Israeli opinion. What you may not know about Ovadia Yossef is that he is not a Zionist and does not speak for Israeli Zionist Jews.

Peace with the Arab and Muslim world is another stage in the realization of the Zionist dream, which we have been working for over a century to implement. However, wanting peace is not the same as being optimistic about the peace talks. Even the widely quoted "ultranationalist" Israel Foreign Minister Lieberman is for peace. He just doesn't believe it is about to happen.

As part of the international campaign to cast Israel as the sole obstacle to peace in the Middle East, Time magazine tries to explain why Israelis don't care about peace..

It is possible that Israelis don't care about the "peace process." or that we are as skeptical as the Palestinian Arab taxi driver in Ramallah, who said it is all "kalahm fahdi" (empty talk). It small wonder if few believe peace is on offer after so many bitter disappointments. We are all entitled to be skeptical. The "peace process" has not yielded anything thus far except photo opportunities and terror victims. But as Ron Prossor, Israel's ambassador to Britain, said,

"It reminds me of the Muppets Statler and Waldorf. If you sit on the balcony shouting, it's a lousy show. With all the cynicism and low expectations, we should say thank you to President Obama and the American people, who are trying to facilitate both sides reaching something."

Badmouthing the peace talks may indeed function as self-fulfilling prophecy, but people are entitled to their opinions. The Zionist movement is painfully aware of the damage done by skeptics who said we would never succeed at every stage: Getting a homeland, convincing Jews to come here, making the Jewish Yishuv economically viable, getting a state, defending that state. At each stage there were plenty of "Statlers and Waldorfs" yelling "it's a lousy show" from the balconies. This stage is no exception.

The current peace talks are really all about Iran and the USA, the Hamas versus the PLO. Without mentioning Iran and the Hamas, nothing about the peace talks will make much sense. According to the American view, fear of non-Arab Shi'a Iran will make Arabs back peace with Israel. Israelis will trade concessions for American support against Iran, and Mahmoud Abbas will supposedly make peace to ward off the Hamas. A peace deal might just be concluded to frustrate Iran, as Hillary Clinton seems to believe. Iran and its puppets are indeed trying to undermine the USA and its clients Abbas and Israel. Abbas and the Israeli leadership must play their parts in the American game. Nobody, however, will be stampeded into believing, as Hillary Clinton tells us, that this is the "last" opportunity for peace.

Iran and its satellites are alarmed by the prospect of peace, which would be a victory for America. Iran is doing is best to stir up Palestinian opposition to peace, never a difficult task. Hezbollah General Secretary Nasrallah, proclaimed that the talks were "stillborn." The Hamas promised more terror attacks. and declared that the talks "aim to liquidate the Palestinian cause." The Iranian regime, was adamantly against the peace talks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said:

"The fate of Palestine will be determined on the ground in Palestine... Not in Washington, not in Paris, and not in London...These talks are death...There is no reason to hold talks."

Ahmadinejad also said that direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are a ruse, and that American negotiators are accomplices to Israeli "crimes" against Palestinians. Hojjatoleslam Khattami declared that the"Washington compromise talks" [are] "another treason against Palestinian nation,"

PLO official Saleh Zawawi, Palestinian ambassador to Iran, is said by Iranian media to have delivered himself of these sentiments:

"With reliance upon Grace of Almighty God and through solidarity of world Muslims, we hope to witness complete eradication of the fabricated regime in due course," Zawawi said.

Zawawi was not alone. Iranian sources also insisted that a member of the PLO Political Office, Abbas Jomah, noted that "Qods Day' celebrated by Iran should bring the collective attention of Muslims to the plight of their Palestinian brethren under the boots of the racist Zionists.

It in inevitable that anti-Zionist extremists must protest direct talks, because they hold the distinct "danger" of peace. After all, the hallmark of the Arab and Muslim campaign against Israel was always non-recognition and non-negotiation. That's what the boycotts are really about. The 1949 armistice agreements were conducted by "indirect" talks. In the cases of Egypt and Jordan, direct negotiations led to peace..

We want peace, but like all adults, we know that what we may want and what we can get may be two different things. Too many commentators thoroughly confound "analysis" with their own political views and wishes. The real course of peace talks is unknown. It is masked in platitudes and inane diplomatic pleasantries such as those delivered at the ceremonial opening of the talks by Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Beneath the virtual "moderate" Palestine constructed for credulous foreigners, there is the actual Palestine, where "Zionists" are synonymous with the devil, where anyone who speaks up for coexistence has signed their own death warrant and terror attacks are OK if they are 'deniable.' In a hundred years of conflict, the Arab Palestinians have learned nothing except how to dissemble better and how to translate "murder the Jews" into a shaggy dog story about "rights" and "legitimacy" which pseudo-intellectuals dignify as a "narrative."

For those who want to see, the "moderate" Palestinians are providing unmistakable signs that the future "peace" that they envision will be nothing like the idyll painted in the opening paragraphs of this article.

An Israeli simulation gave the talks slim chances of success. In his speech at the opening ceremony of the talks, ""moderate" Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, unlike Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu, did not hide behind pleasantries and diplomacy. His message was unambiguous. He chose to speak as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) rather than the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority was created to make peace with Israel. Abbas was supposedly in Washington to talk peace as head of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created to destroy Israel. Abbas had put on a different hat for "deniability” or "legitimacy." Abbas insisted on the bogus "right" of return of the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948, which would, of course, put an end to Israel as a Jewish state. He said:

The Palestine Liberation Organization is taking part in these negotiations... We will not relinquish our rights and claims... and we will continue to insist on a just solution for Palestinian refugees in accordance with international law.

Israel did not undertake to negotiate peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Abbas made it as clear as possible that he has no intention of yielding any point. He since reiterated the message that he is in no mood for compromise. He added a further impossible condition by insisting that any peace deal would have to include Gaza. Neither Abbas nor Israel control Gaza, Ahmadinejad and the Hamas do. How can the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority sign an agreement with Israel about an area that is controlled by someone else?


On the other hand, Mr Abbas's spokesman, Nabil abu Rudeineh, responded to Iranian jibes as follows:

[Ahmedinejad] does not represent the Iranian people, forged elections, suppresses the Iranian people and stole the authority. [He] is not entitled to talk about Palestine, or the president of Palestine."

"President Abu Mazen [Abbas] is the elected president of free and fair elections in which more than two thousand international observers [participated]," Abu Rudeineh said..

"We ... will not allow anyone to undermine the national president or the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organization," he said.

The deliberate confounding of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority continues. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is the elected president of what?? There were no popular elections to the PLO. Abbas's term as president of the Palestinian Authority ran out in 2009. Hamas has not agreed to elections since.

Abu Rudeineh didn't have much to say about the PLO officials quoted by the Iranian press. The Iranian press was prompt to retort with a quote from a Gaza-based PLO official:

Kayed al-Ghoul, a member of the Central Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine reiterated Iran and other Muslim states' rights to defend the Palestinians.

"As Palestinian nationals, we feel obliged to show gratitude to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei and other Iranian dignitaries for their support for the Palestinian nation and the issue of
Palestine," al-Ghoul said.

American statecraft has produced some strange peace supporters. Abbas is bobbing and weaving, trying to please both hawks and doves. We don't know, and perhaps nobody knows, if he represents the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority or the Fatah or only himself. Abbas and the PLO and the Palestinian Authority probably could not tell us for certain if they are for peace or for "eradication of the fabricated regime [Israel]." Perhaps they think that eradication of Israel is synonymous with peace. Israelis are unsurprisingly baffled by the contradictory signals sent out by the Palestinian leadership.

In Israel, prospects for peace have an unlikely booster too. In contrast to his foreign minister, the much maligned "right wing" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet, "We can surprise the doubters to reach historic peace".

Not everyone in the Israeli and Palestinian leadership is keeping to the plan, and there is no guarantee that anyone will keep to the plan in the long run. The Palestinians may exploit the Iranian threat for their own purposes just as the Americans do. There is also no logic to the American premise that a peace agreement will somehow make Israel and the Palestinian Authority immune to Iranian sponsored terror. Only American leadership and protection can do that, but America appears to be standing down everywhere in the Middle East. Abbas may be afraid to make concessions because of Hamas, rather than being forced to make concessions in order to counter Iran. The Iranians may exploit the peace deal to plant a Hamas state next to American allies Israel, Jordan and Egypt. Just because the Iranian Mullahs are against a peace settlement does not mean any Israelis or Palestinians should be for it. In this confused and confusing peace circus anyone can be forgiven if they are skeptical about the prospects for peace.

It never has been easy to do any of the things Zionism had to do. The goals which Zionism have always been derided as impossible by the anti-Zionists before they were achieved and have always been explained away as trivial or inevitable after they were achieved. None of the work of Zionism is really finished. Those, who like Carlo Strenger, think that Zionism finished its work with the creation of the state, are mistaken. We must make the Jewish state an accepted part of the world, accepted even by Jews like Carlo Strenger and Iranian Mullahs. An "existential" threat has always hung over the Zionist endeavor. It can be eliminated only by peace.

That is why, despite all the risks, we must support the peace effort. Geopolitics are illogical, ugly and unlikely. Geopolitical struggles, internal politics and the development of international relations present strange opportunities. We have to understand how to exploit them. The "Jewish National Home" was born in the chaos of World War I. The Jewish State was born of the tragedy of World War II. Peace is another Zionist goal waiting for a historic opportunity that will allow it to happen, and despite the inauspicious signals, we have to seize this opportunity.

For the Zionist movement, peace has always been the only option, but it has never really been on the menu before. Peace may not be on the menu this time, either. But if we are consistent in pursuing our goal, it will be, one day.

Peace requires patience. It will be an ugly baby when it is born. It will not look anything like the utopia described in first paragraphs of this article, just as in 1948 our economy did not resemble the Israeli economy of today, and the Jewish Legion of World War I did not resemble the IDF of today.

Refusing to make peace because the reality does not match the Utopian dream is foolish. Reality will never match Utopian visions, just as Israel will never be like Herzl's Jewish State or JAltneuland, On the other hand, being impatient or wishing for what we can't have will not bring peace or any other desirable goal any closer.

Ami Isseroff




Original content is Copyright by the author 2010. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000757.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.


#1775 From: DrMike <drmikeh49@...>
Date: Tue Sep 7, 2010 5:16 am
Subject: Part 2--The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned
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(This is the second installment of the report on the political battle launched by the BDS movement at the University of California at Berkeley this past spring, written by Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring. Part 1 is at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how-it.html. The third and final part will be posted tomorrow.)

Students for Justice in Palestine has managed to make itself look Jew-friendly, like a home for Jews, in part by actively and aggressively recruiting and employing Jews and, notably, Israelis. SJP at Berkeley boasts many prominent Jewish and Israeli members, and flaunts this fact, often having these members represent the public face of the group: writing op-eds on behalf of SJP in the campus newspaper, speaking to the campus media on behalf of SJP regularly, etc. In having Jewish and Israeli members often represent the face of the group, SJP has managed to look credible as a commentator on Israeli-Palestinian issues and also ‘diverse’, inclusive and friendly to Jews and Judaism. It is worth noting, of course, that Berkeley’s SJP is hardly alone in aggressively recruiting and employing Jews and Israelis; in my experience, this is a tactic of anti-Israel groups in America more generally. In order to fully illustrate the depth of the problem of Jewish and Israeli membership in SJP at Berkeley, it’s worth noting that SJP has more, and more dedicated, Israelis within its ranks than the pro-Israel contingent on campus does.


It must, however, be noted that the overwhelming majority of Israelis, whether living in Israel or abroad, are Zionist--they support the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in their historic homeland. T
he shocking number of virulent anti-Zionist Israelis in Berkeley’s SJP, and in the anti-Israel movement worldwide, should not be taken to suggest that Israelis are generally anti-Zionist or that Israeli youth is anti-Zionist today. Indeed, the anti-Zionist Israelis who can be found in SJP and similar groups are an aberration—they comprise an extreme minority in Israeli society, just as those who call for an overthrow of the American government are an extremist fringe group in this country.
 Nonetheless, the anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis in Berkeley’s SJP and in similar groups make it their mission to attack Israel as savagely as possible: “I lived in Israel for ten years, everything SJP says about the country is true” is a powerful statement when its hearers don’t know much about Israel to begin with. It would not be rash to say that SJP and groups like it each have a small army of Jews, many of whom are Israeli, ready to leap forward and attack Israel whenever called on; and this ‘army’ is large enough and speaks passionately enough that it often succeeds at making non-Jewish bystanders (such as the aforementioned ASUC Senator) think that Jews must be more generally divided on questions like Israel’s right to exist, than would otherwise be assumed. A cautionary word: the great majority of Jews and Israelis at Berkeley, and, I take it, on similar campuses are pro-Israel but are not politically engaged on campus, or engaged in campus politics or in student activism. This, of course, works in SJP’s favor: if there are relatively few politically engaged openly Jewish Jews on campus, and many of the most passionate of these are anti-Israel, this makes it look to bystanders as though a sizable percentage of Jewry is anti-Israel today.


The second thing to note concerning SJP’s fight to look Jewish and gain acceptance in its ‘Jewishness’ or status as an almost ‘Jewish’ student group, is that SJP at Berkeley – and, from what I hear, this is something groups like SJP are starting to try to do at colleges nationwide, more generally – has managed to successfully infiltrate Berkeley Hillel, the “center for Jewish life on campus”. This is how it manages to spread its venom from the inside of the organized student Jewish community and is part of the reason it manages to gain Jewish and Israeli recruits. The way SJP has managed to do this is quite simple: an ‘Israeli’ student group, Kesher Enoshi, was founded several years ago at Berkeley, according to its (Israeli) founders with the intent to raise discussion on campus and among Jews concerning social problems within Israelthat need to be fixed. This is certainly a noble goal, if perhaps one with possible negative consequences (SJP and its allies love to blur the distinction between Israelis and Jews constructively critical of some of Israel’s actions, and Israel-haters like themselves). Whatever the initial plan or philosophy of Kesher Enoshi was, it quickly devolved into an Israeli and Jewish anti-Israel group, a group which claims not to take a stand on issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or even to be ‘Pro-Israel’, but which helps SJP organize anti-Israel events, interfaces with SJP generally, is very close with the SJP leadership and membership, and is essentially at this point ‘the gateway drug to SJP’ for Jews [1]. One of Kesher Enoshi’s founders is now running an anti-Israel blog/website called Borderline Crimes with two of SJP’s biggest leaders, one past, one present; another Kesher Enoshi founder is now working, after college, for Breaking The Silence, a nonprofit which is devoted to spreading awareness of Israeli ‘war crimes’. Both of these individuals are Israeli Jews. Disturbingly, to all appearances many or most young Jews who join Kesher Enoshi seem to end up SJP members or at least anti-Israel fanatics quickly, and the divestment bill meetings were full of Kesher Enoshi members parroting the same anti-Israel tropes as were being put forth by their friends in SJP. It is incumbent to note here that the reason so many Israelis and Jews begin to adopt anti-Israel beliefs and attitudes after joining Kesher Enoshi is not because Kesher Enoshi’s claims or arguments are correct (they aren’t), but because that group uses effective and extreme rhetoric and an anti-Israel narrative of the history of Israel and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, much as SJP does, and relies on the fact that most Jews and even Israelis who are coming to Berkeley are relatively ignorant of the pro-Israel point of view, and thus are easily suckered into believing anti-Israel propaganda, without knowing anything of what the other side of the Israel debate has to say. (Most politically active Israeli undergraduates I’ve met at Berkeley moved to America at a young age, typically in their preteen years.)


I will not make any pronouncements on whether or not ‘Kesher Enoshi’ was always a plan designed to infiltrate the Jewish community. But the fact remains that the Jewish establishment on campus – certainly at Hillel - is reticent to ‘exclude’ any Jews, for fear of making some Jews on campus feel uncomfortable or unwelcome as Jews in the Jewish community on campus. Hillel sees their mission as being that of bringing in all Jews, of all opinions and stripes, in a glorious and harmonious ‘big tent’ (that this is impossible seems to me to be obvious). This sees them, perhaps with some discomfort, allow Kesher Enoshi not only to make their presence known in Hillel but even to do recruiting and put on events in the Hillel building itself, which are often attended by SJP members among others. The anti-Israel forces have therefore found an ‘in’ into advertising directly to Jews, from within the Jewish community. Thankfully, I have heard things recently which suggest that Hillel International may be changing their policy somewhat in order to ensure that anti-Israel groups are kept outside of Hillels on college campuses; I hope this is true.


We now reach the pivotal question: In light of all of SJP’s successes, how did we at Berkeley blunt their advance and keep the divestment bill from passing? (The bill didn’t fail only on account of the student government President’s veto of it; had more Senators been for the bill, the veto would have been overriden.) Also: How can students at other universities and colleges successfully fight bills of this nature in their own student governments?


I have written at great length concerning SJP’s strengths; the key to defeating them and BDS efforts within student governments is, in my opinion, to openly highlight the ‘dark side’ of groups like SJP: their sinister agendas, their propensity to hate speech, their carefully hidden anti-Semitism. Students who are unbiased concerning the Middle East, students who are not anti-Israel to begin with, will not want to support any group with as many skeletons in its closet, as many ill motives, as SJP.


It’s no secret that many members and supporters of anti-Israel groups, including college anti-Israel groups like SJP, are fanatics who hide their extremist goals and support of terrorism in the rhetoric of terms such as “peace and justice”. Many assume – and this is the intuitive, natural response to attacks on Israel, I think – that the best way to do Israel advocacy and to fight BDS efforts is to ‘defend Israel’, that is, to refute claims made about it and to try to portray it in a positive light so as to counteract the image of it painted by its detractors. I think that this ‘defend Israel’ approach, while well-intended, is not the most effective approach to Israel advocacy, not least because it’s typically not even done well; a friend of mine coined the term ‘Cellphone Zionism’ to describe that school of thought in Israel advocacy which is very prominent, which holds that the natural and correct response to demonization, delegitimization and double standards when it comes to Israel (Natan Sharansky’s “Three D’s” which identify when legitimate criticism of Israel crosses the line into anti-Semitism) is to respond by asserting Israel’s accomplishments or strengths: “But Israel invented cell phones!” I think it’s evident that responses such as this, or similar responses like “Israel is the most environmentally conscious country in the world” and “Israel has great minority/LGBT rights” do not even challenge the central claim made by BDS and anti-Zionist advocates: that Israel is, in addition to being illegitimate in its very existence (the “Occupation started in 1948” claim that SJP and others openly espouse), so morally odious as a state that supporting it makes one a supporter of apartheid and genocide. When the bad guys bring out the big guns, when they paint Israel as a country so evil that immediate boycott, divestment and sanctions are morally necessary, when they attack Israel’s very right to exist, we must bring out our own howitzers, too. For to a bystander, even a state which treats its own minorities (LGBT and black and Arab, for instance), far better than its Arab neighboring states do, and which does great things like design innovative and useful technology and advance the cause of environmentalism, cannot be supported if it oppresses indigenous peoples and commits genocide.


Now what are the aforementioned ‘big guns’ our side, the side of Israel advocacy, can use in theBDS debate? Well, one need look no further than the apparent and odious nature of our opposition. The truth is, the anti-Israel movement is so thoroughly saturated with hate, with anti-Semitism, with terror apologetics, that it is exceedingly easy to point this out to an impartial audience – the ‘jury’ which is the student senate, if you will – and thereby rightfully discredit and disgrace the anti-Israel crowd. Debates about history (“Did Israel really expel Arabs en masse in 1948?”) are too technical and dry to work very well as a stand-alone technique for fighting anti-Israel rhetoric and claims, and the aforementioned ‘defending Israel’ school is also not a good standalone technique either, since attack trumps defense: if two men are arguing and one is accusing the other of myriad terrible actions, with a vigor and conviction and passion, and the other is responding, panicked, “none of this is true, I swear!”, who are bystanders more likely to believe? (Hint: the bystander’s response could be “Well, at least some of the claims made about this man must be true.”) But the fact is that it is both intellectually honest and extremely easy to point out the anti-Israel crowd for what it is: a group of radicals, many of whom support -- at least implicitly - things no one likes such as terrorism; many of whom have beliefs (“the American government committed the 9/11 attacks”, for instance) which would be shocking and odious to most Americans (and make no mistake, many or most college students, including those in student government, count under ‘most Americans’ here), and all of whom have an obsession with Israel, and only Israel, which suggests something both powerful and true: that they are, far from being charitable advocates for world ‘peace and justice’, part of the worldwide movement which has been in place for decades to see Israel destroyed.

The strongest point of attack, then, against anti-Israel advocates is to expose these people and their ideology for what they are. It doesn’t take much digging up to find out that, for instance, the Muslim Student Association (MSA), whose 
Berkeley chapter works hand-in-hand with SJP in putting on anti-Israel programming on campus, was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same group Hamas was born out of, and an organization whose founder, Hassan al-Banna, was a devout admirer of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime; nor is it difficult to point out the disturbing nature of the Hitleresque speeches made by anti-Israel advocates. I found, without looking too hard, that Emiliano Huet-Vaughn is a prominent member of the terror-linked International Solidarity Movement, a ‘pro-Palestinian’ group which brings American college students to the Territories in order to attend anti-Israel conferences and take part in actions such as disrupting Israeli military counterterrorism efforts [2]. The ISM itself has links to terrorist groups and activities in the Middle Eastas the Anti-Defamation League has noted; Huwaida Arraf, one of the ISM’s co-founders, has admitted that the ISM cooperates with Hamas, among other groups
ISM conferences in the Middle East also are home to terrorists in the West Bank who, as part of the program, socialize with conference attendees [3]. The whole anti-Israel movement is rife with extremely dangerous, hateful people, people who not only turn a blind eye to terror acts committed intentionally against Israeli civilians, but, in many cases, personally know terrorists and engage and socialize with them.


Americans are by and large not fond of radical Islamic terror; given how easy it is to point out the links between college groups like SJP, their members, and terror, I see no good reason why this strategy is not taken more often.


Another note on this topic: Portraying, correctly, the Jewish people as one historically hunted and discriminated against, and now, in their own land, still being hunted, is to portray a moving and accurate story. The anti-Israel forces have liked to portray the Palestinians as the hunted underdog, but the Jews, as historical perspective shows, have been history’s hated underdog, and remain the underdog in the Middle East today—far outnumbered by nations who desire to see them violently removed from the region, constantly facing terrorism on a level no other country in the world has to deal with, at the mercy of a world addicted to oil and which is in the pockets of powerful dictatorial Middle Eastern regimes who, behind the scenes, funnel much oil money into terrorism and the spread of anti-Israel propaganda. One cannot fail to move a crowd of impartial Americans by correctly pointing out what’s going on – the same Jews who’ve always been, consistently, the world’s scapegoat and undesired minority are now, upon finally living in their own land, away from the European anti-Semitism which plagued them for millennia, finding themselves attacked again, by a worldwide propaganda and terror movement which has an obsession with seeing their state fall. The campaign of anti-Israel propaganda which has taken hold on so many American college campuses is, of course, merely the newest tactic of a relentless, bloodthirsty Arab enemy, after conventional wars have failed to see Israel eradicated [4]. Our enemies are hateful, obsessive, and committed to our state’s destruction at any cost, a goal they and their forbears have pursued since the very creation of Israel. We in Israel advocacy need to spread a pro-Israel narrative that appeals to the same language used by the Left: we, the Jews, are more the indigenous peoples of Israel than are the Arabs, who arrived from Arabia less than 1500 years ago, and we’re being targeted by a PR war, as well as literal terrorism, financed by extremely wealthy, corrupt capitalists who have essentially bought the world’s allegiance through selling oil, who have bought allegiance against the hunted victim in the Middle East: Israel.


SJP and similar groups are trying to force student governments, like at Berkeley, to convict an entire nation (the state of Israel) of numerous and varied felonies in the absence of evidence; instead, SJP relies on what essentially amounts to hearsay evidence: “Human Rights Watch says it’s true, so it must be true!” And what’s more, the ‘witnesses’ SJP brings to the stand (SJP members and others who spout out anti-Israel rhetoric at senate meetings discussing BDS bills) can be found, with only a little bit of digging, to be part of an organized, worldwide cabal devoted specifically to seeing this nation convicted. Americans, with their sense of justice, will not stand for this once the BDS debate is rightly framed this way. For wouldn’t a series of witnesses in a court, shown to all have an intense hatred of the criminal suspect (Israel) and a desire to see him or her fall, and shown to have links with individuals and groups designed to bring down this suspect at all costs regardless of the truth (groups like the ISM, for instance), be excused, removed from court, with their ‘testimony’ stricken from the record? Those who speak out against Israel at divestment bill meetings are universally individuals with a deep-seated, personal hatred of the state; they are not impartial commentators, nor trustworthy ones worthy of serious consideration. Moreover, these ‘witnesses’ never actually bring up solid evidence of any kind. A law professor sympathetic to Tikvah’s side of the divestment bill debate spoke at one of the divestment bill meetings: Is it not inherently unjust to convict a suspect in the absence of real evidence that he or she has committed the crimes he or she is accused of, in a very quick ‘trial’, on an issue that world organizations and governments find complex and worthy of serious study and longterm discussion before pronouncing an opinion?


So I feel that the best way to counter BDS offensives is to launch a counteroffensive and expose the BDS effort and its perpetrators for what they are. And there was some of this – but not as much as there should have been - going on in the midst of the BDS debate on campus. I would like now to draw attention to several other things which can help fight BDS on campuses.


One thing that the anti-divestment bill side of the debate on campus used to great effect was making the point that ‘our side’ promoted the philosophy that the student government on campus should be used to pass bills and pronouncements relating to campus matters rather than those abroad, and that the pro-divestment CalSERVE party cared more for passing this divestment bill and tying up the senate in that debate than for dealing with pressing on-campus matters which directly affect students. Moreover, we noted that the CalSERVErs, as it were, had no problem making a mere plurality of 20 senators, voted on only by a low proportion of Berkeley students, the spokespeople for the university’s 35,000-member student body at large by promoting BDS in the name of the entire student body. We also noted that none of the serving senators had campaigned on a platform of divesting from Israel, or of opposing Israel at all; rather they, as elected representatives, were weighing in on an issue far from the minds of many student voters, an issue they could not reasonably and honestly say they represented campus opinion on. It is inherently undemocratic to feed a small governing representative body of a larger body of individuals (the Berkeley student body, in this case) propaganda intended to get them to vote a certain desired way on an issue which a great many of the voters who appointed the representatives care and know little about, and to then declare that the vote represents the opinion of that student body. We also noted that to support divestment would be to support a bill that would inevitably alienate, at the very least, the great majority of the thousands of Jewish students on campus, and make our campus a hostile atmosphere for these students and their like-minded friends– an action directly counter to the ethos of campus inclusiveness that Berkeley students, and especially CalSERVE officials and senators claim to support and deeply value. In fact, Rabbi Adam Naftalin-Kelman, Executive Director of Berkeley Hillel, suggested to the ASUC in a speech that were this bill passed over the ASUC President’s veto, it is likely Jewish enrollment at Berkeley would decrease in future years – a result counter to the progressive notion of campus inclusiveness. By noting that our political opposition felt an apparent need to bring in extremely charged political issues to the table of campus student politics, whatever the cost, we successfully and honestly portrayed our enemies as fanatics who put the desire to weigh in on complex international affairs ahead of the need to pass campus reforms which would directly impact all students for the better.


The tactical decision to brand our enemies in SJP, and in the CalSERVE party more generally, as being content to ruin the Cal experience for thousands of Jewish students by making controversial pronouncements on murky issues totally unrelated to the campus and the campus experience, was an extremely important decision –it was why we secured many students’ support for our stance on the divestment bill. The enemies of Israel see every issue in daily life as somehow related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and react violently and virulently whenever this topic comes up. Given this, it’s all too easy – so easy that not to do this would be criminal, I think – to take advantage of this fact and use it in the PR war which debates like the divestment bill debate ultimately boil down to. Our enemies – the anti-Israel fanatics – are rabid in their demand that those who support Israel be seen as utterly inhumane; not to respond to this charge would be political suicide, and the easiest response is to throw their rhetoric right back at them: “Our enemies are fanatics, obsessed with this particular world conflict, narcissists who care not for anyone else’s feelings or the fallout of their drafted resolutions on campus or elsewhere and who demand that their whims to make grandstanding pronouncements on complicated, arcane conflicts thousands of miles away take precedence over the university issues the school Senate was designed to reckon with.” It is worth noting that the majority of anti-divestment bill students were probably less concerned with stopping divestment from Israel than with stopping CalSERVE and its efforts to turn the ASUC into a forum for discussion and grandstanding on international politics and conflicts; relatively few Berkeley students want their student government to be devoted to pronouncing on issues which do not affect the campus but which instead only satisfy the egos and hysteria of political radicals more concerned with promoting their own hateful, twisted views on campus than with the welfare of Berkeley students. Jon Haber at Divest This! has noted that it is standard for anti-Israel BDS activists to try to turn forums for discussion unrelated to the Middle East into Israel bashing centers, and that it is also standard for the great majority of individuals associated with these forums (in this case, Berkeley students) to be opposed to this subversion of their organization.



[1] As a colleague of mine in Tikvah: Students for Israel memorably put it.

[2] Pictures of Huet-Vaughn at an ISM conference can be found in Lee Kaplan’s great article“The ISM-Terror Connection”, which recounts in depth the proceedings of an ISM conference in 2006 in East Jerusalem (and recounts, as part of that, Huet-Vaughn’s involvement).

[3]Kaplan’s aforementioned article, largely a recounting of an ISM infiltrator’s experiences at the 2006 conference, points this out (with the aid of pictures, no less).

[4] I am not suggesting that Arabs are inherently or generally anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, by the way.


Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors. Originally posted at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/part-2-bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how.html

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#1776 From: DrMike <drmikeh49@...>
Date: Wed Sep 8, 2010 5:21 am
Subject: Part 3--The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned
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posted by DrMike at 


This is the 3rd and final installment of the report on the political battle launched by the BDS movement at the University of California at Berkeley this past spring, written by Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring. Part 1 is at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how-it.html and part 2 is at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/part-2-bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how.html.  
Ariel can be contacted at zanakus@....
____________________________________________________________________

Another thing which helped us was community support; we couldn’t have won the divestment bill battle alone. The first point to note here is that, as pro-Israel activists, we naturally were up against an opponent with a high level of community support - after all, we were in Berkeley, a community with far more than its share of extremist politics.  The entire San Francisco Bay Area was named by the Reut Institute as one of  five “hubs” of delegitimization of Israel in the world today (the others being London,  Toronto, Madrid and Brussels). This may not be as much of a problem in other areas, but communities with colleges and universities are generally going to be politically aligned with so-called “peace and justice” movements. As a result of this it can take some effort to network and get strong community representation, but this can be a pivotal factor, and in fact is probably necessary to winning wars against anti-Israel campus groups, at least on campuses in cities which are generally anti-Israel themselves, or which have a strong and outspoken anti-Israel community. But beyond the necessity of getting community support in order not to look more marginal than the anti-Israel forces, Jewish community support can provide invaluable help in speaking out for the Jewish community in America or even just locally; SJP made a point of bringing in numerous area Jews who are anti-Israel, in order to give the Senate the impression that a great number of Jews, generally, are anti-Israel. The best way to counter this tactic is to bring in powerful and prominent Jewish voices to lend support for Israel and against those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.


A great example of the way community support can help win battles against BDS is the example of the local Bay Area Jewish group representatives who showed up to the later divestment bill meetings, stayed all night and openly spoke out on behalf of their organizations against the bill while using downtime during the meetings to help us in Tikvah strategize. SJP, as has been touched upon, brought in dozens – hundreds? – of local community Jews to the divestment bill meetings. These individuals wore, of course, ‘I am a Jew and I support divestment’ stickers on their shirts, and a fair number of them spoke before the Senate about the ‘necessity’ of passing the divestment bill. However, even a hundred local community Jews who happen to be anti-Zionist look trivial and lose their effectiveness as a fifth column claiming to stand for a great number of Bay Area Jews when placed up against representatives of major Bay Area Jewish organizations.


Individuals from groups such as the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and San Francisco Voice for Israel (the San Francisco chapter of the influential and prominent pro-Israel organization Stand With Us), showed up and spoke eloquently and powerfully on behalf of their organizations against divestment, showing the Senate (and everyone else in the room) that a small number of disgruntled and rabid Jews, mostly from Berkeley, supporting divestment from Israel can’t be taken as representative of Bay Area Jewry.  In addition, Adam Naftalin-Kelman (as I have mentioned), Executive Director of Berkeley Hillel, and even Akiva Tor, Consul General of Israel for the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, spoke out at the meeting against the divestment bill. Numerous Rabbis from the Bay Area spoke as well. In addition, a coalition of local and national groups published a letter in the Daily Californian condemning the divestment bill.  This letter was supported not only by the groups that one would expect, such as the ADL, the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and StandWithUs, but was also signed by the New Israel Fund and J Street.  Those last two groups are known within the pro-Israel community for their often outspoken criticism of Israel.  But the divestment movement, with its overt delegitimization of Israel, was something all of these groups could unite against.


This all sent the message that the 200,000-member Bay Area Jewish community cannot be taken to be represented by several dozen anti-Israel fanatics. Indeed, the presence and support of local leaders in the Bay Area Jewish community was invaluable, I think, to our success in keeping the divestment bill from passing.


It is worth noting that pro-Israel community members living in the city where one’s university is located and in neighboring areas, both those working professionally for Jewish organizations and those with non-Jewish-related jobs, will often be better informed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and better and more experienced public speakers on this issue than college Israel advocates, and this can be a great boon. In many ways, many of the community Jews of the area in which one goes to college can be seen as the ‘big brothers’ of members of groups such as Tikvah. These people have had decades of experience fighting anti-Israel forces, are more well read on the Arab/Israeli conflict and the PR war which is currently raging, and often are former members of campus pro-Israel groups themselves. Moreover, community members sympathetic to one’s cause, especially when the cause is one as bitterly fought as our own cause of Israel advocacy, often will, in my experience, go out of their way to help university students. Finding community Israel advocates and bringing them to speak on campus is a very useful thing to do as a campus Israel advocate.


Which brings me to my next point: How one should, and can, network with local pro-Israel and Jewish groups and individuals.


Meeting and collaborating with community members is actually very easy, daunting though it may seem to a college student (and it certainly felt daunting to me at first). For one thing, major cities and areas in the United States often have branches of pro-Israel organizations, such as AIPAC or Stand With Us; contacting these local branches is an excellent idea, and is very easy and helpful, especially since these professional advocacy groups consider it part of their own agenda to reach out to offer support to college students ‘in the trenches’. Numerous pro-Israel organizations in America as a matter of fact will organize yearly conferences or trips, which can take place either in America or in Israel, designed to educate college Israel advocates on the history of Israel and the Arabs and on advocacy techniques; I probably learned half of what I know about how to do Israel advocacy from attending the yearly Stand With Us Israel advocacy conference in the Fall of 2007. But simply contacting local groups for assistance is very easy; sending an email usually does the trick.


Aside from local pro-Israel groups, which can often offer financial assistance as well as assistance with putting on campus events, another good resource can be local synagogues. For one thing, Jewish professors on one’s university, or those who are even mildly religiously active, will likely go to a synagogue near the campus, so going to synagogues is one way to meet these professors and network with them in an informal environment.  However, not all synagogues choose to get involved in such issues, and there are even some synagogues whose communities are far from a pro-Israel alignment. The best way to get access to Israel activists in a synagogue is to contact the office and ask for the name and contact information for their Israel Action Committee chair (note: if they don’t have one, that’s not a good sign!).  That individual will not only know others in that congregation who are active on behalf of Israel, but likely in other local synagogues as well, and can also recruit them to help you. Indeed, dozens of our pro-Israel friends and allies, some of them on behalf of local Jewish and pro-Israel groups, from the Bay Area attended the various divestment bill meetings, and many of them spoke very eloquently and convincingly on behalf of our side of the divestment bill debate. Networking, indeed, is essential to success in business, and also in Israel advocacy.


Professors on campus can be extremely helpful allies as well. It’s no secret that academia in our country (and indeed in other countries, notably England) is home to many of the worst anti-Israel personalities in the country: Noam Chomsky is the most famous example, but others abound, such as recently disgraced and fired DePaul professor (and professional Israel hater)Norman Finkelstein. As a result of the fact that anti-Israel groups on campus can and do appeal to professors on ‘their side’ for help, it’s critical that pro-Israel groups and students do the same. And while many pro-Israel professors, in my experience, are somewhat hesitant to get involved in campus student politics and activism, if one looks they can find (usually Jewish) pro-Israel professors who aren’t afraid to speak out. Indeed, when the Chair of the Jewish Studies program at Berkeley, Professor Ronald Hendel, published a letter in the Daily Californian, the campus newspaper, exposing the divestment bill effort as plainly an anti-Israel effort, and not one which had to do with opposing war crimes in the world as the bill’s authors tried to claim, was extremely helpful to Tikvah and to the greater effort to oppose the bill.


There is one last thing I’d like to mention. Much as reaching out to community members and groups sympathetic to the cause of Israel advocacy is important to being successful in keeping anti-Israel bills from getting passed in one’s student government, reaching out to students and student groups on campus for help is very important too.


The most obvious students and student groups to appeal to for help are, of course, the Jewish ones. The fact that the anti-divestment-bill effort on campus saw most of the Jewish groups at Berkeley unite together against the bill was absolutely essential to seeing this bill fail. The clearest display of this fact was when sixteen Jewish groups on campus, most of whom never engage in real Israel advocacy, came together, reportedly under the leadership of Berkeley Hillel, to sign a statement opposing the divestment bill. During the course of the divestment bill fight (not long after the bill was initially vetoed), SJP published a letter in the Daily Californian student campus newspaper titled “We Are Jews and We Support Divestment” which had hundreds of campus and community signers, including some Berkeley graduates and professors. This letter was read by thousands on campus. As I noted earlier, this illustrates the tactic SJP and other anti-Israel groups use, assembling as many anti-Israel Jews as possible and bringing them out in force in an attempt to convince bystanders that American (and local) Jewry is in fact divided heavily when it comes to Israel matters.


What kept the SJP letter from being a runaway success for the anti-Israel movement on campus was that shortly after its publication, another letter would be published in the Daily Californian, a letter urging that the Berkeley student Senate uphold President Smelko’s veto of the divestment bill. This letter was signed by the aforementioned sixteen Jewish groups I mentioned, from the Jewish Business Association to the Berkeley Bayit Jewish cooperative student house to, of course, Tikvah: Students for Israel. (It is perhaps not surprising that Kesher Enoshi refused to sign this letter.) The truth is, the voices of a dozen campus anti-Israel Jews and a couple hundred like-minded community Jews pale next to the voice of the entire organized Jewish community on campus, and any pretense SJP’s letter had to representing a considerable proportion of Jews on campus was immediately killed upon the publication of the campus Jewish community’s letter which came shortly after, as well as the previously noted letter signed by a wide range of American Jewish organizations.


Bringing the Jewish community together on campus against divestment was essential to killing the divestment bill. However, one area which Tikvah, in my estimation, needs to improve at in order to continue gaining strength on campus (and therefore, in order to ensure that no future divestment bills or bills of that nature pass at Berkeley) is in befriending non-Jews and non-Jewish student groups. SJP and similar groups often are very successful in recruiting non-Arabs and individuals who do not have any immediately apparent reason to be invested in the Israeli/Palestinian issue, to their cause as advocates of their side and outspoken activists; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for pro-Israel groups, which, both on campus and more nationally from what I can tell, are nearly exclusively made up of Jews (a pleasing exception is the 200,000-member American organization Christians United for Israel - www.cufi.org). This is a major problem because when it comes to the PR battle on campus, bystanders will immediately associate greater credence with the anti-Israel side of the debate if it has more diversity in its ranks – both because this makes the group look pluralistic and inclusive and non-racist (values college students hold very dear), and because it leads bystanders to think “If thatgroup has so many different kinds of folks in it, they must have something convincing and ‘right’ to say…maybe being pro-Israel is just a Jewish thing, maybe Jews are religiously compelled to defend and support the state of Israel.” (That Jews who support Israel generally do so due to theological beliefs is a lie often spread by groups such as SJP.) As one might imagine, this image is extremely damaging, especially since groups like SJP already take the time to spread the notion that pro-Israel students on campus are only pro-Israel because they’re Jewish (including the implication that Jews are somehow racist for supporting Israel, the Jewish, ‘white’ state). Pro-Israel groups need to reach out to non-Jews as much or more than to Jews; for while one can count on getting some Jewish members (Jews are more likely to be informed on the Middle East, and therefore are more likely to know that the pro-Israel side of the debate is right) to join pro-Israel groups, it takes more effort to reach out to non-Jewish students, who likely are intimidated by the Middle East debate to begin with. Recruitment efforts by university and college pro-Israel groups therefore should not be based around giving arguments Jews care about but others wouldn’t care so much about, and pro-Israel groups should be careful to make their arguments for their side of the Middle East debate arguments which ordinary Americans could relate to and which deal with issues non-Jewish Americans care about (“Israel’s enemies are obsessive, racist, hate Jews and are linked heavily with terror”, not “Israel is home to more Holocaust survivors than any other state”).


It is also extremely important to network with and form allegiances with non-Jewish campus student organizations. There are several very clear advantages this brings. For one, it is a given, I take it, that on any major college campus, SJP or whomever happens to be the resident anti-Israel group on campus is well situated in campus politics and has many allies and allied groups. Touching on the point I just made above, this means that SJP or whomever is more likely to be seen by bystanders as credible  than a lone, largely Jewish pro-Israel group would be. Even a pro-Israel group which is allied with many Jewish groups will not look as credible as an anti-Israel group which is allied with many student groups which deal with issues unrelated to theMiddle East.

Another reason it is very important to network and make allies with other student communities and student groups is that it gives a political advantage: On Berkeley, SJP had a plethora of allied groups and communities which could be counted on to vote for SJP members running for Senate (and who could be counted on to support the divestment bill). At Berkeley SJP became very powerful by making many allies in other student communities – the  African Americans, the Hispanics, the gay rights and women’s rights groups and environmentalist groups. Were it not for the fact that one of the two major political parties at Berkeley has many Jews, and by extension a good amount of pro-Israel sentiment within its ranks, Tikvah would not have had an easy time, in my estimation, convincing too many others (read: non-Jews) to oppose the divestment bill  At  campuses where student government is organized based on political parties as at UC Berkeley, making alliances can be important in just getting people elected who won’t allow the student government to be hijacked by the BDS movement.

Strength is in numbers, and, at colleges, in diversity within one’s ranks.

Incidentally, networking and making allies with other student communities is much easier than one might suspect. Many student groups want to reach out and learn about other student groups, and so scheduling a mixer between one’s own pro-Israel group and, say, a Christian group or an Indian group isn’t hard and can be very rewarding. It’s especially easy if members of one’s own group are good friends with members of another group. Frankly, mixers are especially good to do because they lead to friendships being made, and one student community will be willing to go to bat for another when they have good friends in the other community. There is no substitute for personal connections. And of course, all of this advice concerning networking with non-Jewish student groups and communities can be applied more generally, seeing as networking and making friends with non-Jewish off-campus groups obviously can help immensely too.


Politically, there are certain groups that are worth approaching as allies: LGBT groups, environmental groups, Indian students and Armenian students. The first two are relatively obvious, though LGBT groups have far too often allied themselves with anti-Israel groups that support extremely homophobic and hateful entities such as Hamas. India and Israel have strong ties and both see themselves as targets of radical Islamic terror groups (in India’s case, from Pakistan); in fact several prominent representatives of the Indian-American student community on campus spoke out against the divestment bill and helped the Jewish community and Tikvah in its struggle against that bill. Armenian students, in the current political climate of Turkish anti-Israel activism, may also be receptive, though wary because of Israel’s previous close ties with Turkey; Armenian students also, in my experience, can relate to Jewish students, as they see the Armenian genocide of the 1910s as akin to the Nazi Holocaust, and therefore see themselves as brethren to the Jewish people.


This goes along with a more general point, that it’s important to be politically involved and to take the time to get to know the ‘power players’ on one’s campus. Getting a person from one’s own student group elected to student government is the most prized possession, and leads to a number of positive things – visibility for one’s student group, an ability to help shape campus rules and discourse, one guaranteed ‘no’ vote on anti-Israel bills in the student Senate – with the relatively minor downside that with a student government official in office from one’s group, it’s very important for the student group itself to act maturely on campus and to comport itself well (lest the group have a harder time electing another member in the future). But even just networking with student government officials is a good idea, since many of them, in my experience, genuinely care to hear what their constituents (read: students at their university) think, and are willing to hear out one’s opinions on matters on campus (for instance, things like anti-Israel bills). It’s best to do this networking before things like anti-Israel bills come up; at that point, Senators are likely to be paying attention to their personal friends, as well as their party leaders and colleagues. It is worth noting, on a side note, that anti-Israel groups, at least at California universities, are, more and more, planning to take over university student governments more generally these days, for the purpose of having the power to pass whatever bills they so desire. 

In sum, we in Tikvah: Students for Israel and in the organized Jewish community at UC Berkeley defeated the effort to pass an Israel divestment bill on campus through a number of strategies and with the benefit of knowing the character and tactics of the anti-Israel community on campus. We worked, with our allies in the Student Action political party on campus, to portray the often radical CalSERVE party which supported the bill as more concerned with grandstanding on international issues than with passing bills concerned with the campus and student life on campus. We helped undermine the anti-Israel effort by portraying its main pushers in Students for Justice in Palestine as fanatics obsessed with damaging Israel (even if we should have done more of this). We knew how the anti-Israel cabal on campus operates, and made use of that knowledge to tactically fight it in the ‘courtroom’ which was the Senate meeting room. We contacted and secured the help of Bay Area Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, and came together as a unified Jewish community on campus as well. There are many things we should have done better, and in my opinion our battle would have gone more smoothly if we’d spent more time revealing the backers of the divestment bill as the villains they are, as well as networking more with non-Jewish student communities on campus. But we ultimately – with more than a little help from ASUC President Will Smelko, the pivotal player in the divestment bill fight – succeeded in keeping the bill from passing, and came out with our heads and shoulders raised high, in a position of strength after the divestment bill war. I hope that the lessons and tactics suggested in this article will be inspiring to readers from other colleges, for I am certain that they are the right ones.


Ariel Kaplan

B.A., Philosophy, 2010

UC Berkeley




Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors. Originally posted at http://www.bluetruth.net/2010/09/part-3-bds-movement-at-uc-berkeley-how.html

 Please do link to these articles, quote from them and forward them by email to friends with this notice. Other uses require written permission of the author. Distributed by ZNN. Subscribe by email to ZNN-subscribe@...

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