Israeli War Criminals in the West Bank

"Most [Israelis] are not, like, evil and malevolent toward Palestinians": Yuval Noah Harari.

No, but there are enough who are to provide the subject matter of reports like this, from a Norwegian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer, Kristin Foss, who describes an Israeli army POGROM on the Palestinian village of Kafr Qaddum in the occupied/colonised West Bank. Note that I've reproduced here only the climactic part of Foss' testimony:

"The shooting had been going for about one and a half hours before it started to calm down. Apart from some tear gas inhalation there had been no injuries at this point. When things were calm, I was approached by a senior citizen, asking if we could help him. He had gone out to his driveway earlier. He was going to get into his car to pick up his wife. He hadn't noticed that his driveway was full of Israeli soldiers. The soldiers stole/confiscated his car and keys, and parked it in the middle of the road as a makeshift shield. As it was calm, we agreed to accompany him to speak to the soldiers and to ask for his car back. There was no shooting, nor stones being thrown at this point. The old man, Anna, and I started walking towards the soldiers with our hands in the air. I had my camera phone in one hand. The man walked surprisingly fast and was soon with the soldiers, whilst Anna and I stopped some 20 metres behind, still with our hands up. I am filming at this point.

"One of the soldiers shouts something at me in Hebrew, I don't understand, but I shout back that the man just wants his car back. Then he shouts that it is dangerous. I shout back that it is only dangerous because he is pointing a machine gun at me. One shot is fired as I am shouting, then another shot is directed at me, and hits me in the abdomen. I would say from approximately 20-30 metres. There is absolutely no doubt I was targeted and shot at deliberately." (A statement from the Norwegian ISM volunteer targeted and shot by an Israeli soldier in Kafr Qaddum, video included. palsolidarity.org, 21/8/18)

While the bullet penetrated her skin at an angle, Kristin lived to tell the tale. Incredibly, however, this appeared on her FB page mere days later: "Went back to Kafr Qaddum to show that solidarity is stronger than fear! Very nervous though, so kept right at the back, up against the wall. Thought I was safe-ish. But they shot me again!! The protest had been on for 2 minutes. Israeli activists at the front talking to the soldiers earlier... so yeah... I just got shot twice in a week." (24/8/18)

Israelis have no excuse. Their silence, referred to by Harari in my previous post, is tantamount to complicity in the war crimes committed by their offspring, most of whom willingly accept being drafted into the trigger-happy IDF at the age of 18.

More Blah for Your Bucks

Sound the shofers!

The latest BLAH from Israel's much-touted intellectual giant, Yuval Noah Harari, author of such ground-breaking tomes as Blah and Blah Blah. (Warning: there's now another such out and about - Blah Blah Blah).

Courtesy of the suitably worshipful (pro-Iraq War, pro-Blair, pro-Israel, anti-Corbyn) David Aaronovitch, in his puff piece, The BIG Thinker, in this weekend's Weekend Australian Magazine, here are some of Harari's undying utterances (commentary added), culled from same, to put you on your knees:

"My father... had a very big disbelief in any kind of authority... He fought in both the Six Day War of 1967 and the more existential Yom Kippur War of 1973."

Not bad for a guy who doesn't believe in authority, eh? Still, whenever things get down and existential in Israel, as they not infrequently do if you believe the hype, hey, you do what your Zionist masters tell you to, right?

"There are a lot of people today... who might actually look favourably on a scenario of creating a new race of superhumans and leaving ordinary Homo sapiens behind. And if you look at China, for example, today, it's out in the open. People speak of high-quality people and low-quality people."

So here's this bloke, YNH, in Israel, surrounded by folk who, while willingly 'serving' their country in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza, regularly hammer Palestinians because they're inconveniently standing in the way of the 'Jewish' people's brutal quest for Arabrein lebensraum, and what does he do? He fingers... China!

Howzat for chutzpah?

"How optimistic is he about our dealing with this big stuff, when he lives in a country that can't deal with its own very local, very intimate problems? Isn't big-picture thinking also a distraction... from thinking about horribly complicated problems in the here and now? He admits that Israelis have become very good at the art of just not seeing. 'Most people, they are not, like evil and malevolent toward the Palestinians. They just don't care. They don't want to know what's happening there. The mental distance is immense'."

Israel's Palestine problem? Isn't it really Palestine's Israel problem?

Israelis are not evil and malevolent towards the Palestinians... So how does YNH explain the existence of watchdog groups such as B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and others? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.) And how does he explain the ongoing electoral success of Netanyahu and his Greater Israel cronies and allies, and Israel's inexorable march to the right? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.)

They just don't care, eh? Neither, we are often reminded, did the Germans of the Nazi era. If YNH were honest, he'd admit to not caring either. In an earlier post I documented a dinner he'd had with the Netanyahus. Aaronovitch's puff piece begins with him going, not an anti-occupation action, but to a gay rights rally in the Tel Aviv bubble.

Harari & Friends

Yuval Noah Harari gets a dinner invitation from Haaretz columnist Benny Ziffer, and look who's coming to dinner:

"After the election [in March], Sara Netanyahu thanked me profusely for defending her and invited me over for dinner. I thought that it would be better if they came to our house. The truth is that my culinary experience at the Prime Minister's residence was not very exciting... We set up a little buffet in the corner of the living room, and opened the windows and balcony doors wide. The security guards remained outside and even the street wasn't closed off. I also invited [writers] Eyal Megged and Zeruya Shalev who are mutual friends and to embellish the dinner party I invited Nehemia Shtrasler, Prof. Yigal Schwartz and his wife and Yuval Noah Harari and his partner. We had a lovely evening. It was enjoyable and interesting." ('I hate the Left!', Naami Lanski, israelhayom.com, 22/4/16)

It was. Benny's a great raconteur. Sample:

"I feel that the Left is disingenuous with the slogans it disseminates. 'Stop the occupation,' for example. That's not realistic. It's a bunch of bull. This week I went to [the Palestinian village of] Bil'in with my wife after we hadn't been there for a long time. You go past the checkpoint and you see Modin Ilit and Kiryat Sefer, which have expanded to the point of touching the neighboring Palestinian villages, and you see some of the villages, which used to be dirty, God-forsaken hell holes, thriving and flourishing... People go there to have their cars fixed at garages, to get dental work done at dental clinics. They opened a commercial center there. There are Jewish clients. Peaceful coexistence is an inevitable byproduct of all this occupation-shmoccupation stuff. Life is stronger than any occupation. The existing model actually works." (ibid)

As Benny said, "We had a lovely evening. It was enjoyable and interesting." Harari fitted in perfectly. The perfect embellishment.

He Who Hypes Harari

I see that that Yuval Noah Harari's over-the-top promo/Q&A by the Guardian's Andrew Anthony garnered over 600 comments. Most thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. A few evinced scepticism. Amazingly, none touched on his provenance as an Israeli living in an apartheid state built on the genocide and mass expulsion of Palestine's indigenous Arab population, or were interested in what, if anything, he had to say about this overriding matter. Ignorance is bliss?

Anyway, I thought I'd investigate Anthony. He's written a book called The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (2008).  In it, he writes:

"I remember how disgusted I was by [the 1982 Sabra & Shatila massacre], all the more so because only months before I had travelled through Israel and the West Bank. At the time my friends had said that visiting Israel was just as bad as visiting South Africa, for it was just another vicious apartheid regime (whereas travelling to countries in the Middle East from which Jews were forcibly ejected, or countries where a sexual apartheid operated or torture a standard project, was a recommended means of broadening the mind)."

So Anthony's "friends" were talking about Israeli apartheid at the beginning of the 80s? Really?

And then he goes to the West Bank and sees nothing worthy of comment in that regard?

And also to Arab countries where he sees/hears nothing of Palestinian refugee camps full of people actually ejected from Palestine in 1948, yet can parrot Zionist propaganda about Middle Eastern Jews "ejected"* from Arab countries?

What to make of a guy who can see no evidence of Israeli apartheid while in occupied Palestine, but mutters of  "sexual apartheid" long before hijabs and niqabs became all the rage after 9/11?

What to make of a guy who sees "torture" everywhere in the Middle East but in Israel?

I'm beginning to understand why he's working for the Guardian and spruiking YNH.

Now here's another telling extract from Fallout:

"The Iraq War and the events of 11 September 2001 do not enjoy a conventional causal relationship. No evidence exists... that links Saddam Hussein to the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. And yet without 9/11 it seems certain that Iraq would not have been invaded... The destruction of the Twin Towers transformed... global politics. It created a new paradigm - the rogue state as a facilitator of a previously unimagined scale of terrorism... "

No evidence exists... and yet Anthony seems to have no trouble in linking, however tenuously, Saddam Hussein with 9/11. It - the 9/11 acts of terrorism - created a new paradigm?

No, a cabal of Ziocons, both within and without the Bush administration, created that paradigm long before 2003, and Bush, Blair, Howard and the rest ran with it, invading and occupying Iraq, destroying the Iraqi state, sowing death, destruction, division and sectarianism wherever they went, and paving the way for AQI and its even more murderous offspring, ISIS. But, in Anthony's ambiguous characterisation, there's not a hint of this.

And isn't this bit of whataboutery so like that of every other Israel apologist you've ever read?:

"By convention, when it comes to Middle East affairs, only a terrible abuse performed by the Israeli army tends to provoke Western liberals into organized condemnation."

Any wonder he's promoting YNH in the Guardian.

[*Just click on the 'Arab Jews' label below for the facts.]

Israel's 'All-Purpose Sage'

I'm almost at the point where I wish Jonathan Freedland's Guardian website would disappear behind a paywall, like Murdoch's Australian and Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald. Why? Because I suspect that any cash-strapped young people out there, sufficiently motivated to  read the news online, are probably heading to Guardian Australia and copping an overdose of soft pro-Israel propaganda there.

My gripe arises out of the latest Guardian promo for Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Noah Harari: 'Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so by Andrew Anthony (19/3/17). Here, for example, is some of Anthony's PR paean to Harari (rudely interrupted by my interpolated comments):

"Now 41, Harari grew up in a secular Jewish family in Haifa. He studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his doctorate at Oxford. He is a vegan and he meditates for two hours a day, often going to extended retreats. He says it helps him focus on the issues that really matter."

If I may interrupt here, can we all agree, perhaps, that if you are a sentient being, residing somewhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Israeli or Palestinian, then the issue that really matters for you is the Palestine/Israel problem? Yes? Hold that thought...

"He lives with his husband on a moshav, an agricultural co-operative, outside Jerusalem. Being gay, he says, helped him to question received opinions."

Really? Received opinions about what, exactly?

"One of the pleasures of reading his books is that is that he continually calls on readers... to think about what we know... And he has little time for fashionable stances."

Such as...? This is all so infuriatingly vague.

"He writes and speaks like a man who is not excessively troubled by doubt. If that makes him sound arrogant..."

Well, doesn't that describes Netanyahu and his political mates, not to mention those who voted for him? In fact, doesn't it describe just about every Israeli bar the small handful, generally derided as leftists and Arab-lovers, working against Israeli occupation and apartheid? Rhetorical question: Has this staggering genius, Yuval Noah Harari, ever left his meditations long enough to join them?

"[I]t's tempting to see him less as a historian than as some kind of all-purpose sage."

OFFS!

"We asked public figures and readers to pose questions for Harari, and many of these were of a moral or ethical nature seeking answers about what should be done, rather than about what has happened."

OK, so did any of Anthony's "public figures and readers" ask the obvious question: What is your/the solution to the Palestine/Israel problem? Short answer: no. The closest a "reader", known only as AA (Andrew Anthony?), got to that question was this:

"You live in a part of the world that has been shaped by religious fictions. Which do you think will happen first - that Homo sapiens leave behind religious fiction or the Israel-Palestine conflict will be resolved?"

Now brace yourselves for the Sage's answer:

"As things look at present, it seems that Homo sapiens will disappear before the Israeli political conflict will be resolved."

But, O Sage, what should be done about the... er... "Israeli political conflict"?

"I think that Homo sapiens as we know them will probably disappear within a century or so, not destroyed by killer robots... but changed and upgraded with biotechnology and artificial intelligence into something different."

But, O Sage, if I may bring you back to earth, what should be done now about the "Israeli political conflict," as you call it?

"The timescale for that kind of change is maybe a century."

Listen, O Wise One, fuck this "century" business, what should be done NOW?!

"And it's quite likely that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will not be resolved by that time. But it will definitely be influenced by it."

Oh well, at least the Palestinian side of the equation has made a reappearance!

So much for the sage who focuses on the issues that really matter, not to mention what should be done about them.

Next post: His Guardian spruiker, Andrew Anthony

The Mother of All Myths

If historian Yuval Noah Harari were not an Israeli, seriously, would we be hearing about him? Just look at this fawning nonsense in Murdoch's Weekend Australian Magazine by Sunday Times journalist Josh Glancy:

"These are the views of Yuval Noah Harari, the 40-year-old Israeli historian who has become something of a prophet when it comes to explaining our past and predicting our future. He's like his namesake, the biblical Noah, warning of the coming flood. He is the seer loved by Silicon Valley who doesn't have a smartphone or use social media. The man who spends months at a time in silent meditation before emerging to write books that strike at the heart of the modern condition." ('People don't realise what is happening', 3/9/16)

A little googling tells us where Glancy's coming from:

"Last week I conducted an experiment. I was one of several partygoers being subjected to a long and tedious sermon on the Middle East by a Tehran-based journalist. As his references to Zionism became increasingly vicious (and his tone increasingly tiresome), I decided to change the direction. 'I'm a Zionist', I said. A shocked silence followed. the other members of the group stared into their wine glasses, mildly embarrassed to have ended up in conversation with such a mindless zealot. They quickly drifted away." (Ed got it wrong. Zionism is about more than support, thejc.com, 31/3/13)

He elaborates:

"For many, the word Zionism has become utterly toxic, symbolic not just of walls, tanks and dying children but of a vast imperialist project that from its inception sought to dispossess an indigenous population in order to accommodate the desires of European migrants with an ancient, even spurious territorial claim."

Glancy advocates "mounting an effective defence" of Zionism by pushing the idea that "Zionism is about more than providing shelter. It is also about giving a rootless, homeless people the freedom to build their own country. It seeks to give members of this nation the choice whether to live in that country or not... It seeks to normalise the Jewish experience, so that Jews do not forever remain a nation of forced exiles."

The problem here is that, like all Zionists, Glancy conflates Judaism/Jewishness with people/nation.

Israeli historian Shlomo Sand comprehensively demolished this fundamental Zionist dogma in his 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People. In the introduction to that book, he writes:

"If world Jews were indeed a nation, what were the common elements in the ethnographic cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakech, other than religious belief and certain practices of that belief? Perhaps, despite everything we have been told, Judaism was simply an appealing religion that spread widely until the triumphant rise of its rivals, Christianity and Islam, and then, despite humiliation and persecution, succeeded in surviving into the modern age. Does the argument that Judaism has always been an important belief-culture, rather than a uniform nation-culture, detract from its dignity, as the proponents of Jewish nationalism have been proclaiming for the past 130 years?

"If there was no common cultural denominator among the communities of the Jewish religion, how could they be connected and set apart by ties of blood? Are the Jews an alien 'nation-race,' as the anti-Semites have imagined and sought to persuade us since the nineteenth century? What are the prospects of defeating this doctrine, which assumes and proclaims that Jews have distinctive biological features (in the past it was Jewish blood; today it is a Jewish gene), when so many Israeli citizens are fully persuaded of their racial homogeneity?

"Another historical irony: there were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belonged to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-Semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that the people known in the world as Jews (as distinct from today's Jewish Israelis) have never been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew-hater.

"Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel still refuses, 60 years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands) - that is to say, a state that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of modern democracy and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land." (pp 21-22)

In his puff piece on Harari, Glancy writes that his "basic theory [in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind] states that it is our capacity for telling stories that has made us great... We use our language skills to create myths - money, religion, nationhood - that bind us together and allow us to co-operate on a mass scale."

Indeed. And surely the "eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land" is the mother of all "active myths," to borrow Sand's words.

Another Israeli Genius

More Zionist claptrap from the Guardian:

"I'm a historian... I grew up in a small industrial suburb of Haifa, in Israel. As far back as I can remember I was interested in big questions. Who are we? What are we doing here?"

Thus spake Yuval Noah Harari in Yuval Noah Harari: 'We are quickly acquiring powers that were always thought to be divine' (Tim Adams, 27/8/16)

Come on, Yuval, it's not rocket science:

Who are we?

'We' are Israeli Jews. We came to Palestine from Europe, under British protection, colonised the place, trained and armed for the inevitable showdown with Palestine's indigenous Arab population, drove them OUT in '48, and called the place Israel.

What are we doing here?

Heaps:

Keeping the '48 Palestinians OUT.
Keeping the so-called Israeli Arabs DOWN.
Occupying the West Bank Palestinians.
Blockading those in the Gaza Strip.

"Just as the 19th century created the working class, the coming century will create the useless class. Billions of people are likely to have no military or economic function." (ibid)

Military or economic function?

Very very interesting word order there, Yuval.

PS: The Guardian has given Harari yet another thumbs-up with Forget ideology, liberal democracy's newest threats come from technology & bioscience (John Naughton, 28/8/16). Enough already!

From Gush to Gosh

The gushing Geraldine Doogue is never so gushing as when she's gushing over an Israeli guest.

On this week's Saturday Extra (Radio National, 11/10) the object of her gushing was Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, "a very ambitious work indeed... about how our branch of humans, Homo sapiens, conquered the earth."

Sapiens was predictably "a very ambitious work indeed," abounding in "fresh insights," and "extraordinary thinking." What's more, it's received "rave reviews in the northern hemisphere," and "65,000 [are taking] his online course." Doogue even urged her listeners to rush out and buy a copy.

And what a wonderful, compassionate gent Yuval turned out to be too, blowing the whistle, for example, on the dreadful impact of the agricultural revolution on domesticated animals, which "subjugated them to a regime of exploitation... geared to further the interests of Homo sapiens while ignoring their subjective interests."

So, what fresh insights and extraordinary thoughts, wondered I, must this exceptional man have on the vexed issue of Palestine-Israel? Surely, I thought, if he can sort out the distant past, why not the present?

Imagine my disappointment then, when I read his views on the subject in Haaretz. Gosh, golly, gee, it was just the same old, same old Zionist shit:

"Israel is the only country in the world that... faces an existential threat from its neighbors. Most of the countries in its vicinity refuse to recognize its right to exist, and frequently declare their intent to wipe it off the map." (Only in Israel, or only in Palestine? 7/7/14)

"Only the Palestinian refugees... are still considered refugees. For a wide variety of reasons, their host countries, as well as international organizations, preferred to perpetuate the refugee status of the Palestinians... [they] should be allowed to strike roots, even if that falls short of giving them justice."

Gosh, golly, gee what a fucking let-down.