Palestinian

In reporting the brutal murder in Melbourne of  Palestinian Israeli exchange student Aya Maasarwe, the Australian corporate media have referred to her either as an 'Israeli' or an 'Arab Israeli', the latter being the preferred Zionist term for the Palestinian minority who managed to avoid being driven into stateless exile in 1948, were kept under military lock and key until 1966, and who only thereafter received Israeli - second class - citizenship.

I can't recall seeing Aya anywhere in the media described as what she was, a 'Palestinian Israeli'. Here is yet another example of how a hopelessly biased, Zionised media misrepresents, marginalises, and erases Palestinian reality.

Another Palestinian Israeli, the poet Mahmoud Darwish, wrote the following lines, taken from his 1966 poem, A Lover from Palestine. He was, of course, referring to his stolen homeland. My thoughts are of Aya Maasarwe as I type Darwish's words here:

Palestinian, her eyes and her tattoo
Palestinian, her name
Palestinian, her dreams and her sorrow
Palestinian, her scarf, her feet, and her body
Palestinian, her words and her silence
Palestinian, her voice
Palestinian, her birth and her death

The Netanyahu Declaration

On the subject of Israel's latest APARTHEID legislation:

"'We have determined in law the founding principle of our existence,' [Netanyahu] said. 'Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people and respects the rights of all of its citizens'." (More equal than others, David Halbfinger & Isabel Kershner, The New York Times/Sydney Morning Herald, 21/7/18)

Note the second half of Netanyahu's sentence: "and respects the rights of all of its citizens."

Remind you of anything?

That's right, the Balfour Declaration's utterly hollow, 'safeguard' clause:

"... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities... "

Moving along, here's a Palestinian Israeli perspective on the new bill, which fleshes out just what it means to live as a non-Jew in a Jewish state, from Yousef Jabareen, MK (Hadash), Israel just dropped the pretense of equality for Palestinian citizens (latimes.com, 20/7/18):

"The Israeli Knesset on Thursday passed into law a bill designed to make a permanent underclass of Palestinian citizens. It threatens to set the country on a course to a full-blown Jewish theocracy. The so-called 'Jewish nation-state' bill formalizes in Israeli law the superior rights and privileges that Jewish citizens of the state enjoy over its indigenous Palestinian minority, who comprise roughly 20% of the population. It demotes Arabic from one of two official languages to a mere 'special' status, deepens racial segregation by directing the government to 'encourage and promote' Jewish settlement, and declares that the right to self-determination in Israel is 'exclusive' to the Jewish people, denying the history and ancient Palestinian roots in this land. It also prioritizes the Jewishness of the state over its democratic character, omitting any reference to 'democracy' or 'equality'.

"The final reading of the nation-state bill took place just days after the Knesset rejected a bill that I, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and Knesset member, had introduced. My bill called for Israel to guarantee full equality for all of its citizens, regardless of religion or race. A similar bill introduced in June calling for Israel to be a country 'for all its citizens' was banned from even being discussed. The fate of these three bills confirms what Palestinians have always known: In Israel, only Jews enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship.

"The tension of being a Palestinian citizen of a country that defines itself as Jewish has shaped every aspect of my life, from early childhood to my career as a human rights activist and a member of Israel's parliament today.

"I was born in Umm al Fahem, which pre-dates the state of Israel and is one of the largest Palestinian towns in the country. Although it is bigger and older than the Jewish municipalities that surround it, the residents of Umm al Fahem are denied the same quality of public services that Jewish towns receive, including in healthcare and public transportation.

"I first began to understand the unequal nature of Israeli society when I was 12 years old and started going to school in nearby Nazareth. Because we didn't have a bus station, I had to hitch a ride to and from class every day and witness the stark contrast between the crumbling buildings, roads, and other underfunded public infrastructure in Umm al Fahem and those of the affluent Jewish towns I traveled through.

"Every day, I would also pass by the village where members of my mother's family lived before Israel's establishment, Al Lajjun. They were uprooted and told they could not return. Israel's destruction of Palestinian communities like my ancestral village continues today, in places like Umm al-Hiran, a town in southern Israel facing destruction so that it can be replaced with a city for Jews (to be called 'Hiran').

"The nation-state bill further marginalizes my community and entrenches Israel's regime of racial discrimination and deterioration into apartheid. It will lead to more racist, anti-democratic laws, adding to the more than 50 laws already on the books that disadvantage non-Jewish citizens.

"In contrast, the bill I introduced called for the country to become a democracy that guarantees complete civil and national equality to all who live within its borders. It would have ensured that Israeli law is based on universal values that recognize both Arab and Jewish ethnic groups. The state would have been required to invest the wealth of this land for the benefit of all its citizens, not just a privileged majority. There would be equal status for the Arabic language and culture, and inclusive national symbols, so Palestinian girls and boys would feel welcome in their own country, and no longer have to be represented by a country's flag containing religious symbols that are not their own.

"Like President Trump in the United States and right-wing demagogues elsewhere, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government wish to turn the clock back on humanity's march toward a freer, more just and egalitarian world. Imagine if Trump and the Republican Party passed a constitutional amendment declaring the U.S. to be officially a Christian state, formally subordinating the country's democracy to right-wing, fundamentalist Christian principles, and encouraging American cities and towns to exclude Jews, Muslims and indigenous Americans.

"That is the situation that Palestinians in Israel face today. As we continue our struggle for equal citizenship and the just rights of Palestinians everywhere, we call on our brothers and sisters of conscience in the U.S. and around the world to support our shared vision for enlightened democracy and the well-being of all people, regardless of race or religion."

Don't Even Think About It

What makes Israel different from every other country on earth (apart, that is, from its cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs who stand up to its bullying) is that it is not a state of its citizens, but, in line with its 'Jewish state' Zionist ideology, the state of Jews all over the world - whether or not they wish to take up or refuse Israeli citizenship.

This, of course, means that while Jews get the red carpet treatment should they ever wish to avail themselves of Israeli citizenship, non-Jewish, indigenous Palestinian Arabs, whether evicted from their Palestinian homeland by Israeli forces in 1948 and 1967, or subjected to Israeli military occupation and the violence of Israeli settler thugs since 1967, haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of ever being granted Israeli citizenship.

Yes, the Palestinian remnant, which escaped being ethnically cleansed in 1948, and which now constitutes 20% of Israel's population, are Israeli citizens, but of a distinctly inferior, second-class kind.

As it happens, one of the latter's MKs had recently dared to place a bill on the Knesset's agenda, calling for Israel "to be defined as a state of all its citizens." That is, mandating real equality between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.

The result? "On June 5, the Knesset issued a press release stating that its Presidium (a group consisting of the speaker and deputy speakers) voted to disqualify [it]." (Israeli lawmakers kill 'equality of all citizens' bill before it is even introduced, Mohamed Mohamed, mondoweiss.net, 6/6/18)

Yes, Virginia, Israel is an apartheid state.

Israeli Brutality from the River to the Sea

As I said in a previous post, all of Palestine, from the River to the Sea, is Israeli-occupied land. If you think that the crimes of the occupation are confined to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and that the law of the jungle only applies east of the fabled Green Line, think again:

"According to Adalah, Israel's Police Investigation Unit (Mahash), which operates under the Ministry of Justice, disregards the majority of complaints filed against Israeli police. In a 2014 report, Adalah found that between 2011 and 2013, the Mahash closed 93% of complaints without laying charges... At least 50 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed by police since 2000." ('They killed him because he was an Arab', Zena Tahhan, aljazeera.com, 31/7/17)

Trump's Biggest Fans

Palestinian-Israeli freedom fighter Haneen Zoabi MK on Israel and Trump:

"Israel, she says, wants to 'close the file on the Palestinians' demand for a state. Binyamin Netanyahu... 'is shifting the paradigm from managing the crisis to solving the crisis - but [this is] a one-sided solution in the interests of Israel. Something has changed in the minds of Israelis: Palestinians have ceased to exist. The walls are not just physical, they are also psychological.'

"This mindset is reinforced by the new US president, she says. 'Donald Trump may seem bizarre and unique to most of the world, but not for Israel. His kind of populism [and] his way of violent speech are the dominant model in Israel. Israel is the only country not shocked and not afraid of Trump. On the contrary, Netanyahu and Trump represent the same model.' If Trump follows through on his election pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, signifying endorsement of Israel's claim of the city as its 'eternal and undivided capital', there should be 'strong reaction', says Zoabi.

"Zoabi said that Trump's ban on people from some Muslim countries entering the US was a dangerous formalisation of Islamophobia. 'This hatred is nothing new, it's part of the culture, but now it's being turned into policy. It's becoming part of the norm that you can talk with hatred about Muslims without feeling any shame,' she said." (From Haneen Zoabi: 'Israel is the only country not shocked by or afraid of Trump', Harriet Sherwood, theguardian.com, 31/1/17)

Feel the Hate

Commentators couldn't help but reflect on the racism of Netanyahu's election day rally cry on Facebook:

"The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the ballot booths." (Netanyahu surges to 'great victory', Ruth Pollard, Sydney Morning Herald, 19/3/15)

How dare those 'Arabs' (actually the descendents of Palestinians who managed to escape expulsion from their homes and lands in 1948) use the ballot box against us! (And this despite decades of Israeli propagandists exploiting the Israeli 'Arab' right to vote as the sine qua non of Israel's alleged democratic character).

The only surprise, however, is that anyone should be surprised.

Whether it's Zionism's godfather, Theodor Herzl, writing of "spiriting the penniless [Palestinian Arab] population across the border" in his diary in 1895,* or the 1917 Anglo-Zionist Balfour Declaration fantastically dismissing the Arab Muslim/Christian population of Palestine (90% at the time) as Palestine's "existing non-Jewish communities," Zionism has routinely set its face against the presence Palestine's indigenous sons and daughters, ignoring, denying, confining, repressing or, circumstances permitting, driving them off their land and into exile as in 1948 and 1967.

In brief, Zionist settler-colonialism abhors the very existence of these people, casting them as an existential, even demonic ('Hamas death cult') threat to its control of their native homeland.

Which brings me to the subject of this post, Zionist hate speech. The term hate speech, of course, is one Zionist propagandists have made peculiarly their own, using it to describe practically any and every manifestation of anti-Israeli/anti-Zionist reaction to the crimes of the Zionist project in or beyond Palestine. Meanwhile, the fact that Zionists themselves indulge in hate speech, particularly but not always against the Palestinians, is insufficiently regarded. 

Keeping in mind The International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR) definition of hate speech, namely, "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence," tell me if the following - hosted at the jwire.com.au website - doesn't fit the definition:

"At the beginning of the 20th Century, if one were referred to as a Palestinian, it was automatically implied that he or she was Jewish. Decades later Arabs cleverly commandeered the term 'Palestinian' and fools the world over, including Jewish fools, have bought the propaganda that 'Palestinians' have never forgiven the division of their 'country' by the UN. If there was such a country, who were its rulers, what was its currency, the questions are endless, but no one poses these types of questions to the Palestinian Authority.

"The facts are that there was no country called Palestine.

"Simply put, Palestine was a land mass administered finally by the British until the 1947 Partition Plan when only a part was allocated back to its century's [sic] old rightful owners, the Jewish people.

"Successive Israeli governments have never once opened their mouth [sic] in a convincing way to debunk the entire 'Palestinian' narrative and in the process appear to have discarded the Jewish heritage of the Temple Mount.

"So much for the profound: 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.'

"Does no one see the consequences of this tragic situation?

"It is time for Israel to act like a sovereign power in control of its own destiny and take unilateral action on many fronts, including the reclaiming of the Temple Mount before it is lost forever.

"In short, it is time for the gloves to finally come off." (The unfolding tragedy that is the Temple Mount, Gil Solomon, 15/3/15)

Some of Solomon's readers were sufficiently incited to comment as follows:

"I stood right at the entrance of the Dome of the Rock and prayed it would be demolished and the Temple rebuilt."

"You have, in the past, accused me, Gil, of 'touchy, feely' political views - well, sit back because it's just a matter of a few short years and Netanyahu and his people will be sitting pretty on land rightfully theirs."

"I most strongly object to the international community which demands that Jews share their land with a pretend people, saying not a word when those same aggressive, callous, lying pack of pretenders refuses to share a site holy to Jews and significant to mohammedans only on an interpretation of a dream."

You can feel the hate.

For another recent example of this kind of bile - appearing in The Australian Jewish News - see my 8/7/14 post Settler Haters Hate.

[*See my 4/1/13 post What Would Herzl Do?]

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

"If you're not careful newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

Not hanging offences, I know, but...

Case 1:

"... so-called Arab Israelis - mostly ethnic Palestinians who complain of being treated as second-class citizens..." (Arab parties hold key to Israeli poll, Jamie Walker*, The Australian, 16/3/15)

Instead of "so-called Arab Israelis - mostly ethnic Palestinians" why not simply refer to them as what they are, namely 'Palestinian Israelis'?

Better still: 'Palestinian Israelis whose ancestors somehow managed to escape the great ethnic cleansing of 1948, known to Palestinians as 'the Nakba (catastrophe)'.

And what's with "who complain of being treated as second-class citizens"?

Maybe it's because they are second-class citizens, Jamie.

And that's simply because they're not Jews. It's called apartheid, actually, as your predecessor, John Lyons, once acknowledged: see my 2/5/12 post Consensus at Last.

Case 2:

"... Hartley, a strident political advocate for Palestine..." (The secret Murdoch file kept hidden by British government, Philip Dorling, Sydney Morning Herald, 16/3/15)

Oh, FFS!

Hands up anyone who's ever heard an Israel lobbyist/propagandist described as "strident" in the ms press?

Just as I thought... not a hand in sight!

[*So Murdoch's Australian has a new Middle East correspondent, replacing John Lyons. It's too early to say whether he can fill Lyons' shoes - or better! - let's hope the above infelicities are just a matter of finding his feet.]

The Nation State of the Jewish People

The following news reminds me of the old biblical injunction: 'There is nothing new under the sun':

"A controversial bill that officially defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people has been approved by cabinet despite warnings that the move risks undermining the country's democratic character. Opponents, including some cabinet ministers, said the new legislation defined reserved 'national rights' for Jews only and not for its minorities, and rights groups condemned it as racist. The bill, which is intended to become part of Israel's basic laws, would recognise Israel's Jewish character, institutionalise Jewish law as an inspiration for legislation and delist Arabic as a second official language. Arab Muslims and Christians make up 20% of Israel's population." (Israeli cabinet approves legislation defining nation-state of Jewish people, Peter Beaumont, theguardian.com, 24/11/14)

What we have here seems to be yet another piece of Israeli apartheid legislation (ranking alongside Israel's Law of Return (1950), Absentees' Property Law (1950), and Development Authority Law (1950), to name but 3 of the pack) which will operate to further entrench the divide between Jewish and non-Jewish (Palestinian) Israelis, enhancing the first class citizen status of the former while exacerbating the second class citizen status of the latter.

(Before proceeding further, however, that talk about the bill "undermining the country's democratic character," cannot be allowed to pass without comment. As I've pointed out many times in this blog: Any state that has most of its indigenous population living outside its borders, unable to return (Palestinian refugees), and the rest living either under a draconian military occupation (occupied Palestinians) or as second-class citizens within its borders (Palestinian Israelis), simply cannot be described, no matter how it is spun, as a democracy in good standing. An ethnocracy, yes. An apartheid state, yes. But emphatically, not a democracy.)

It's the 'Jewish people' concept that bears closer examination. This feature of Zionist ideology dates back to the very beginnings of the political Zionist movement. The concept rests on the false premise that Israel is 'the State of the Jews' - that is, all Jews, no matter where in the world they reside, or whether they embrace or reject an alleged connection to said 'State of the Jews'. According to the 'Jewish people' concept, Israel is not, therefore, simply the state of its citizens. The concept thus has important implications for Jews who are citizens of countries other than Israel.

The following excerpts on the subject are taken from an essay by W.T. Mallison, Jr., The Legal Problems Concerning the Juridical Status & Political Activities of the Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency, published in the William & Mary Law Review, Spring 1968:

"Zionism and its 'Jewish State' act upon the postulate that anti-Semitism is fundamental and ineradicable. Upon this postulate the Zionist juridical objectives that 'the Jewish people' be constituted as an additional nationality entity, membership in which is to be conferred upon all Jews, are based. The 'Jewish people' concept is used to recruit Jewish immigration to Israel and to achieve other Zionist political objectives. The Zionist 'solution' to anti-Semitism is to 'ingather' all Jews into the State of Israel...

"The 'Jewish people' concept is consistently advanced as a juridical claim in international law decision-making contexts. A particularly well known example involved the exploitation of the claim in the Eichmann Trial Judgment... 'The connection between the State  of Israel and the Jewish people needs no explanation'...

"The United States Department of State has commented upon the 'Jewish people' concept as follows: 'The Department of State recognizes the State of Israel as a sovereign State and citizenship of the State of Israel. It recocognizes no other sovereignty or citizenship in connection therewith. It does not recognize a legal-political relationship based upon the religious identification of American citizens. It does not in any way discriminate among American citizens upon the basis of their religion. Accordingly, it should be clear that the Department of State does not regard the 'Jewish people' concept as a concept of international law'...

"At the outset it should be recognized that the enunciation of the 'Jewish people' concept or claim in public law-making contexts involves an assertion of jurisdiction over Jews in the United States. The enunciation, consequently, involves implementation as well...

"The double loyalty issue is... recognized by some of the Zionist elite and dealt with in apparent double talk. For example, Mr Berl Locker, speaking as chairman of the Zionist Executive at a Session of the Zionist General Council, stated as one of 'the basic doctrines of Zionism in the present day': 'The State of Israel lays no claim to the political loyalty of Jews resident in other countries. Jews are good citizens in all countries of their domicile and especially in the countries in which they enjoy equal rights. But Jews as a community do possess a collective loyalty to the State of Israel, as Israel is the national home of the entire Jewish people.'

"On its face this statement is simply double talk since it can be interpreted textually as meaning either single or double loyalty. A Zionist statement, however, must usually be interpreted in greater depth than 'on its face'. The italics in the original indicate, of course, the relatively greater significance of the italicized statement concerning the loyalty of Jews to the State of Israel. Further analysis requires a basic understanding of Zionist public law. Such law is concerned almost exclusively with collective rights and duties consistent with the collective 'Jewish people' concept. From this perspective the statements which are not in italics have no Zionist significance since they are only concerned with individual  Jews ('good citizens'). The italicized statement concerns the Zionist concept of the 'entire Jewish people as well as the lower level concept of 'Jews as a community.' Since Zionism is concerned with collective rights and duties this is the only part of the quotation which has meaning to Zionists.

"The contemporary implementation of the 'Jewish people' concept continues to emphasize the immigration of Jews living in 'exile' or in the 'diaspora' (the Zionist terms for Jews who are nationals of any state other than the State of Israel) to Israel. In view of the substantial failure of Zionist recruitment of Jewish immigrants in the United States, Zionism has developed other major political objectives within this country which are conducted in spite of the provisions of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation Between the United States and Israel which deny authority to conduct such activities. Each of these objectives is documented in the 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing concerning the 'Activities of Nondiplomatic Representatives of Foreign Principals in the United States.' Perhaps the most important and comprehensive one is to conduct Zionist political activities in the United States as if they were genuine American activities. A related objective includes the domination of the mass media of communications with Zionist-Israel political viewpoints presented to make them appear to be American ones."

Most interesting those last two sentences.

Shlomo Sand: The 'New Jews'

Essential reading from Shlomo Sand's whistle-blowing must-read, How I Stopped Being a Jew (2014):

"According to the spirit of its laws, the State of Israel belongs more to non-Israelis than it does to its citizens who live there. It claims to be the national inheritance more of the world's 'new Jews' (for instance, Paul Wolfowitz, former president of the World Bank; Michael Levy, the well-known British philanthropist and peer in the House of Lords; Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Vladimir Gusinsky, the Russian media oligarch who lives in Spain) than of the 20% of its citizens identified as Arabs, whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born within its territory. Various nabobs of Jewish origin from around the world thus feel the right to intervene in Israeli life; through massive investment in the media and the political apparatus, they increasingly seek to influence its leaders and its orientation.

"Intellectuals who know well that the state of the Jews is their own also figure among the ranks of the 'new Jews'. Bernard-Henri Levi, Alan Dershowitz, Alexandre Adler, Howard Jacobson, David Horowitz, Henryk M. Broder and numerous other champions of Zionism, active in various fields of the mass media, are quite clear about their political preferences. Contrary to what Moscow meant for Communists abroad in former times, or Beijing for the Maoists of the 1960s, Jerusalem really is their property. They have no need to know the history or the geography of the place, nor are they obligated to learn its languages (Hebrew or Arabic), to work there or pay taxes, or - thank heaven! - to serve in its army. It is enough to make a short visit to Israel, readily obtain an identity card, and acquire a secondary residence there before returning immediately to their national culture and their mother tongue, while remaining in perpetuity a co-proprietor of the Jewish state - and all this simply for having been lucky enough to be born of a Jewish mother.

"The Arab inhabitants of Israel, on the other hand, if they marry a Palestinian of the opposite sex in the occupied territories, do not have the right to bring their spouses to live in Israel, for fear that they will become citizens and thereby increase the number of non-Jews in the Promised Land.

"That last assertion, in fact, requires a certain amplification. If an immigrant identified as Jewish arrives from Russia or the United States along with his non-Jewish wife, the latter will have the right to citizenship. However, even if the spouse and her children are never considered Jews, the fact that they are not Arab will prevail over the fact of not being Jewish. 'White' immigrants from Europe or America, even if not Jewish, have always enjoyed somewhat tolerant treatment. To diminish the demographic weight of the Arabs, it is judged better to weaken the Jewish state through non-Jewish dilution, so long as the newcomers are white Europeans." (pp 84-85)

Next post: Shlomo Sand: To be a Jew in Israel

Unsentimental Israelis

Today is the 58th anniversary of Israel's infamous Kafr Qassem massacre. The following reference to it, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, unfortunately hardly does justice to the gravity of the crime:

"Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has acknowledged past and present wrongdoings to his country's Arabs... Mr Rivlin spoke at a memorial ceremony for victims of the 1956 massacre at Kafr Qassem, where Israeli forces killed 47 residents of the Israeli Arab village for breaking a wartime curfew, becoming the first Israeli president to attend the event. 'A terrible crime was committed here,' he said. 'The brutal killings in Kafr Qassem are an anomalous [?!] and sorrowful chapter in the history of the relations between Arabs and Jews living here... Kafr Qassam is adjacent to the West Bank. In 1956, it was under [Israeli] military rule and, on October 29 - the first day of a war with Egypt - Israeli border policemen gunned down residents who were unaware a curfew had been imposed... The Kafr Qassem massacre is taught in the Israeli education system as a case of an illegal military order that must be refused by soldiers." (Killings were crime against Israeli Arabs, says president, AFP/Sydney Morning Herald, 28/10/14)

Notice how, in the ms media, Israel almost always manages to come up smelling like roses? Funny, that.

By way of contextualising the final sentence in the AFP report, I draw your attention to the following finding by Israeli educationist Nurit Peled-Elhanan:

"The Kaffer Kassem massacre is remembered in Jewish-Israeli consciousness mainly for being the source for the court's unprecedented ruling against compliance with 'manifestly unlawful orders' [but Israeli textbooks] failed to mention that the verdict was not carried out to its term and said nothing about the suffering of the villagers." (Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology & Propaganda in Education, 2012, p 172)

The following account of the massacre and its aftermath by British scholar David Hirst shows why:

"The Arabs remember Kafr Qasem as the Deir Yassin of the established State. Less revealing, perhaps, than the event itself was the reaction it generated. On 29 October 1956, on the eve of Israel's invasion of Egypt, a detachment of Frontier Guards imposed a curfew on villages near the Jordanian frontier. Among them was Kafr Qasem. The Mukhtar was informed of the curfew just half an hour before it was due to go into effect. It was therefore quite impossible for him to pass the message on to the villagers who would be returning, as dusk fell, from their various places of work. Major Shmuel Melinki, the detachment commander, had foreseen this eventuality, and he asked his superior, Brigadier Yshishkhar Shadmi, what should be done about anyone coming home in ignorance of the curfew. The Brigadier had replied: 'I don't want any sentimentality... that's just too bad for him.' And there was no sentimentality. In the first hour of the curfew, between 5 and 6 o'clock, the Frontier Guards killed 47 villagers. They had returned home individually or in batches. A few came on foot, but most travelled by bicycle, mule cart or lorry. They included women and children. But all the Frontier Guards wanted to know was whether they were from Kafr Qasem. For if they were, they shot them down at close range with automatic weapons. 'Of every group of returning workers, some were killed and others wounded; very few succeeded in escaping unhurt. The proportion of those killed increased, until, of the last group, which consisted of 14 women, a boy and 4 men, all were killed, except one girl, who was seriously wounded.' The slaughter might have gone on like this had not Lieutenant Gavriel Dahan, the officer on the spot '... informed the command several times over the radio apparatus in the jeep of the number killed. Opinions differ as to the figure he gave in his reports, but all are agreed that in his first report he said:

... 'one less', and in the next two reports: 'fifteen less' and 'many less - it is difficult to count them'. The last two reports, which followed each other in quick succession, were picked up by Captain Levy, who passed them on to Melinki. When he was informed that there were 'fifteen less' in Kafr Qasem, Melinki gave orders which he was unable to transmit to Dahan before the report arrived of 'many less - it is difficult to count them', for the firing to stop and for a more moderate procedure to be adopted in the whole area... This order finally ended the bloodshed at Qafr Qasem.'

"All this was established in the trial which, as the scandal slowly leaked out, the government was obliged to hold. The trial was a pro forma affair. There was little moral outrage in the courtroom, and, apart from a few lone voices, very little outside it. During the proceedings the leading newspaper Haaretz reported that 'the eleven officers and soldiers who are on trial for the massacre in Kafr Qasem have all received a 50% increase in their salaries. A special messenger was sent to Jerusalem to bring the cheques to the accused in time for Passover. A number of the accused had been given a vacation for the holiday... The accused mingle freely with the spectators; the officers smile at them and pat them on the back; some of them shake hands with them. It is obvious, that these people, whether they will be found innocent or guilty, are not treated as criminals, but as heroes.' One Private David Goldfield reportedly resigned from the Security Police in protest against the trial. According to the Jewish Newsletter, his testimony merely reflected what most Israelis thought: 'I feel that the Arabs are the enemies of our State... When I went to Kafr Qasem, I felt that I went against the enemy and I made no distinction between the Arabs in Israel and those outside its frontiers.' Asked what he would do if he met an Arab woman, in no sense a security threat, who was trying to reach her home, he replied: 'I would shoot her down, I would harbour no sentiments, because I received an order and I had to carry it out.' The sentences were pro forma too. Melinki and Dahan got jail terms of 17 and 15 years respectively, but it was a foregone conclusion that they would only serve a fraction of them. In response to appeals for a pardon, the Supreme Military Court decided to reduce the 'harsh' sentence; and, following this generous example, the Chief of Staff, then the Head of State, and finally a Committee for the Release of Prisoners all made contributions, so that within a year of their sentence Melinki and Dahan were free men. As for Brigadier Shadmi - the 'no sentimentality' senior officer - a Special Military Court found him guilty of a 'merely technical' error, reprimanded him and fined him one piastre. But the twist in the tail was yet to come. Nine months after his release from prison, Dahan, convicted of killing 43 Arabs in an hour, was appointed 'officer responsible for Arab affairs' in the town of Ramleh. And the last that has been heard of Major Melinki was that, through his influential connections in the army, he had secured a coveted permit, sought after by many an entrepreneur, to set up a tourist centre in southern Israel." (The Gun & The Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 1977, pp 185-87)

By way of highlighting the obscenity of the judicial farce which followed the massacre (which, incidentally, was covered up for 6 weeks before the troops responsible were charged with murder), it's worth recalling colonial Australia's Myall Creek massacre. Here's the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on it:

'The Myall Creek massacre involved the killing of up to 30 unarmed Indigenous Australians by 10 white Europeans and one black African on 10 June 1838 at Myall Creek near Bingara in northern New South Wales. After two trials, seven of the 11 colonists involved in the killings were found guilty of murder and hanged."

That was 118 years before Kafr Qassem.

Memo to Bob Carr: Israel is Occupied Palestine

In an opinion piece in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, former Labor foreign ministers, Bob Carr and Gareth Evans, slammed "Australia's new policy of refusing to describe East Jerusalem as 'occupied'":

"If East Jerusalem is not to be referred to as 'occupied', why not Nablus or Bethlehem? If the Australian government can say 'occupied East Jerusalem' is fraught with 'pejorative implications' what is to stop Ms Bishop applying this to the occupied West Bank as a whole?" (East Jerusalem stance will not aid peace process)

Point well taken, but perhaps it's time to broaden the discussion:

If East Jerusalem is to be referred to as occupied (which, if course, it certainly is), why not West Jerusalem?

If Nablus and Bethlehem are to be referred to as occupied (which, of course, they certainly are), why not Jaffa and Haifa?

The simple fact of the matter is that today's 'Israel' - taken by brute force force and ethnic cleansing in 1948 - is just as much occupied Palestine as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - taken by brute force and ethnic cleansing in 1967.

Do Carr and Evans need to consult the shades of the Zionist architects of Israeli-occupied Palestine - from the River to the Sea - to understand the bleeding obvious? Namely, that every inch of Palestine is stolen land? That just about every Jewish Israeli is either a settler or the son and daughter of a settler or the grandson or granddaughter of a settler? That yesterday's kibbutzim and moshavim are today's West Bank settlements? That Israel is because Palestine isn't?

So be it then:

David Ben-Gurion: "If I was an Arab leader, I should never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but that was two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

Vladimir Jabotinsky: "Any native people... views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs... They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon the prairie..."

Moshe Dayan: "Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes, we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul, Gvat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Haneifa, and Kfar-Yehoshua in the place of Tel-Shaman. There is not one single place in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

Carr and Evans also wrote:

"Israeli realists know indefinite occupation of the West Bank will degrade their own country, maintaining its Jewish identity only at the price of compromising its democracy."

Can they tell us how maintaining the "Jewish identity" of Israel - at the expense of the non-Jewish Palestinians - is not as racist a project as that of White South Africans maintaining the White identity of South Africa - at the expense of non-White South Africans?

Maybe they need to sit down and listen, really listen, to the unashamedly Zionist, and hence unashamedly racist, Israeli mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gapso:

"I'm not afraid to say it out loud... Upper Nazareth is a Jewish city and it's important that it remain so. If that makes me a racist, then I'm a proud offshoot of a glorious dynasty of 'racists' that started with the 'Covenant of the Pieces' [that God made with Abraham, recounted in Genesis 15:1-15] and the explicitly racist promise: 'To your seed have I given this land' [Genesis 15:38]...

"The racist Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, not The State of All Its Citizens). Lord Balfour recommended the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people. David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Arlosoroff, Moshe Sharett and other racists established the Jewish Agency, and the racist UN decided to establish a Jewish state - in other words, a state for Jews. The racist Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the Jewish State in the Land of Israel, and during the War of Independence even made sure to bring in hundreds of thousands of Jews and drive out hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had been living here - all to enable it to be founded with the desired racist character.

"Since then, racially pure kibbutzim without a single Arab member and an army that protects a certain racial strain have been established, as have political parties that proudly bear racist names such as Habayit Hayehudi - 'The Jewish Home'. Even our racist national anthem ignores the existence of the Arab minority - in other words, the people Ben-Gurion did not manage to expel in the 1948 war. If not for all that 'racism' it's doubtful we could live here, and doubtful we could live at all.

"In these times of hypocrisy and bleeding-heart sanctimoniousness, of the proliferation of flaky types who are disconnected from reality, in the relative security that causes us to forget the dangers we face, we can sit in north Tel Aviv and cry 'racism' to seem enlightened and good-hearted in our own eyes. We can be shocked at a mayor who prefers that his city, which is right next to the largest Arab city in Israel, retain a Jewish majority and not be swallowed up in the Arab area that surrounds it. There will not be a single Jew in the future Palestinian state, but that's all right. That isn't racism." ('If you think I'm a racist, then Israel is a racist state', Haaretz, 7/8/13)

Howling Nonsense Meets Gushing Vacuity 2

Geraldine Doogue:

Well, you also talk about the fact that for a lot of those who came... they didn't see the people who were already there.

So let me get this straight: they could see the coming Holocaust, but not the Palestininian Arabs right in front of their eyes? Right. Please explain then, if you can, the 1891 testimony of at least one such Zionist settler with a conscience, name of Ahad Ha-Am:

"They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these things." (See my 18/6/08 post Avnery's Apology: A Critique for the full quote)

Ari Shavit:

The subtitle of my book is The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel. The triumph is the result of what I describe. It's a remarkable human endeavour of a poor, lonely people saving itself.

Here we go again...

The tragedy is really the tragedy of the conflict, and in my own case, I describe the arrival of my own great grandfather. He, like others, would not see the others who were living in the land, the Palestinians. Now, as I make the point in the book, they were not conquistadors. There wasn't a political entity called Palestine at the time. There was no Palestinian republic, no Palestinian kingdom, and yet there were half a million Palestinians in the land at the time...

Not conquistadors, Ari? No, not initially, at any rate. They didn't need to be. They had British conquistadors to keep the natives in check, while the Jewish colons learnt the ropes. And then, when the British conquistadors had grown tired of the dirty work, the colons took up conquistadoring, first against the British, then against the natives. Every colonist is a conquistador of sorts, Ari. And just as great gramps Herbert didn't 'see' the natives, you, the ex-paratrooper, don't 'see' what you really are.

Now I know you're probably not big on Vladimir Jabotinsky, but at least he was more honest than you:

"Any native people... views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs... They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie." (See my 12/6/08 post Pemulwuy in Palestine for the full quote)

... and because of their desperate need to build a national home for the Jews, and because of their yearning for the glorious biblical past, they overlooked the fact that there were others living in the land, and that set in motion this horrible hundred year war that is still going on. So you have the complexity, the beauty, I would say the heroism, the morality, and the need, and the blindness which led them to this inevitable and ongoing, deep and tragic conflict.

Sorry, Ari, however you like to dress up the Zionist project in Palestine, it was all, from the very beginning, just another grubby colonial land grab. Hey, but at least you've managed to fool dopey Geraldine!

Geraldine:

Indeed, and... um... I must say I was conscious on my recent trip of the vitality of Israel and lots of people write about this. You describe it as a miracle, and you feel it, the greenery, the gardens, the cultural life, the opinions, the openness, and of course the Arabs look on at this, and what is your sense? I got a very mixed sense about how the Arabs... I thought some Arabs desperately wanted to be part of it to be honest, which you don't hear that said much...

Part of Israel? But of course, Israel is occupied Palestinian land. Always was, always will be - Palestinian land. As Moshe Dayan once said in a moment of candour, describing the massive post-Nakba theft of Palestinian land:

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages... There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." (See my 1/9/12 post Only 'Sort Of'? for the details.)

... and the others, of course, as one man said to me in Bethlehem, this older man who looked for all the world like somebody from Scotland but he was actually - hahaha - a Palestinian with Crusader blood in him - ha! - a redhead, freckled man, he said, We have to lose all hope, we have to abandon all hope we Palestinians, it's a terrible phrase actually, but you know, how do you reconcile these two facts. They're both true.

OK, you want a classic example of folie a deux? Here it is:

Ari:

... the Holy Land, and this conflict, are much more complex than many people realise so I think that what you have on the one hand is that there are many Palestinians who, and I have empathy to them - my book tells the story of my people from my point of view, but its full of empathy to the other - and I see the Palestinians all the time and I'm aware of their tragedy, of their suffering. I think there are two states of mind. On the one hand, there are these grievances, the hostility, the bitterness, and all that side of it that we hear so much about. On the other hand, there is a side that we don't hear that much about. Israel, for all its faults, and I'm very critical of government policies on many issues, Israel is, if you look at the Middle East, an oasis of liberty and prosperity and freedom. What you have in Israel, sadly, sadly, you do not have hundreds and probably thousands of miles around, and therefore I think many Palestinians and Arabs are ambivalent because on the other hand, for good reasons from their point of view, they have resentment. On the other hand they want to join the the party in some ways and those who live within Israel again, while politically...

Geraldine:

Well, they think they've got the jackpot. I met them hahaha...

So Palestinians in Israel have hit the jackpot! Just as well they managed to dodge the Great Ethnic Cleansing of 1948. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to experience the thrill of living under the Israeli jackboot a full 19 years before their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza won the jackpot/jackboot in 1967.

Ari:

... So while politically they've got a lot of criticism, as I say, especially when there is this terrible tragedy happening - it's worse than a tragedy happening, it's a catastrophe - the human catastrophe happening in Syria with the world looking at this helpless as hundreds are killed daily, then I think many Arabs and Palestinians living in Israel, with all their criticism, they realise that life under the Zionists in Nazareth is somewhat better than life under the Arab nationalists in Damascus. Now this is not something that most of them say aloud. You don't hear it publicly...

No, Ari, what they were really saying was Thank God for Ben Dunkelman, otherwise we wouldn't be here now. Never heard of him? I thought not. He was the Canadian Jew who commanded the Haganah's Seventh Brigade, which took control of Nazareth in 1948. Here's what he had to say about the immediate aftermath: 

"Two days after the second truce came into effect, the Seventh Brigade was ordered to withdraw from Nazareth. Avraham Yaffe, who had commanded the 13th battalion in the assault on the city, now reported to me with orders from Moshe Carmel to take over from me as its military governor. I complied with the order, but only after Avraham had given me his word that he would do nothing to harm or displace the Arab population. My demand may sound strange, but I had good reason to feel concerned on this subject. Only a few hours previously, Haim Laskov had come to me with astounding orders: Nazareth's civilian population was to be evacuated! I was shocked and horrified. I told him I would do nothing of the sort - in view of our promises to safeguard the city's people, such a move would be both superfluous and harmful. I reminded him that scarcely a day earlier, he and I, as representatives of the Israeli army, had signed the surrender document, in which we solemnly pledged to do nothing to harm the city or the population. When Haim saw that I refused to obey the order, he left. A scarce twelve hours later, Avraham Yaffe came to tell me that his battalion was relieving my brigade; I felt sure that this order had been given because of my defiance of the evacuation order. But although I was withdrawn from Nazareth, it seems that my disobedience did have some effect. It seems to have given the high command time for second thoughts, which led them to the conclusion that it would, indeed, be wrong to expel the inhabitants of Nazareth. To the best of my knowledge, there was never any more talk of the evacuation plan, and the city's Arab citizens have lived there ever since." (Truth Whereby Nations Live, Peretz Kidron, in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship & the Palestinian Question, Ed. by Edward Said & Christopher Hitchens, 1988, p 87)

... but actually people are aware of it, and this is where some of my cautious, conditional optimism comes from, because while I do not see us right now signing a grand peace deal that will end the conflict the way American Secretary of State Kerry just tried, I do think there is a kind of grass roots pragmatism on both sides that has some hope in it of some coexistence. People do want to move on with their lives. As I like to say when I'm in this great country of yours, at the end of the day, speaking about my fellow Israelis, most Israelis want Israel to be like Australia. They don't want it to be some sort of religious entity or extremist national [state], that's the vision of a tiny minority. Most people would like to have a good life, a vibrant democracy, a kind of sunny, vibrant hedonistic society celebrating life. That's the real vision and the real wish of most people, so if you give them a realistic, pragmatic peace concept, something to solve the issues not in complete, just and permanent way but something that is real, they'll go for it and if we and the international community will come up with that kind of new thinking I think that you'll be surprised to find that most Israelis, and hopefully most Palestinians, will be more pragmatic than what we see right now.

Er, Ari, about that realistic, pragmatic peace concept... to solve the issues NOT in a complete, just and permanent way that you're on about, didn't you say that great gramps Herbert and the rest had brought a fierce belief in justice with them to Palestine?

To be continued...

'Improving the Lives of All Israelis, Jewish or Not'

"While not without fault, Israel has proven its long-term commitment to democracy and liberty and to improving the lives of all Israelis, whether Jewish or not." (Janet Albrechtsen, It is time for Middle East to police its own region, The Australian, 29/1/14)

Not!

Clearly, Planet Janet hasn't read Max Blumenthal's must-read Goliath: Life & Loathing in Greater Israel (2013):

"In the eyes of Palestinians, there are few symbols of Israel's occupation more recognizable than the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer. Custom-fitted with explosive-resistant armor, the 49-ton tractor was the instrument responsible for Rachel Corrie's death and the demolition of more than 1500 civilian homes in Rafah between the years 2000 and 2005. Since the dawn of the occupation in 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), the State of Israel has destroyed well over 26,000 Palestinian homes. Most of these demolitions occurred in and around occupied East Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip, but also in places such as the Jenin Refugee Camp, where a drunken bulldozer pilot nicknamed 'Kurdi Bear' reduced densely populated neighborhoods to a canyon of doom, boasting that he 'left [Jenin's] residents with a football stadium so they could play.'

"As the state stepped up its campaign of 'Judaization' under the watch of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian neighborhoods in mixed Israeli cities were becoming acquainted with the US-manufactured Caterpillar-D9 as well. Fifteen minutes east of Tel Aviv, in the Lod Ghetto, where Palestinian citizens lived surrounded by lower-class Jewish communities, I visited a de facto refugee camp filled with the residents of an entire neighborhood that had been leveled to the ground the night before.

"On December 13, 2010, 17-year-old Hamza Abu Eid was taken out of class at his high school in Lod and summoned to the principal's office. 'The Israelis are destroying your house right now,' the principal told him. 'It is best that you remain here. The last thing we want is for you to have a confrontation with a police officer.'

"But Abu Eid could not stay. He rushed to his family's house, hoping to salvage whatever belongings he could before the bulldozers from the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) rumbled through. When he arrived it was too late. The bulldozers had destroyed virtually everything - all seven homes belonging to the Abu Eid family were reduced to rubble. A black-masked Israeli riot police officer grabbed Hamza, restraining him while the bulldozers finished their work and preventing him from attempting to save his belongings. Three refrigerators and a TV set were among the appliances that Hamza's family lost in the destruction.

"In the end, 74 people were left homeless - including 54 children - and were forced to sleep under the open sky during the coldest period of the year. No government social worker arrived with assistance, nor did the state offer any temporary aid. The families gathered whatever belongings they could, pitching tents like so many Palestinian refugees have done in the past, and placing a sign over their land plot. It read, 'Abu Eid Refugee Camp.'

"When I arrived at the encampment, the area looked like Rafah after Israeli operations during the Second Intifada, or the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza after Operation Cast Lead. Unlike these occupied areas, however, the Abu Eid camp was located only 15 kilometers from Tel Aviv in the Abu Toq neighborhood of Lod. All of Lod's Palestinian residents are citizens of Israel, but they are treated by the state like foreign aliens, or worse, as an existential threat to the survival of Zionism.

"For years, the Abu Eid family applied for permits to allow them to renovate their homes to accommodate their growing family. But the state zoned their neighborhood as agricultural land and refused their requests (applications for renovation and building permits are almost always denied to the Arabs inside Israel). Finally, the state ordered them to seek residency elsewhere because their homes were slated for demolition.

"Directly beside the Abu Eid refugee camp, building has begun on a yeshiva directed by an Orthodox rabbi from the United States named Yaakov Saban. And plans were authorized to build a road directly through the center of the neighborhood. Pressure on the Palestinian Israelis of Lod to leave intensified day by day, thanks to the far-right takeover of the city.

"Widespread corruption had prompted the collapse of the elected municipality, enabling the Israeli Ministry of the Interior to install an emergency government consisting of hand-picked military officials. With the Ministry of the Interior under the control of Eli Yishai, who led the right-wing religious Shas Party, the new municipality became a means for meting out the wrath of anti-Arab populists against the local Arab population. 'They are poor in culture, poor in behavior. No ambition,' the mayor of Ramle, a neighboring city, said of the Palestinians of Lod.

"By the time the Abu Eid family's homes were demolished, as many as 30 demolition orders hovered over the Arab residents of Lod. The Arabs of Lod were not only denied the right to renovate their own houses, they also claimed they were forbidden as Arabs from living in a giant, new public housing complex built in the heart of the city. Thus they were confined to an overcrowded ghetto doomed by state plans that prioritized Judaization.

"I arrived at the Abu Eid camp on January 25, 2010, to observe a protest by Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity, a national movement that grew out of the protests against East Jerusalem evictions of Palestinian families, and which was establishing a presence in mixed cities around Israel, as well as in the most threatened areas of the West Bank. Amiel Vardi, a veteran activist, explained to me, 'For years I've been trying to say, 'Don't think the occupation will stop at the Green Line.' Now we see it's not stopping. They're using the same methods with the settlements, with the courts, and with the Shabak [Shin Bet] on both sides of the Green Line. Go to the Abu Eid camp in Lod or to Al-Arakib [a repeatedly demolished Bedouin village in the Negev], and there's absolutely no difference from what I see in the Hebron Hills.'

"I entered the remains of the Abu Eid family dwellings at the end of Lod's Helen Keller Boulevard, finding small groups of grizzled men seated around open fires and sipping tea, while small children clambered in and out of tents erected beside piles of rubble, debris, and shattered home appliances. A forlorn-looking middle-aged man named Riyadh Abu Eid met me at the entrance and took me into the makeshift camp.

"'This place was here before 1948,' he said. 'They destroyed it because they said we had no permit. But we can't get permits because we are '48 Arabs. We asked many times and were denied every time. They say we are terrorists. But look around - this is the real terror. Throwing children into the street on the coldest day of the year - that is terror.'

"According to Riyadh Abu Eid, many children from camp were unable to attend school because they could not concentrate. A 9-year-old girl who was especially traumatized had refused to leave her bed for days. Riyadh did not try to conceal his desperation. 'We do not feel safe here,' he said. 'We want to ask the United nations and Obama for international protection from a fascist government that has proven capable of massacring the unarmed.' He added, 'The days of 1948 have come again'." (pp 165-67)

She's Baaack

Whaddya know, Planet Janet's back on The Australian's opinion page with more of her all-leather chutzpah after an unnoticed and unmissed absence of...?

And blow me down if she hasn't "humbly draft[ed] a speech for President Obama after spending the last few weeks in the US where newspapers have been busily reporting continuing crises in the Middle East, and failed peace talks, because Sunni and Shia, the two main branches of Islam are once again pitted against one another." (It is time for Middle East to police its own region, Janet Albrechtsen, 29/1/14)

That just about says it all really.

You see, in the beginning was the word, and the word was Sunni-Shia Divide (S-SD), the latest USraeli propaganda construct designed to deflect attention away from the actual roots of violence in the Middle East - 'good' old-fashioned imperialism and colonialism. In the scribblings of USraeli propagandists these days everything that moves or stirs in the Middle East is a manifestation of the dreaded S-SD.

And Planet Janet's Obama has had a gutful:

"It is a speech I must give because, to be frank, America is sick of its role as the international policeman of first resort... America - and I am sure our great allies abroad - has grown tired of being called upon to solve these conflicts."

Poor old Barack! He's like: 'OMG, these never-ending interventions are such a drag! I mean, America's had it up to here being dragged kicking and screaming into conflict after conflict in the flogging Middle East. Enough already! She is so fucking droned you wouldn't believe.'

After all:

"In the name of human decency and liberty, we helped free the Iraqi people from a government that gassed and slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens. We helped liberate the Afghan people from the brutal yoke of the Taliban. We then provided support to put an end to the murderous regime in Libya."

It hardly matters for Planet Janet, of course, that Iraq only had an attack of the S-SD after the Yanks waded in in 2003. Or that the Yanks paved the way for the Taliban by backing its 'Holy Warrior' forbears against a secular, Russian-backed Afghan regime from 1979 to 1992. Or that, in the case of Libya, the Shia half of the equation has been conspicuous by its complete and unremitting absence since the year dot.

Planet Janet's Obama, of course, has only one thing on his mind:

"The world cannot wait for Sunnis and Shia to continue to slaughter each other in the name of Mohammed and a centuries old conflict about his rightful heir."

Thankfully, on the Syrian front of the S-SD, our sock-puppet Prez has the advantage of the foreign policy expertise and wisdom of the world's leading statesman:

"The Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, best described the conflict in Syria as one between bad guys and bad guys. He is right. We need more of this frankness."

That the conflict in Syria has bugger all to do with the S-SD, and everything to do with the sectarian genie unleashed in Iraq by those wonderfully 'decent, liberty-loving' folk, Bush, Blair and Howard, a genie which has slipped across the border into a secular Syria, bristling with CIA-supplied arms and wallets stuffed with Gulf petrodollars, is of course neither here nor there to Planet Janet.

Then there's that other unfinished business in the Middle East, which has bugger all to do with the S-SD - the unresolved issue of Zionist ethnic cleansing and colonization in Palestine (1948-2014):

"Finally, as part of the resolution of this conflict in the Middle East, I call on Hezbollah and Hamas, and all Arab governments which haven't yet done so, immediately to recognise Israel as the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people. Until that happens there will be no enduring settlement of outstanding issues in the Middle East, whether they are conflicts over land or religion. While not without fault, Israel has proven its long-term commitment to democracy and liberty and to improving the lives of all Israelis, whether Jewish or not."

Planet Janet, of course, neglects to mention that Shia Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas are on the same side here, and also that Jewish Israel is the mother of all sectarian entities in the Middle East.

And quite how the Palestinians are expected to get an "enduring settlement" out of giving the thumbs up to Israel's wholesale theft of their country is anyone's guess, but face it - what else would you expect one of the rambammed (2008) to say?

Notice here that, with respect to the Zionist entity, Planet Janet covers her svelte, leather-clad arse with the lawyerly formulation, "while not without fault." Typically, such faults are never spelt out by the likes of Planet Janet (too long a list maybe?), just glossed over with tripe about Israel "improving the lives of all Israelis... Jewish or not," about which matter I'll be returning in my very next post.

And isn't it amazing that not even the spectacle of Planet Janet putting her tongue in Barack Obama's mouth does it for certain old grumps:

"Nothing can save Barack Obama from ignominy, not even Janet Albrechtsen's formidable skills as a speech-writer." George Fishman, Vaucluse, NSW (The Australian, 30/1/14)

The Hounding of Jake Lynch

The bullying and intimidation of Jake Lynch goes on:

"An Israeli civil rights group has launched legal action against Jake Lynch, the head of the University of Sydney's Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies, in the Human Rights Commission, alleging his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement contravenes the Racial Discrimination Act. Associate Professor Lynch last year refused to assist Dan Avnon, the author of the only joint civics curriculum for Jewish and Arab school students*, to undertake work at the university as a representative of an Israeli institution... The Shurat HaDin complaint is based on Section 9 of the 1975 Race [sic] Discrimination Act. It reads: 'It is unlawful for a person to do any act involving a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of any human right or fundamental freedom in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life'." (Professor faces legal action on BDS stand, Christian Kerr, The Australian, 2/8/13)

(*Kerr, of course, can't even tell the story straight: it's a civics curriculum for joint Jewish/Arab schools, not the other way round.)

While Mr Avnon was no doubt completely shattered by the experience (as only an Israeli can be?), it should always be kept in mind that when it comes to dishing out "distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour (who knows?), descent or national or ethnic origin," the apartheid, 'Jewish' state of Israel, of which his university is an integral part, is second to none.

Even a simple scan of the blurb for his 2009 book, Plurality & Citizenship in Israel: Moving Beyond the Jewish/Palestinian Divide, reveals that Israel's Palestinian minority experiences "unequal access to citizenship; unequal access to land; discrimination in access to public services; insufficient defence of minority rights in Israel's legal system; unequal obligations; [and] unequal economic opportunities." And while we're at it, name me one other country in the world which bases its immigration policy solely on biology?

One wonders, therefore, why such a "civil rights group" as Shurat HaDin, modelled, so Kerr tells us, "on the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Centre, that has successfully used US courts to target the Ku Klux Klan," needs to come all the way to Australia to bother one of this country's most ethical academics. Could there possibly be some other reason? Just asking. 

But back to the matter of difference, exclusion or preference based on national/ethnic origin and the Israeli apartheid state. Whilst pottering around on the internet recently, this particularly egregious example, of which I was hitherto completely unaware, really had me sitting up and taking notice:

"In May of 1948, the State of Israel was established as the modern nation-state of the Jewish people. That November, a state agency, the 'Central Bureau of Statistics' (CBS), conducted the first population census, at the height of the War of Independence [sic: ethnic cleansing of Palestine]. Under a curfew of 7 hours, military and security personnel proceeded to canvass every Israeli household and register all its citizens. An order was given specifying that those absent from their homes would not be registered as citizens and that their ownership of goods, property and land was not to be recognized. Though the order was formulated in universalistic terms, applying to all inhabitants, its sanctions were in effect applied only to the Palestinian Arab population, for it was only members of this group who were not at home. Hundreds of thousands had fled and had been driven from their homes during the fighting [sic: ethnic cleansing]. While the census was ostensibly an enumeration of all residents, it in fact created the population that it was counting. Those who were not counted were thereby excluded from the target population, their rights forfeited. This included not only the refugees who had left the territory under Israel's control, but internal refugees as well. Of those absent during the census, many were internal refugees, remaining within the territory that eventually became Israel's... Though this group was given Israeli citizenship, their property rights were never restored, and they became the statistical category of 'present-absentees'." (The Uncounted: Citizenship & Exclusion in the Israeli Census of 1948, Anat Leibler & Daniel Breslau, sts-biu.org)

Only in Israel.

Fiddler With No Roof

Q&A buffs out there may remember when Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was on the panel last September.

They may even remember this particular question from one, Marrianne Fraser:

"After all the pogroms throughout the centuries, with Jews never being able to own land in any country they lived in and being forced from their homes time and again as portrayed so well in my favourite musical Fiddler on the Roof, and after the Holocaust, isn't it just for Jews to have been given a place to call their own?"

Certainly, they'll remember Pappe's memorable reply:

"You know, this kind of question always reminds me of people setting off in search of a refuge for battered women and abused children. They find a home where another family lives, throw them off the balcony, and their home becomes the refuge." (The rest of that response and more may be found in my 22/9/12 post The Nakba Comes to Q&A.)

Well, Fiddler on the Roof's Tevye has made a welcome reappearance in a new Rabbis4 Human Rights production called Theodore Bikel: It hurts that the descendents of Anatevka expel Israeli Bedouin, just posted on YouTube.

Set against the backdrop of Israeli government bulldozers demolishing the Bedouin village of El-Araqib, and Israeli troops terrorising its inhabitants, apparently to make way for a Jewish National Fund project called 'The Ambassadors Forest', Tevye, in trademark cap, makes the following plea:

"My name is Theodore Bikel and I want to ask you to help prevent a terrible moral tragedy.

"I've spent much of my life playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. I see a parallel with what is happening today. 40,000 Bedouins in the Negev Desert are being told to get out of their homes.

"Remember the scene in Fiddler on the Roof when the Russians arrived and tell them they have 3 days to get out? Tevye says, Why should I get out? He says, Not just you, all of you! Tevye says, Why should we leave? He says, I don't know why. I have an order here. Tevye says, A piece of paper can get me out? What if we refuse to leave? He says, You know the consequences of refusal.

"It hurts me. But what hurts me even more is the fact that the very people who are telling them to get out are the descendents of the people of Anatevka - my people. I want to prevent that. I want to prevent an injustice. I want you to help and join me and join the Rabbis4 Human Rights."

If They're Good Enough for the Technion...

In his propaganda piece in yesterday's Australian contra Sydney University's Student Representative Council's decision to back Associate Professor Jake Lynch's academic boycott of Israel, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, Philip Chester, drew attention to the Technion's alleged embrace of Palestinian-Israeli (or in Zionist parlance Arab Israeli) students:

"About 20% of the [Technion's] students are Arabs, which is proportionate to the Arab component of Israel's population... For more than 12 years, the Technion has been running an outreach program that specifically prepares Israeli Arab high school students for university... Some of the most successful collaboration between Palestinians and Israelis is in the field of science." (Appalling attempt to boycott Israeli uni)

(Which talk, incidentally, reminds me of the joint Israeli/Palestinian sporting teams set up by the Peres Centre for Peace, one example of which turned up in Australia in 2008,* designed to distract gullible Westerners from an understanding of Israel's colonial, apartheid reality.)

Chester is suggesting, of course, that a boycott of Israeli academic institutions such as the Technion is in fact anti-Palestinian/Arab and therefore counterproductive.

To argue in this way, however, is a potentially risky strategy for Zionist propagandists because it raises - or should raise - some fundamental questions about the very nature of a supremacist Jewish state in Palestine: if Palestinian-Israelis/Arab Israelis are good enough to study at one of Israel's oldest and most prestigious universities (or to play in Israeli sporting teams), then why are they not good enough to be treated as equal citizens with Israeli Jews; and why, for that matter, aren't the exiled Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 good enough to be repatriated as full and equal citizens with Israeli Jews in a bi-national, secular, democratic Israeli-Palestinian state?

Philip?

[*See my 5/10/11 post The Peace Team: Politics & PR.]

What a Pity Lieberman Speaks Fluent Israeli

Sometimes (well most of the time actually) I just don't understand The Australian Jewish News. No sooner had I registered (in my previous post) my amazement that former Argentine military supremo Jorge Videla speaks fluent Israeli, than I came across the much more extraordinary spectacle of an  AJN columnist expressing amazement that Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, does too:

"Avigdor Lieberman has such a way with words. Israel's ultra-controversial Foreign Minister went to visit el-Zamouk last week, a Bedouin town in southern Israel, to emphasise the fact - much to residents' anger - that the government considers it illegally built. His subtext was to point out that unauthorised structures in the village are still standing, even though, to his disappointment, the state has begun evacuating Jewish settler homes that are illegally built on Palestinian land. As Lieberman spoke to reporters, an Arab lawmaker, Taleb el-Sana, came to heckle him. 'You have no business to be here,' el-Sana said. 'You are persona non grata in the Bedouin communities. You act like the mafia.' Did Lieberman continue in a dignified manner? Or come up with a witty response? Nope, instead he threw out that stock insult that members of the Israeli right love to throw out at Arabs with whom they have a conflict. 'You are a terrorist,' he retorted." (The things Liebermans say, Bob Meiser, 6/7/12)

If only Lieberman had displayed a bit of the old Jewish wit instead of speaking fluent Israeli, then it would have more than made up for the bulldozing of Bedouin homes, right Bob?

Consensus At Last...

... in the Murdoch and Fairfax press!

Yes, Virginia, Israel is an apartheid state, whether it's in Israel (im)proper:

"In the never-ending conflict in the Middle East, Taiseer Khatib and his wife Lana are part of a new frontline... Born in Akko (Acre) in northern Israel where his family goes back more than 400 years, Khatib married Lana, whose family fled Haifa, in Israel, for Jenin in the West Bank in 1948, upon the formation of Israel. Under Israeli law, Palestinians from the West Bank are not permitted to migrate to Israel, even if they have a spouse there. Many Palestinians who live in Israel, officially known by Israel as 'Israeli Arabs', form relationships with Palestinians in the West Bank... [A]s 'a West Banker', Lana Khatib can only pass through Israeli checkpoints into Israel to visit her husband in Akko if she can get a temporary visitor's permit... 'We feel like half-humans', Taiseer Khatib told visiting journalists this week. 'Any immigrant who is coming to Israel from Ethiopia or Russia who is new to this city, the minute he puts his feet down at the airport, he has more rights than I have. I'm talking pure racism, which is beyond apartheid. Under apartheid, there were cases where people were allowed to have mixed marriages but she (Lana) is part of me and the state is interfering in my personal choices, getting into my bed, my own room'." (Living under the cloud of Israel's cruel apartheid, John Lyons, The Australian, 5/5/12)

Or in the occupied West Bank:

"The residents of the tiny Palestinian village of Sheb al-Buttum, built on the hard soil and rocks of the South Hebron Hills, are thankful for small mercies. The recent installation of 4 neat rows of solar panels has brought a steady supply of electricity to the village for the first time, allowing them to abandon the expensive and unreliable generator they could only run for 2 hours a day. They now have enough power to run a fridge (to store the butter they make from their sheep and goat's milk), an electric churn (to save hours of hand mixing every day) and when their children need to study after dark they can do so by a light brighter than a candle's flicker. But this clean energy project is now under threat - Israel's Civil Administration has put a demolition order on the panels.

"Since January more than 100 solar panels and 6 wind turbines - installed by Israeli group Community Electricity & Technology Middle East (COMET-ME), and funded by the German foreign ministry - have been marked for demolition. They cover 7 villages. The COMET-ME director, Noam Dotan, a retired Israeli tech executive and physicist, says Israel wants to move all Palestinians from the area. 'The fight here is a daily fight for every dunum [1000 square metres]'.

***

"All the villages are in Area C, which covers 60% of the West Bank, and is under Israeli administrative control. It is home to 150,000 Palestinians and contains the bulk of Palestinian agricultural and grazing land... At the same time as it has refused to permit Palestinian construction in the area, Israel has allowed more than 300,000 settlers to develop more than 135 settlements and 100 outposts - areas that are off limits to Palestinians and yet often built on privately-owned Palestinian land, the settlement watch group Peace Now says.

"Israel also prevents Palestinian villages from connecting to the water and electricity grids for nearby settlements, says Alon Cohen-Lifshitz of Bimkom - Planners for Planning Rights. 'Israel wants to clean this area of Palestinians', Mr Cohen-Lifshitz says. 'It is not occupation, it is apartheid'." ('They want to destroy our village': Israel plans solar panel demolition, Ruth Pollard, The Sun-Herald, 6/5/12)

Some Honest Reporting At Last

I spend a lot of my time on this blog critiquing the pro-Israel bias of corporate journalists. Just occasionally, however, they manage to get things right, and deserve credit for doing so.

This applies to Fairfax's Middle East correspondent Ruth Pollard for her report, Bedouin battle to stay in their villages ends in rubble, in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald. Although she doesn't use the term 'ethnic cleansing', this is in fact the phenomenon Pollard documents in her report, as this month's briefing to the UN Committee on Economic & Cultural Rights by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) shows:

"[S]ince 1967 Israel has demolished over 25,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The motivation for demolishing these homes is purely political: to either drive the Palestinians out of the country altogether or to confine the 4 million residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza to small, crowded, impoverished and disconnected enclaves. This policy will effectively foreclose the possibility of any viable Palestinian entity and the realization of Palestinian self-determination, while solidifying Israeli control, illegal settlement expansion and de facto annexation of the occupied territory. Taken against the background of Israel's systematic destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages, towns and urban neighborhoods in the 1948 war and subsequently, as well as its ongoing policy of demolishing 'unrecognised villages', the picture that emerges is one of ethnic cleansing."

It should never be forgotten that, whether backing Israel to the hilt in the UN, throwing birthday parties for it in federal parliament or catering to its domestic agents' every whim, official Australia is 100% complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine*.

Here is Pollard's report in full:

"The Israeli authorities came without warning last week, and despite her pleas for time to pack, the house Rifa al-Oqbi shared with her 2 young sons was demolished, and with it some of their most valued possessions. Smashed pale blue and white floor tiles lay among the debris of broken brick blocks and wooden framing, as her sons Ali, 5, and Omar, 4, played in the rubble of what was once their home in the village of al-Qrain, in the Negev Desert of southern Israel.

"The village was under a demolition order, but experts say there is rarely any warning before the bulldozers arrive. 'They asked me to immediately leave my house, and I asked them for 24 hours so I could remove the furniture and my other belongings... and they said no', the 31-year-old explained. 'They closed this entire area, and when I tried to grab one more thing, they beat me and threw me to the ground... and beat up a relative who came to help'.

"Israel's long-term goal of evicting between 30,000 and 40,000 indigenous Bedouin from their lands in the Negev Desert in order to create new Jewish settlements was cemented on September 11 with the adoption of the Prawer Plan. Due before parliament in the coming days, opponents of the plan say it will result in the seizure of two-thirds of the Bedouin's land, destroy all but 10 of the 45 'unrecognised' Bedouin villages in the Negev and extinguish the Bedouin's land claims without proper compensation.

"Thabet Abu Ras, the director of the Negev Project at Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said that although they make up about 30% of the region's population, the Bedouin occupy only about 2.5% of the Negev. They have already been 'corralled' onto the smallest amount of land possible', he said. 'If you take the land from the Bedouin... you are denying their right to exist'. Professor Abu Ras, who is also a professor of political geography at Ben Gurion University, has just returned from a lobbying trip to the US to try to raise the plight of the Bedouin.

"The Israeli cabinet this week gave the green light for work to begin on 10 Jewish settlements in the area 'to attract a new population to the Negev'. On Thursday, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, met the mayors from some Bedouin villages before the implementation of the plan, in which the 10 villages that are allowed to remain will become eligible for government services. All others will be razed and their residents forced to move to towns such as the government-created Hura, which has schools, a medical clinic, paved roads, water and electricity. To many Bedouin, Hura is overdeveloped and has no agricultural land for grazing. It 'feels like a prison', one community leader said.

"Mr Netanyahu said the plan would 'allow the Bedouin, for the first time, to realise their assets and turn them from dead capital to living capital to receive ownership of the land, which will allow for home construction, according to law, and for the development of enterprises and employment. This will jump the population forward and provide it with economic independence'.

"In a report before the development of the Prawer Plan, retired judge Eliezer Goldberg recommended that many Bedouin villages be recognised, acknowledging their 'general historic ties' to the land. Then the government asked the former deputy head of the National Security Council Ehud Prawer to implement Justice Goldberg's recommendations. He istead proposed the immediate transfer to the state of half the land claimed by the Bedouin, with minimal compensation for the remaining land. Not a single Bedouin was consulted by the committee.

"One village, al-Araqib, which is home to about 300 Bedouin, has been demolished and rebuilt 29 times in the past 18 months. The battle between Israeli forces and Bedouin in al-Araqib is played out with monotonous regularity. It is a process repeated throughout the region. Khalil al-Amour, school teacher, law student, father of 7 and the leader of the village of al-Sira, knows this battle. His house, along with the rest of the village of 47 homes and 500 people, is the subject of a demolition order. 'It is about cramming the maximum Bedouin onto the minimum amount of land', he said. And because his village is one of the many 'unrecognised villages', there is no running water, electricity, social services or schools. They are cut off from the rest of Israeli society, despite the fact that they serve in the army, vote, pay taxes and speak Hebrew, and some work in nearby Beersheba and other major centres. Many are now fighting through the courts for ownership of what land they have left. Mr Amour has a document he says proves his family ownership of the land, dated November 23, 1921, notarised by Britain. It is not recognised by Israel.

"There is often a deep misunderstanding of what it means to be a Bedouin, fuelled partly by a romantic image as the original nomads of the desert, resistant to the ways of the modern world. 'Bedouin are not against development and advancement and improvement to our lives', Mr Amour said. 'We just reject the way the government impose this on us. They are asking us to move to cities and towns that are the antithesis to Bedouin being. Israel uses a demolition order 'to encourage us to move'.

"Forced to live under the constant threat of demolition, the people of al-Sira are deeply frustrated and depressed. 'Even though they are determined to stay and fight, everything we build in this environment may not be here in the long term, so we build very rough just to survive', Mr Amour said.

"Professor Abu Ras estimates that in 1948 there were 100,000 Bedouin in the Negev. By 1951 there were 10,000 remaining, the rest had been forcibly moved to Jordan and the Sinai. Professor Abu Ras said the plan to push the Bedouin from their land had been under development since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, when they were first moved into what was known as the 'siyag triangle' in the Western Negev, with the promise that they could soon return to their ancestral lands. 'They are still waiting'.

"He estimates that under the Prawer Plan the Bedouin would receive just 100,000 dunams (10,000 hectares) of their outstanding claim of 600,000 dunams and monetary compensation would be far less than half the land value. For many Bedouin, some of whom have already been forcibly relocated at least once by the government, that compensation is just not enough."

Can Pollard's fine expose go unpunished? Stay tuned.

[*Not that complicity in Israel's ongoing crime against humanity bothers our rambammed polliewaffles. Here's federal treasurer Wayne Swan, for example, in 2003, extolling Israel's policies towards its Bedouin population after having travelled to Israel on a National Australia Bank Yachad Scholarship. Note that Swan 2003 sounds no different to Netanyahu today: "In the Negev Desert... there are programs that generate opportunities for the local Bedouin community. Young people receive scholarships and housing assistance to complete school education. There is affirmative action to ensure many can enter university and family-support programs for Bedouin children run by Bedouins [sic]. Conventional wisdom suggests disadvantaged communities such as the Negev Bedouin will not attain social or economic parity with other Israelis for generations. In providing intensive family support and access to education and training, however, the Israelis aim to accelerate the economic development. The long term aim is, of course, security and stability. There are clear lessons for Australia here... There are strong parallels between the experience of the Bedouins [sic] in Israel and our indigenous community." (We can learn from Israel's policies, The Sun-Herald, 30/11/03)]