Israel's Latest Insult

As almost everyone must know, the latest episode in the saga of Israeli contempt for the United States (literally, the hand that feeds this beast), exploded recently when Israel announced, at the very moment when Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel trying to pave the way for newly-announced peace negotiations, that it was building 1600 new dwellings in the area of East Jerusalem historically occupied by Palestinians. These will be illegal (International intergovernmental organizations such as the Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, every major organ of the United Nations, and the European Union have declared that the settlements are a violation of international law. see wikipedia) dwellings for Israeli settlers—the most rabidly anti-Palestinian, violent members of the Israeli nation. The announcement clearly took Biden by surprise, and he responded with appropriate umbrage. So, in subsequent days, did the State Department, announcing that Secretary of State Clinton had upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu (himself the most right-wing head of state Israel has had in a long time) for the “insult” to American peace-making attempts. More tellingly, perhaps, the American military, in the persons of Admiral Mike Mullen and General David Petraeus pointed out the same thing to Israel that Biden had: Israel’s actions, by further inflaming anti-American hatred among Muslims, endanger American troops in the Middle East. One might add that they also endanger American lives in general, both at home, and abroad.

None of this seems to matter, of course, to the zealots now in power in Israel, and their supporters in the United States. The pro-Israel lobby has been ringing the phones off the hook complaining about President Obama’s “anti-Israel policies” and even his alleged hatred of Israel and love for the Palestinians. This in the face of Obama’s having bent over backwards to curry favor with AIPAC during his presidential run, and for his recurrent announcements of the inseparable bonds joining the two nations. But for the pro-Israel lobby, nothing an American president does is ever good enough. It is not enough that for 60 years American presidents have been virtual handmaidens to Israel’s aggression against Palestinians; have pretended not to notice that Israel, alone among Middle Eastern nations, has developed nuclear weapons and now has a stockpile of more than 200 of the most advanced of them; and have supplied Israel with billions upon billions in military aid, to the point where it is now the 5th most powerful military on the planet—this with a tiny population of 5 million or so. Nor is it enough that American administrations have blocked all sanctions against Israel’s war crimes via its veto in the United Nations Security Council, and have propagandized almost as feverishly as Israel itself to characterize Palestinians and Arabs/Muslims in general as terrorists. No, it will apparently never be enough until every last Palestinian is hounded and terrorized and starved sufficiently to abandon the entire territory which Israel claims as its own—all of historic Palestine, which Israeli Zionists call Eretz Israel: greater Israel. That is the plan, and the United States of America is expected to go along with it, help implement it, no matter the danger to its own national interest and the safety of its citizens. To not do so is to be accused of being “anti-Semitic” by the pro-Israel lobby: AIPAC, the ADL (anti-defamation league), AIPAC-loyal Democrats in Congress, the propagandists on Commentary Magazine and in the general media, and on and on.

One example of this was the reaction of U.S. Representative Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) to the State Department’s criticism of Netanyahu; she called it an “irresponsible overreaction.” This was about the same as the Anti-Defamation League’s criticism, which called it a “gross overreaction” (could it be that the two worked out their language together?). No doubt more colorful and extreme language will be forthcoming. So will more extreme pressure on both Democrats in the Congress (a huge percentage of their funding comes from American Jews), and the Obama administration. Whether it will be able to weather the storm, maintain its perfectly legitimate stance, and/or pressure Israel to pull back from its illegal and inflammatory settlement activity, is an open question. But as Chris Hedges wrote recently on TruthDig, the current flap has inspired a perhaps more dangerous dilemma: it has put Liberal Jews on the Spot. Hedges means not only liberal Jews in the United States, but those in Israel as well—people like A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and the novelist Amos Oz. These are the people who have traditionally “anguished” over Israeli crimes, but taken a kind of strange pride in their anguish. As Norman Finkelstein described it in Hedges’ article, their stance said, “Isn’t it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done?” But the report of the classic Jewish liberal, Judge Richard Goldstone, whose Goldstone report on the Israeli invasion of Gaza noted the disproportionate military force used against Hamas militants and the failure to take adequate precautions to protect the civilian population, has blown the cover of these liberals. If a man who calls himself a Zionist, a man whose daughter moved to Israel, a man who sits on the board of governors of Hebrew University in Jersusalem and who has an honorary degree from that university—if such a man can condemn the Gaza invasion in such terms, and even indict Israel for its continuing occupation, its blockade, its torture of Palestinians, its willful decimation of their economy, and its erection of the so-called “security wall” creating an apartheid state—then Jewish liberals can no longer take refuge in their traditional anguish. As Finkelstein says:

“Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal, which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes….’you have to go to the criminal court.’” (from Chris Hedges, Israeli Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot, TruthDig, 3/15/2010).

In short, if liberal means belief in the rule of law, then the Goldstone Report makes clear that “it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel’s conduct.” Of course, many groups both within Israel and in the United States have known this for a long time. Many of my heroes in the American Jewish community, people like Noam Chomsky, Barbara Lubin, Norman Finkelstein, Dennis Bernstein and Nora Barrows Friedman of KPFA’s Flashpoints, and many many others, have for years researched and publicized and condemned Israeli brutality toward Palestinians. Many groups and individuals inside Israel itself have done the same thing, risking their positions and lives to condemn their own government’s policies: peace groups like B’Tselem, the New Israel Fund, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, as well as countless scholars like Uri Avnery, and young people—the so-called refuseniks—who refuse compulsory military service. The Israeli government has, to be sure, noted all this, and has recently undertaken a crackdown on all such groups, including NGOs trying to help the Palestinians survive. Whether it will succeed in silencing all dissent and aid within the country is not yet resolved.

What the two initiatives suggest, however, is that the right-wing zealots in Israel are gaining ground, and seem to be willing to risk alienating even the United States in their push to ethnically cleanse the territory they see as theirs by biblical right. Any effort by outside parties, such as the Obama administration, to seek peace—even so minimal and fraudulent a peace as the “peace process” has sought over the years—clearly thwarts this long-term goal. The only question that remains is the simple and obvious one: how long will the U.S. government tolerate the preferencing of this so-called ally over all other national interests, including the safety of its own citizens? How long will campaign contributions from wealthy American Jews so distort the political process that it puts the entire nation at risk? How long will government officials who take the oath of office to defend and protect this nation violate that oath by ignoring, and even amplifying obvious threats to its well-being and the well-being of its citizens? Does Obama have the courage to take this on, to threaten the cutoff of all aid if the insult is not rectified, if Israeli violations of international and humanitarian law are not stopped? The next few months should be very instructive in this regard.



Lawrence DiStasi

Condemning Goldstone

 
The sniveling, cowardly behavior of United States officials regarding Israel continues unabated under President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (who recently trumpeted the “courage” of Israel in agreeing to “restrict” its illegal settlements in the interest of peace; which is like congratulating a rapist for restricting his assault to mere intercourse). It also continues in the House of So-called Representatives, with the prospective passage of a resolution, drafted by Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, condemning the Goldstone Report for bias against Israel, and resolving to block “any further consideration” by the United States of its findings.
            For those who have been on Mars, the Goldstone Report is the UN-sponsored report headed by South African Justice Richard Goldstone, which recently investigated the alleged war crimes in Israel’s attack last year on Gaza. Goldstone, himself a Jew and longtime Zionist supporter of Israel, insisted, before he agreed to head the report, that the UN resolution include investigations into rocket attacks by Hamas as well, attacks which Goldstone’s report also condemns as war crimes. But to read the House Resolution, one would never know this—for it goes on and on about how the report is biased, the UN is biased, the Human Rights Council is biased, the whole world is biased against Israel. Nor would one know that Goldstone actually responded to each of the Resolution’s charges in detail—showing how each is either factually incorrect or misleading. Consider this response, for example (the House Resolution condemning his report is in italics, and Goldstone’s response is in standard type):
Whereas clause #8: “Whereas the report repeatedly made sweeping and unsubstantiated determinations that the Israeli military had deliberately attacked civilians during Operation Cast Lead;”
This whereas clause is factually incorrect. The findings included in the report are neither "sweeping” nor “unsubstantiated” and in effect reflect 188 individual interviews, review of more than 300 reports, 30 videos and 1200 photographs. Additionally, the body of the report contains a plethora of references to the information upon which the Commission relied for our findings. (from Goldstone letter to U.S. Representatives Howard Berman and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Oct. 29, 2009, cited on website of U.S. Representative Brian Baird.)
But the jurist’s responses are not expected to affect the outcome. Reports suggest that the House Resolution will pass easily—especially given the fact that the House of Representatives is controlled from top to bottom by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations, the combined weight of which terrifies and targets House members who dare to question the United States’ undying support for any crime Israel chooses to commit.
            This resolution, though, is taking things to absurd lengths. For what does it say about a nation, the United States of America, and a legislature, the House of Representatives, which, while continually bragging about its commitment to human rights, condemns a UN report commissioned to investigate war crimes, and which indeed finds evidence of war crimes? For that is what the Goldstone Report’s findings amounted to: that Israel, in attacking Gaza and its civic infrastructure including schools, hospitals, and individual homes with the most devastating modern weapons available, committed numerous violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law required of all militaries. And though the report also condemns the firing of rockets by Hamas, the weight of its findings—as indeed the weight of the damage, 1387 Gazans killed, 13 Israeli soldiers killed; no damage to speak of in Israel; Gaza left in ruins—is a condemnation of Israel and its brutal invasion last year (during, it should be noted, the interregnum period when Bush was leaving office and Obama had not yet been inaugurated.)
            The only bit of positive news in all this is that at least one House member, Brian Baird of Washington state, has condemned the House Resolution in no uncertain terms. In a piece appearing on Common Dreams on Nov. 3, and on his website (baird.house.gov), Baird’s essay, “Israel and Gaza Deserve Better than a Misguided Resolution,” asks some pertinent question about H. Res. 867, most significantly, “Have those who will vote on H. Res. 867 actually read the resolution? Have they read the Goldstone report?” Clearly, Baird believes that the answer to both questions is “no.” Nor, he writes, do most House members have any idea what took place in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009: “Since scarcely a dozen House Members have actually been to Gaza, what actual first-hand knowledge do the rest of the Members of Congress possess on which to base their judgment of the merits of H.Res.867 or the Goldstone report?” And most important, “What will it say about this Congress and our country if we so readily seek to block ‘any further consideration’ of a human rights investigation produced by one of the most respected jurists in the world today…”
            What will it say indeed. Representative Baird considers the issue vital, both to the Middle East, and to the United States of America, whose reputation in the world has taken such a beating in recent years, and most directly, to the conscience of the Congress. Because unlike most of the toadies who will vote to protect their backsides and their pro-Israel funders, Baird himself has seen the devastation caused by Israel in Gaza, and says it seems to support what the Goldstone Report asserts. This makes it more than “just another imposed political litmus test,” Baird writes:
   “This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, to deliberately destroy non-military factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day….” 
Clearly, Baird thinks it unacceptable, especially given the fact that “our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations.” Would that more of his sniveling associates in the United States Congress, and, regrettably, in the White House itself, felt the same way. But at this writing, it appears that the United States is about to announce to the world that not only does it consider such behavior perfectly legitimate and even praiseworthy, but that those who would dare question it deserve public condemnation and burial.
 
Lawrence DiStasi

Hussein in Yarmulka

 

 

Among the dismaying news items from yesterday, July 23, were these two:

1) a photo of presidential hopeful Barack Obama at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, wearing a yarmulka—the skull cap worn by Jewish men on occasions deemed culturally or spiritually significant;

2) an interview on NPR with distinguished Israeli historian, Bennie Morris, concerning the op-ed piece he wrote in the July 18 New York Times predicting that “Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.”

            Consider the Morris prediction first. Despite all the talk about a new effort by the United States to engage Iran diplomatically, the war threats from Israel have never really ceased. Coming from Bennie Morris—a historian who was among the first to publicize the true story of the 1948 ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Israelis, including the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin, and so one who knows intimately the grave crimes committed by his country—this was grim news indeed. So were his reasons for why Israel cannot count on diplomacy to stop the Iranians from “getting a nuclear weapon,” and the reasons why Israel is certain that Iran with a nuclear weapon would mean an Iran which would drop a nuke on Israel. Simple, said Morris: “the Iranians are not rational people.” They are controlled, he said, by religious zealots who are irrational; they “threaten Israel with destruction every day.” Here, once again, we have the purposeful distortion of what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, which was not so much a threat as a prediction:  “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”—and one that Iran scholar Juan Cole says “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” By contrast, it is Morris’ article that contains the real threat, for what he concludes it with is this: Iran should hope that Israel’s conventional strike succeeds, for though it would mean “thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation,” the alternative—Israel being forced to use its nuclear weapons on an Iran that did succeed in building its own nuke—“is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.” 

            Isn’t this rich? Here we have an Israeli scholar who has researched the international crimes his nation has committed and continues to commit. He also must be aware that his nation is controlled by a Zionist ideology which is nothing if not zealous, racist, and ruthless in its admission that in order for it to survive, it must rid Palestine of all Palestinians, and perhaps Iran of all Iranians. He also must know that his nation is animated by a sense of its own superiority—that is, the superiority of even a single Jewish life over the lives of thousands of Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims—indeed, a nation whose leaders have routinely referred to Palestinians as insects or worse. Finally, he clearly, in the very op-ed piece under discussion, threatens Iran with a nuclear holocaust. And he is calling the Iranians “irrational.” He is saying that the Iranians are so “irrational” that they cannot be trusted with a single nuclear weapon (ignoring the fact that the best U.S. evidence indicates that the Iranians gave up their nuclear program in 2003).

            "But doesn’t Israel have nuclear weapons itself?" asked the NPR interviewer. “Yes,” said Morris, “but they have never threatened anyone with their use.” In other words, unlike the irrational Iranians, the Israelis are MORAL people; they would NEVER use nuclear weapons, or even threaten to use them (again, forgetting his own words). But wait: who has been at war for virtually its entire existence as a nation? Who has attacked and continues to attack a population with virtually no weapons, and certainly none comparable to the American-supplied planes, tanks, rockets, and ships possessed by armed-to-the-teeth Israel? Who has just written an entire essay that is essentially a threat of nuclear destruction? And from the other side, who has Iran ever attacked in modern times? No one, unless we call Iran’s defending itself from Iraq’s aggression in 1980 an “attack.” No, what Iran has done is make the supreme error of taking over its own oil fields. It has made the supreme error of getting rid of its U.S.-backed and-created dictator, the Shah. It has made the supreme error of telling the western powers, including Israel, that it doesn’t need them and their exploitation. And in the lexicon that pertains today in Israel and the United States, that translates into that dread word: “irrational,” which justifies not only a pre-emptive strike, but a nuclear holocaust.

            The sad part of all this is that Barack Obama has made irrational statements agreeing with such propaganda. As I noted in a previous blog, Obama, groveling before the rabidly pro-Israel minions at the recent AIPAC conference in Washington, DC, said:

“Now, there's no greater threat to Israel or to the peace and stability of the region than Iran…. The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. Its president denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.”

            Then yesterday, he continued his groveling, attending sit-downs with no less than half a dozen Israeli leaders, topping it off with his yarmulka-enhanced photo op at the Wailing Wall. This is truly disturbing stuff. For it not only indicates the lengths to which Obama now seems willing to go to demonstrate his fealty to Jewish Americans and the money they contribute to Democratic Party candidates, but also his fear of the concerted power of Jewish-controlled opinion in the United States and the West. This is a serious situation indeed. For where Obama has been at great pains to downplay what would seem to be his logical concern for his own people in his own country—the African Americans who are supporting him almost universally and who need his help—he does public prostrations meant to announce in bold type his willingness to “go to the wall” on behalf of a foreign nation that has been at the center of international conflict for its entire existence, and now threatens a neighboring nation with a nuclear holocaust.

            Any hope, therefore, that an American president would finally take a look at history and conclude that the United States places itself and all its people in peril by supporting a nation that condemns entire peoples and religions to sub-human status, must be abandoned. Absent growing outrage from Americans themselves, and that includes condemnation of the powerful forces in this country, like AIPAC and other Jewish organizations, which exist to bludgeon politicians into undying support for Israel regardless of its actions or its threats, we can expect more of the same, with the consequent rising frustration and hatred from Arab and Muslim nations.

            What a terrible irony for a man whose middle name is “Hussein.”            

Lawrence DiStasi
=

Nuclear Hypocrisy

 

One of the things that continues to stagger me is how the media routinely follows the United States’ party line in treating the issue of Nuclear proliferation. A recent report I heard on National Public Radio, for instance, addressed the “explosive” situation in the Middle East, with experts on Iran, Pakistan and India commenting on the danger as if all three nations were equally culpable, irrational and essentially out of control where nukes are concerned. Reference was of course made to the United States’ alarmist warnings about Iran, and the Bush administration’s constant reassertion of its threat that Iran must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to continue with its alleged quest to obtain nuclear weapons. Underlining this was commentary on the fact that Israel not only supports (or demands) this U.S. stance, but multiplies it, as evidenced by the revelation that it has recently conducted military exercises said to have been a dress rehearsal for a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s “nuclear weapons facilities.”

            All of which left out two crucial facts.

            First, India and Pakistan are two of the states on the planet which have NOT signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran, by contrast, HAS signed it.

            Second, India and Pakistan are KNOWN to have nuclear weapons, and have tested them in recent years. Furthermore, India has just been gifted with a proposed treaty whereby the Bush Administration would give India even more nuclear technology—despite the fact that it has NOT signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, much less abided by it.

            Then, of course, there is the real elephant in this geopolitical room. I mean Israel. Israel is the third (fourth if we count Korea) nation on the planet which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has not signed because, according to almost all objective observers including Israeli nuclear scientist Mordecai Vanunu, Israel has had its own nuclear weapons program for years, and is now estimated to possess at least 200 nuclear weapons along with the sophisticated rocketry to launch them. Further, Israel’s leaders, such as Golda Meir, are known to have considered firing those weapons at the beginning of the 1973 war. That they did not does not mean they would not. As neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz wrote in Commentary in 1976: “The Israelis would fight with conventional weapons for as long as they could, and if the tide were turning against them…it is safe to predict that they would fight with nuclear weapons in the end.”

            So we have the following nuclear situation. Iran has joined the NPT. That treaty, in particular Article IV, guarantees unequivocally and in several places “the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.” Iran has stated that its nuclear program is in fact peaceful, thereby putting it in compliance with NPT. The recent National Intelligence Estimate of the United States has also concluded that Iran, in fact, gave up all attempts to pursue nuclear weapons in 2003, and has not revived them.

            And yet, we are assaulted almost daily with inflammatory rhetoric from George Bush and Israeli officials of every stripe screaming about the threat posed by Iran and its nuclear weapons, and the right of states like Israel and the U.S. to take action against this alleged “illegal” threat because the economic sanctions are not working.

            “Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons,” we are told.

            “All options are on the table,” we are told.

            ‘Both Israel and the United States are preparing to attack,’ we are told. Because this imperial “we”—Israel and the United States, we are told—these two peaceful and innocent and holy states are simply outraged that Iran would dare to secretly violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

            But WAIT. Israel is one of only four states which refused to sign this ultimate peace treaty! Where does it get off accusing Iran for violations? Even if Iran had violated it, which all evidence says it has not, where does Israel get the right?

            And WAIT, again. The United States is criticizing Iran? The United States—the only nation in the history of the world to ever use a nuclear weapon against another nation, wiping out 200,000 Japanese civilians in an instant—the United States is accusing Iran of seeking nuclear weapons?         

And WORSE. For aren’t we obliged to remember that the Non-Proliferation Treaty specifically states that the nuclear-weapon states (the U.S., France, England, the Soviet Union, & China—Israel, of course, not agreeing because it has never confirmed it has nukes nor signed the NPT) declare “their intention to achieve at the earliest possible date the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament” and “the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles”? Aren’t we obliged to recall that that’s what the treaty says? And that the United States has not only NOT done that, but under the Bush administration has made clear it intends just the opposite—i.e. that it is seeking to upgrade its nuclear arsenal and outfit it for the space age so it can win unchallenged nuclear dominance in space? Isn’t this the most egregious NPT violation of all? 

            And this is the nation that is threatening Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program?

            In spite of its own intelligence estimate that Iran has no weapons program?

            Aided and abetted and egged on (one cannot tell if it is Israel which is egging on the U.S. here, or the other way round) by Israel, the secret possessor of over 200 nuclear weapons and one of the four refusers of the NPT?

            Are you kidding me?

            And yet. And yet we have the idiot American media propagandizing us daily, without a touch of irony, with never a mention of Israel—except to refer to poor little Israel which feels so threatened by the possibility that Iran might some day get nuclear weapons. Poor little Israel with only 200 measly nukes, as well as rockets and submarines capable of launching them, of its own.    

            It is the height of hypocrisy. Though actually, the word hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to address the colossal gall, the provocative, calamitous, Imperial arrogance of this stuff.

            Not to mention the fact that this kind of threat is precisely what is prohibited in the United Nations rules and by-laws. So that what we have here, on the part of the United States and its chief enforcer Israel, is something more akin to the threats and blackmail Nazi Germany began to toss around in the years leading up to World War II.

            That is what we have here. And it is time the media and the American people and the U.S.Congress began to wake up to it, and do something about it before it is too late.

 

Lawrence DiStasi