Terror and Tyranny

[Nur]

" We Blew Her to Pieces "

 

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

 

by Aaron Glantz

 

 

MARFA, Texas, Sep 16 (IPS) - Aside from the Iraqi people, nobody knows what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq better than the soldiers themselves. A new book gives readers vivid and detailed accounts of the devastation the U.S. occupation has brought to Iraq, in the soldiers' own words.

 

"Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupation," published by Haymarket Books Tuesday, is a gut-wrenching, historic chronicle of what the U.S. military has done to Iraq, as well as its own soldiers.

 

Authored by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and journalist Aaron Glantz, the book is a reader for hearings that took place in Silver Spring, Maryland between Mar. 13-16, 2008 at the National Labour College.

 

"I remember one woman walking by," said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines who served three tours in Iraq. "She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realised that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces."

 

Washburn testified on a panel that discussed the rules of engagement in Iraq, and how lax they were, even to the point of being virtually non-existent.

 

"During the course of my three tours, the rules of engagement changed a lot," Washburn's testimony continues. "The higher the threat the more viciously we were permitted and expected to respond."

 

His emotionally charged testimony, like all of those in the book that covered panels addressing dehumanisation, civilian testimony, sexism in the military, veterans' health care, and the breakdown of the military, raised issues that were repeated again and again by other veterans.

 

"Something else we were encouraged to do, almost with a wink and nudge, was to carry 'drop weapons', or by my third tour, 'drop shovels'. We would carry these weapons or shovels with us because if we accidentally shot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body, and make them look like an insurgent," Washburn said.

 

Four days of searing testimony, witnessed by this writer, is consolidated into the book, which makes for a difficult read. One page after another is filled with devastating stories from the soldiers about what is being done in Iraq.

 

Everything from the taking of "trophy" photos of the dead, to torture and slaughtering of civilians is included.

 

"We're trying to build a historical record of what continues to happen in this war and what the war is really about," Glantz told IPS.

 

Hart Viges, a member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army who served one year in Iraq, tells of taking orders over the radio.

 

"One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation...One of the snipers replied back, 'Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?' The lieutenant colonel responded, 'You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.' After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment."

 

Vincent Emanuele, a Marine rifleman who spent a year in the al-Qaim area of Iraq near the Syrian border, told of emptying magazines of bullets into the city without identifying targets, running over corpses with Humvees and stopping to take "trophy" photos of bodies. "An act that took place quite often in Iraq was taking pot shots at cars that drove by," he said. "This was not an isolated incident, and it took place for most of our eight-month deployment."

 

Kelly Dougherty, the executive director of IVAW, blames the behaviour of soldiers in Iraq on the policies of the U.S. government. "The abuses committed in the occupations, far from being the result of a 'few bad apples' misbehaving, are the result of our government's Middle East policy, which is crafted in the highest spheres of U.S. power," she said.

 

Knowing this, however, does little to soften the emotional and moral devastation of the accounts.

 

"You see an individual with a white flag and he does anything but approach you slowly and obey commands, assume it's a trick and kill him," Michael Leduc, a corporal in the Marines who was part of the U.S. attack of Fallujah in November 2004, said were the orders from his battalion JAG officer he received before entering the city.

 

This is an important book for the public of the United States, in particular, because the Winter Soldier testimonies were not covered by any of the larger media outlets, aside from the Washington Post, which ran a single piece on the event that was buried in the Metro section.

 

The New York Times, CNN, and network news channels ABC, NBC and CBS ignored it completely.

 

This is particularly important in light of the fact that, as former Marine Jon Turner stated, "Anytime we did have embedded reporters with us, our actions changed drastically. We never acted the same. We were always on key with everything, did everything by the book."

 

"To me it's about giving a picture of what war is like," Glantz added, "Because here in the U.S. we have this very sanitised version of what war is. But war is when we have a large group of armed people killing large numbers of other people. And that is the picture that people will get from reading veterans testimony...the true face of war."

 

Dehumanisation of the soldiers themselves is covered in the book, as it includes testimony of sexism, racism, and the plight of veterans upon their return home as they struggle to obtain care from the Veterans Administration.

 

There is much testimony on the dehumanisation of the Iraqi people as well. Brian Casler, a corporal in the Marines, spoke to some of this that he witnessed during the invasion of Iraq.

 

"But on these convoys, I saw marines defecate into MRE bags or urinate in bottles and throw them at children on the side of the road," he stated.

 

Numerous accounts from soldiers include the prevalence of degrading terms for Iraqis, such as "hajis," "towel-heads" and "sand-niggers".

 

Scott Ewing, who served in Iraq from 2005-2006, admitted on one panel that units intentionally gave candy to Iraqi children for reasons other than "winning hearts and minds".

 

"There was also another motive," Ewing said, "If the kids were around our vehicles, the bad guys wouldn't attack. We used the kids as human shields."

 

Glantz admits that it would be difficult for the average U.S. citizen to read the book, and believes it is important to keep in mind while doing so what it took for the veterans to give this historic testimony.

 

"They could have been heroes, but what they are doing here is even more heroic -- which is telling the truth," Glantz told IPS. "They didn't have to come forward. They chose to come forward."

[Nur]

A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties

 

by Oded Yinon

 

 

This essay originally appeared in Hebrew in KIVUNIM (Directions) , A Journal for Judaism and

Zionism; Issue No, 14--Winter, 5742, February 1982, Editor: Yoram Beck. Editorial Committee: Eli Eyal, Yoram Beck, Amnon Hadari, Yohanan Manor, Elieser Schweid. Published by the Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organization , Jerusalem. At the outset of the nineteen eighties the State of Israel is in need of a new perspective as to its place, its aims and national targets, at home and abroad. This need has become even more vital due to a number of central processes which the country, the region and the world are undergoing. We are living today in the early stages of a new epoch in human history which is not at all similar to its predecessor, and its characteristics are totally different from what we have hitherto known. That is why we need an understanding of the central processes which typify this historical epoch on the one hand, and on the other hand we need a world outlook and an operational strategy in accordance with the new conditions.

 

The existence, prosperity and steadfastness of the Jewish state will depend upon its ability to adopt a new framework for its domestic and foreign affairs. This epoch is characterized by several traits which we can already diagnose, and which symbolize a genuine revolution in our present lifestyle. The dominant process is the breakdown of the rationalist, humanist outlook as the major cornerstone supporting the life and achievements of Western civilization since the Renaissance. The political, social and economic views which have emanated from this foundation have been based on several "truths" which are presently disappearing--for example, the view that man as an individual is the center of the universe and everything exists in order to fulfill his basic material needs. This position is being invalidated in the present when it has become clear that the amount of resources in the cosmos does not meet Man's requirements, his economic needs or his demographic constraints. In a world in which there are four billion human beings and economic and energy resources which do not grow proportionally to meet the needs of mankind, it is unrealistic to expect to fulfill the main requirement of Western Society, i.e., the wish and aspiration for boundless consumption. The view that ethics plays no part in determining the direction Man takes, but rather his material needs do--that view is becoming prevalent today as we see a world in which nearly all values are disappearing. We are losing the ability to assess the simplest things, especially when they concern the simple question of what is Good and what is Evil.

The vision of man's limitless aspirations and abilities shrinks in the face of the sad facts of life, when we

 

witness the break-up of world order around us. The view which promises liberty and freedom to

 

mankind seems absurd in light of the sad fact that three fourths of the human race lives under

 

totalitarian regimes. The views concerning equality and social justice have been transformed by

 

socialism and especially by Communism into a laughing stock. There is no argument as to the truth of

 

these two ideas, but it is clear that they have not been put into practice properly and the majority of

 

mankind has lost the liberty, the freedom and the opportunity for equality and justice. In this nuclear

 

world in which we are (still) living in relative peace for thirty years, the concept of peace and

 

coexistence among nations has no meaning when a superpower like the USSR holds a military and

 

political doctrine of the sort it has: that not only is a nuclear war possible and necessary in order to

 

achieve the ends of Marxism, but that it is possible to survive after it, not to speak of the fact that one

 

can be victorious in it. 2

 

 

The essential concepts of human society, especially those of the West, are undergoing a change due to

 

political, military and economic transformations. Thus, the nuclear and conventional might of the USSR

 

has transformed the epoch that has just ended into the last respite before the great saga that will

 

demolish a large part of our world in a multi-dimensional global war, in comparison with which the past

 

world wars will have been mere child's play. The power of nu clear as well as of conventional weapons,

 

their quantity, their precision and quality will turn most of our world upside down within a few years,

 

and we must align ourselves so as to face that in Israel. That is, then, the main threat to our existence

 

and that of the Western world. The war over resources in the world, the Arab monopoly on oil, and the

 

need of the West to import most of its raw materials from the Third World, are transforming the world

 

we know, given that one of the major aims of the USSR is to defeat the West by gaining control over

 

the g igantic resources in the Persian Gulf and in the southern part of Africa, in which the majority of

 

world minerals are located. We can imagine the dimensions of the global confrontation which will face

 

us in the future.

 

 

The Gorshkov doctrine calls for Soviet control of the oceans and mineral rich areas of the Third World.

 

That together with the present Soviet nuclear doctrine which holds that it is possible to manage, win and survive a nuclear war, in the course of which the West's military might well be destroyed and its

 

inhabitants made slaves in the service of Marxism-Leninism, is the main danger to world peace and to

 

our own existence. Since 1967, the Soviets have transformed Clausewitz' dictum into "War is the

 

continuation of policy in nuclear means," and made it the motto which guides all their policies. Already

 

today they are busy carrying out their aims in our region and throughout the world, and the need to face

 

them becomes the major element in our country's security policy and of course that of the rest of the

 

Free World. That is our major foreign challenge.

 

 

The Arab Moslem world, therefore, is not the major strategic problem which we shall face in the

 

Eighties, despite the fact that it carries the main threat against Israel, due to its growing military might.

 

This world, with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-

 

destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal

 

successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the

 

State of Israel in the long run, but only in the short run where its immediate military power has great

 

import. In the long run, this world will be unable to exist within its present framework in the areas

 

around us without having to go through genuine revolutionary changes. The Moslem Arab World is

 

built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreign ers (France and Britain in the Nineteen

 

Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was

 

arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorites and ethnic groups which are

 

hostile to one anoth er, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic so cial destruction from

 

within, and in some a civil war is already raging. Most of th e Arabs, 118 million out of 170 millio n, 5

 

live in Africa, mostly in Egypt (45 million today).

 

Apart from Egypt, all the Maghreb states are made up of a mixture of Arabs and non-Arab Berbers. In

 

Algeria there is already a civil war raging in the Kabile mountains between the two nations in the

 

country. Morocco and Algeria are at war with each other over Spanish Sahara, in addition to the internal

 

struggle in each of them. Militant Islam endangers the integrity of Tunisia and Qaddafi organizes wars

 

which are destructive from the Arab point of view, from a country which is sparsely populated and

 

which cannot become a powerful nation. That is why he has been attempting unifications in the past

 

with states that are more genuine, like Egypt and Syria. Sudan, the most torn apart state in the Arab

 

Moslem world today is built upon four groups hostile to each other, an Arab Moslem Sunni minority

 

which rules over a majority of non-Arab Africans, Pagans, and Christians. In Egypt there is a Sunni

 

Moslem majority facing a large minority of Christians which is dominant in upper Egypt: some 7

 

million of them, so that even Sadat, in his speech on May 8, expressed the fear that they will want a

 

state of their own, something like a "second" Christian Lebanon in Egypt.

 

All the Arab States east of Israel are torn apart, broken up and riddled with inner conflict even more

 

than those of the Maghreb. Syria is fundamentally no different from Lebanon except in the strong

 

military regime which rules it. But the real civil war taking place nowadays between the Sunni majority

 

and the Shi'ite Alawi ruling minority (a mere 12% of the population) testifies to th e severity of the

 

domestic trouble.

 

 

Iraq is, once again, no different in essence from its neighbors, although its majority is Shi'ite and the

 

ruling minority Sunni. Sixty-fiv e percent of the population has no say in politics, in which an elite of 20

 

percent holds the power. In addition there is a large Kurdish minority in the north, and if it weren't for

 

the strength of the ruling regime, the army and the oil revenues, Iraq's future state would be no different than that of Lebanon in th e past or of Syria today. The seed s of inner conflict and civil war are apparent today already, especially after the rise of Khomeini to power in Iran, a leader wh om the Shi'ites in Iraq view as their natural leader.

 

 

All the Gulf principalities and Saudi Arabia are built upon a d elicate house of sand in which there is

 

only o il. In Kuwait, the Kuwaitis co nstitute only a quarter of the population. In Bahrain, the Shi'ites are

 

the majority but are deprived of power. In the UAE, Shi'ites are once again the majority but the Sunnis

 

are in power. The same is true of Oman and North Yemen. Even in the Marx ist South Yemen there is a

 

sizable Shi'ite minority. In Saudi Arabia half the population is foreign, Egyptian and Yemenite, but a

 

Saudi minority holds power.

 

 

Jordan is in reality Palestinian, ruled by a Trans-Jordanian Bedouin minority, but most of the army and

 

certainly the bureaucracy is now Palestin ian. As a matter of fact Amman is as Palestinian as Nab lus. All

 

of these countries have powerful armies, relatively speaking. But there is a problem there too. The

 

Syrian army today is mostly Sunni with an Alawi officer corps, th e Iraqi army Shi'ite with Sunni

 

commanders. This has great significance in the long run, and that is wh y it will not be possible to retain

 

the loyalty of the army for a long time except where it comes to the only common denominator: The

 

hostility towards Israel, and today even th at is insufficient.

 

 

Alongside the Arabs, split as they are, the other Mo slem states share a similar predicament. Half of

 

Iran's population is comprised of a Persian speaking group and the other half of an ethnically Turkish

 

group. Turkey's population comprises a Turkish Sunni Moslem majority, some 50%, and two large

 

minorities, 12 million Shi'ite Alawis and 6 million Sunni Kurds. In Afgh anistan there are 5 million

 

Shi'ites who constitute one third of the population. In Sunni Pakistan there are 15 million Shi'ites who

 

endanger the existence of that state.

 

 

This national ethnic minority picture extending from Morocco to India and from Somalia to Turkey

 

points to the absence of stability and a rapid degeneration in the entire region. When this picture is

 

added to the economic one, we see how the entire region is built like a house of cards, unable to

 

withstand its severe problems.

 

 

In this giant and fractured world there are a few wealthy groups and a huge mass of poor people. Most

 

of the Arabs have an average yearly income of 30 0 dollars. That is the situation in Egypt, in mo st of the

 

Maghreb countries except for Libya, and in Iraq. Lebanon is torn apart and its economy is falling to

 

pieces. It is a state in which there is no centralized power, but only 5 de facto sovereign authorities

 

(Christian in the north, supported by the Syrians and under the rule of the Franjieh clan, in the East an

 

area of direct Syrian conquest, in the center a Phalangist controlled Christian enclave, in the south and

 

up to the Litani river a mostly Palestinian region controlled by the PLO and Major Haddad's state of

 

Christians and half a million Shi'ites). Syria is in an even graver situation and even the assistance she

 

will obtain in the future after the unification with Libya will not be sufficient for dealing with the basic

 

problems of existence and the maintenance of a large army. Egypt is in the worst situation: Millions are

 

on the verge of hunger, half the labor force is unemployed, and housing is scarce in this most densely

 

populated area of the world. Except for the army, there is not a single department operating efficiently

 

and the state is in a permanent state of bankruptcy and depends entirely on American foreign assistance

 

granted since the peace.

 

 

In the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Egypt there is the largest accumulation of money and oil in

 

the world, bu t those enjoying it are tiny elites who lack a wide base of support and self-confidence,

 

something that no army can guarantee. The Saudi army with all its equipment cannot defend the regime

 

from real dangers at home or abroad, and what took place in Mecca in 1980 is only an example. A sad

 

and very stormy situation surrounds Israel and creates challenges for it, problems, risks but also far-

 

reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967 . Chances are that opportunities missed at that time

 

will become achievab le in the Eighties to an extent and along dimensions which we cannot even

 

imagine today.

 

 

The "peace" policy and the return of territories, through a dependence upon the US, precludes the

 

realization of the new option created for us. Since 1967, all the governments of Israel have tied our

 

national aims down to narrow political needs, on the one hand, and on th e other to destructive opinions

 

at home which neutralized our capacities both at ho me and abroad. Failing to take steps towards the

 

Arab population in the new territories, acquired in the course of a war forced upon us, is the major

 

strategic error committed by Israel on the morning after the Six Day War. We could have saved

 

ourselves all the bitter and dangerous conflict since then if we had given Jord an to the Palestinians who

 

live west of the Jordan river. By doing that we would have neutralized the Palestinian problem which

 

we nowadays face, and to which we have found solutions that are really no solutions at all, such as

 

territorial compromise or autonomy which amount, in fact, to the same thing. Today, we suddenly face

 

immense opportunities for transforming the situation thoroughly and this we must do in the coming

 

decade, otherwise we shall not survive as a state.

 

 

In the course of the Nineteen Eighties, the State of Israel will have to go through far-reaching changes

 

in its political and economic regime domestically, along with radical changes in its foreign policy, in

 

order to stand up to the global and regional challenges of this new epoch. The loss of the Suez Canal oil

 

fields, of the immense potential of the oil, gas and other natural resources in the Sinai peninsula which

 

is geomorphologically identical to the rich oil-producing countries in the region, will result in an energy

 

drain in the near future and will destroy our domestic economy: one quarter of our present GNP as well

 

as one third of the budget is used for the purchase of oil. The search for raw materials in the Negev and

 

on the coast will not, in the near future, serve to alter that state of affairs.

 

 

(Regaining) the Sinai peninsula with its present and potential resources is therefore a political priority

 

which is obstructed by the Camp David and the peace agreements . The fault for that lies of course with

 

the present Israeli government and the governments which paved the road to the policy of territorial

 

compromise, the Alignment governments since 1967. The Egyptians will not need to keep the peace

 

treaty after the return of the Sinai, and they will d o all th ey can to return to the fold of the Arab world

 

and to th e USSR in order to gain support and military assistance. American aid is guaranteed only for a

 

short while, for the terms of the peace and the weakening of the U.S. both at home and abroad will bring about a reduction in aid. Without oil and the income from it, with the present enormous expenditure, we will not be able to g et through 1982 under the present conditions and we will have to act in order to return the situation to the status quo which existed in Sinai prior to Sadat's visit and the mistaken peace agreement signed with him in March 1979 .

 

 

Israel has two major routes through which to realize this purpose, one direct and the other indirect. The

 

direct option is the less realistic one because of the nature of the regime and government in Israel as

 

well as the wisdom of Sadat who obtained our withdrawal from Sinai, which was, next to the war of

 

1973, his major achievement since he took power. Israel will not unilaterally break the treaty, neither

 

today, nor in 1982, unless it is very hard pressed economically and politically and Egypt provides Israel

 

with the excuse to take the Sinai back into our hands for the fourth time in our short h istory. What is left therefore, is the indirect option. The economic situation in Egypt, the nature of the regime and its pan-Arab po licy, will bring about a situation after April 1982 in which Israel will be forced to act directly or indirectly in order to regain control over Sinai as a strategic, economic and energy reserve for the long

 

run . Egypt does n ot constitute a military strategic problem due to its internal conflicts and it could be

 

driven back to the post 19 67 war situation in no more than one day.

 

The myth of Egypt as the strong leader of the Arab World was demolished back in 1956 and definitely

 

did no t survive 1967, but our po licy, as in the return of the Sinai, served to turn the myth into "fact." In

 

reality, however, Egypt's power in proportion both to Israel alone and to the rest of the Arab World has

 

gone down about 50 p ercent since 1967. Egypt is no longer the leading political power in the Arab

 

World and is economically on the verge of a crisis. Without foreign assistance the crisis will come

 

tomorrow. In the short run, due to the return of the Sinai, Egypt will gain several advantages at our 12

 

expense, but only in the short run until 1982, and that will not change the balance of power to its

 

benefit, and will possibly bring about its downfall. Egypt, in its present domestic political p icture, is

 

already a corpse, all the more so if we take into account the growing Moslem-Christian rift. Breaking

 

Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the political aim of Israel in the Nineteen

 

Eighties on its Western front .

 

 

Egypt is divided and torn apart into many foci of authority. If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya,

 

Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their p resent form and will join the

 

downfall and dissolution of Egypt. The vision of a Christian Coptic State in Upper Egypt alongside a

 

number of weak states with very localized power and without a centralized government a s to date, is the

 

key to a historical development which was only set back by the peace agreement but which seems

 

inevitable in the long run . 13

 

 

The Western front, which on the surface appears more problematic, is in fact less complicated than the

 

Eastern front, in which most of the events that make the headlines have been taking place recently.

 

Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precendent for the entire Arab world

 

including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The

 

dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unqiue areas such as in Lebanon, is

 

Israel's primary target on the Eastern fron t in the long run, while the d issolution o f the military power

 

of th ose sta tes serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in acco rdance with its

 

ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a

 

Shi'ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus

 

hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state , maybe even in our Golan, and

 

certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan . This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and

 

security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today . 14

 

 

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for

 

Israel's targets . Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than

 

Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian

 

war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a

 

wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will

 

shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in

 

Lebanon . In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Otto man times

 

is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and

 

Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that

 

the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization. 15

 

 

The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external

 

pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia. Regardless of whether its economic

 

might based on oil remains intact or whether it is diminished in the long run, the internal rifts and

 

breakdowns are a clear and natu ral development in light of th e present political structure. 1 6

 

 

Jordan constitutes an immediate strategic target in the short run but no t in the long run, for it does not

 

constitute a real threat in the long run after its disso lution , the termination of the lengthy rule of King

 

Hussein and the transfer of power to the Palestinians in the short run.

 

 

There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel's

 

policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present

 

regime and the transfer of power to th e Palestin ian majority. Changing the regime east of the river will

 

also cause the termina tion of the problem of the territories densely populated with Arabs west of the

 

Jordan. Whether in war or under cond itions of peace, emigrationfrom the territories and economic

 

demographic freeze in them, are the guarantees for the coming change on both banks of the river, and

 

we ought to be active in order to accelerate this process in the nearest future . The autonomy plan ought

 

also to be rejected, as well as any compromise or division of the territories for, given the plans of the

 

PLO and th ose of the Israeli Arabs themselves, the Shefa'amr plan of September 1980, it is not possible

 

to go on living in this country in the present situation without separating the two nations, the Arabs to

 

Jordan and the Jews to the areas west of the river . Genuine coexistence and peace will reign over the

 

land only when the Arabs understand that without Jewish rule between the Jordan and the sea they will

 

have neither existence nor security. A nation of their own and security will be theirs only in Jordan. 17

 

 

Within Israel the distinction between the areas of '67 and the territories beyond them, those of '48, has

 

always been meaningless for Arabs and nowadays no longer has any significance for us. The problem

 

should be seen in its entirety without any divisions as of '67. It should be clear, under any future

 

political situation or mifitary constellation, that the solution o f the problem of the indigenous Arabs will

 

come only when they recognize the existence of Israel in secure borders up to the Jordan river and

 

beyond it, as our existential need in this difficult epoch, the nuclear epoch which we shall soon enter. It

 

is no longer possible to live with three fourths of the Jewish population on the dense shoreline which is

 

so dangerous in a nuclear epoch.

 

 

Dispersal of the population is therefore a domestic strategic aim of the highest order; otherwise, we

 

shall cease to exist within any borders. Judea, Samaria and the Galilee are our sole guarantee for

 

national existence, and if we do not become the majority in the mountain areas, we shall not rule in the

 

country and we shall be like the Crusaders, who lost this country which was not theirs anyhow, and in

 

which they were foreigners to begin with. Reb alancing the country demographically, strategically and

 

economically is the highest and most central aim today. Taking hold of the mountain watershed from

 

Beersheba to the Upper Galilee is the national aim g enerated by th e major strategic co nsideration which

 

is settling the mountainous part of the country that is empty of Jews today .

 

Realizing our aims on th e Eastern front depends first on the realization of this internal strategic

 

objective. The transformation of the p olitical and economic structure, so as to enable the realization of

 

these strategic aims, is the key to achieving the entire change. We need to change from a centralized

 

economy in which the government is extensively involved, to an open and free market as well as to

 

switch from depending upon the U.S. taxpayer to developing, with our own hands, of a genuine

 

productive economic infrastructure. If we are not able to make this change freely and voluntarily, we

 

shall be forced into it by world developments, especially in the areas of economics, energy, an d politics,

 

and by our own growing isolation.

 

From a military and strategic po int of view, the West led by the U.S. is unable to withstand the global

 

pressures of the USSR throughout the world, and Israel must therefore stand alone in the Eighties,

 

without any foreign assistance, military o r economic, and this is within our capacities today, with no

 

compromises. Rapid changes in the world will also bring about a change in the condition of world 20

 

Jewry to which Israel will become not only a last resort but the only existential option. We cannot

 

assume that U.S. Jews, and the communities of Europe and Latin America will continue to exist in the

 

present form in the future .

 

Our existence in this country itself is certain , and there is no force that could remove us from here either forcefully or by treachery (Sadat's method). Despite the difficulties of the mistaken "peace" policy and the problem of the Israeli Arabs and those of the territories, we can effectively deal with these problems in the foreseeable future.

 

Conclusion

 

 

1. Three imp ortant points have to be clarified in order to be able to understand the significant possibilities of realization of this Zionist plan for the Middle East, and also why it had to be published.

 

2. The Military Background of The Plan

 

The military conditions of this plan have not been mentioned above, but on the many occasions where

 

something very like it is being "explained" in closed meetings to members of the Israeli Establishment,

 

this point is clarified. It is assumed that the Israeli military forces, in all their branches, are insufficient

 

for th e actual work of occupation of such wide territories as discussed above. In fact, even in times of

 

intense Palestinian "unrest" on the West Bank, the forces of the Israeli Army are stretched out too much.

 

The answer to that is the method of ruling by means of "Haddad forces" or of "Village Associations"

 

(also kn own as "Village Leagues"): local forces under "leaders" completely dissociated from the

 

population, not having even any feudal or party structure (such as the Phalangists have, for example).

 

The "states" proposed by Yinon are "Haddadland" and "Village Associations," and their armed forces

 

will be, no doubt, quite similar. In addition, Israeli military superiority in such a situation will be much

 

greater than it is even now, so that any movement of revolt will be "punished" either by mass

 

humiliation as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or by bombardment and obliteration of cities, as in

 

Lebanon now (June 1982), or by both. In order to ensure this, the plan , as explained orally, calls for the

 

establishment of Israeli garrisons in focal places between the mini states, equipped with the necessary

 

mobile destructive forces. In fact, we have seen something like this in Haddadland and we will almost

 

certainly soon see the first example of this system functioning either in South Lebanon or in all

 

Lebanon.

 

 

3. It is obvious that the above military assumptions, and the whole plan too, depend also on the Arabs

 

continuing to be even more divided than they are now, and on the lack of any truly progressive mass

 

movement among them. It may be that those two conditions will be removed only when the plan will be

 

well advanced, with consequences which can not be foreseen.

 

 

4. Why it is necessary to publish this in Israel?

 

The reason for publication is the dual nature of the Israeli-Jewish society: A very great measure of

 

freedom and democracy, specially for Jews, combined with expansionism and racist discrimination. In

 

such a situation the Israeli-Jewish elite (for the masses follow the TV and Begin's speeches) has to be

 

persuaded . The first steps in the process of persuasion are oral, as indicated above, but a time comes in

 

which it becomes inconvenient. Written material must be produced for the benefit of the more ******

 

"persuaders" and "explainers" (for example medium-rank officers, who are, usually, remarkably ******).

 

They then "learn it," more or less, and preach to others. It should be remarked that Israel, and even the

 

Yishuv from the Twenties, has always functioned in this way. I myself well remember how (before I

 

was "in opposition") the necessity of war with was explained to me and others a year before the 1956

 

war, and the necessity of conq uering "the rest of Western Palestine when we will have the opportunity"

 

was explained in the years 1965-67.

 

 

5. Why is it assumed that there is no special risk from the outside in the publication of such plans?

 

Such risks can come from two sources, so long as the principled opposition inside Israel is very weak (a

 

situation which may change as a consequence of the war on Lebanon) : The Arab World, including the

 

Palestin ians, and the United States. The Arab World has shown itself so far quite incapable of a detailed

 

and rational analysis of Israeli-Jewish society, and the Palestinians have been, on the average, no better

 

than the rest. In such a situation, even those who are shouting about the dangers of Israeli expansionism

 

(which are real enough) are doing this not because of factual and detailed knowledge, but because of

 

belief in myth. A good example is the very persistent belief in the non-existent writing on the wall of

 

the Knesset of the Biblical verse about the Nile and the Euphrates. Another example is the persistent,

 

and completely false declarations, which were made by some of the most important Arab leaders, that

 

the two b lue stripes of the Israeli flag symbolize th e Nile and the Euphrates, while in fact they are taken

 

from the stripes o f the Jewish praying shawl (Talit). The Israeli specialists assume that, on the whole,

 

the Arabs will pay no attention to th eir serious discussions of the future, and the Lebanon war has

 

proved them right. So why should they not continue with their old methods of persuading other Israelis?

 

 

6. In the United States a very similar situation exists, at least until now. The more or less serious

 

commentators take their information about Israel, and much of their opinions about it, from two

 

sources. The first is from articles in the "liberal" American press, written almost totally by Jewish

 

admirers of Israel who, even if they are critical of some aspects of the Israeli state, practice loyally what

 

Stalin used to call "th e constructive criticism." (In fact those among them who claim also to be "Anti-

 

Stalinist" are in reality more Stalinist than Stalin, with Israel being their god which has not yet failed).

 

In the framework of such critical worship it must be assumed that Israel has always "good intentions"

 

and only "makes mistakes," and therefore such a plan would not be a matter for discussion--exactly as

 

the Biblical genocides committed by Jews are not mentioned. The other source of information, The

 

Jerusalem Post , has similar policies. So long, therefore, as the situation exists in which Israel is really a

 

"closed society" to the rest of the world, because the world wants to close its eyes , the publication and

 

even the beginning of the realization of such a plan is realistic and feasible.

 

Israel Shahak

 

June 17, 1982

 

Jerusalem

 

 

About the Translator

 

 

Israel Shahak is a professor of organic chemistly at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the chairman

 

of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. He published The Shahak Papers , collections of key

 

articles from the Hebrew press, and is the author of numerous articles and books, among them Non-Jew

 

in the Jewish State . His latest book is Israel's Global Role: Weapons for Repression , published by the

 

AAUG in 1982. Israel Shahak: (1933-2001)

 

Notes

 

 

1 . American Universities Field Staff. Report No.33, 1979. According to this research, the population of the world

 

will be 6 billion in the year 2000. Today's world population can be broken down as follows: China, 958 million;

 

India, 635 million; USSR, 261 million; U.S., 218 million Indonesia, 140 million; Brazil and Japan, 110 million

 

each. According to the figures of the U.N. Population Fund for 1980, there will be, in 2000, 50 cities with a

 

population of over 5 million each. The population ofthp;Third World will then be 80% of the world population.

 

According to Justin Blackwelder, U.S. Census Office chief, the world population will not reach 6 billion because of

 

hunger.

 

 

2 . Soviet nuclear policy has been well summarized by two American Sovietologists: Joseph D. Douglas and

 

Amoretta M. Hoeber, Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War , (Stanford, Ca., Hoover Inst. Press, 1979). In the Soviet

 

Union tens and hundreds of articles and books are published each year which detail the Soviet doctrine for nuclear

 

war and there is a great deal of documentation translated into English and published by the U.S. Air Force,including

 

USAF: Marxism-Leninism on War and the Army: The Soviet View , Moscow, 1972; USAF: The Armed Forces of

 

the Soviet State . Moscow, 1975, by Marshal A. Grechko. The basic Soviet approach to the matter is presented in the

 

book by Marshal Sokolovski published in 1962 in Moscow: Marshal V. D. Sokolovski, Military Strategy, Soviet

 

Doctrine and Concepts (New York, Praeger, 1963).

 

 

3 . A picture of Soviet intentions in various areas of the world can be drawn from the book by Douglas and Hoeber,

 

ibid. For additional material see: Michael Morgan, "USSR's Minerals as Strategic Weapon in the Future," Defense

 

and Foreign Affairs , Washington, D.C., Dec. 1979.

 

 

4 . Admiral of the Fleet Sergei Gorshkov, Sea Power and the State , London, 1979. Morgan, loc. cit. General George

 

S. Brown (USAF) C-JCS, Statement to the Congress on the Defense Posture of the United States For Fiscal Year

 

1979 , p. 103; National Security Council, Review of Non-Fuel Mineral Policy , (Washington, D.C. 1979,); Drew

 

Middleton, The New York Times , (9/15/79); Time , 9/21/80.

 

5 . Elie Kedourie, "The End of the Ottoman Empire," Journal of Contemporary History , Vol. 3, No.4, 1968.

 

6 . Al-Thawra , Syria 12/20/79, Al-Ahram ,12/30/79, Al Ba'ath , Syria, 5/6/79. 55% of the Arabs are 20 years old and

 

younger, 70% of the Arabs live in Africa, 55% of the Arabs under 15 are unemployed, 33% live in urban areas,

 

Oded Yinon, "Egypt's Population Problem," The Jerusalem Quarterly , No. 15, Spring 1980.

 

7 . E. Kanovsky, "Arab Haves and Have Nots," The Jerusalem Quarterly , No.1, Fall 1976, Al Ba'ath , Syria, 5/6/79.

 

8 . In his book, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said that the Israeli government is in fact responsible for the

 

design of American policy in the Middle East, after June '67, because of its own indecisiveness as to the future of

 

the territories and the inconsistency in its positions since it established the background for Resolution 242 and

 

certainly twelve years later for the Camp David agreements and the peace treaty with Egypt. According to Rabin,

 

on June 19, 1967, President Johnson sent a letter to Prime Minister Eshkol in which he did not mention anything

 

about withdrawal from the new territories but exactly on the same day the government resolved to return territories

 

in exchange for peace. After the Arab resolutions in Khartoum (9/1/67) the government altered its position but

 

contrary to its decision of June 19, did not notify the U.S. of the alteration and the U.S. continued to support 242 in

 

the Security Council on the basis of its earlier understanding that Israel is prepared to return territories. At that point

 

it was already too late to change the U.S. position and Israel's policy. From here the way was opened to peace

 

agreements on the basis of 242 as was later agreed upon in Camp David. See Yitzhak Rabin. Pinkas Sherut ,

 

( Ma'ariv 1979) pp. 226-227.

 

9 . Foreign and Defense Committee Chairman Prof. Moshe Arens argued in an interview ( Ma 'ariv ,10/3/80) that the

 

Israeli government failed to prepare an economic plan before the Camp David agreements and was itself surprised

 

by the cost of the agreements, although already during the negotiations it was possible to calculate the heavy price

 

and the serious error involved in not having prepared the economic grounds for peace.

 

The former Minister of Treasury, Mr. Yigal Holwitz, stated that if it were not for the withdrawal from the oil fields,

 

Israel would have a positive balance of payments (9/17/80). That same person said two years earlier that the

 

government of Israel (from which he withdrew) had placed a noose around his neck. He was referring to the Camp

 

David agreements ( Ha'aretz , 11/3/78). In the course of the whole peace negotiations neither an expert nor an

 

economics advisor was consulted, and the Prime Minister himself, who lacks knowledge and expertise in

 

economics, in a mistaken initiative, asked the U.S. to give us a loan rather than a grant, due to his wish to maintain

 

our respect and the respect of the U.S. towards us. See Ha'aretz 1/5/79. Jerusalem Post , 9/7/79. Prof Asaf Razin,

 

formerly a senior consultant in the Treasury, strongly criticized the conduct of the negotiations; Ha'aretz , 5/5/79.

 

Ma'ariv , 9/7/79. As to matters concerning the oil fields and Israel's energy crisis, see the interview with Mr. Eitan

 

Eisenberg, a government advisor on these matters, Ma'arive Weekly , 12/12/78. The Energy Minister, who

 

personally signed the Camp David agreements and the evacuation of Sdeh Alma, has since emphasized the

 

seriousness of our condition from the point of view of oil supplies more than once...see Y ediot Ahronot , 7/20/79.

 

Energy Minister Modai even admitted that the government did not consult him at all on the subject of oil during the

 

Camp David and Blair House negotiations. Ha'aretz , 8/22/79.

 

10 . Many sources report on the growth of the armaments budget in Egypt and on intentions to give the army

 

preference in a peace epoch budget over domestic needs for which a peace was allegedly obtained. See former

 

Prime Minister Mamduh Salam in an interview 12/18/77, Treasury Minister Abd El Sayeh in an interview 7/25/78,

 

and the paper Al Akhbar , 12/2/78 which clearly stressed that the military budget will receive first priority, despite

 

the peace. This is what former Prime Minister Mustafa Khalil has stated in his cabinet's programmatic document

 

which was presented to Parliament, 11/25/78. See English translation, ICA, FBIS, Nov. 27. 1978, pp. D 1-10.

 

According to these sources, Egypt's military budget increased by 10% between fiscal 1977 and 1978, and the

 

process still goes on. A Saudi source divulged that the Egyptians plan to increase their militmy budget by 100% in

 

the next two years; Ha'aretz , 2/12/79 and Jerusalem Post , 1/14/79.

 

11 . Most of the economic estimates threw doubt on Egypt's ability to reconstruct its economy by 1982. See

 

Economic Intelligence Unit , 1978 Supplement, "The Arab Republic of Egypt"; E. Kanovsky, "Recent Economic

 

Developments in the Middle East," Occasional Papers , The Shiloah Institution, June 1977; Kanovsky, "The

 

Egyptian Economy Since the Mid-Sixties, The Micro Sectors," Occasional Papers , June 1978; Robert McNamara,

 

President of World Bank, as reported in Times , London, 1/24/78.

 

12 . See the comparison made by the researeh of the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and research camed

 

out in the Center for Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University, as well as the research by the British scientist, Denis

 

Champlin, Military Review , Nov. 1979, ISS: The Military Balance 1979-1980, CSS; Security Arrangements in

 

Sinai ...by Brig. Gen. (Res.) A Shalev, No. 3.0 CSS; The Military Balance and the Military Options after the Peace

 

Treaty with Egypt , by Brig. Gen. (Res.) Y. Raviv, No.4, Dec. 1978, as well as many press reports including El

 

Hawadeth , London, 3/7/80; El Watan El Arabi , Paris, 12/14/79.

 

 

13 . As for religious ferment in Egypt and the relations between Copts and Moslems see the series of articles

 

published in the Kuwaiti paper, El Qabas , 9/15/80. The English author Irene Beeson reports on the rift between

 

Moslems and Copts, see: Irene Beeson, Guardian , London, 6/24/80, and Desmond Stewart, Middle East

 

Internmational , London 6/6/80. For other reports see Pamela Ann Smith, Guardian , London, 12/24/79; The

 

Christian Science Monitor 12/27/79 as well as Al Dustour , London, 10/15/79; El Kefah El Arabi, 10/15/79.

 

14 . Arab Press Service , Beirut, 8/6-13/80. The New Republic , 8/16/80, Der Spiegel as cited by Ha'aretz , 3/21/80,

 

and 4/30-5/5/80; The Economist , 3/22/80; Robert Fisk, Times , London, 3/26/80; Ellsworth Jones, Sunday Times ,

 

3/30/80.

 

15 . J.P. Peroncell Hugoz, Le Monde , Paris 4/28/80; Dr. Abbas Kelidar, Middle East Review , Summer 1979;

 

Conflict Studies , ISS, July 1975; Andreas Kolschitter, Der Zeit , ( Ha'aretz , 9/21/79) Economist Foreign Report ,

 

10/10/79, Afro-Asian Affairs , London, July 1979.

 

 

16 . Arnold Hottinger, "The Rich Arab States in Trouble," The New York Review of Books , 5/15/80; Arab Press

 

Service , Beirut, 6/25-7/2/80; U.S. News and World Report , 11/5/79 as well as El Ahram , 11/9/79; El Nahar El

 

Arabi Wal Duwali , Paris 9/7/79; El Hawadeth , 11/9/79; David Hakham, Monthly Review , IDF, Jan.-Feb. 79.

 

17 . As for Jordan's policies and problems see El Nahar El Arabi Wal Duwali , 4/30/79, 7/2/79; Prof. Elie Kedouri,

 

Ma'ariv 6/8/79; Prof. Tanter, Davar 7/12/79; A. Safdi, Jerusalem Post , 5/31/79; El Watan El Arabi 11/28/79; El

 

Qabas , 11/19/79. As for PLO positions see: The resolutions of the Fatah Fourth Congress, Damascus, August 1980.

 

The Shefa'amr program of the Israeli Arabs was published in Ha'aretz , 9/24/80, and by Arab Press Report 6/18/80.

 

For facts and figures on immigration of Arabs to Jordan, see Amos Ben Vered, Ha'aretz , 2/16/77; Yossef Zuriel,

 

Ma'ariv 1/12/80. As to the PLO's position towards Israel see Shlomo Gazit, Monthly Review ; July 1980; Hani El

 

Hasan in an interview, Al Rai Al'Am , Kuwait 4/15/80; Avi Plaskov, "The Palestinian Problem," Survival , ISS,

 

London Jan. Feb. 78; David Gutrnann, "The Palestinian Myth," Commentary , Oct. 75; Bernard Lewis, "The

 

Palestinians and the PLO," Commentary Jan. 75; Monday Morning , Beirut, 8/18-21/80; Journal of Palestine

 

Studies , Winter 1980.

 

18 . Prof. Yuval Neeman, "Samaria--The Basis for Israel's Security," Ma'arakhot 272-273, May/June 1980; Ya'akov

 

Hasdai, "Peace, the Way and the Right to Know," Dvar Hashavua , 2/23/80. Aharon Yariv, "Strategic Depth--An

 

Israeli Perspective," Ma'arakhot 270-271, October 1979; Yitzhak Rabin, "Israel's Defense Problems in the

 

Eighties," Ma'arakhot October 1979.

 

 

19 . Ezra Zohar, In the Regime's Pliers (Shikmona, 1974); Motti Heinrich, Do We have a Chance Israel, Truth

 

Versus Legend (Reshafim, 1981).

 

20 . Henry Kissinger, "The Lessons of the Past," The Washington Review Vol 1, Jan. 1978; Arthur Ross, "OPEC's

 

Challenge to the West," The Washington Quarterly , Winter, 1980; Walter Levy, "Oil and the Decline of the West,"

 

Foreign Affairs , Summer 1980; Special Report--"Our Armed Forees-Ready or Not? " U.S. News and World Report

 

10/10/77; Stanley Hoffman, "Reflections on the Present Danger," The New York Review of Books 3/6/80; Time

 

4/3/80; Leopold Lavedez "The illusions of SALT" Commentary Sept. 79; Norman Podhoretz, "The Present

 

Danger," Commentary March 1980; Robert Tucker, "Oil and American Power Six Years Later," Commentary Sept.

 

1979; Norman Podhoretz, "The Abandonment of Israel," Commentary July 1976; Elie Kedourie, "Misreading the

 

Middle East," Commentary July 1979.

 

21 . According to figures published by Ya'akov Karoz, Yediot Ahronot , 10/17/80, the sum total of anti-Semitic

 

incidents recorded in the world in 1979 was double the amount recorded in 1978. In Germany, France, and Britain

 

the number of anti-Semitic incidents was many times greater in that year. In the U.S. as well there has been a sharp

 

increase in anti-Semitic incidents which were reported in that article. For the new anti-Semitism, see L. Talmon,

 

"The New Anti-Semitism," The New Republic , 9/18/1976; Barbara Tuchman, "They poisoned the Wells,"

 

Newsweek 2/3/75

[Nur]

A Plea from Israel

 

 

Come, Obama, Change My Life

 

By Edna Canetti

 

November 07, 2008 --- Obama my dear, they tell me that you are going to change the world. Do me a favor, come and change my life personally.

 

Come to Israel, grab its styupid leadership by the throat and take its foot off the neck of another people. Come and force us to do what is clear, and written, and fitting, and necessary, come and get us out of the Territories, if necessary do it with a smile that reveals million-dollar teeth. If necessary bare your teeth and force us to do it.

 

Make it so that I don’t have to get up in the morning – I who hate to get up early, to go to the checkpoints, to watch and to weep. Make it so I will not have to see 19-year-old children who have been duped into believing that they are defending the home front by pointing rifles at five-year-old children.

 

Make it so that when my daughters take a shower for half an hour I don’t have to think about Ayad’s family from Awarta that puts buckets under all the washbasins in order to reuse the water which is more precious than gold. Because the settlements need the West Bank’s water more than the Palestinians do.

 

Make it so that when I sit in a traffic jam I don’t have to think about the vast numbers of cars that are standing at the entrance to Tul Karem while each one is checked by soldiers and dogs because there has been a warning that they’re about to blow up Tul Karem.

 

Make it so that when my sister urgently rushes to the hospital to give birth and when I rush my husband to the hospital practically with red lights flashing, I don’t have to think about the women giving birth and the heart patients and the wounded people who are stopped at the entrance to Nablus because their vehicle has no permit to enter.

 

Make it so that when I see a soldier in uniform on the street I do not wonder what he did last night. What house he entered in a “Straw Widow procedure”,* what boy he beat up in the alleys of Hawara because he smiled the wrong way.

 

Make it so that in the morning I don’t hear the satisfaction in the voice of the radio newsreader who relates that the IDF has killed six terrorists.

 

Obama my dear, this autumn I did not go to the olive harvest. It didn’t work out. Please make it so that I will not suffer from pangs of conscience because I am not doing enough. That I am living my own good life, pursuing my career, while for the other people just to get home safely is a career in itself.

 

Please relieve me of this pain that I have all the time deep in my belly. It never lets up, I can never really enjoy life, children, friends or work, because my mind is preoccupied with the image of the shepherd in Baq’a standing by the locked gate and shivering with cold because the redhead with the key has not showed up, and the bound blindfolded boy, and the three-year-old girl who got hit on the head by the carousel at the checkpoint, and the barriers of dirt and the concrete blocks that stop the lives of so many people from flowing smoothly.

 

Come, Obama, come and save us from ourselves.

 

And if that is what they mean when they say you are not a friend of Israel, then don’t be a friend. We have already had friends who arm us and justify every horror we carry out and save us from the international courts. Be a true friend. Save us from ourselves. And don’t do it for the world, do it only for me, so I can have peace. You owe it to me. I do not believe in God but still I prayed for you.

 

*The IDF practice of forcibly occupying private Palestinian homes temporarily, for tactical purposes – translator

 

Edna Canetti wrote this for MachsomWatch. Ther piece was translated from Hebrew by George Malent.

[Nur]

Living on Borrowed Time in a Stolen Land

 

By Gilad Atzmon

 

January 04, 2009 "ICH" -- Communicating with Israelis may leave one bewildered. Even now when the Israeli Air Force is practicing murder in broad daylight of hundreds of civilians, elderly persons, women and children, the Israeli people manage to convince themselves that they are the real victims in this violent saga.

 

 

Those who are familiar intimately with Israeli people realise that they are completely uninformed about the roots of the conflict that dominates their lives. Rather often Israelis manage to come up with some bizarre arguments that may make a lot of sense within the Israeli discourse, yet make no sense whatsoever outside of the Jewish street. Such an argument goes as follows: ‘those Palestinians, why do they insist upon living on our land (Israel), why can’t they just settle in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon or any other Arab country?’ Another Hebraic pearl of wisdom sounds like this: ‘what is wrong with these Palestinians? We gave them water, electricity, education and all they do is try to throw us to the sea’.

 

 

Astonishingly enough, the Israelis even within the so-called ‘left’ and even the educated ‘left’ fail to understand who the Palestinians are, where they come from and what they stand for. They fail to grasp that for the Palestinians, Palestine is home. Miraculously, the Israelis manage to fail to grasp that Israel had been erected at the expense of the Palestinian people, on Palestinian land, on Palestinian villages, towns, fields and orchards. The Israelis do not realise that Palestinians in Gaza and in refugee camps in the region are actually dispossessed people from Ber Shive, Yafo, Tel Kabir, Shekh Munis, Lod, Haifa, Jerusalem and many more towns and villages. If you wonder how come the Israelis don’t know their history, the answer is pretty simple, they have never been told. The circumstances that led to the Israeli Palestinian conflict are well hidden within their culture. Traces of pre-1948 Palestinian civilisation on the land had been wiped out. Not only the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians, is not part of the Israeli curriculum, it is not even mentioned or discussed in any Israeli official or academic forum.

 

 

In the very centre of almost every Israeli town one can a find a 1948 memorial statue displaying a very bizarre, almost abstract, pipe work. The plumbing feature is called Davidka and it is actually a 1948 Israeli mortar cannon. Interestingly enough, the Davidka was an extremely ineffective weapon. Its shells wouldn’t reach more than 300 meters and would cause very limited damage. Though the Davidika would cause just minimal harm, it produced a lot of noise. According to the Israeli official historical narrative, the Arabs i.e., Palestinians, simply ran away for their lives once they heard the Davidka from afar. According to the Israeli narrative, the Jews i.e., ‘new Israelis’ did a bit of fireworks and the ‘Arab cowards’ just ran off like ******. In the Israeli official narrative there is no mention of the many orchestrated massacres conducted by the young IDF and the paramilitary units that preceded it. There is no mention also of the racist laws that stop Palestinians[1][1] from returning to their homes and lands.

 

 

The meaning of the above is pretty simple. Israelis are totally unfamiliar with the Palestinian cause. Hence, they can only interpret the Palestinian struggle as a murderous irrational lunacy. Within the Israeli Judeo- centric solipsistic universe, the Israeli is an innocent victim and the Palestinian is no less than a savage murderer.

 

 

This grave situation that leaves the Israeli in the dark regarding his past demolishes any possibility of future reconciliation. Since the Israeli lacks the minimal comprehension of the conflict, he cannot contemplate any possible resolution except extermination or cleansing of the ‘enemy’. All the Israeli is entitled to know are various phantasmic narratives of Jewish suffering. Palestinian pain is completely foreign to his ears. ‘Palestinian right of return’ sounds to him like an amusing idea. Even the most advanced ‘Israeli humanists’ are not ready to share the land with its indigenous inhabitants. This doesn’t leave the Palestinians with many options but to liberate themselves against all odds. Clearly, there is no partner for peace on the Israel side.

 

 

This week we all learned more about the ballistic capability of Hamas. Evidently, Hamas was rather restrained with Israel for more than a long while. It refrained from escalating the conflict to the whole of southern Israel. It occurred to me that the barrages of Qassams that have been landing sporadically on Sderot and Ashkelon were actually nothing but a message from the imprisoned Palestinians. First it was a message to the stolen land, homes fields and orchards: ‘Our beloved soil, we didn’t forget, we are still here fighting for you, sooner rather than later, we will come back, we will start again where we had stopped’. But it was also a clear message to the Israelis. ‘You out there, in Sderot, Beer Sheva, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Tel Aviv and Haifa, whether you realise it or not, you are actually living on our stolen land. You better start to pack because your time is running out, you have exhausted our patience. We, the Palestinian people, have nothing to lose anymore’.

 

 

Let’s face it, realistically the situation in Israel is rather grave. Two years ago it was Hezbollah rockets that pounded northern Israel. This week the Hamas proved beyond doubt that it is capable of serving the South of Israel with some cocktail of ballistic vengeance. Both in the case of the Hezbollah and the case of the Hamas, Israel was left with no military answer. It can no doubt kill civilians but it fails to stop the rocket barrage. The IDF lacks the means of protecting Israel unless covering Israel with a solid concrete roof is a viable solution. At the end of the day, they might be planning just that (link).

 

 

But this is far from the end of the story. In fact it is just the beginning. Every Middle East expert knows that Hamas can seize control of the West Bank within hours. In fact, PA and Fatah control in the West Bank is maintained by the IDF. Once Hamas takes the West Bank, the biggest Israeli population centre will be left to the mercy of Hamas. For those who fail to see, this would be the end of Jewish Israel. It may happen later today, it may happen in three months or in five years, it isn’t matter of ‘if’ but rather matter of ‘when’. By that time, the whole of Israel will be within firing range of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israeli society will collapse, its economy will be ruined. The price of a detached villa in Northern Tel Aviv would equal a shed in Kiryat Shmone or Sderot. By the time a single rocket hits Tel Aviv, the Zionist dream will be over.

 

 

The IDF generals know it, the Israeli leaders know it. This is why they stepped up the war against the Palestinian into extermination. The Israelis do not plan upon invading Gaza. They have lost nothing there. All they want is to finish the Nakba. They drop bombs on Palestinians in order to wipe them out. They want the Palestinians out of the region. It is obviously not going to work, Palestinians will stay. Not only they will they stay, their day of return to their land is coming closer as Israel has been exploiting its deadliest tactics.

 

 

This is exactly where Israeli escapism comes into play. Israel has passed the ‘point of no return’. Its doomed fate is deeply engraved in each bomb it drops on Palestinian civilians. There is nothing Israel can do to save itself. There is no exit strategy. It can’t negotiate its way out because neither the Israelis nor their leadership understand the elementary parameters involved in the conflict. Israel lacks the military power to conclude the battle. It may manage to kill Palestinian grassroots leaders, it has been doing it for years, yet Palestinian resistance and persistence is growing fierce rather than weakening. As an IDF intelligence general predicted already at the first Intifada. ‘In order to win, all Palestinians have to do is to survive’. They survive and they are indeed winning.

 

 

Israeli leaders understand it all. Israel has already tried everything, unilateral withdrawal, starvation and now extermination. It thought to evade the demographic danger by shrinking into an intimate cosy Jewish ghetto. Nothing worked. It is Palestinian persistence in the shape of Hamas politics that defines the future of the region.

 

 

All that is left to Israelis is to cling to their blindness and escapism to evade their devastating grave fate that has become immanent already. All along their way down, the Israelis will sing their familiar various victim anthems. Being imbued in a self-centred supremacist reality, they will be utterly involved in their own pain yet completely blind to the pain they inflict on others. Uniquely enough, the Israelis are operating as a unified collective when dropping bombs on others, yet, once being slightly hurt, they all manage to become monads of vulnerable innocence. It is this discrepancy between the self-image and the way they are seen by the rest of us which turns the Israeli into a monstrous exterminator. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from grasping their own history, it is that discrepancy that stops them from comprehending the repeated numerous attempts to destroy their State. It is that discrepancy that stops Israelis from understanding the meaning of the Shoah so can they prevent the next one. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from being part of humanity.

 

 

Once again Jews will have to wander into an unknown fate. To a certain extent, I myself have started my journey a while ago.

[Nur]

Israel's War of Deceit, Lies and Propaganda

 

By Uri Avnery

 

January 12 "Gulf Times" -- - -Nearly 70 years ago, in the course of the Second World War, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centres.

 

The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

 

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

 

This is the description that would now appear in the history books - if the Germans had won the war.

 

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in Israeli media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas "terrorists" use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave Israel no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to Israel's deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

 

In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets") has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

 

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

 

War - every war - is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one's country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor. The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.

 

Falsification

 

An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.

 

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army "revealed" that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.

 

Later the official liar claimed that "our soldiers were shot at from inside the school". Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.

 

But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public was completely convinced that "they shot from inside the school", and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.

 

So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas "terrorist". Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a "symbol of Hamas rule". Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the "most moral army in the world".

 

The truth is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak - a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called "moral insanity", a sociopathic disorder.

 

The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.

 

A top priority for the planners was the need to minimise casualties among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro-war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.

 

This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war is a part of the election campaign. The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press coverage. But in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view cannot completely exclude all others - the cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot be controlled. Al Jazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home.

 

Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers see the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian National Authority as collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.

 

If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.

 

What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

 

In the end, this war is a crime against Israelis too, a crime against the State of Israel.

 

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to Counter Punch's book 'The Politics of Anti-Semitism'.

[Nur]

On The Wrong Side

 

By Uri Avnery

 

January 26, 2009 "Gush Shalom" -- OF ALL the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.”

 

He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words

 

In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!”

 

Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the language of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs which once terrorized their neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their time had already passed.

 

DURING THE rousing celebrations, again and again the multicolored patchwork of the new president’s family was mentioned.

 

All the preceding 43 presidents were white Protestants, except John Kennedy, who was a white Catholic. 38 of them were the descendants of immigrants from the British isles. Of the other five, three were of Dutch ancestry (Theodor and Franklin D. Roosevelt , as well as Martin van Buren) and two of German descent (Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower.)

 

The face of Obama’s family is quite different. The extended family includes whites and the descendents of black slaves, Africans from Kenya, Indonesians, Chinese from Canada, Christians, Muslims and even one Jew (a converted African-American). The two first names of the president himself, Barack Hussein, are Arabic.

 

This is the face of the new American nation – a mixture of races, religions, countries of origin and skin-colors, an open and diverse society, all of whose members are supposed to be equal and to identify themselves with the ”founding fathers”. The American Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was born in a Kenyan village, can speak with pride of “George Washington, the father of our nation”, of the “American Revolution” (the war of independence against the British), and hold up the example of “our ancestors”, who include both the white pioneers and the black slaves who “endured the lash of the whip”. That is the perception of a modern nation, multi-cultural and multi-racial: a person joins it by acquiring citizenship, and from this moment on is the heir to all its history.

 

Israel is the product of the narrow nationalism of the 19th century, a nationalism that was closed and exclusive, based on race and ethnic origin, blood and earth. Israel is a “Jewish State”, and a Jew is a person born Jewish or converted according to Jewish religious law (Halakha). Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, it is a state whose mental world is to a large extent conditioned by religion, race and ethnic origin.

 

When Ehud Barak speaks about the future, he speaks the language of past centuries, in terms of brute force and brutal threats, with armies providing the solution to all problems. That was also the language of George W. Bush who last week slinked out of Washington, a language that already sounds to the Western ear like an echo from the distant past.

 

The words of the new president are ringing in the air: “Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.” The key words were “humility and restraint”.

 

Our leaders are now boasting about their part in the Gaza War, in which unbridled military force was unleashed intentionally against a civilian population, men, women and children, with the declared aim of “creating deterrence”. In the era that began last Tuesday, such expressions can only arouse shudders.

 

BETWEEN Israel and the United States a gap has opened this week, a narrow gap, almost invisible – but it may widen into an abyss.

 

The first signs are small. In his inaugural speech, Obama proclaimed that “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers.” Since when? Since when do the Muslims precede the Jews? What has happened to the “Judeo-Christian Heritage”? (A completely false term to start with, since Judaism is much closer to Islam than to Christianity. For example: neither Judaism nor Islam supports the separation of religion and state.)

 

The very next morning, Obama phoned a number of Middle East leaders. He decided to make a quite unique gesture: placing the first call to Mahmoud Abbas, and only the next to Olmert. The Israeli media could not stomach that. Haaretz, for example, consciously falsified the record by writing - not once but twice in the same issue - that Obama had called “Olmert, Abbas, Mubarak and King Abdallah” (in that order).

 

Instead of the group of American Jews who had been in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama, on his very first day in office, appointed an Arab-American, George Mitchell, whose mother had come to America from Lebanon at age 18, and who himself, orphaned from his Irish father, was brought up in a Maronite Christian Lebanese family.

 

These are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years, they have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support, from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the Security Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support may now be reaching its limits.

 

It will happen, of course, gradually. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington will continue to put the fear of God into Congress. A huge ship like the United States can change course only very slowly, in a gentle curve. But the turn-around started already on the first day of the Obama administration.

 

This could not have happened, if America itself had not changed. That is not a political change alone. It is a change in the world-view, in mental outlook, in values. A certain American myth, which is very similar to the Zionist myth, has been replaced by another American myth. Not by accident did Obama devote to this so large a part of his speech (in which, by the way, there was not a single word about the extermination of the Native Americans).

 

The Gaza War, during which tens of millions of Americans saw the horrible carnage in the Strip (even if rigorous self-censorship cut out all but a tiny part), has hastened the process of drifting apart. Israel, the brave little sister, the loyal ally in Bush’s “War on Terror”, has turned into the violent Israel, the mad monster, which has no compassion for women and children, the wounded and the sick. And when winds like these are blowing, the Lobby loses height.

 

The leaders of official Israel do not notice it. They do not feel, as Obama put it in another context, that “the ground has shifted beneath them”. They think that this is no more than a temporary political problem that can be set right with the help of the Lobby and the servile members of Congress.

 

Our leaders are still intoxicated with war and drunk with violence. They have re-phrased the famous saying of the Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz into: “War is but a continuation of an election campaign by other means.” They compete with each other with vainglorious swagger for their share of the “credit”. Tzipi Livni, who cannot compete with the men for the crown of warlord, tries to outdo them in toughness, in bellicosity, in hard-heartedness.

 

The most brutal is Ehud Barak. Once I called him a “peace criminal”, because he brought about the failure of the 2000 Camp David conference and shattered the Israeli peace camp. Now I must call him a “war criminal”, as the person who planned the Gaza War knowing that it would murder masses of civilians.

 

In his own eyes, and in the eyes of a large section of the public, this is a military operation which deserves all praise. His advisors also thought that it would bring him success in the elections. The Labor party, which had been the largest party in the Knesset for decades, had shrunk in the polls to 12, even 9 seats out of 120. With the help of the Gaza atrocity it has now gone up to 16 or so. That’s not a landslide, and there’s no guarantee that it will not sink again.

 

What was Barak’s mistake? Very simply: every war helps the Right. War, by its very nature, arouses in the population the most primitive emotions – hate and fear, fear and hate. These are the emotions on which the Right has been riding for centuries. Even when it’s the ”Left” that starts a war, it’s still the Right that profits from it. In a state of war, the population prefers an honest-to-goodness Rightist to a phony Leftist.

 

This is happening to Barak for the second time. When, in 2000, he spread the mantra “I have turned every stone on the way to peace, / I have made the Palestinians unprecedented offers, / They have rejected everything, / There is no one to talk with” - he succeeded not only in blowing the Left to smithereens, but also in paving the way for the ascent of Ariel Sharon in the 2001 elections. Now he is paving the way for Binyamin Netanyahu (hoping, quite openly, to become his minister of defense).

 

And not only for him. The real victor of the war is a man who had no part in it at all: Avigdor Liberman. His party, which in any normal country would be called fascist, is steadily rising in the polls. Why? Liberman looks and sounds like an Israeli Mussolini, he is an unbridled Arab-hater, a man of the most brutal force. Compared to him, even Netanyahu looks like a softie. A large part of the young generation, nurtured on years of occupation, killing and destruction, after two atrocious wars, considers him a worthy leader.

 

WHILE THE US has made a giant jump to the left, Israel is about to jump even further to the right.

 

Anyone who saw the millions milling around Washington on inauguration day knows that Obama was not speaking only for himself. He was expressing the aspirations of his people, the Zeitgeist.

 

Between the mental world of Obama and the mental world of Liberman and Netanyahu there is no bridge. Between Obama and Barak and Livni, too, there yawns an abyss. Post-election Israel may find itself on a collision course with post-election America.

 

Where are the American Jews? The overwhelming majority of them voted for Obama. They will be between the hammer and the anvil – between their government and their natural adherence to Israel. It is reasonable to assume that this will exert pressure from below on the “leaders” of American Jewry, who have incidentally never been elected by anyone, and on organizations like AIPAC. The sturdy stick, on which Israeli leaders are used to lean in times of trouble, may prove to be a broken reed.

 

Europe, too, is not untouched by the new winds. True, at the end of the war we saw the leaders of Europe – Sarkozy, Merkel, Browne and Zapatero – sitting like schoolchildren behind a desk in class, respectfully listening to the most loathsome arrogant posturing from Ehud Olmert, reciting his text after him. They seemed to approve the atrocities of the war, speaking of the Qassams and forgetting about the occupation, the blockade and the settlements. Probably they will not hang this picture on their office walls.

 

But during this war masses of Europeans poured into the streets to demonstrate against the horrible events. The same masses saluted Obama on the day of his inauguration.

 

This is the new world. Perhaps our leaders are now dreaming of the slogan: “Stop the world, I want to get off!” But there is no other world.

 

YES, WE ARE NOW on the wrong side of history.

 

Fortunately, there is also another Israel. It is not in the limelight, and its voice is heard only by those who listen out for it. This is a sane, rational Israel, with its face to the future, to progress and peace. In these coming elections, its voice will barely be heard, because all the old parties are standing with their two feet squarely in the world of yesterday.

 

But what has happened in the United States will have a profound influence on what happens in Israel. The huge majority of Israelis know that we cannot exist without close ties with the US. Obama is now the leader of the world, and we live in this world. When he promises to work “aggressively” for peace between us and the Palestinians, that is a marching order for us.

 

We want to be on the right side of history. That will take months or years, but I am sure that we shall get there. The time to start is now.

[Nur]

Glasnost In London – War Fever In Washington

 

By Eric Margolis

 

February 03, 2009 "Lew Rockwel" -- -LONDON – What used to be called "Cool London" looks more like "Crash London" these days. Of all the leading industrial nations, Britain has so far suffered more than any other nation, even the United States.

 

Most major banks, even venerable names like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s, are on life support. The financial district around Canary Wharf is beginning to look like a ghost town, as offices close and whole floors of financial drones are fired. Gloom pervades just about everywhere.

 

Meanwhile, two senior British officials have created a sensation by finally speaking some hard truths that contradict all the lies spewed out by Washington and London about the bogus "war on terror."

 

Lord West, the security minister of Britain’s Labor government (equivalent to the US Homeland Security chief), dropped a bombshell last week by declaring that his nation’s military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan had actually fueled global radicalism against Britain and the US as well as domestic "terrorism" in the United Kingdom.

 

According to the outspoken minister, the Western power’s recent policies in the Muslim world were encouraging what we term terrorism. Interestingly, I happened to be in London at the time, promoting my new book, American Raj, which argues precisely the same point.

 

West described as "bollocks" former PM Tony Blair’s claims the US-led "war on terror" had nothing to do with growing Islamic radicalism. This comes soon after Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, urged an end to the use of the term "war on terror," which he called deceptive and misleading.

 

In an extraordinary move, cabinet minutes of Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq may shortly be made public, raising the possibility of serious criminal charges against some senior British officials. At minimum, the sanctimonious Blair is likely to be exposed as a liar and hypocrite in his claims the Iraq war was justified and necessary.

 

Many Britons are calling for war crimes trials against their former leaders and are angered by plans to send more British troops to Afghanistan. Britain’s soldiers have become as much auxiliaries in the American military machine as were Nepal’s renowned Gurkha troops in the British Empire.

 

While glasnost sweeps London, in Washington, it’s déjà vu and love your government. President Barack Obama vowed to continue President Bush’s war policies in Afghanistan and intensify the eight-year-old conflict by doubling the number of US troops and aircraft there in coming months.

 

In addition, Washington is rife with rumors that the Obama administration plans to dump the US-installed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and replace him by one of four CIA-groomed candidates. The problem is, three new stooges won’t be any better than one old stooge.

 

London is warning Washington both against a precipitous change of regime in Kabul that would be widely viewed as crass political manipulation and against a plan to arm tribes in neighboring Pakistan that the US used in by now totally fragmented Iraq.

 

Obama’s dismaying eagerness to expand the war demonstrates political inexperience and a faulty grasp of events in Afghanistan. A change of administration in Washington, and departure of the reviled Bush, offered an ideal opportunity for Washington to declare a pause in the Afghan War and reassess its policies. It also presented an ideal opportunity to offer negotiations to Taliban and its growing number of supporters.

 

The Afghan War will have to be ended by a political settlement that includes the Taliban-led nationalist alliance that represents over half of Afghanistan’s population, the Pashtun people. There is simply no purely military solution to this grinding conflict – as even the Secretary General of NATO admits.

 

But instead of diplomacy, the new administration elected to stick its head ever deeper into the Afghan hornet’s nest. The bill for an intensified war will likely reach $4 billion monthly by midyear at a time when the United States is bankrupt and running on borrowed money from China and Japan.

 

The 20,000–30,000 more US troops slated to go to Afghanistan will also be standing on a smoking volcano: Pakistan. The Afghan War is relentlessly seeping into Pakistan, enflaming its people against the NATO powers and, as Lord West rightly says, generating new jihadist forces.

 

Polls show most Pakistanis strongly oppose the US-led war in Afghanistan and the grudging involvement of their armed forces in it. Intensifying US air attacks on Pakistan have aroused fierce anti-American sentiment across this nation of 165 million.

 

Why is President Obama, who came to power on an antiwar platform, committed to expanding a war where there are no vital US interests?

 

Oil is certainly one reason. The proposed route for pipelines taking oil and gas from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea coast run right through Taliban-Pashtun territory.

 

Another reason: Americans still want revenge for 9/11. In the absence of a clear perpetrator, Taliban has been selected as the most convenient and identifiable target though it had nothing to do with the attacks and knew nothing about them. The 9/11 attacks were mounted from Germany and Spain, not Afghanistan, and planned by a group of Pakistanis. Washington is yet to offer a White Paper promised in 2001 "proving" the guilt of Osama bin Laden in the attacks.

 

There is also the less obvious question of NATO. Washington arm-twisted the reluctant NATO alliance badly for the US-led forces as their vulnerable supply lines come increasingly under Taliban attack. Here in Europe, the majority of public opinion opposes the Afghanistan War as a neocolonial adventure for oil and imperial influence.

 

The US could survive a defeat in Afghanistan, as it did in Vietnam. But the NATO alliance might not.

 

The end of the cold war and collapse of the USSR removed the raison d’être of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization which was created to resist Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

 

According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading strategists, NATO serves as the primary tool for America’s strategic domination of Europe. Japan fulfills the same role for the US in Asia. The Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact to dominate Eastern Europe.

 

The US also uses NATO to help deter the creation of a truly united – and rival – Europe with its own unified armed forces. The EU will not become a truly integrated national state until it has its own independent armed forces.

 

NATO’s defeat in Afghanistan would raise questions about its continuing purpose and obedience to US strategic demands. Calls would inevitably come for empowerment of the European Defense Union, an independent European armed force that answers to the EU Brussels, not to Washington.

 

This, I believe, is one of the primary reasons why vested interests in Washington – notably the Pentagon – have prevailed on the new president to expand the war in Afghanistan by claiming that America’s influence in Europe depends on victory in Afghanistan.

 

The US and its allies cannot be seen to be defeated by a bunch of Afghan tribesmen. Coming after the epic defeat in Vietnam and the trillion-dollar fiasco in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan is simply unthinkable to the military-industrial-petroleum-financial complex that still seems to be calling many of the shots in Washington.

 

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website..

[Nur]

Afghanistan!

 

A War on innocent people who have not attacked America, nor are threat to America or its Allies is an unjust war, its unwinnable in the long run. Acting great is what reduced Pharaoh's civilization when he chased the oppressed children of Prophet Yaqub ( Israel) to the Red Sea, only to drown.

 

 

An Afghan Taliban when asked about his determination to fight on against the most powerful nations of the world, US and NATO responded: " We shoot at them ten dollars worth of bullets, they shoot us with 10 Million Dollars worth of bombs, we will see if cost of their bombs outlasts cost of our bullets!"

 

 

Nur

[Fabregas]

Nur,I was watching documentary on the bbc about young british soldiers. One of the things that amazed was that the soldier who the documentary was about tatooed the arabic words, " al kafir" on his back. caajib wale. The soldier was later left the army as he got into violence and other problems when he returned to prison. One of the telling thing he said was something like, " I am demonised if I commit violence in Britian, but I am glorified and decorated if do the same thing abroad.

[Nur]

The Politics Of Bollocks

 

By John Pilger

 

February 06, 2009 "ICH" --- Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw off its closest American contender. It had authority.

 

A high official with the Gilbertian title of Lord West of Spithead used it to great effect on 27 January. The former admiral, who is security adviser to Gordon Brown, was referring to Tony Blair's famous assertion that invading countries and killing innocent people did not increase the threat of terrorism at home.

 

"That was clearly bollocks," said his lordship, who warned of the perceived "linkage between the US, Israel and the UK" in the horrors inflicted on Gaza and the effect on the recruitment of terrorists in Britain. In other words, he was stating the obvious: that state terrorism begets individual or group terrorism at source. Just as Blair was the prime mover of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, so Brown, having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will share responsibility for related atrocities at home.

 

There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.

 

The BBC's explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken people of Gaza is a vivid example. Mark Thompson, the director general, cited the BBC's legal requirement to be "impartial... because Gaza is a major ongoing news story in which humanitarian issues... are both at the heart of the story and contentious."

 

In a letter to Thompson, David Bracewell, illuminated the deceit behind this. He pointed to previous BBC appeals for the Disasters Emergency Committee that were not only made in the midst of "an ongoing news story" in which humanitarian issues were "contentious", but demonstrated how the BBC took sides. In 1999, at the height of the illegal Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal on behalf of Kosovar refugees. The BBC web page for that appeal was linked to numerous articles meant to support the gravity of the humanitarian issue. These included quotations from Blair himself, such as "This will be a daily pounding until [slobodan Milosevic] comes into line with the terms that Nato has laid down." There was no significant balance of view from the Yugoslav side, and not a single mention that the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after Nato had started bombing. Similarly, in an appeal for the victims of the civil war in the Congo, the BBC favoured the regime of Joseph Kabila without referring to the Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other reports accusing his forces of atrocities. In contrast, the rebel leader Nkunda was "accused of committing atrocities" and was ordained the BBC's bad guy. Kabila, who represented western interests, was clearly the good guy – just like Nato in the Balkans and Israel in the Middle East.

 

While Mark Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.

 

On 23 January, the Guardian's front page declared, "Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' ". The "wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George Bush's war on terror", said the report, had been ordered by the new president who would be "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition...".

 

The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday". Obama's orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony, "would restore America's moral standing in the world". What moral standing? It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can transmit PR stunts like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies from the same source under only nominally different management.

 

Far from "deconstructing [sic] the war on terror", Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W. Bush's first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama's wars – with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism", 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.

 

Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network", Obama's executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, "current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role." A semantic sleight of hand is that "long term prisons" are changed to "short term prisons"; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America's numerous "covert actions" will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.

 

Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America's "secret army" of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama's nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh interrogation", which will be kept secret.

 

Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush's totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans' library and bookshop records. The man of "change", is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington.

 

The Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Prize (Runner-up) is shared. On 28 January, a national Greenpeace advertisement opposing a third runway at London's Heathrow airport summed up the almost willful naivety that has obstructed informed analysis of the Obama administration. "Fortunately," declared Greenpeace beneath a God-like picture of Obama, "the White House has a new occupant, and he has asked us all to roll back the spectre of a warming planet." This was followed by Obama's rhetorical flourish about "putting off unpleasant decisions". In fact, Obama has made no commitment to curtail the America's infamous responsibility for the causes of global warming. As with Bush and most modern era presidents, it is oil, not stemming carbon emissions, that informs the new administration. Obama's national security adviser, General Jim Jones, a former Nato supreme commander, made his name planning US military control over the exploitation of oil and gas reserves from the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Guinea in Africa.

 

Sharing the Bollocks Runner-up Prize is the Observer, which on 25 January published a major news report headlined, "How Obama set the tone for a new US revolution". This was reminiscent of the Observer almost a dozen years ago when liberalism's other great white hope, Tony Blair, came to power. "Goodbye Xenophobia" was the Observer's post-election front page in 1997 and "The Foreign Office says Hello World, remember us". The government, said the breathless text, would push for "new worldwide rules on human rights and the environment" and implement "tough new limits" on arms sales. The opposite happened. Last year, Britain was the biggest arms dealer in the world; currently it is second only to the United States.

 

In the Blair mould, the Obama White House "sprang into action" with its "radical plans". The new president's first phone call was to that Palestinian quisling, the unelected and deeply unpopular Mohammed Abbas. There was a "hot pace" and a "new era", in which a notorious name from an ancien regime, Richard Holbrooke, was dispatched to Pakistan. In 1978, Holbrooke betrayed a promise to normalise relations with the Vietnamese on the eve of a vicious embargo that ruined the lives of countless Vietnamese children. Under Obama, the "sense of a new era abroad", declared the Observer, "was reinforced by the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state". Clinton has threatened to "entirely obliterate Iran" on behalf of Israel.

 

What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power assembled under cover of America's first "post-racial president". Apart from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel, having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with impunity. On 10 February, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to put Binyamin Netanyahu into power. Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who has made clear his intention of attacking Iran. In the Wall Street Journal on 24 January, he described Iran as the "terrorist mother base" and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities". On 31 January, unaware he was being filmed, Israel's ambassador in Australia described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" - dress rehearsal - for an attack on Iran.

 

For Netanyahu, the reassuring news is that Obama's administration is the most Zionist in living memory – a truth that has struggled to be told from beneath the soggy layers of Obama-love. Not a single member of Obama's team demurred from Obama's support for Israel's barbaric actions in Gaza. Obama himself likened the safety of his two young daughters with that of Israeli children while making not a single reference to the thousands of Palestinian children killed with American weapons - a violation of both international and US law. He did, however, demand that the people of Gaza be denied "smuggled" small arms with which to defend themselves against the world's fourth largest military power. And he paid tribute to the Arab dictatorships, such as Egypt, which are bribed by the US Treasury to help the US and Israel enforce policies described by the United Nations Rapporteur, Richard Falk, a Jew, as "genocidal".

 

It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth. " In the time of universal deceit, " wrote George Orwell, " telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

[Nur]

War On Terror Within

 

 

 

The End of Jewish History

 

By Gilad Atzmon

 

March 20, 2009 "ICH" --- The issue I am going to discuss today is probably the most important thing I’ve ever had to say about Israeli brutality and contemporary Jewish identity. I assume that I could have shaped my thought into a wide-ranging book or an analytical academic text but instead, I will do the very opposite, I will make it as short and as simple as possible.

 

In the weeks that have just passed we had been witness to an Israeli genocidal campaign against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza. We had been witnessing one of the strongest armies in the world squashing women, elderly people and children. We saw blizzards of unconventional weapons bursting over schools, hospitals and refugee camps. We had seen and heard about war crimes committed before, but this time, the Israeli transgression was categorically different. It was supported by the total absolute majority of the Israeli Jewish population. The IDF military campaign in Gaza enjoyed the support of 94% of the Israeli population. 94% of the Israelis apparently approved of the air raids against civilians. The Israeli people saw the carnage on their TV screens, they heard the voices, they saw hospitals and refugee camps in flames and yet, they weren’t really moved by it all. They didn’t do much to stop their “democratically elected” ruthless leaders. Instead, some of them grabbed a seat and settled on the hills overlooking the Gaza Strip to watch their army turning Gaza into modern Hebraic coliseum of blood. Even now when the campaign seems to be over and the scale of the carnage in Gaza has been revealed, the Israelis fail to show any signs of remorse. As if this is not enough, all throughout the war, Jews around the world rallied in support of their “Jews-only state”. Such a popular support of outright war crimes is unheard of. Terrorist states do kill, yet they are slightly shy about it all. Stalin’s USSR did it in some remote Gulags, Nazi Germany executed its victims in deep forests and behind barbed wire. In the Jewish state, the Israelis slaughter defenceless women, children and the old in broad daylight, using unconventional weapons targeting schools, hospitals and refugee camps.

 

This level of group barbarism cries for an explanation. The task ahead can be easily defined as the quest for a realisation of Israeli collective brutality. How is it that a society has managed to lose its grip of any sense of compassion and mercy?

 

 

The Terror Within

 

 

More than anything else, the Israelis and their supportive Jewish communities are terrorised by the brutality they find in themselves. The more ruthless the Israelis are, the more frightened they become. The logic is simple. The more suffering one inflicts on the other, the more anxious one becomes of the possible potential deadly capacity around. In broad terms, the Israeli projects on the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Iranian the aggression which he finds in himself. Considering the fact that Israeli brutality is now proved to be with no limit and with no comparison, their anxiety is as at least as great.

 

Seemingly, the Israelis are fearful of themselves being the henchmen. They are engaged in a deadly battle with the terror within. But the Israeli is not alone. The Diaspora Jew who rallies in support of a state that pours white phosphorous on civilians is caught in the exact same devastating trap. Being an enthusiastic backer of an overwhelming crime, he is horrified by the thought that the cruelty he happens to find in himself may manifest itself in others. The Diaspora Jew who supports Israel is devastated by the imaginary possibility that a brutal intent, similar to his own, may one day turn against him. This very concern is what the fear of anti-Semitism is all about. It is basically the projection of the collective Zio-centric tribal ruthlessness onto others.

 

 

 

There is no Israeli - Palestinian Conflict

 

 

 

What we see here is a clear formation of a vicious cycle in which the Israeli and his supporters are becoming an insular fireball of vengeance that is fueled by some explosive internal aggression. The meaning of it all is pretty revealing. Since Palestinians cannot militarily confront Israeli aggression and destructive capacity, we are entitled to argue that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All there is, is Israeli psychosis in which the Israeli is being shattered with anxiety by the reflection of his own ruthlessness. Being regarded as the Nazis of our time, the Israeli is thus doomed to seeing a Nazi in everyone. Similarly, there is no rise in anti-Semitism either. The Diaspora Zionist Jew is simply devastated by the possibility that someone out there is as ethically corrupted and merciless as he himself proved to be. In short, Israeli politics and Zionist lobbying should be seen as no less than a lethal Zio-centric collective paranoia on the verge of total psychosis.

 

Is there a way to redeem the Zionist of his bloody expedition? Is there a way to change the course of history, to save the Israelis and their supporters from total depravity? Probably the best way to pose this question is to ask whether there is a way to save the Israeli and the Zionist from themselves. As one may gather, I am not exactly interested in saving Israelis or Zionists, however, I do grasp that redeeming Zionists of their transgression may bring a prospect of peace to Palestine, Iraq and probably the rest of us. For those who fail to see it, Israel is just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the day, America, Britain and the West are now subject to some similar forms of "politics of fear" that are the direct outcome of Neocon deadly interventionist ideology and practices.

 

 

 

The Shrink from Nazareth

 

 

 

Many years ago, so we are told, there was an Israelite who lived amongst his brethren in the land of Canaan. Like the contemporary Israelis, he was surrounded by hate, vengeance and fear. At a certain stage he had decided to intervene and to bring a change about, he realised that there was no other way to fight ruthlessness than to search for grace. “Turn your other cheek” was his simple suggestion. Identifying the Israelite’s psychosis as “a war against terror within”, Jesus grasped that the only way to counter violence is to look in the mirror while searching for Goodness within.

 

It is rather apparent that Jesus’ lesson paved the way to the formation of western universal ethics. Modern political ideologies drew their lesson from the Christian prospect. Marx’s normative search for equality can be seen as a secular rewriting of Jesus’ notion of brotherhood. And yet, not a single political ideology has managed to integrate the deepest notion of Jesus’ grace. To seek peace is primarily to search for one within. While Israelis and their Neocon twins would aim at achieving peace by means of deterrence, true peace is achieved by the search for harmony within. As a Lacanian scholar may suggest, to love your neighbour is actually to love yourself loving your neighbour. The case of the Israeli is the complete opposite. As they manage to prove time after time, they are really loving themselves hating their neighbours or in short, they simply love themselves hating in general. They hate almost everything: the neighbour, the Arab, Chavez, the German, Islam, the Goy, Pork, the Pope, the Palestinian, the Church, Jesus, Hamas, calamari and Iran. You name it, they hate it. One may have to admit that hating so much must be a very consuming project unless it gives pleasure. And indeed the Israeli “pleasure principle” could be articulated as follows: it continuously drives the Israeli to seek pleasure in hate while inflicting pain upon others.

 

It must be mentioned at this point that the ˜War Against Terror within” is not exactly a Jewish invention. Everyone, whether it is nations, peoples or individuals, are a potential subject to it. The consequences of American nuclear murderous slaughter in Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the American people into a terrorised collective. This collective anxiety is known as the “cold war”. America is yet to redeem itself of the fear that there maybe someone out there as merciless as America proved to be. To a certain extent, operation Shock and Awe had a very similar effect on Britain and America. It led to the creation of horrified masses easily manipulated by highly motivated elite. This exact type of politics is called “politics of fear”.

 

And yet, within the western discourse a correction mechanism is in place. Unlike the Jewish state that is getting radicalised by its own self feeding paranoia, in the West, evil is somehow confronted and contained eventually. The murderer is denounced and hope for peace is somehow reinstated till further notice. Not that I hold my breath for President Obama bringing any change, one thing is rather clear, Obama was voted in to bring a change. Obama is a symbol of our genuine attempt to curtail evil. In the Jewish state, not only it doesn’t happen, it can never happen. The difference between Israel and the West is rather obvious. In the West, Christian heritage is providing us with a possibility of a wish grounded on belief in universal goodness. Though, we are under the constant danger of exposure to evil, we tend to believe that goodness will eventually prevail. On the other hand, in Hebraic tribal discourse, Goodness is the property of the chosen. The Israelis do not see goodness or kindness in their neighbors, they see them as savage and as a life-threatening entity. For the Israelis, kindness is their very own property, accidentally they are also innocent and victims. Within the western universal discourse, goodness doesn’t belong to one people or a single nation, it belongs to all and to none at the same time. Within the western universal heritage, Goodness is found in each of us. It doesn’t belong to a political party or an ideology. The elevating notion of grace and a Good God is there in each of us, it is always very close to home.

 

 

 

What Kind Of Father Is That?

 

 

 

“Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you –“ a land with large, fine cities you did not build, houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant – and you eat your fill.” (Deuteronomy: 6: 10 -11).

 

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2)

 

At this point we may try to attempt and to grasp the root cause behind the severe lack of compassion within the Israeli discourse and its supportive lobbies. I believe that an elaboration on the troubled relationships between the Jews and their different Gods may throw some light on the topic. It is rather obvious that the ever growing list of Jewish “Gods”, “Idols” and “Father-figures” is slightly problematic at least as far as ethics and kindness are concerned. The very relationship between “the son” and the “non-ethical father” must be explored. The philosopher Ariella Atzmon (who happens to be my mother) defines the complexity of the false beginning as the “Fagin Syndrome”. Charles Dickens’ Fagin is a “kidsman”, an adult who recruits children and trains them as pickpockets and thieves, exchanging food and shelter for goods the children steal. Though the kids must be grateful towards their master, they must also despise him for turning them into thieves and pickpockets. The kids realise that Fagin’s goods are all stolen and his kindness is far from being genuinely honest or pure. Sooner or later the kids will turn against their master Fagin in an attempt to liberate themselves of the immoral catch.

 

From a father-son perspective, the Biblical Jewish God Jehovah is no different from what we might see in the Fagin syndrome. The father of Israel leads his chosen people through the desert to the promised land so they can rob and plunder its indigenous habitants. This is not exactly what one may expect of an ethical father or a “kind God”. Consequently, as much as the sons of Israel love Jehovah, they must also be slightly suspicious of him for turning them into robbers and murderers. They might even be apprehensive regarding his kindness. Thus, it shouldn’t take us by a surprise that throughout Jewish history more than just a few Jews had turned against their heavenly father.

 

However, bearing in mind the common secularist perception that Gods are actually invented by people, one may wonder, what leads to the invention of such an “unethical God”? What makes people follow the rules of such a God? It would be also interesting to find out what kind of alternative Gods Jews happened to pick or invent once Jehovah has been shunned.

 

Since emancipation, more than just a few Jews had been disassociating themselves from the traditional tribal setting and rabbinical Judaism. Many intermingled with their surrounding realities, dropped their chosen entitlement and turned into ordinary human beings. Many other Jews insisted upon dropping God yet maintaining their racially orientated tribal affiliation. They decided to base their tribal belonging on ethnic, racial, political, cultural and ideological grounds rather than the Judaic precept. Though they noticeably dropped Jehovah they insisted upon adopting a secularist view that was soon shaped into a monolithic religious-like precept. All throughout the 20th century, the two religious-like political ideologies that had been found to be most appealing by the Jewish masses were Marxism and Zionism.

 

Marxism can be easily portrayed as a secular universal ethical ideology. However, within the process of transformation into a Jewish tribal precept, Marxism has managed to lose any traces of humanism or universalism. As we know, early Zionist ideology and practice was largely dominated by Jewish leftists who regarded themselves as true followers of Marx. They genuinely believed that celebrating their Jewish national revival at the expense of Palestinians was a legitimate socialist endeavour.

 

Interestingly enough, their opponents, the anti-Zionist Bund of the East European Jewish Labour, didn’t really believe in the institutional robbery of the Palestinians, instead, they believed that taking from rich European is a great universal mitzvah on the path towards social justice.

 

 

 

The following are a few lines from The Bund’s anthem

 

 

 

We swear our stalwart hate persists,

 

Of those who rob and kill the poor:

 

The Tsar, the masters, capitalists.

 

Our vengeance will be swift and sure.

 

So swear together to live or die!

 

 

 

Without engaging in questions having to do with ethics or political affiliation, it is rather obvious that the Jewish Marxist anthem is overwhelmingly saturated with “hate” and “vengeance”. As much as Jews were enthusiastic about Marx, Marxism, Bolshevism and equality, the end of the story is known. Jews en masse dropped Marx a long time ago. They somehow left the revolution to some enlightened Goyim such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. Leaders who truly internalised in the real meaning of universal equality and ethics.

 

Though in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, Marxism found many followers amongst European Jews, following the Holocaust, Zionism has gradually become the voice of world Jewry. Like Fagin, the Zionist Gods and Idols: Herzl, Ben Gurion, Nordau, Weizmann, promised their followers a new unethical beginning. Robbing the Palestinians was their path towards a long overdue historical justice. Zionism transformed the Old Testament from a spiritual text into a land registry. But again as in the case of Jehovah, the Zio God transformed the Jew into a thief, it promised him someone else’s property. This in itself may explain the Israeli resentment towards Zionism and Zionist ideology. Israelis prefer to see themselves as the natural dwellers of the land rather than pioneers in a non-ethical Jewish Diaspora colonial project. The Israeli Jew furnishes his political stand by means of severe ethical escapism. This may explain the fact that as much as the Israelis love their wars, they really hate to fight them. They are not willing to die for a big abstract remote ideology such as the “Jewish nation” or “Zionism”. They overwhelmingly prefer to drop white phosphorous and cluster bombs from afar.

 

However, along the relatively short history of modern Jewish nationalism the Zio God made friends with some other Gods and kosher idols. Back in 1917 Lord Balfour promised the Jews that they would erect their national home in Palestine. Needless to say, as in the case of Jehovah, Lord Balfour made the Jews into plunderers and robbers, he came up with an outright non-ethical promise. He promised the Jews someone else’s land. This was basically a false beginning. Evidently, it didn’t take long before the Jews turned against the British Empire. In 1947 the UN made exactly the same foolish mistake, it gave birth to the “Jews-only State” again at the expense of the Palestinians. It legitimised the robbery of Palestine in the name of the nations. Like in the case of shunned Jehovah, it didn’t take long before the Jews turned against the UN. “It doesn’t matter what the Goyim say, all that matters is what the Jews do”, said Israeli PM David Ben Gurion. Recently Israelis had managed to even shun their best subservient friends in the White House. On the eve of the last American presidential election Israeli Generals had been filmed denouncing President Bush for “damaging Israeli interests for being overwhelmingly supportive” (Ret. Brig General Shlomo Brom). The Israeli Generals basically blamed Bush for not stopping Israel from destroying its neighbours. The moral is rather clear, the Zionists and the Israelis will inevitably turn against their Gods, Idols, fathers and others who try to help them. This is the real meaning of the Fagin syndrome within the Israeli political context. They will always have to turn against their fathers.

 

I believe that the most interesting Jewish belief system of them all is the Holocaust Religion, which the Israeli Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz rightly defined as the “new Jewish religion”. The most interesting aspect of the Holocaust religion is its God-figure, namely “the Jew”. The Jewish follower of that newly formed dogmatic precept believes in “the Jew”, the one who redeemed oneself. The one who “survived” the “ultimate genocidal” event. The followers believe in “the Jew”, the “innocent” victim sufferer who returned to his “promised land” and now celebrates his successful revival narrative. To a certain extent, within the Holocaust religious discourse, the Jew believes in “the Jew”, expressed as his/her powers and his/her eternal qualities. Within the newly formed religious framework, Mecca is Tel Aviv and the Holy Shrine is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. The newly formed religion has many shrines (Museums) scattered around the world and it has many priests who spread the message around and punish its opposing elements. From a Jewish perspective, the Holocaust religion is a fully transparent expression of self love. It is where past and future merge into a meaningful present, it is when history is translated into praxis. Whether consciously or unconsciously, every person who identifies politically and ideologically (rather than religiously) as a Jew is, practically speaking, succumbing to the Holocaust religion and a follower of its father-figure “the Jew”. And yet, one may wonder, what about Kindness, is there any goodness in this newly formed ‘father-figure’? Is there any grace in this narrative of innocent victimhood that is celebrated daily at the expense of the Palestinian people?

 

If there is an end to history, the Holocaust religion embodies the very end of Jewish history. In the light of the Holocaust religion the “Father” and the “Son” unite at last. At least in the case of Israel and Zionism they bond into an amalgam of genocidal ideology and reality. In the light of the Holocaust religion and its epic survival ethos the Jewish State considers itself legitimated in dropping white phosphorus on women and children who they have caged in an inescapable open-air prison. Sadly enough, the crimes committed by the Jewish State are done on behalf of the Jewish people and in the name of their troubled history of persecution. The Holocaust religion brings to life what seems to be the ultimate possible form of insular brutal incarnation.

 

Historically Jews have shunned many Gods, they dropped Jehovah, they dumped Marx, some have never followed Zionism. But in the light of the Holocaust religion, while bearing in mind the scenes from Gaza, Jenin and Lebanon, the Jew may have to continue in the tradition and drop “the Jew”. He will have to accept that his newly formed father-figure was formed in his own shape. More concerning is the devastating fact that the new father is proved to be a call to kill. Seemingly, the new father is the ultimate evil God of them all.

 

I wonder how many Jews will be courageous enough to shun their esoteric newly formed father-figure. Will they be courageous enough to join the rest of humanity adopting a universal ethical discourse? Whether the Jew drops “The Jew”, only time will tell. Just to remove any doubt, I did drop my “Jew” a long time ago and I am doing fine.

[Nur]

God Blessed America

 

By Gilad Atzmon

 

June 08, 2009 "ICH" -- -I am very lucky to be in America this week, to watch a place being transformed, to smell the refreshing scent of restored liberty, to glance at the euphoric rise of hope. When I visited America two years ago it was a different place. There was fear in the air, the country was terrorized by its own lethal retribution. The gigantic American flags that were waving from every corner had a rather threatening impact on me. And now somehow, seeing exactly the same flags evokes sympathy and trust in me.

 

Three days ago, at 5 am, still in my London home, while waiting for the airport cab service, I caught Justin Webb’s BBC interview with President Obama. I will be honest and say, as much as I wanted to love Obama like the rest of humanity, I was very suspicious of the man. I remembered him rushing to appease AIPAC within minutes after he secured his Democratic Party nomination. We all knew about his first appointee Emmanuel Rahm, we obviously learned quickly who Rahm was and what he was affiliated with. In case we failed to see it, we had Rahm’s father to remind us http://www.haaretz.c om/hasen/spages/1037 256.html .

 

And yet, at 5 am, waiting for the driver to knock on my front door, I was blown away by President Obama. I wasn’t prepared for it and I simply couldn’t believe my ears. When asked about Iran’s nuclear project, this is was what President Obama had to say, “What I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations. On the other hand, the international community has a very real interest in preventing nuclear arms in the region.”

 

This didn’t leave much room for interpretation, Obama simply said ‘YES to nuclear energy, No to nuclear bomb.’ I, on my part, actually believe that an Iranian nuclear bomb is the necessary way forwards. It will deter and restrain the Israeli leadership that had been proving time after time that Israel is merciless and murderous beyond comparison. However, approving Iran’s legitimate right for nuclear energy was indeed the right move. It left the BBC interviewer in a state of confusion, he was probably as surprised as I was, he wasn’t sure whether Obama really meant what he said. He repeatedly challenged the President asking whether Iran could have the “right to reprocess energy?” Once again President Obama didn’t leave any room for doubt. “We need,” he said, “to reinvigorate a much broader agenda for nuclear nonproliferation - including the United States and Russia drawing down our stockpiles in very significant ways, to the extent that Iran feels that they are treated differently than anybody else. That makes them embattled.” Obama’s message was lucid and transparent. It was also an ethical and universal one. We are about to restore the belief in humanity and brotherhood. President Obama was there to remind us that the United State of America was founded upon the ideal that all are created equal. And this obviously applies to Iranians and Muslims (not just Jews and Christian Zionists).

 

Watching a world leader talking sense, thinking ethically and expressing himself eloquently is indeed a rare, refreshing event these days. After years of repulsive world hegemony invaded by Zionised Neocon war mongering a la Bush and Blair. After years of Western leaders dancing to Israeli cacophony composed and orchestrated by different types of repulsive Wolfowitzes, listening to Obama’s extended humanist cadenza was indeed music to my ears.

 

With Obama’s shift in my mind, I was looking forward to my trip to America. In spite of the credit crunch inflicted on America by the enemy within, there is a scent of cheerfulness in the air. As much as Bush and Blair failed to liberate the Iraqi people, the Americans have managed after all, to liberate themselves. They left the keys to the White House in the possession of a man, who at least verbally, is inspired by humanism and tolerance. They have elected an inspiring man of incredible intellectual esteem.

 

I am now in America for a week. I am meeting hundreds of Palestinians and solidarity activists. I can definitely detect a level of genuine optimism, something I couldn’t even remotely feel two years ago. America is expressing some real fatigue of its Ziocon invaders. Not only have the Ziocons failed to achieve anything. It made Americans accomplices in a colossal crime, the Iraqi Holocaust that until now has cost more than 1,300,000 civilian lives. It bought America some fierce enemies all over the world and if this is not enough, the financial meltdown is there to make sure that each American will pay in the coming decades a heavy personal price for both Wolfowitz’s wars and Greenspan’s speculative capitalistic financial models.

 

Being a lucky sod, I was here in America yesterday when President Obama delivered his landmark Cairo speech to the Muslim world. It is rather obvious that Obama and his team were doing their homework. It seems as if they manage to grasp what Islam stands for and what Jihad means in particular. Obama’s speech is immaculately structured to address the Islamic meaning of Jihad. By doing so, Obama assures America’s enemies that respect for Islam, to Allah and Muslims is indeed restored.

 

Unlike his shameless predecessor, who for some reason was sure that Islam and Fascism were one word, Obama and his team realise that Islam is actually all about Salam i.e., peace. ‘Armed jihad is temporary in that it ends when the enemy ceases its aggression.’ Obama grasped also that Korea tells its followers to ‘move quickly to establish peace once the enemy seeks peace.’ Obama comprehended that America had been defeated in Iraq. He realises that in Islam, ‘showing compassion to the enemy that has been defeated or in seeking peace is considered superior to achieving victory.’

 

Bearing it all in mind, Obama was ready for his Cairo platform. Launching his speech greeting the Islamic world with assalaamu alaykum he prepared the ground for an outstanding speech. “I am here to talk to you face to face. It is peace I am searching.” Unlike the previous Zionised puppet, the current American president understands the notion of mutuality and respect.

 

“You and us,” he told his billion and a half Muslim listeners, “share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

 

This is very interesting indeed, considering the fact that these are the exact qualities that the previous administration was lacking. Instead of justice and progress it was reactionary bigotry. Instead of tolerance and dignity it was overwhelmingly supremacist, chauvinist and Ziocentric.

 

Obama is brave enough to admit that in spite of 9/11 being an ‘enormous trauma’, “it led us to act contrary to our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course.” Besides the fact that Obama confesses here that mistakes had been made, he also hints that actually the Bush administration and its Ziocon ideologists were in essentially Non American by nature for failing to understand the Americans ‘Ideals’. For many years we speak about the elementary de-Zionification of Israel. Surprisingly enough, the de-Zionification of America seems to be more likely.

 

It is clear that Obama is not yet ready to depart from his dedicated fundraisers. He still seems to be committed to the Zionist phantasmic narrative. In spite of the fact that Obama did not use the word ‘terror’ even once in his speech, he still seems to be committed to the Israeli cause and the ‘Israeli right to exist’ at the expense of others. “America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Actually, I myself believe that it can be easily denied. In fact there is no rational reason for the Palestinians to be penalised for crimes committed against Jews by Europeans.

 

However, as much as Obama seems to succumb to the Zionist narrative, he doesn’t stop himself from the necessary equation between the Jewish Holocaust and the ongoing Palestinian holocaust that is committed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people.

 

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust”, says the president, but he then continues, “on the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”

 

I think that this doesn’t leave a room for a doubt. President Obama seems to realise what is going on. He knows about the humiliation, he knows about the starvation, he knows about Israelis using WMDs against civilian population. He for the first time promises one billion and a half Muslims around the world that America will not turn its backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Whether Obama keeps his promise time will tell, however, the fact that he allows himself to juxtapose the Holocaust and Gaza proves that he is a million years ahead of most Palestinian solidarity campaigners who are reluctant to engage in this necessary equation just to avoid offending one Jew or another.

 

I may allow myself to advise the President that he is slightly misinformed in regards to Palestinians and their rights and aspirations. On top of ‘aspiration for dignity’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘a state of their own’, the Palestinians also have another fundamental legitimate right in their disposal, it is the right to return to their homes, villages, towns, lands, field and orchards. In short we call it ‘the right of return’.

Every Palestinian refugee holds such a legitimate right within his disposal. Not a single Palestinian leader will ever give this right away, and if this is not enough, not a single world leader has the authority to dismiss such a right. The right of return is a right that belongs exclusively to the very owner of the land, the Palestinian people themselves. It is not a political matter for anyone to give away this right collectively in the name of very many Palestinians. As one extremely clever Palestinian refugee pointed to me last night in Houston: “my land near Safad”, so he said, “is my land, and no one can negotiate its fate on my behalf. Neither a Palestinian leader nor any other world leader.” I admit, as simple as it is, I have never thought about it before. The right of return is not a political matter or subject for negotiation. Thus, it won’t be resolved politically. It is an elementary fundamental right that will be fulfilled, as

long as it takes.

 

As much as I am inspired with Obama the intellectual, I do also realise that putting his ideology into practice may take some time. Obama should prove us that he knows how to translate his beautiful words into action. It is rather clear that Obama is reluctant to put real pressure on the Jewish state. If it were down to me, I would give the Israelis a 24-hour ultimatum to lift the closure on Gaza. Would they fail to provide, I would call home my ambassador in Tel Aviv, I would immediately stop any form of financial and military aid to Israel, I would freeze Israeli assets for being a terrorist state, I would also start a rapid deportation of Israelis from America. But as it seems, at least momentarily, I am not Obama, I am just a non-elected monarch of the Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble. President Obama, on the other hand, is the elected president of the American people, he may know what he is doing.

 

The president has still long way to go. And yet, President Obama has made a major step in the last few days. He is now marching America towards humanism. He reclaims the American ideology of liberty. I salute the man, I salute the great intellect, I salute the humanist. Gladly I am to admit that God blessed America. But someone better take very good care of the safety of its president. He has some fierce and relentless enemies out there. And as we know, they do not stop in red!

 

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel in 1963 and had his musical training at the Rubin Academy of Music, Jerusalem (Composition and Jazz). Atzmon's essays are widely published his novel 'Guide to the perplexed' and 'My One And Only Love' have been translated into 24 languages all together.

[Nur]

Auschwitz Survivor

 

"I Can Identify with Palestinian Youth"

 

By Adri Nieuwhof

 

June 26, 2009 "Electronic Intifada" --- June 02, 2009 ---- Hajo Meyer, author of the book The End of Judaism, was born in Bielefeld, in Germany, in 1924. In 1939, he fled on his own at age 14 to the Netherlands to escape the Nazi regime, and was unable to attend school. A year later, when the Germans occupied the Netherlands he lived in hiding with a poorly forged ID. Meyer was captured by the Gestapo in March 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp a week later. He is one of the last survivors of Auschwitz.

 

Adri Nieuwhof:What would you like to say to introduce yourself to EI's readers?

 

Hajo Meyer: I had to quit grammar school in Bielefeld after the Kristallnacht [the two-day pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany], in November 1938. It was a terrible experience for an inquisitive boy and his parents. Therefore, I can fully identify with the Palestinian youth that are hampered in their education. And I can in no way identify with the criminals who make it impossible for Palestinian youth to be educated.

 

AN: What motivated you to write your book, The End of Judaism?

 

HM: In the past, the European media have written extensively about extreme right-wing politicians like Joerg Haider in Austria and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. But when Ariel Sharon was elected [prime minister] in Israel in 2001, the media remained silent. But in the 1980s I understood the deeply fascist thinking of these politicians. With the book I wanted to distance myself from this. I was raised in Judaism with the equality of relationships among human beings as a core value. I only learned about nationalist Judaism when I heard settlers defend their harassment of Palestinians in interviews. When a publisher asked me to write about my past, I decided to write this book, in a way, to deal with my past. People of one group who dehumanize people who belong to another group can do this, because they either have learned to do so from their parents, or they have been brainwashed by their political leaders. This has happened for decades in Israel in that they manipulate the Holocaust for their political aims. In the long-run the country is destructing itself this way by inducing their Jewish citizens to become paranoid. In 2005 [then Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon illustrated this by saying in the Knesset [the Israeli parliament], we know we cannot trust anyone, we only can trust ourselves. This is the shortest possible definition of somebody who suffers from clinical paranoia. One of the major annoyances in my life is that Israel by means of trickery calls itself a Jewish state, while in fact it is Zionist. It wants the maximum territory with a minimum number of Palestinians. I have four Jewish grandparents. I am an atheist. I share the Jewish socio-cultural inheritance and I have learned about Jewish ethics. I don't wish to be represented by a Zionist state. They have no idea about the Holocaust. They use the Holocaust to implant paranoia in their children.

 

AN: In your book you write about the lessons you have learned from your past. Can you explain how your past influenced your perception of Israel and Palestine?

 

HM: I have never been a Zionist. After the war, Zionist Jews spoke about the miracle of having "our own country." As a confirmed atheist I thought, if this is a miracle by God, I wished that he had performed the smallest miracle imaginable by creating the state 15 years earlier. Then my parents would not have been dead.

 

I can write up an endless list of similarities between Nazi Germany and Israel. The capturing of land and property, denying people access to educational opportunities and restricting access to earn a living to destroy their hope, all with the aim to chase people away from their land. And what I personally find more appalling then dirtying one's hands by killing people, is creating circumstances where people start to kill each other. Then the distinction between victims and perpetrators becomes faint. By sowing discord in a situation where there is no unity, by enlarging the gap between people -- like Israel is doing in Gaza.

 

AN: In your book you write about the role of Jews in the peace movement in and outside Israel, and Israeli army refuseniks. How do you value their contribution?

 

HM: Of course it is positive that parts of the Jewish population of Israel try to see Palestinians as human beings and as their equals. However, it disturbs me how paper-thin the number is that protests and is truly anti-Zionist. We get worked up by what happened in Hitler's Germany. If you expressed only the slightest hint of criticism at that time, you ended up in the Dachau concentration camp. If you expressed criticism, you were dead. Jews in Israel have democratic rights. They can protest in the streets, but they don't.

 

AN: Can you comment on the news that Israeli ministers approved a draft law banning commemoration of the Nakba, or the dispossession of historic Palestine? The law proposes punishment of up to three years in prison.

 

HM: It is so racist, so dreadful. I am at a loss for words. It is an expression of what we already know. [The Israeli Nakba commemoration organization] Zochrot was founded to counteract Israeli efforts to wipe out the marks that are a reminder of Palestinian life. To forbid Palestinians to publicly commemorate the Nakba. ... they cannot act in a more Nazi-like, fascist way. Maybe it will help to awaken the world.

 

AN: What are your plans for the future?

 

HM: [Laughs] Do you know how old I am? I am almost 85 years old. I always say cynically and with self-mockery that I have a choice: either I am always tired because I want to do so much, or I am going to sit still waiting for the time to go by. Well, I plan to be tired, because I have still so much to say.

 

Adri Nieuwhof is consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.

[Nur]

Israel Will Implode.

 

By Gilad Atzmon

 

http://www.youtube.c om/watch?v=ljLEPjaF3 S0

[Nur]

A Fundamental Jewish Value.

 

Interview with Judge Richard Goldstone

 

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

 

October 02, 2009 "Tikkun" -- This interview was given to Tikkun magazine by Judge Goldstone (herein referred to as RG) and conducted by Rabbi Michael Lerner (ML below), editor of Tikkun magazine and chair of the interfaith organzation The Network of Spiritual Progressives and by Rabbi Brain Walt (BW below), founding chair person of Rabbis for Human Rights (North America) and chair of Ta'anit Tzedeck.

 

ML: I really appreciate you for taking the time to be with us.

 

RG: Well thank you for making the contact, I really appreciate it.

 

ML: Was and is the blockade of Gaza a war crime?

 

RG: It was a violation of international law, it was not a war crime because there was no war. It was a violation of the 4th Geneva convention. There has to be an actual military armed conflict for it to be a war crime. It is also a violation of international human rights law.

 

ML: What are the specific steps that Israel could have taken to stop the shelling of southern Israel before commencing an attack on Gaza?

 

RG: Well, it could have used greater pressure by diplomatic means. They could have used the security council for that purpose. Israel could have put the security council on notice and said "if you don't stop this, if you don't do something to stop it, we will have to resort as a last resort to military means." But in our report we didn't question the right of Israel to use military force.

 

ML: So you are saying that the attack on Gaza was, by your estimation, not a violation of any international laws or agreements?

 

RG: I'm not sure I want to comment on it, it was not something we looked into. We were looking at war crimes, which are crimes committed during military operation. We didn't look at the justification for using military force.

 

ML: Do you think Israel could have succeeded in stopping the bombing of Sderot had it gone to the Security Council?

 

RG: Well, I don't know. If it didn't work, then I have got no doubt that Israel was entitled to take a strong action to put a stop to the firing of rockets and mortars and has a duty to its own population to protect them.

Military force should be the very last resort. I think it is arguable here that other diplomatic means could have worked. If they didn't work then the last resort is to use force, and whether it is military or policing action force, Israel was entitled to take active steps.

 

ML: Hamas and supporters of the Palestinian cause have always said that Israel could have taken the step of ending the blockade of Gaza, and that would have been a condition for ending the attacks by Hamas.

 

RG: That is getting into the politics of the situation, which I don't wish to do. What I hear you say is why peace is so crucial in the Middle East. There is a sort of spiral, the blockade, the refusal to respect the right of self-determination for the Palestinians.

 

ML: So once deciding to attack, the question gets raised: Is there any way to fight a war against terrorists that would not result in deaths and casualties of civilians, assuming that urban terrorists have located themselves in the midst of the population?

 

RG: You know, commando actions could have been taken. But in any event, even though Israel might have been entitled to use force, the real point of the report was that it was disproportionate force. Look at the thousands of homes destroyed, the factories, the agricultural land, this is almost impossible to justify militarily.

 

BW: Also in your view, in the view of your report, it was deliberate?

 

RG: I don't think there is any dispute about it. The Israeli army has very sophisticated weaponry, and I don't think they make many mistakes as to what they target.

 

BW: But I think that is the one piece where your critics are very upset about the report: the whole question of intention. And they do deny that there is intention, they claim that the civilians died accidentally

 

RG: I think we are talking at two different levels. When it comes to the destruction of infrastructure, they haven't really responded at all to that, and that was part of what the report addressed. None of the Israeli responses have even said a word about the property destruction, the bulldozing of agricultural fields, the bombing of water wells, the bombing of sewage works that caused a huge spill over a huge area. There has been no attempt to justify that. When it comes to the actual killing of civilians in urban areas, that is where the big dispute comes in. I think all I can do is refer to the 36 incidents that we report on. And with almost all of them, we found the Israeli response to be disproportionate.

 

BW: As regard to wells and the factories, one can make a reasonable argument, not a pleasant argument, why Israel would want to do it?

 

RG: There was a political reason, and that was collective punishment and an effort to weaken the support for Hamas.

 

ML: Is that a violation of international human rights, destruction of infrastructure?

 

RG: It is a war crime. It is an attack on civilian objects, as opposed to military objects.

 

ML: Is that the kind of attack that is serious enough to warrant reprimand through the ICC?

 

RG: It would certainly be something that falls within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

 

BW: Let's jump to civilians. Do you follow that same logic with regard to civilians? i.e. in regard to the water, electrical, and food, they wanted to go after the infrastructure, in regards to civilians, was that disregard for human rights, or was it intentional killing?

 

RG: Certainly some of the incidents appear to be intentional. What we didn't do, because it wasn't our mandate to do, was to investigate who bore responsibility. Whether this was policy at a high level, or policy at a battalion level, or specific soldiers who acted on their own. That is the sort of investigation that we suggested should be taken by Israel itself.

 

BW: If I remember correctly, in the report, you quote Israeli officials who say "we are going after the infrastructure, we want to cause them hurt," and so on and so forth, but I don't remember any references to Israeli officials indicating their intention to kill civilians.

 

RG: No, we didn't make any allegation that there was a policy to kill civilians.

 

ML: That is an issue that has to be investigated.

 

RG: Yep.

 

BW: Like you, I was raised in the South African Jewish community. I know exactly the community you have come from, I was raised in the same community, with similar values around Israel and so on. And it seems to me that when I read the statement that you made yesterday just before the council ... it felt to me very courageous because I admire immensely what you did. It was so moving to me to read that statement.

 

ML: You made a statement in response to a woman who was attacking you for betraying your own people?

 

RG: I said I wasn't going to dignify her remarks with a response, but they call to mind the attacks made on me as a white South African for going against the interests of whites during the Apartheid era. And I said I thought having regard to the terrible history of the Jewish people, of over 2000 years of persecution, I found it difficult to understand how Jews wouldn't respond in protecting the human rights of others. And I talked about that as being a fundamental Jewish value.

 

BW: Rabbi Lerner and I are involved in an organization, Ta'anit Tzedeck, that is calling for the lifting of the blockade because of the material deprivation it causes, and we are calling upon people to fast the 3rd Thursday of each month in solidarity with this demand. I wondered for you as a South African Jew who cares about Israel, how is it to face the incredible wall that Israel has placed in your way about this, and seeming disregard, like they aren't really interested in your findings and substantive things. It is a position of arrogance.

 

RG: When I went into this, I didn't know any of the details we were going to find. I obviously watched the TV and knew there was tremendous destruction, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw on the ground.

 

BW: What happened when you saw what you saw on the ground?

 

RG: I was shocked at the number of buildings that had been razed. Particularly private homes. And I wasn't prepared for the stories that were told by witnesses we considered to be credible. As to the way the Israeli Army treated them. I felt a great deal of shame and embarrassment particularly as a Jew, but also as a human being.

 

ML: Maybe you could cite one such story?

 

RG: Well, the one that really upset me was the shelling of a full Mosque during the afternoon service. And we didn't look at other Mosques. We accepted the idea that maybe some Mosques were used to give shelter to fighters and militants. They may also have been used to store weapons, but even if that was true (and we found that it wasn't in respect to this particular Mosque), but even if it was, it is completely unacceptable and a warcrime to shell the Mosque during a service. There were hundreds of people in that Mosque, and 15 people were killed and many more were injured. It is that sort of conduct that is absolutely unacceptable. That was one of the incidents that caught me in particular. And it is a particular concern because of the reaction of people who were there. I put myself in the position how Jews would feel if they were attacked in a synagogue when it was full of worshipers.

 

ML: Israeli Prime Minister said "The Israeli public will not be willing to take risks for peace if stripped of its right to self-defense." And the article said, Netanyahu referred to the Goldstone report written by the fact-finding UN mission that investigated IDF operations, stating that the peace process would be brought to a halt if the report was submitted to the international court in The Hague. A democratic state's right to defend its population has been crushed by the UN body.

 

 

RG: Well, it is absolutely incorrect. Our report doesn't bear on the question of self-defense at all. It is not a relevant remark to make.

There is not a word in the report that questions the right to self-defense.

 

ML: Netanyahu, however, is saying that de facto, you can't conduct defense in a war against terrorists without engaging in operations against civilians, and your response is, there is a way to conduct those.

 

RG: Yes, it is a question of what is proportionate.

 

ML: Your report suggested that Israel has to conduct a further investigation, and the question is, is there any point in a government-led investigation?

 

RG: It depends who they appoint. If they appoint someone who is transparent and public about it, then I think that would certainly be exactly what we had in mind.

 

ML: Do you think you could state any minimum requirements? Those who are critical of Israeli policy think that the investigation would be a way of avoiding taking any responsibility and would get the public's eye away from the Goldstone report and would drown the impact of the Goldstone report and would probably come up with a much more equivocal finding than your report. I am wondering if you could state any minimum criteria for what it would take for people outside to take a government report where the government is investigating itself.

 

RG: I think the investigation must be conducted by people who are independent and are perceived to be independent like former Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak. And it must be done with openness and transparency. And it certainly must take into account evidence from all sides. One of the problems I've got with these military investigations is, as far as I know, there's only one which I've read about where the military investigations even spoke to any of the victims, spoke to any of the people from Gaza who obviously are the best people to speak to.

 

ML: In other words you're saying that the first criterion is that the people be independent, and second...

 

RG: that the investigation is a transparent one.

 

ML: The second is transparent and the third is that they speak to the victim.

 

RG: Right.

 

ML: The victims of the assault, not just to the military people to explain what they were intending to do.

 

RG: Correct.

 

ML: Are there any other criteria?

 

RG: No, I think those are the major criteria. And Israel has done it. I think the Israel's investigation into Sabra and Shatilla is a very good example. And that was accepted absolutely by the international community as being appropriate.

 

ML: You say people are independent but there were some people in the peace movement in Israel who say that Aharon Barak himself led a Supreme Court that never challenged the Israeli military's denial of human rights to Palestinians

 

RG: It's a difficult one. I've known Aharon Barak for many years and I absolutely respect his independence and integrity. In my book he'd be a very appropriate person.

 

ML: OK. Let me give you one of the frequent criticisms of the Goldstone report that I've heard and that I'd like to put to you. Not that it's inaccurate but that it's a reflection of a prejudice because of selective prosecution. The UN gives this attention to the sins of little countries or powerless countries, relatively powerless countries, while never daring to do a comparable report on big guys like the human rights violations of the United States in Iraq, of Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet. The argument goes that when one picks on historically oppressed groups like Jews for their sins while ignoring the far greater sins of the more powerful, the UN participates in a kind of double standard that in other contexts would be seen transparently as racist or illegitimate. So that even though you, Judge Goldstone, were perfectly fine in what you did, the actual investigation itself by virtue of selecting this target by a body that doesn't target the more powerful is a reflection of prejudice.

 

RG: Generally I agree with the criticism. I think the powerful are protected because of their power. But it's not prejudice it's politics. It's a political world. There's no question of not investigating countries because of who they are for religious reasons or cultural reasons, it's because of their power. They use their power to protect themselves. It doesn't mean that investigations [in countries] where politically they can be held are in any way necessarily flawed or shouldn't take place. The same argument was raised by Serbia in particular. They said, "Why was the international criminal tribunal set up for us? It wasn't set up for Pol Pot, it wasn't set up for Saddam Hussein, it was set up for Milosevic." And my response at the time when it was put to me by the Serb minister of justice, as I remember very well, was if this is the first of the lot, then I agree with you, it's an act of discrimination, but if it's the first of others to come then you can't complain, you have no right to complain because you're the first. And if crimes are being committed then at least, to go after those that one can go after politically is better than doing nothing.

 

ML: For example, there haven't been any comparable investigations of human rights violations by Syria, by Saudi Arabia, by Egypt -- admittedly these are against their own populations.

 

RG: I think that what distinguishes this from that is that these war crimes are committed in a situation of international armed conflict. It's not going to be a civil war situation.

 

ML: And you don't think there is something inconsistent or one-sided and prejudicial in investigating this type of crime but not internal crime?

 

RG: I think it's a double-standard more than prejudice.

 

ML: So you would agree that there's a double-standard.

 

RG: Absolutely.

 

ML: And that it should be changed, but that doesn't invalidate what you do.

 

RG: This is why. The best way of changing it is for every nation to join the International Criminal Court.

 

ML: About that. Do you have any theory of why the Obama Administration has not embraced your report.

 

RG: I really don't know. No reasons have been given. I'm happy that it supports the recommendation of internal investigation.

 

ML: What do you think about those who'd say that pushing accountability on these kinds of crimes will be destructive to the process of peace, because Israel once facing this kind of international pressure will not be willing to submit itself to any other pressure for actual peace and that consequently the Obama Administration's refusal to take your human rights violations seriously is a reflection of their desire to make the peace process work.

 

RG: I don't know that but if that's correct I would strongly disagree with their reasoning. It's been my experience that there can be no peace without justice. There can be no peace if victims are not acknowledged. [Editor's note: This view, of course, has been the underpinning of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa that did in fact yield peace between the white and black populations, an outcome that has frequently been attributed to this process of requiring both the African National Council and other freedom fighters as well as the supporters of the apartheid regime to fully describe what they did and when they violated the human rights of others. The Goldstone report calls for both Hamas and for Israel to conduct investigations.]

 

ML: Can you say another sentence about what gives you that feeling. What's the historical basis for thinking that?

 

RG: Well you know you're not going to get peace when a society has a deeply imbedded call for revenge. And the way to avoid that, and a way to avoid collective guilt is through justice. The crimes that we've identified that were committed by the Israeli Defense Force are not in my view crimes committed by the people of Israel. There are many people in Israel who would oppose them.

 

 

ML: I'll look at that then. Do you think there's anything in the speculation of some in the United States that the reason why it wants to distance from the Goldstone report is because by the similar criteria the United States might be brought to a similar accounting for what it has done in Iraq or Afghanistan?

 

RG: I don't. I absolutely don't, I haven't read or heard of the U.S. intentionally attacking civilians. if innocent civilians have been killed or injured by the United States in Afghanistan or Iraq it's been by negligence. It hasn't been by intention. And when it's happened it's usually been followed by apology.

 

ML: What do you think Americans can do now to push our government to take seriously the recommendations of the Goldstone report?

 

RG: My first choice would be to put added pressure on Israeli to have the sort of investigation we've been talking about. I don't know, maybe I'm a naive optimist, but I thought the statement by Netanyahu that the cabinet is going to consider an investigation is a positive shift.

 

ML: And do you have any views on the larger conflict itself, about what you think would be the most wise path that would come to settlement between the two sides?

 

RG: It seems to me its a question of leadership. I think we're lucky in South Africa to have leaders of the caliber of DeClerk and Mandela. Leadership could deliver what they promised. And it seems to me that that's what missing at the moment in the Middle East. Particularly on the Palestinian side. As long as they're going to be fighting against each other who's going to represent them meaningfully at the peace negotiations?

 

ML: Your daughter Nicole is alleged to have told the international media that you are a proud Jew and one who loves the State of Israel and if not for your efforts the outcome of the report would've been even more damaging.

 

RG: That's her opinion, and I really don't want to comment on it. The first part is absolutely correct. I don't think it's possible to say whether the report would've been more or less damaging if I hadn't been involved.

 

ML: Could you say one last sentence about what your feelings are about Israel and Zionism. I wanted to hear from you.

 

RG: I've worked for Israel all of my adult life.

I've been involved with the governor of the Hebrew University for what must be thirty years. And I've worked in World ORT since 1966. I've been involved in working for Israel and I'm a firm believer in the absolute right of the Jewish people to have their home there in Israel.

 

ML: That's a strong and clear statement. I want to thank you for this work. It's a Kadush Hashem from my standpoint and the standpoint of many many Jews. I know that Israel will be much stronger when its embodying Jewish values of generosity or love of a stranger

 

RG: Thank you very much for reaching out to me. I much appreciate it and certainly it's really crucially important for Jews particularly to stand up for Jewish values. I don't think this is what's happening sufficiently.

 

To read the full Goldstone report, go to:

 

http://www2.ohchr.or g/english/bodies/hrc ouncil/specialsessio n/9/FactFindingMissi on.htm

 

This interview was conducted on October 1st, 2009, with Judge Richard Goldstone, the chair of the UN commission investigating the War in Gaza in 2008 and 2009. In the latter years of Apartheid in South Africa, Goldstone served as chairperson of the South African Standing Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, later known as the Goldstone Commission. The Commission played a critical role in uncovering and publicizing allegations of grave wrongdoing by the Apartheid-era South African security forces and bringing home to "White" South Africans the extensive violence that was being done in their name. The Commission concluded that most of the violence of those years was being orchestrated by shadowy figures within the Apartheid regime, often through the use of a so-called "third force." The Commission thus provided a first road map for the investigations into security force wrongdoing that, after democratization, were taken up by the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After South Africa's first democratic election in April 1994, Goldstone served as a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, from July 1994 to October 2003. The Court was entrusted with the task of interpreting the new South African Constitution and supervising the country's transition into democracy.

 

He also served as national president of the National Institute of Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of In August 1994, Goldstone was named as the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was established by a resolution of the UN Security Council in 1993. When the Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in late 1994, he became its chief prosecutor, too. He was a member of the International Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA) which was established in 1997 to identify Nazi war criminals who had emigrated to Argentina, and transferred victim assets (Nazi gold) there. Goldstone was chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo from August 1999 until December 2001. Goldstone serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations that promote justice, including Physicians for Human Rights, the International Center for Transitional Justice, the South African Legal Services Foundation, the Brandeis University Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Economic and Social Rights. He is a trustee of Hebrew University.

 

Subsequent to the release of his UN report which criticizes human rights abuses and violations of international law by both Hamas and Israel, and calls for each to conduct an independent and objective investigation, he has been assaulted by various leaders in the Jewish world and described as being anti-Semitic.