Israel skader verdens jøder

I hvert fald de amerikanske, skriver Philip Weiss – med sin uretfærdige og brutale besættelse, sit krigsmageri og ikke mindst den tåkrummende racisme blandt ekstreme zionister. Israel har efterhånden forvandlet sig til alt, hvad amerikanske jøder ikke ønsker at være, skriver han:

A feeling has taken root deep in the American Jewish community that Israel is hurting us, hurting our standing in the world and our future. The restrictions on democracy, the curbs on women, the intransigence vis-a-vis the Palestinians when Obama has demanded movement, the indifference to the Arab Spring– Israel is a society we no longer recognize as Jewish like we’re Jewish, and worst of all, its militarism is exposing American Jews to the accusation that we are dually loyal. And we don’t like that: We’re Americans.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was clearly the oafish ad campaign that targeted Christmas and intermarriage– the ad campaign that Netanyahu cancelled. Even rightwing Israel lobbyists were stunned by how clueless the ad campaign was. But it was an expression of genuine Israeli attitudes. And that is what’s so scary: American Jews are waking up to the fact that Israeli society is nothing like ours.

We are integrators. We live in America because we want to be Jews in a diverse society. That is the spirit of American Jewish life by and large. And now these Zionists–separatists whom we never completely trusted when we were arguing with them in Eastern Europe–are quietly understood to have hijacked Jewishness and taken it to a dark ugly place. And their cake is cooked; Israel has produced “apartheid on steroids,” as a Jewish leader in the Nation wrote this fall; he wanted no part of it.

Israeli values are incompatible with American Jewish values. Even Jeffrey Goldberg says the occupation is a “moral disaster.” Well guess what, it’s been going on for 44 years! In its segregated buses and roads, in its ad campaigns that targets intermarriage and Christmas, in the refusal to end the occupation– Israel is a different society than ours.

Læs endelig det hele på MondoWeiss.

Palæstinensiske aktivister tager “whites-only”-busser til Jerusalem, bliver anholdt

Hvad gør myndighederne i “Mellemøstens eneste demokrati”, når medlemmer af den forkerte etniske gruppe vil tage bosætternes busser fra Vestbredden til Jerusalem?

De slår ned, præcis som myndighederne i de amerikanske Sydstater gjorde i 60erne:

Six Palestinians seeking to emulate the “freedom rides” in the segregated southern United States of the 1960s by travelling in a West Bank-to-Jerusalem bus alongside Jewish settlers were arrested by Israeli police yesterday.

The Palestinian activists managed to board a number 148 bus outside the West Bank settlement of Psagot, near Ramallah, but the bus was halted and the activists taken off near the Hizma entry terminal to Jerusalem.

Three walked off the bus under police escort but another three, including one woman, Huwaida Arraf, resisted and were dragged off it by force amid shouts of “Stop the apartheid”, and “I have the right to go to Jerusalem”.

Police had earlier boarded the bus at the checkpoint to persuade the activists to leave of their own accord as supporters waved banners, including one – in an echo of the famous speech by civil rights activist Martin Luther King – proclaiming: “We have a dream.”

Two of the activists were told by a police officer: “You are detained. Please get off the bus. If not we will have to use force.” One of the Palestinians, Nadim Sharabati, a 33-year-old blacksmith from Hebron, told the officer: “This is racial discrimination between me and the settlers. Why don’t you take permits from the settlers when they come to us?”

When the police officer told the men: “I am asking in a civilised way, with respect,” the other man, Badiya Dweik, replied: “If you respected us you would treat us like [you treat] the settlers.” When the officer asked if he had a permit, Mr Dweik replied: “Why do you not ask the settlers for a permit?”

Another of the Palestinian activists, Fadi Quran from El Bireh adjacent to Ramallah, asked the officers, in an apparent reference to the settlers: “Why are you protecting the Klu Klux Klan?”

Link: Palestinians board settler’s bus

Israel – Mellemøstens p.t. ældste diktatur

Al Jazeeras Marwan Bishara minder om, at Israel ikke blot er “Mellemøstens eneste demokrati”, som det så smukt (og ikke længere sandt, udviklingen i Tunesien og Egypten taget i betragtning) hedder. Israels herredømme over de besatte palæstinensiske områder er Mellemøstens p.t. ældste diktatur – og faktisk et af de allerværste af slagsen:

Unlike other colonial powers and dictatorships in recent memory, Israel took all, but gave nothing in return. The settlements, the bypass roads and the industrial zones it built, are exclusively for Jews.

Israel and its various Zionist organisations have built over 600 towns, villages and other form of settlements for the Jews, but none for the Palestinians – not even those it considers part of its own citizens, who make up almost one-fifth of its population.

And much like other dictatorships, it’s in denial over the damage it has caused to the people under its rule, and delusional over occupation it deems necessary, benevolent, or even divinely promised.

No other dictatorship in the region has been as indifferent and destructive for so long over those it ruled, as the Zionist regime has been in Palestine.

It didn’t hesitate to use lethal, excessive force time and again against those under its occupation. The most recent war crimes have been documented and detailed in various UN reports, including that of Judge Goldstone regarding the 2008/9 war on Gaza, which added or changed little in regards to the reality on the ground.

Like other dictatorships it boasts of sacrificing for peace,  demonises its detractors and oppositions, and justifies any wrong-doing on the basis of national security, order and stability.

Although it preached democracy, Israeli leaders long preferred to deal with autocrats, not only in the Arab world but also in the greater Middle East, as well as in Asia and Africa. (…)

Any attempt to understand the nature and the political, economic and social – even religious – evolution of the Israeli state in separation from its colonial dictatorship over another people would be futile at best. In reality, misleading and destructive.

The same goes for the Palestinians. Their national and political evolution over the last century, and to a greater extent of the last six decades, is intertwined with that of Zionism and Israeli dictatorship.

Mellemøstens “eneste demokrati” ville altså aldrig have udviklet sig, som det har, hvis ikke det reelt havde været et diktatur.  Værd at tænke over.

Roger Waters: Tear down this apartheid wall

Selveste Roger Waters, som er kendt fra Pink Floyd og ikke mindst albummet The Wall, forklarer i dagens Guardian, hvorfor han ikke vil spille i Israel, så længe de opretholder deres apartheidlignende undertrykkelse af palæstinenserne i de besatte områder, ikke mindst meget konkret i form af den mur, de har bygget mod Vestbredden.

Waters skriver bl.a.:

Under the protection of the United Nations I visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that day. The wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression.

If it could be like that for me, a foreigner, a visitor, imagine what it must be like for the Palestinians, for the underclass, for the passbook carriers. I knew then that my conscience would not allow me to walk away from that wall, from the fate of the Palestinians I met: people whose lives are crushed daily by Israel’s occupation. In solidarity, and somewhat impotently, I wrote on their wall that day: “We don’t need no thought control.”

Sadly, in the intervening years the Israeli government has made no attempt to implement legislation that would grant rights to Israeli Arabs equal to those enjoyed by Israeli Jews, and the wall has grown, inexorably, illegally annexing more and more of the West Bank.For the people of Gaza, locked in a virtual prison behind the wall of Israel’s illegal blockade, it means another set of injustices. It means that children go to sleep hungry, many chronically malnourished. It means that fathers and mothers, unable to work in a decimated economy, have no means to support their families. It means that university students with scholarships to study abroad must watch the opportunity of a lifetime slip away because they are not allowed to travel.

In my view, the abhorrent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), coupled with its denial of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair-minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance.

Link: Tear down this Israeli wall

Arabisk revolution – next stop Palestine?

Faktisk kunne en regulær palæstinensisk opstand som dem, vi har set i Libyen, Tunesien og Egypten måske være det, der skal til for at bryde den israelske besættelse og få såvel israelerne som Abbas’ Quislingestyre til at trække sig helt tilbage, spekulerer Larry Derfner i Jerusalem Post:

Something’s going to blow, I figured, and my guess was that Israel would start one war too many, maybe against Iran, or Lebanon, or Gaza, and masses of Israelis as well as foreigners would die, and when the smoke cleared it would be recalled that we started it, and the world would finally run out of patience with us and we would get out of the West Bank in a lather to avoid being ostracized, to save ourselves from becoming a Jewish North Korea.

Again, not my preferred way of ending the occupation. But no “good” way was presenting itself.

And then came Tunisia. And Egypt. And Iran, and Yemen, and Bahrain, and Libya, and no one knows where this is going to stop.

And it became pretty clear to me that this is how Israeli rule in the West Bank is going to end – through Palestinian people power. Masses of Palestinians, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, marching to IDF checkpoints and outposts, marching to Israeli-only roads, to settlements, to the security fence – to the nearest Israeli presence and screaming, “Out! Out!”

And refusing to leave.

WHAT THE hell is the IDF going to do then? Shoot them? Arrest them? With the whole world not only watching but, for the first time, already won over by other unarmed Arab masses facing down their oppressors? What will the IDF do under the eyes of a world that, for the first time, is seeing Arabs as people like themselves who want freedom, who deserve it and who are earning it, to say the least, with their courage?

How will the IDF and the Palestinian Authority police – those who don’t defect – get all these people to go back home and stay there?

I don’t see it. I think we’re going to have grand-scale anarchy on our hands – and we won’t be able to solve it by force, and the world will be on the side of the anarchists.

Impossible? If you say this is impossible, you’ve been on Mars for the last month. If you’ve been on Earth, the idea of the Arab revolt not reaching the West Bank is what seems impossible. To me, it’s inevitable. I’m only surprised it hasn’t started already.

After all, the Palestinians’ “war of the stones,” the first intifada in the late 1980s, was close to being a model for what’s happening in the Middle East now. The Egyptians and other Arab rebels have even adopted the term intifada, which means “shaking off.”

True, the first intifada (not to mention the second one) wasn’t nonviolent – the Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails. But they certainly played David to the IDF’s Goliath. And in recent years, the “popular resistance” – the marches on the security fence in Bil’in and other West Bank villages – has been all but nonviolent, with only a few teenagers throwing stones at IDF troops, usually from far distances.

The Palestinians are the Arab world’s masters at political judo – at turning the enemy’s superior power against him. This is how civil disobedience works, and it’s working wonders in the Middle East, so why on earth shouldn’t it come to the West Bank, too?

It’s a matter of time. Maybe it’ll start Friday with the Palestinians’ “Day of Rage” against the US veto of the UN resolution against settlements. If not Friday, it’ll start soon. Something will set it off.

And yes, I’m hoping it happens. If the only other options are occupation forever or peace following catastrophe – and I think those are the only other options – I prefer people power.

Link: People get ready – there’s a train a-comin’ (via Angry Arab).

Palestine Papers: Israel skyder sig selv i foden

Efter den lækkede afsløring af de palæstinensiske forhandleres utroligt vidtgående tilbud til israelerne og den arrogance, hvormed de alle blev modtaget uden antydning af vilje til at gøre blot den mindste indrømmelse til gengæld, mener den israelske journalist Gideon Levy, at Israel har forpasset sin chance og nu tværtimod står til at miste det meste af de områder, de møjsommeligt har erobret og besat:

One upon a time there was a farmer who wanted to save on feed. Every day he would reduce the amount of food for his horse, see that it worked, and continue cutting and cutting until the horse had nothing to eat. The horse died.

This hackneyed tale has now been revived, emerging from the Palestine Papers leaked to the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera.

The Israeli farmer closed his hand, and the Palestinian horse was fit to die. One of them saved, the other expired. The Palestinians had already conceded most of their world, and greedy Tzipi Livni insisted: what about Har Homa and Maaleh Adumim?

Terror has stopped, they’re coordinating targeted killings to serve Israel. Selling their souls to the devil, they’re for the closure on Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas explains, like an Israeli propagandist, that the return of the refugees will destroy the state of Israel. Maybe 10,000 a year, they’re still trying – in vain. Livni doesn’t agree.

They conceded most of the settlements in Jerusalem, the Old City is also no longer exclusively in their hands, and nothing. Betar Ilit and Modi’in Ilit are ours, and that’s not enough for Israel, as if it has forgotten that the 1967 borders are the Palestinian compromise.

What more do we want? What more will Israel ask of the dying horse, a moment before it gives up the ghost? A Palestinian state in greater Abu Dis? Hatikvah as its anthem? And what will happen then, when the horse dies? A wild pony will emerge that will never agree to live under the conditions of the old horse.

Link: Israel will bever get a better deal than the one it rejected

Aljazeera Transparency Unit: Al-Jazeera lancerer sit eget Wikileaks

Dette er formentlig det største, uafhængige Wikileaks-agtige projekt, vi endnu har set – TV-stationen og nyhedsorganisationen Aljazeera tilbyder en hjemmeside med sikker upload af dokumenter og fokus på Mellemøsten:

Launched in January 2011, the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) aims to mobilize its audience – both in the Arab world and further afield – to submit all forms of content (documents, photos, audio & video clips, as well as “story tips”) for editorial review and, if merited, online broadcast and transmission on our English and Arabic-language broadcasts.

We believe that this initiative will allow Al Jazeera’s supporters to shine light on notable and newsworthy government and corporate activities which might otherwise go unreported.

From human rights to poverty to official corruption, AJTU will fairly evaluate and pursue all leads and content submitted, without geographical, political, cultural, or religious bias.

All submitted content is subjected to a rigorous vetting and authentication process that encompasses respect for individual privacy, contextualization, and fierce adherence to our tradecraft commitment of “journalism of depth.”

Al Jazeera has also gone to great lengths to protect the identities of our sources. Files will be uploaded and stored on our secure servers, and accessed only by journalists working for the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit.

For more information about how to upload files, and the security measures in place to protect your identity, click here.

Det første initiativ er The Palestine Papers, en række dokumenter fra forhandlingerne mellem det palæsitnensiske selvstyre og israelerne, der viser, at den palæstinensiske regering i Ramallah i lang tid har opført sig, som det, de er – israelernes betalte lakajer.

Tariq Ali skriver herom i London Review of Books:

The ‘Palestine Papers’ being published this week by al-Jazeera confirm in every detail what many Palestinians have suspected for a long time: their leaders have been collaborating in the most shameful fashion with Israel and the United States. Their grovelling is described in grim detail. The process, though few accepted it at the time, began with the much-trumpeted Oslo Accords, described by Edward Said in the LRB at the time as a ‘Palestinian Versailles’. Even he would have been taken aback by the sheer scale of what the PLO leadership agreed to surrender: virtually everything except their own salaries. Their weaknesses, inadequacies and cravenness are now in the public domain.

Now we know that the capitulation was total, but still the Israeli overlords of the PLO refused to sign a deal and their friends in the press blamed the Palestinians for being too difficult. They wanted Palestine to be crushed before they would agree to underwrite a few moth-eaten protectorates that they would supervise indefinitely. They wanted Hamas destroyed. The PLO agreed. The recent assault on Gaza was carried out with the approval of Abbas and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, not to mention Washington and its EU. The PLO sold out in a literal sense. They were bought with money and treated like servants. There is TV footage of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David playfully tugging at Arafat’s headgear to stop him leaving. All three are laughing. Many PLO supporters in Palestine must be weeping as they watch al-Jazeera and take in the scale of the betrayal and the utter cynicism of their leaders. Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try to destroy Hamas militarily.

Det bliver spændende at se, hvad fremtiden kan bringe af afsløringer fra denne og andre whistle-blower-faciliteter. Ægypten, Tunesien, Libyen, Algeriet, shady dealings med USA og Iran, anyone? Lige netop på Aljazeeras nye side kommer der nok ikke så meget om Qatars regering, men det kunne jo komme på en konkurrent.

Link: Aljazeera Transparency Unit.