By Susie Kneedler on May 12, 2010
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro and NPR have at last reported on the month-old Israeli “military order” that allows the IDF to deport any Palestinian inhabitant of the West Bank it defines as an “infiltrator,” simply for lacking the paperwork that the Israeli government itself refuses to issue. Garcia-Navarro details the suffering of the Palestinian people more fully than any recent NPR reporter, but her “report” perfectly embodies the failure of “she said–she said journalism,” in which oppression becomes merely a matter of perspective.
Garcia-Navarro does document the horrific fear that Israeli government policies inflict on one woman and her family. We hear the anguish in Palestinian Umm Qusay’s voice beneath the translation; and the broadcast closes with a line deleted from the online article: “Qusay says the wider implications don’t matter to her. After waiting ten years to join her husband and children, she just wants to stay here.”
But Garcia-Navarro allows an Israeli military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, to assure us that, “The amendments to this law actually help the Palestininans or the other illegal residents that are here.” We hear Leibovich declare in sunny tones that, “There is a committee of judges which is reviewing the material and deciding whether to begin with the process of repatriation or not” [Leibovich’s emphasis]. Garcia-Navarro does not challenge the fairness of Israeli judges, let alone that of military courts, to Palestinian plaintiffs or defendants.
The “wider” ramifications may not matter to Qusay in her desperation to care for her children, but they determine whether listeners are informed or given only the false equivalence of those cliched “competing narratives.” Even Garcia-Navarro’s description of Qusay’s husband as merely a “resident”—not a native –of the West Bank minimizes how Israel wrongs the family.
Where is the research that would sort out rival claims, the obligation of a journalist to check facts? Four whole weeks have dragged on between what Garcia-Navarro calls the “new Israeli army order” and today’s story –plenty of time for investigation. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro should read the Geneva Conventions, the Oslo Accords, and other agreements to verify that, “the new military order contravenes international law and previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.” She could ascertain roughly how many people are marooned in hiding. She might look into the harm to “civil society.” Instead, she leaves all questions open.
In sum, nowhere does Garcia-Navarro grapple with the terrible inhumanity of a regime that has kept other people stateless for 60 years, depriving them not just of civil but human rights. A military occupation that arbitrarily defines the legitimate owners of a land as “infiltrators” is unspeakable. Why is “our” U.S. government paying for the illegal expulsions?
“[A]nti Zionism may be a ‘fool’s anti-imperialism,’ where Jewish nationalism itself is erroneously seen as the problem rather than the alliance its leaders have made with exploitative Western interests.” – Stephen Zunes, 2006.1
By Michael Barker | Pulse Media | May 12, 2010
Who is Stephen Zunes? Well according to his web-site, he is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, who in 2002 won recognition from the Peace and Justice Studies Association as Peace Scholar of the Year. Although Zunes describes himself as a committed peace loving, anti-imperialist activist, by reviewing just one of his books this article will demonstrate that in actual fact his scholarly actions belie such intent. The book in question is Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Zed Books, 2003), a popular text that received glowing accolades from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, and Saul Landau (amongst others). This essay will illustrate how Zunes’ proclivity for defending Zionism ultimately leads hims to promote a “fool’s anti-imperialism.”
That is not to say that Zunes is uncritical of U.S. foreign policy, far from it, just that his work serves as a smokescreen for understanding the real drivers of U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.
For example, on the antagonist relationship between U.S. elite interests and human rights, he recognizes that:
However, Zunes continues, “since at least the 1970s” U.S. administrations — or should we say regimes — have “to some degree” been forced to respond to “public and Congressional pressure regarding the lack of democracy and human rights in allied countries.” Typical responses often “constitute little more than lip service and damage control,” but significantly, “the very region that receives the largest amount of American arms and aid has been notably absent from the public debate: the Middle East.” Indeed, with regard the U.S.’s special commitment to Israel, U.S. aid “has generally increased as the government’s repression in the occupied territories has worsened.”2 Moreover, Zunes points out, this relationship…
So how might we come to understand the existence of this enduring toxic relationship? Well according to Zunes, such aid actually runs counter to the best interests — that is, “legitimate defence needs” — of both Israel and the United States. Therefore, as neither State profits from this situation U.S.-based arms manufacturers must be largely to blame, as he says, they are the people who profit most from this insecurity. To support this point Zunes draws upon the words of Matti Peled, the late Israeli major general (and Knesset member), who in the early 1990s “argued that he and other Israeli military leaders saw the [$1.8 billion Israeli military] aid package as little more than a U.S. government subsidy for American arms manufacturers.”3
Zunes does not seriously consider the possibility that an alternative explanation for this state of affairs is that neither the U.S. nor Israel are intent on pursuing peace in the Middle East. Indeed it seems fairly obvious that Israel has no interest in promoting what Zunes considers to be its “legitimate defence needs,” as leading Zionist elites are quite happy escalating tension in the region to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This might explain why “it appears that the priority of both the executive branch and Congress in recent decades has not been Israeli security, but maintaining the flow of American arms exports.”4 Yet, Zunes is convinced that the root of the problem lies not with Zionism but with the arms manufacturers, thus he writes:
This gross underestimation of the power of the Israel lobby is almost identical to Noam Chomsky’s arguments which have already been thoroughly rebutted elsewhere. Thus it is fitting that Zunes, like Chomsky, plays the oil card, and says that the “primary reason” why the U.S. supports Israel is because of their need to control oil supplies, which is facilitated by Israel’s ability to prevent “victories by radical nationalist movements” in the Middle East.6 As before, this is an erroneous, unsupported statement that has been convincingly debunked.
Either way if one follows Zunes’ assertion that aid to Israel threatens their national security, “should U.S. policy,” Zunes asks, “then, really be considered ‘pro-Israel?’” He argues not: such aid is counterproductive, as it endangers Israel by encouraging militaristic elements within Israel’s ruling class.7 This inelegant mislogic is used to bolster his case that U.S. support for Israel must be predominantly driven by arms manufacturers and big oil; no need for hard evidence though.
Now that Zunes has cajoled his readers into accepting his fallacious arguments, he provides other “evidence” to help understand what “motivates the strong American bias against the Palestinians.” Thus in addition to the military and oil lobbies, Zunes identifies four other contributing factors to explain this bias: these are (1) a mixture of sentimental attachment combined with guilt (driven by the history of Western anti-Semitism), “friendships with Jewish Americans who identify strongly with Israel, and fear of inadvertently encouraging anti-Semitism,” (2) the rising power of the Christian Right in the United States, which interprets the Israeli-Palestine conflict as “simply a continuation of the Biblical battles between the Israelites and the Philistines,” (3) the “failure of progressive movements in the United States,” and (4) the Israel lobby. No doubt the first three points are all relevant to some degree, but their contemporary significance have all been amplified, and in some cases driven, by the far-reaching influence of the Israel lobby.8
On point four however — that is, the Israel lobby — Zunes suggests that caution must be heeded, because Jews are generally peaceful and only make up a small percentage of the U.S. population (“less than 4 percent”): moreover, “[m]any of the most outspoken members of Congress supportive of Israel’s occupation policies are from states or districts with very small Jewish populations.”9 Yet here Zunes’ argument is nonsensical (again), as the number of active Zionists is insignificant, as ultimately it is the power they exert, not their numbers, that matters most. Furthermore, no one is arguing that all Jews are Zionists, indeed it is only the small but extremely influential Jewish population residing in the American ruling class — along with their non-Jewish Zionist recruits — who give the Israel lobby its tremendous clout. Here as an example of the influence of the Israel lobby we might look to Stephen Green’s book, Taking Sides, America’s Secret Relations with Militant Israel (William Morrow, 1984), which Jeffrey Blankfort observes …
Although Blankfort admits that this is a “slight exaggeration, perhaps,” it is ironic that Zunes refers to Green’s book to support his contention that Israel helps U.S. foreign policy elites, not vice versa.10 But irrespective of contrary evidence, Zunes asks that we put aside our critical faculties because “the strength of the lobby is often greatly exaggerated.”11 Furthermore, to ensure his readers are less likely to believe that the Israel lobby has a significant impact on guiding U.S. foreign policy, Zunes caricatures proponents of this point of view as belonging to the radical Right. No mention is made of Leftists who have long warned of the power of the lobby, like Edward Herman, Alexander Cockburn, and Jeffrey Blankfort; instead, Zunes points to anti-Semitic conservatives, like the politician Patrick Buchanan.12 Lest we forget, oil is the “primary issue.” Thus following Zunes’ example of using Zionists to back his unconvincing case for the overwhelming power of the U.S. arms industry, we could just as easily cite such Zionist sources to undermine his oil argument. For example, in the early 1980s, Morris Amitay, the former executive director of AIPAC, said: “We rarely see them [oil corporations] lobbying on foreign policy issues… In a sense, we have the field to ourselves.”
As this essay has demonstrated, being a progressive scholar does not necessarily guarantee that your analyses will effectively challenge the status quo. Thus while Zunes self-identifies as an anti-imperialist activist, he is a liberal Zionist at heart, and he is certainly not comfortable with advocating the type of systemic social change that we need to eradicate capitalism: by way of a contrast even the moderate civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, recognized that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism” (King’s words). This explains why Zunes counsels U.S. citizens that “bringing about a more enlightened foreign policy is necessary for national security.”13
Instead of problematising the obvious contradictions between democracy and capitalism, Zunes suggests that the United States political system is simply being misused. He writes that “there is a growing sense that the Bush Administration is cynically manipulating the country’s genuine need for security for the sake of its rigid ideological constructs and its wealthy financial supporters.”14 Unbeknown to Zunes, cynical manipulation is nothing new, it is simply part and parcel of the misnomer that is capitalist democracy. Such shallow thinking necessarily leads Zunes to observe that one of the key problems of America’s counter-terrorism policies is that they confront “the symptoms rather than the cause.” But this will always be the case under capitalism: one would hardly expect the ruling class to attempt to address the root cause of injustice — that is for us to do. A capitalist elite would have lost its marbles if it ever traced universal exploitation back to capitalism itself.
Finally, it is critical to recognize that Zunes’ failure to differentiate between polyarchy (or low-intensity democracy) and more popular understandings of democracy, enables him to suggest with no sense of irony that “worldwide trends [have been] toward democracy and greater individual freedom throughout the world”. Furthermore, he is naïve enough to believe that the popularity of the United States “can be restored, but only if the United States shifts its policies to become more consistent with support for human rights, international law, sustainable economic development and demilitarization.” What Zunes fails to recognize is that the U.S. is already the foremost promoter of human rights — along with Israel — but only a neutered, low-intensity form of rights better known as humanitarian imperialism (see “The Project for A New American Humanitarianism”). Zunes, however, closes his eyes to such suggestions, which he refers to as “conspiracy theories,” and instead argues that what the world needs is just a more benign form of capitalism. “Foreign aid,” he writes, “should be directed toward poorer countries and in support of grassroots development initiatives and away from support for the wealthier countries and/or corrupt and autocratic governments.”15 But here he misses the point, the real solution is not capitalist foreign aid, the real solution is grassroots organizing unhindered by the manipulative funding regimes of U.S. foreign policy elites. This is why Zunes, like capitalism and Zionism, fails to provide the radical theory necessary to eradicate both capitalism and Zionism.
Michael Barker is an independent researcher who is currently based in the UK. His web site is http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com. The author submitted this piece to PULSE.
– Notes –
By NADIA HIJAB | May 11, 2010
Israel’s inexorable accession to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development country club — is set to be confirmed this month barring last-minute hitches. Although several OECD members have doubts about Israel’s qualifications both on technical grounds and lack of shared values, no state has dared publicly oppose.
Instead, public opposition has been left to a loose and unusual network of Palestinian and Jewish organizations that have been hard at work lobbying European countries, Turkey, the United States, and other members. It has also provided a rare point for common action between Palestinian official and civil society organizations.
The “technical issues” that worried the OECD include corruption, particularly in the arms industry; intellectual property rights, particularly in the drugs industry; and the occupation.
More specifically about the occupation, Israel included data covering its illegal settlements and annexed territories in its economic report, according to a leaked OECD document cited by 18 Irish parliamentarians who called on their government to oppose Israel’s membership. The OECD has apparently resolved this issue by inserting a disclaimer. It will use Israeli data without prejudice to the status of the occupied territories, as Avi Shlaim and Simon Mohun wrote in their Guardian comment calling for OECD conditions on Israeli membership.
However, prominent legal experts have raised serious problems regarding state obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention if OECD member states pursue this planned course of action. And this may still throw up a last-minute hurdle.
Besides, as Israeli economist Shir Hever of the Alternative Information Center has pointed out, the data give an unrealistic picture of Israel’s standard of living because settlers receive more services than Israeli citizens within the Green Line. He also notes that were the Palestinians under occupation to be included Israel “would have to be refused accession because of the enormous disparities in wealth.”
Most seriously, from a human rights perspective, the OECD has completely ignored its own Road Map for Israel’s accession, which states that Israel has to demonstrate a commitment to pluralist democracy based on the rule of law. Indeed, only a democracy can join the OECD. A 17-point memo to the OECD by the worldwide Palestinian coalition BNC (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee) listed the many ways in which Israel does not uphold the rule of law at home or abroad.
As if on cue, Israel has just provided a compelling illustration by arresting one of its most respected citizens – Ameer Makhoul – and depriving him of due process. The indefatigable Makhoul heads Ittijah, the coalition of 64 major civil society organizations representing the Palestinian citizens of Israel. He was seized at 3 am and separated from his wife and two daughters as the police ransacked their home.
In formalizing Makhoul’s detention, Israel’s security forces ordered him deprived of an attorney for at least two days. Israel recently prohibited Makhoul from travel for two months. In an article he had just written about the ban — published by Electronic Intifada on the day of his arrest — Makhoul pointed out that the accusations against him are based on “secret evidence that I am not allowed to see.” In yet another suspension of democratic norms, Israel imposed a blanket media gag on the arrest — a bizarre move since the news spread round the world in minutes, and a Facebook page was established within hours.
The OECD hopes to influence Israeli behavior from within the organization, according to groups lobbying against accession. Who knows? Maybe the OECD will have better luck than the United Nations. Israel pledged to let Palestinian refugees return home when it become a UN member state. Sixty-two years on, we’re still waiting…
Outrageous though it is, OECD member states are swayed more by economic than political arguments. Indeed, the OECD has praised Israel for liquidating the welfare state, privatizing government assets and undermining workers’ negotiating power.
“It’s like a trade agreement so it’s not used to lobbying based on human rights,” explained Miri Weingarten, who heads the London-based JNews, a platform for news and comment by anti-occupation Jewish groups. Anti-occupation — and in some cases — anti-Zionist groups opposing Israeli actions have flowered in Europe since the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008. Several have joined in the European Jews for a Just Peace network, which has led the effort against OECD membership for Israel until it upholds the law.
The determined, multifaceted outreach to member capitals in Europe, Asia and the United States had chalked up previous successes. For example, the European Union’s planned upgrade of relations with Israel was put on hold in the wake of Israel’s Gaza attack. Intensive lobbying by several churches and non-government organizations — including three Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem, HaMoked and Physicians for Human Rights — has helped prevent it from being acted on since.
Despite the OECD setback, parliamentarians and civil society are now mobilized in their demand that governments use economic measures to hold their peers accountable. As Ameer Makhoul wrote just before his arrest, “Injustice unites us; we are all together in this struggle.”
Nadia Hijab is a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies.
By Jeff Blankfort and Phil Weiss on May 11, 2010
Yesterday Phil Weiss wrote that Elena Kagan’s nomination calls on American Jews to recognize our prominence in the elite of American society. Here’s some more evidence. According to wikipedia, Marc Yudof, an educator who is president of the University of California, is Jewish and has sterling Zionist credentials:
In 1993, he and his wife, Judy, were the co-recipients of the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award. Judy Yudof became the first female international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism in 2002
The Jewish National Fund was the chief means of taking former Palestinian lands and making them Jewish in Israel and Palestine.
Sherry Lansing is vice chair of the University of California Board of Regents. The big movie executive, she is also Jewish. We don’t know if she is a Zionist.
But yesterday, responding to Blankfort’s email, Yudof sent back a statement signed by himself, Lansing and Russell Gould, who is chair of the board of regents, slamming the divestment-from-the-occupation campaign by students at two schools in the system:
…In 2005, the Regents stated that a policy of divestment from a foreign government shall be adopted by the University only when the United States government declares that a foreign regime is committing acts of genocide. It was also noted at the time that divestment is a serious decision that should be rarely pursued.
We share The Regents’ belief that divestment needs to be undertaken with caution. We firmly believe that if there is to be any discussion of divestment from a business or country, it must be robust and fair-minded. We must take great care that no one organization or country is held to a different standard than any other. In the current resolutions voted on by the UC student organizations, the State of Israel and companies doing business with Israel have been the sole focus. This isolation of Israel among all countries of the world greatly disturbs us and is of grave concern to members of the Jewish community.
We fully support the Board of Regents in its policy to divest from a foreign government or companies doing business with a foreign government only when the United States government declares that a foreign regime is committing acts of genocide. The U.S. has not made any declaration regarding the State of Israel and, therefore, we will not bring a recommendation before the Board to divest from companies doing business with the State of Israel.
Note the concern for the Jewish community. Note the deference to the US government (we thought college was supposed to teach you to think for yourself!). Note that if such a line had been held in the ’80s, no one would have divested from Apartheid South Africa.
Against the grain | 4 May 2010
A curious thing happened last week. A lot of people were under the impression that the World Bank was going to release its long-awaited study on global land grabs at its annual land conference in Washington DC on 26 April 2010. This is what GRAIN was told. It’s what many journalists were told. And it’s what those involved in producing the study expected. But it didn’t happen.
Instead, the Bank gave another powerpoint presentation summarising what the study will show, reiterated its proposed seven principles for “socially responsible” land grabs and unveiled its new business-to-business website – a kind of internet dating service to match up corporate land grabbers and government land givers.
This is not the first time that this study has been delayed. Indeed, ever since the Bank started compiling the data for it, tight political reins have been put on any public sharing of the results. They initially said the report would be out in December 2009. Then it was supposed to be March 2010. Then, we were assured, it would be released at the land conference last week. We do know that all of the research and analysis was completed long ago. So what’s holding the Bank back?
Bad news
The partial glimpse of the study presented in Washington last week sheds some light on an answer. The Bank initially wanted to do a comprehensive study of 30 countries, the hot spots for the land grabs. But it had to cut back severely on its expectations because, as it admits, the governments would not provide them with information. The corporations wouldn’t talk either, we were told by people writing the country chapters. This in itself is a powerful statement that says volumes about the hush-hush nature of these deals. If the World Bank can’t get access to the information, who can?
The Bank decided instead to base its study on the projects that have been reported by the media and captured on the farmlandgrab.org website. The Bank identified nearly 400 projects in 80 countries in this way, nearly one quarter (22%) of which are already being implemented. The study thus makes it plain that the global land grab is very real and moving along faster and further than many have assumed (See box for a basic glimpse of what the study is expected to say.)
| BOX: What the World Bank study is expected to say
[NB: GRAIN has not seen the World Bank’s report. The following is drawn simply from publicly available documents, plus some verification from World Bank staff and consultants.] The World Bank study focuses on large-scale farmland acquisitions of the last few years – what we all call land grabbing. While it largely confirms many things we already know, people have been awaiting the release of this report because the Bank was supposed to get access to more information than anyone else up to now. After all, most of these deals are shrouded in secrecy and controversy, and attract accusations of neocolonialism, even genocide. The Bank inventorised 389 land deals in 80 countries. The bulk (37%) of the so-called investment projects are meant to produce food (crops and livestock), while biofuels come in second place (35%). Unsurprisingly, Africa is the target of half the land grab projects, followed by Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In terms of countries being approached for their land, the Bank reveals that, in Africa, Sudan comes in first place, followed by Ghana and Madagascar. In Asia–Pacific, Indonesia ranks first, followed by the Philippines and Australia. In Latin America, Brazil is the favoured destination, then Argentina and Paraguay. In terms of country of origin of the land grabbers, China and the UK tie in the top slot, followed by Saudi Arabia. Finally, the Bank did statistical analysis of what draws land grabbers to certain countries rather than others – the “probability” factors. Three are particularly noteworthy: land availability, low mechanisation and weak land governance. This means that investors will prioritise places where: (a) it is relatively easy to get control over people’s land; (b) large-scale holdings are possible; and (c) bringing in machinery will yield quick productivity gains. |
The Bank’s most significant findings, however, are about the impacts of these projects on local communities. Its overwhelming conclusion, shared at the land conference last week, is that these projects are not providing benefits to local communities. Environmental impact assessments are rarely carried out, and people are routinely booted off their land, without consultation or compensation. The Bank even revealed that investors are deliberately targeting areas where there is “weak land governance”.
It is hard to see how, given these damning findings, the Bank could come up with anything positive to say about this new wave of foreign investment in farmland; this probably explains its reluctance to release the report. The Bank, after all, embarked on the study “to provide guidance to Bank clients (in government and the private sector) and partners who may be faced with or interested in large scale land acquisition so as to enable them to maximize the long-term benefits from such investments.” 1 And, while its study waits in limbo, the Bank is becoming more and more committed to making the land grabs happen. European investors, for instance, say that they will be using the Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency to provide them with political risk insurance for their farmland deals. Should anything backfire, “You’ll have the World Bank on your side,” says Gary Vaughan-Smith of London-based SilverStreet Capital LLP, which recently launched a US$300-million fund to invest in farmland in Africa. “They’re going to have enormous clout if there are any difficulties.” 2
Not winning anyone over
The problem for the Bank and the other land grab promoters, however, is that hardly anyone is fooled by talk of “win–win” guidelines or codes or principles to make it all work for everyone’s benefit. No matter how hard they try, they can’t shake the “land grab” label or stigma off these transactions.
“Here’s what I’m sure of”, weighs in Howard Buffet, son of Warren Buffet, in an Oakland Institute report released in time for the Bank’s conference last week. “These deals will make the rich richer and the poor poorer, creating clear winners who benefit while the losers are denied their livelihoods.” 3
If the Bank and its friends at partner UN agencies hoped that last week’s events in Washington would finally give them some control over the land grab discussion, they were mistaken. More than 100 groups from more than 100 countries crashed their party by releasing a common declaration a few days before, which denounced their “seven principles” for socially responsible land grabbing. They didn’t beat about the bush. As they see it, on the ground, this land grab is nothing but a massive transfer of lands from small food producers to foreign corporations, from sustainable farms to industrial plantations, and these groups were making it crystal clear that they are committed to throwing this trend into reverse. Against this, the Bank’s “win–win”, or responsible investment initiative, looks hollower than ever.
By Kristin Srzemski, The Electronic Intifada, 8 May 2010
 |
| Author Margaret Atwood |
On Sunday, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood will accept the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University and her portion of the $1 million payout that goes with it. Meanwhile, a mere 40 miles away, students in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip will stilll be struggling to find the ways and means to continue their educations.
Atwood will be accepting her prize despite a worldwide call — initiated by the Palestinian Students Campaign for a Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PSACBI) — for her to turn down the award. The Canadian author, whose work often reflects issues of colonization, feminism, structures of political power and oppression, will be sharing the literary prize with Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, whose novels question the brutalities of colonial rule and post-colonial dispossession. Ghosh was also asked to turn down the prize, which he has declined to do.
Being an artist of conscience has been one of Atwood’s hallmark characteristics throughout her career. She supported the South African anti-Apartheid movement and, according to filmmaker John Greyson, was the first public figure to speak out in support of gay rights after police arrested 300 men in Toronto in 1981. The late Palestinian scholar Edward Said named her as an “oppositional intellectual.” That’s why her acceptance of the Dan David Prize is fraught with ironies, not least of which is the requirement that she donate 10 percent of the prize money back to support graduate students at Tel Aviv University, while Gaza’s students — just a short drive away — are enclosed in an open-air prison, unable to complete their studies.
“We have no fuel supply in Gaza for student transportation,” Ayah Abubasheer of PSCABI wrote in an email on 21 April. “There are no basic supplies or stationery for students in Gaza. Basic materials such as pens, pencils, sharpeners, erasers and so on are not available. And, books? There are no books, research resources or any of the like in Gaza. Israel bombed the Islamic University’s labs and student residences during the [winter 2008-09 attacks on Gaza].”
PSCABI is the student arm of the Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. Both groups belong to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, started in Palestine in 2005. The group is comprised of students representing all Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and has alliances with Palestinian student groups at Israeli universities, Abubasheer said. This coalition of activists wrote an open letter to Atwood on 4 April, asking her to turn down the prize. The letter went “viral” and was soon posted on websites and blogs across the Internet. It also spawned other letters and action alerts, all with the aim of persuading Atwood to stand in solidarity with Gaza’s students.
Atwood admitted via email she was aware of the open letter, but said she did not receive it personally. She did not respond to the students in Gaza, but she did reply to Antoine Raffoul, a Palestinian architect living in London who is the founder of the organization 1948: Lest We Forget.
Cultural boycotts equal censorship, Atwood said. In addition, the Dan David Prize is a cultural event, funded by an individual, she said. “To boycott a discussion of literature such as the one proposed would be to take the view that literature is always and only some kind of tool of the nation that produces it — a view I strongly reject.”
Atwood also said via email that she is the international vice president of the literary organization PEN, which advocates for writers who are persecuted or imprisoned because of their work. As such, she is not allowed to participate in cultural boycotts, she said.
Dan David and Tel Aviv University
Dan David, 80, was born and raised in communist Romania. He joined the Zionist youth movement and helped organize aliyah or Zionist emigration to Israel, according to a 13 November 2007 article published by the Israeli daily Haaretz. David, who made his fortune in instant photo booths, used $100 million of his own money to found the Dan David Foundation, which administers the Dan David Prize. He also sits on the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University (TAU), which is at the center of Israel’s military-industrial complex.
Today, some 64 research projects in defense or national security are being funded by Israeli and US defense agencies on the TAU campus. “TAU is playing a major role in enhancing Israel’s security capabilities and military edge,” reads the introduction to an article entitled “Lifting the Veil of Secrecy” in the Tel Aviv University Review, Winter 2008/09 issue.
“‘People are just not aware of how important university research is in general, and how much TAU contributes to Israel’s security in particular,’ says TAU President Zvi Galil in the article.
One project currently underway explores how to turn birds into weapons because they are relatively “unobtrusive,” especially when compared to the much larger unmanned drones, according to the article.
Antoine Raffoul said that the Dan David Prize cannot be divorced from Israel. “Its institutions, whether cultural, educational, industrial, scientific, judicial, agricultural or military, are part and parcel of the political institution of the state … working hand in hand to enforce the policies of an illegal occupation of Palestinian land,” he said.
TAU was built upon the remains of a Palestinian village depopulated and destroyed by Zionist forces in 1948. “By accepting the prize at Tel Aviv University, you will be indirectly giving a slight and inadvertent nod to Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide. This university has refused to commemorate the destroyed Palestinian village on which it was built. That village is called Sheikh Muwanis, and it no longer exists as a result of Israel’s confiscation. Its people have been expelled,” the Gaza students wrote in their open letter.
Upholding the rights and voices of the persecuted
During an acceptance speech for the American PEN Literary Service Award in New York City in April, Atwood said oppressors share a commonality. “They wish to silence the human voice, or all human voices that do not sing their songs. They wish to indulge their sense of power, which is best done by grinding underfoot those who cannot retaliate.”
Gaza’s students are disappointed with Atwood’s decision to accept the Dan David Prize, Abubasheer said. “We are deeply wounded by her decision. Students here have been asking about the sincerity of her novels and wonder whether she will reconsider her decision to stand on the wrong side of history”
In the end, for Atwood, at least, it comes down to whether or not a cultural boycott is equivalent to censorship. But as filmmaker Cathy Gulkin said in an article posted on the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s website on 6 May, the two issues are distinct. Gulkin said that censorship is wielded by a force with the power to prevent a work from being presented, while a boycott asks artists to withdraw their work voluntarily. She participated in a boycott of the Tel Aviv International Film Festival last winter.
“Palestinian civil society has no power or will to silence or censor. They can only appeal to people of conscience … to support them in their struggle to achieve their human rights,” Gulkin wrote in her call to boycott last winter.
The Palestinian students and Raffoul point to a number of artists and authors, including Naomi Klein, Carlos Santana, Bono, Snoop Dog and Sting, who have heeded Palestinian civil society’s call for the boycott of Israel.
Raffoul even pointed to actor Marlon Brando, who rejected his Academy Award in 1973 to protest the US government’s treatment of Native Americans or the Beatles rejecting knighthoods in England.
“I sympathize with the very bad conditions the people of Gaza are living through due to the blockade, the military actions, and the Egyptian and Israeli walls,” Atwood wrote in her email to Raffoul.
“We are not asking for sympathy!” Abubasheer said. “We want solidarity. … You are either with justice or with injustice. There is no neutral zone.”
Abubasheer added: “Thus, we all have an individual moral responsibility to boycott. Boycott is inclusive and it brings people together, fighting for peace through justice and accountability, from the youngest to the oldest, from the four quarters of the world, anyone can boycott. After the wiping out of entire families in broad daylight, what else do some public intellectuals need to see in order to make a bold move?”
Raffoul contends that today no one — especially important cultural figures such as Atwood — can exist in a vacuum. “You can’t hide behind the cloak of literature,” he said. “We don’t live in a shell anymore. You cannot claim to be a humanitarian in any state and then … fly into a zone called Israel [that is] killing people and dehumanizing innocent people.”
Atwood said she plans to “observe” what she sees in Palestine and then write about it. She suggested this reporter hold off on writing this article until then.
But Abubasheer would not be comforted by this promise. Quoting Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she said: “If you choose to be neutral in situations of injustice, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
She added: “The position taken by Ms. Atwood … is clear in the light of this statement.”
Kristin Szremski is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years in newspapers. She began her career in Warsaw, Poland, working on an English-language newspaper with members of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) union. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally. Szremski is currently a freelance journalist living outside Chicago.
By Jeremy Scahill | Rebel Reports | May 3, 2010
Erik Prince, the reclusive owner of the Blackwater empire, rarely gives public speeches and when he does he attempts to ban journalists from attending and forbids recording or videotaping of his remarks. On May 5, that is exactly what Prince is trying to do when he speaks at DeVos Fieldhouse as the keynote speaker for the “Tulip Time Festival” in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. He told the event’s organizers no news reporting could be done on his speech and they consented to the ban. Journalists and media associations in Michigan are protesting this attempt to bar reporting on his remarks.
Despite Prince’s attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, The Nation magazine has obtained an audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater. The people of the United States have a right to media coverage of events featuring the owner of a company that generates 90% of its revenue from the United States government.
In the speech, Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight “terrorists” in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence. He expressed disdain for the Geneva Convention and described Blackwater’s secretive operations at four Forward Operating Bases he controls in Afghanistan. He called those fighting the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan “barbarians” who “crawled out of the sewer.” Prince also revealed details of a July 2009 operation he claims Blackwater forces coordinated in Afghanistan to take down a narcotrafficking facility, saying that Blackwater “call[ed] in multiple air strikes,” blowing up the facility. Prince boasted that his forces had carried out the “largest hashish bust in counter-narcotics history.” He characterized the work of some NATO countries’ forces in Afghanistan as ineffectual, suggesting that some coalition nations “should just pack it in and go home.” Prince spoke of Blackwater working in Pakistan, which appears to contradict the official, public Blackwater and US government line that Blackwater is not in Pakistan.
Prince also claimed that a Blackwater operative took down the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W Bush in Baghdad and criticized the Secret Service for being “flat-footed.” He bragged that Blackwater forces “beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene” during Katrina and claimed that lawsuits, “tens of millions of dollars in lawyer bills” and political attacks prevented him from deploying a humanitarian ship that could have responded to the earthquake in Haiti or the tsunami that hit Indonesia.
Several times during the speech, Prince appeared to demean Afghans his company is training in Afghanistan, saying Blackwater had to teach them “Intro to Toilet Use” and to do jumping jacks. At the same time, he bragged that US generals told him the Afghans Blackwater trains “are the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan.” Prince also revealed that he is writing a book, scheduled to be released this fall.
The speech was delivered January 14 at the University of Michigan in front of an audience of entrepreneurs, ROTC commanders and cadets, businesspeople and military veterans. The speech was titled “Overcoming Adversity: Leadership at the Tip of the Spear” and was sponsored by the Young Presidents’ Association (YPO), a business networking association primarily made up of corporate executives. “Ripped from the headlines and described by Vanity Fair magazine, as a Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier and Spy, Erik Prince brings all that and more to our exclusive YPO speaking engagement,” read the event’s program, also obtained by The Nation. It proclaimed that Prince’s speech was an “amazing don’t miss opportunity from a man who has ‘been there and done that’ with a group of Cadets and Midshipmen who are months away from serving on the ‘tip of the spear.’” Here are some of the highlights from Erik Prince’s speech:
Send the Mercs into Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria
Prince painted a global picture in which Iran is “at the absolute dead center… of badness.” The Iranians, he said, “want that nuke so that it is again a Persian Gulf and they very much have an attitude of when Darius ran most of the Middle East back in 1000 BC. That’s very much what the Iranians are after.” [NOTE: Darius of Persia actually ruled from 522 BC–486 BC]. Iran, Prince charged, has a “master plan to stir up and organize a Shia revolt through the whole region.” Prince proposed that armed private soldiers from companies like Blackwater be deployed in countries throughout the region to target Iranian influence, specifically in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia. “The Iranians have a very sinister hand in these places,” Prince said. “You’re not going to solve it by putting a lot of uniformed soldiers in all these countries. It’s way too politically sensitive. The private sector can operate there with a very, very small, very light footprint.” In addition to concerns of political expediency, Prince suggested that using private contractors to conduct such operations would be cost-effective. “The overall defense budget is going to have to be cut and they’re going to look for ways, they’re going to have to have ways to become more efficient,” he said. “And there’s a lot of ways that the private sector can operate with a much smaller, much lighter footprint.”
Prince also proposed using private armed contractors in the oil-rich African nation of Nigeria. Prince said that guerilla groups in the country are dramatically slowing oil production and extraction and stealing oil. “There’s more than a half million barrels a day stolen there, which is stolen and organized by very large criminal syndicates. There’s even some evidence it’s going to fund terrorist organizations,” Prince alleged. “These guerilla groups attack the pipeline, attack the pump house to knock it offline, which makes the pressure of the pipeline go soft. they cut that pipeline and they weld in their own patch with their own valves and they back a barge up into it. Ten thousand barrels at a time, take that oil, drive that 10,000 barrels out to sea and at $80 a barrel, that’s $800,000. That’s not a bad take for organized crime.” Prince made no mention of the nonviolent indigenous opposition to oil extraction and pollution, nor did he mention the notorious human rights abuses connected to multinational oil corporations in Nigeria that have sparked much of the resistance.
Blackwater and the Geneva Convention
Prince scornfully dismissed the debate on whether armed individuals working for Blackwater could be classified as “unlawful combatants” who are ineligible for protection under the Geneva Convention. “You know, people ask me that all the time, ‘Aren’t you concerned that you folks aren’t covered under the Geneva Convention in [operating] in the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan? And I say, ‘Absolutely not,’ because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and they have a 1200 AD mentality. They’re barbarians. They don’t know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there.”
It is significant that Prince mentioned his company operating in Pakistan given that Blackwater, the US government and the Pakistan government have all denied Blackwater works in Pakistan.
Taking Down the Iraqi Shoe Thrower for the ‘Flat-Footed’ Secret Service
Prince noted several high-profile attacks on world leaders in the past year, specifically a woman pushing the Pope at Christmas mass and the attack on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, saying there has been a pattern of “some pretty questionable security lately.” He then proceeded to describe the feats of his Blackwater forces in protecting dignitaries and diplomats, claiming that one of his men took down the Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at President Bush in Baghdad in December 2008. Prince referred to al-Zaidi as the “shoe bomber:”
“A little known fact, you know when the shoe bomber in Iraq was throwing his shoes at President Bush, in December 08, we provided diplomatic security, but we had no responsibility for the president’s security—that’s always the Secret Service that does that. We happened to have a guy in the back of the room and he saw that first shoe go and he drew his weapon, got a sight picture, saw that it was only a shoe, he re-holstered, went forward and took that guy down while the Secret Service was still standing there flat-footed. I have a picture of that—I’m publishing a book, so watch for that later this fall—in which you’ll see all the reporters looking, there’s my guy taking the shoe thrower down. He didn’t shoot him, he just tackled him, even though the guy was committing assault and battery on the president of the United States. I asked a friend of mine who used to run the Secret Service if they had a written report of that and he said the debrief was so bad they did not put it in writing.”
While the Secret Service was widely criticized at the time for its apparent inaction during the incident, video of the event clearly showed another Iraqi journalist, not security guards, initially pulling al-Zaidi to the floor. Almost instantly thereafter, al-Zaidi was swarmed by a gang of various, unidentified security agents.
Blackwater’s ‘Forward Operating Bases
Prince went into detail about his company’s operations in Afghanistan. Blackwater has been in the country since at least April 2002, when the company was hired by the CIA on a covert contract to provide the Agency with security. Since then, Blackwater has won hundreds of millions of dollars in security, counter-narcotics and training contracts for the State Department, Defense Department and the CIA. The company protects US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and other senior US officials, guards CIA personnel and trains the Afghan border police. “We built four bases and we staffed them and we run them,” Prince said, referring to them as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). He described them as being in the north, south, east and west of Afghanistan. “Spin Boldak in the south, which is the major drug trans-shipment area, in the east at a place called FOB Lonestar, which is right at the foothills of Tora Bora mountain. In fact if you ski off Tora Bora mountain, you can ski down to our firebase,” Prince said, adding that Blackwater also has a base near Herat and another location. FOB Lonestar is approximately 15 miles from the Pakistan border. “Who else has built a [Forward Operating Base] along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?” Prince said earlier this year.
Blackwater’s War on Drugs
Prince described a Narcotics Interdiction Unit Blackwater started in Afghanistan five years ago that remains active. “It is about a 200 person strike force to go after the big narcotics traffickers, the big cache sites,” Prince said. “That unit’s had great success. They’ve taken more than $3.5 billion worth of heroin out of circulation. We’re not going after the farmers, but we’re going after the traffickers.” He described an operation in July 2009 where Blackwater forces actually called in NATO air strikes on a target during a mission:
“A year ago, July, they did the largest hashish bust in counter-narcotics history, down in the south-east. They went down, they hit five targets that our intel guys put together and they wound up with about 12,000 pounds of heroin. While they were down there, they said, ‘You know, these other three sites look good, we should go check them out.’ Sure enough they did and they found a cache—262,000 kilograms of hash, which equates to more than a billion dollars street value. And it was an industrialized hash operation, it was much of the hash crop in Helmand province. It was palletized, they’d dug ditches out in the desert, covered it with tarps and the bags of powder were big bags with a brand name on it for the hash brand, palletized, ready to go into containers down to Karachi [Pakistan] and then out to Europe or elsewhere in the world. That raid alone took about $60 million out of the Taliban’s coffers. So, those were good days. When the guys found it, they didn’t have enough ammo, enough explosives, to blow it, they couldn’t burn it all, so they had to call in multiple air strikes. Of course, you know, each of the NATO countries that came and did the air strikes took credit for finding and destroying the cache.”
December 30, 2009 CIA Bombing in Khost
Prince also addressed the deadly suicide bombing on December 30 at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. Eight CIA personnel, including two Blackwater operatives, were killed in the bombing, which was carried out by a Jordanian double-agent. Prince was asked by an audience member about the “failure” to prevent that attack. The questioner did not mention that Blackwater was responsible for the security of the CIA officials that day, nor did Prince discuss Blackwater’s role that day. Here is what Prince said:
“You know what? It is a tragedy that those guys were killed but if you put it in perspective, the CIA has lost extremely few people since 9/11. We’ve lost two or three in Afghanistan, before that two or three in Iraq and, I believe, one guy in Somalia—a landmine. So when you compare what Bill Donovan and the OSS did to the Germans and the Japanese, the Italians during World War II—and they lost hundreds and hundreds of people doing very difficult, very dangerous work—it is a tragedy when you lose people, but it is a cost of doing that work. It is essential, you’ve got to take risks. In that case, they had what appeared to be a very hot asset who had very relevant, very actionable intelligence and he turned out to be a bad guy… That’s what the intelligence business is, you can’t be assured success all the time. You’ve got to be willing to take risks. Those are calculated risks but sometimes it goes badly. I hope the Agency doesn’t draw back and say, ‘Oh, we have to retrench and not do that anymore,’ all the rest. No. We need you to double down, go after them harder. That is a cost of doing business. They are there to kill us.”
Prince to Some NATO Countries in Afghanistan: ‘Go Home’
Prince spoke disparagingly of some unnamed NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan, saying they do not have the will for the fight. “Some of them do and a lot of them don’t,” he said. “It is such a patchwork of different international commitments as to what some can do and what some can’t. A lot of them should just pack it in and go home.” Canada, however, received praise from Prince. “The Canadians have lost per capita more than America has in Afghanistan. They are fighting and they are doing it and so if you see a Canadian thank them for that. The politicians at home take heavies for doing that,” Prince said. He did not mention the fact that his company was hired by the Canadian government to train its forces.
Prince also described how his private air force (which he recently sold) bailed out a US military unit in trouble in Afghanistan. According to Prince, the unit was fighting the Taliban and was running out of ammo and needed an emergency re-supply. “Because of, probably some procedure written by a lawyer back in Washington, the Air Force was not permitted to drop in an uncertified drop zone… even to the unit that was running out of ammo,” Prince said. “So they called and asked if our guys would do it and, of course, they said, ‘Yes.’ And the cool part of the story is the Army guys put their DZ mark in the drop zone, a big orange panel, on the hood of their hummer and our guys put the first bundle on the hood of that hummer. We don’t always get that close, but that time a little too close.”
Blackwater: Teaching Afghans to Use Toilets
Prince said his forces train 1300 Afghans every six weeks and described his pride in attending “graduations” of Blackwater-trained Afghans, saying that in six weeks they radically transform the trainees. “You take these officers, these Afghans and it’s the first time in their life they’ve ever been part of something that’s first class, that works. The instructors know what they’re talking about, they’re fed, the water works, there’s ammunition for their guns. Everything works,” Prince said. “The first few days of training, we have to do ‘Intro to Toilet Use’ because a lot of these guys have never even seen a flushed toilet before.” Prince boasted: “We manage to take folks with a tribal mentality and, just like the Marine Corps does more effectively than anyone else, they take kids from disparate lifestyles across the United States and you throw them into Paris Island and you make them Marines. We try that same mentality there by pushing these guys very hard and, it’s funny, I wish I had video to show you of the hilarious jumping jacks. If you take someone that’s 25 years old and they’ve never done a jumping jack in their life—some of the convoluted motions they do it’s comical. But the transformation from day one to the end of that program, they’re very proud and they’re very capable.” Prince said that when he was in Afghanistan late last year, “I met with a bunch of generals and they said the Afghans that we train are the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan.”
Prince also discussed the Afghan women he says work with Blackwater. “Some of the women we’ve had, it’s amazing,” Prince said. “They come in in the morning and they have the burqa on and they transition to their cammies (camouflage uniforms) and I think they enjoy the baton work,” he said, adding, “They’ve been hand-cuffing a little too much on the men.”
Hurricane Katrina and Humanitarian Mercenaries
Erik Prince spoke at length about Blackwater’s deployment in 2005 in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, bragging that his forces “rescued 128 people, sent thousands of meals in there and it worked.” Prince boasted of his company’s rapid response, saying, “We surged 145 guys in 36 hours from our facility five states away and we beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene.” What Prince failed to mention was that at the time of the disaster, at least 35% of the Louisiana National Guard was deployed in Iraq. One National Guard soldier in New Orleans at the time spoke to Reuters, saying, “They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here… We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq.” Much of the National Guard’s equipment was in Iraq at the time, including high water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers and generators.
Prince also said that he had a plan to create a massive humanitarian vessel that, with the generous support of major corporations, could have responded to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis across the globe. “I thought, man, the military has perfected how to move men and equipment into combat, why can’t we do that for the humanitarian side?” Prince said. The ship Prince wanted to use for these missions was an 800 foot container vessel capable of shipping “1700 containers, which would have lined up six and a half miles of humanitarian assistance with another 250 vehicles” onboard. “We could have gotten almost all those boxes donated. It would have been boxes that would have had generator sets from Caterpillar, grain from ADM [Archer Daniels Midland], anti-biotics from pharmaceutical companies, all the stuff you need to do massive humanitarian assistance,” Prince said, adding that it “would have had turnkey fuel support, food, surgical, portable surgical hospitals, beds cots, blankets, all the above.” Prince says he was going to do the work for free, “on spec,” but “instead we got attacked politically and ended up paying tens of millions of dollars in lawyer bills the last few years. It’s an unfortunate misuse of resources because a boat like that sure would have been handy for the Haitian people right now.”
Outing Erik Prince
Prince also addressed what he described as his outing as a CIA asset working on sensitive US government programs. He has previously blamed Congressional Democrats and the news media for naming him as working on the US assassination program. The US intelligence apparatus “depends heavily on Americans that are not employed by the government to facilitate greater success and access for the intelligence community,” Prince said. “It’s unprecedented to have people outed by name, especially ones that were running highly classified programs. And as much as the left got animated about Valerie Plame, outing people by name for other very very sensitive programs was unprecedented and definitely threw me under the bus.”
Press TV – May 3, 2010
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the United States should dismantle its nuclear bases around the world as a step to create a nuke-free world.
“Nuclear weapons stationed in military bases in the US and those in its allied countries such as Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands must be dismantled,” President Ahmadinejad said in an address before the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday.
“Those who used nuclear weapons for the first time in history are the most detested and disgraceful people in the world,” he said, adding that nuclear arms are “the most disgusting and shameful kind of weapons in the world.”
The United Sates, despite being a signatory to the NPT, is the “main suspect” responsible for the stockpiling, spread and the threatening of other nations with nuclear weapons, the Iranian president said.
Ahmadinejad noted that “possessing nuclear weapons is nothing to be proud of,” while criticizing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for adopting a double standard toward nuclear-armed countries and those seeking nuclear energy.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon opening the nuclear non-proliferation review conference in New York, said the world expected nuclear-armed states to “act” on disarmament.
Ahmadinejad, who is the only head of state attending the summit, said world powers should set a deadline to create a nuke-free world, calling on the UN to rebrand the NPT as the “Disarmament NPT.”
The Iranian president, who described as “hazardous” the production and stockpiling of nuclear weapons by world powers, criticized the United Nations for its inability to establish sustainable security for the world against nuclear weapons. He stressed that nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation have not materialized, saying that the US should be blamed for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. World powers, he said, should live up to their obligations under the NPT.
Ahmadinejad also provided a comprehensive resolution to strengthen the non-proliferation treaty:
– Nuclear disarmament should be put at the core of the NPT mandate through “transparent binding and effective mechanisms.”
– The establishment of an independent, international group to fully materialize Article 6 of the NPT; including planning and supervising nuclear disarmament and preventing proliferation.
“All these nuclear weapons should be eliminated within a timetable set by this group.”
– The introduction of legally binding, comprehensive security guarantees, without discrimination or preconditions until the achievement of full nuclear disarmament by nuclear-armed states.
– The immediate termination of all types of research, development or improvement of nuclear weapons and their related facilities.
– The adoption of a legally binding instrument on the full prohibition of production, stockpiling and improvement proliferation, maintaining and use of nuclear weapons.
– The suspension of membership in the IAEA board of governors for states that use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.
“The presence of such members has allowed the agency to deviate from conducting its authorized missions.”
– The secession of all kinds of nuclear cooperation with non-signatories of the NPT and the adoption of effective punitive measures against all those states which continue to cooperate with such non-member states.
– Considering any threat to use nuclear weapons or any attack on peaceful nuclear facilities as a breach of international law.
– Immediate and unconditional implementation of the resolution adopted by the 1995 Review Conference on the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
– Collective effort to reform the structure of the (UN) Security Council as its current structure mainly serves the interests of nuclear weapons states.
Press TV – May 1, 2010
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) waves to the audience next to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak at the American Jewish Committee Annual Gala dinner in Washington April 29, 2010. Reuters photo
The US says it would not withdraw its support for Israel at the UN, denying reports that it would let the body target the occupation of the Palestinian lands.
British newspaper The Guardian said on Thursday that the US deputy Middle East envoy David Hale had promised the Palestinian Authority that Washington would consider letting the United Nations Security Council attack Israel if it found Tel Aviv’s settlement construction in the West Bank “provocative.”
The paper said this meant that Washington was to abstain from voting on the council’s anti-Israeli resolutions instead of vetoing them.
Washington has invariably invoked the veto power to block the UN resolutions against the Israeli aggression on the Palestinians and the regime’s building up the occupied lands.
White House spokesman Tommy Vietor rejected the Guardian report:
“This report is inaccurate,” he was quoted as saying in a piece published in the American news and analysis website Politico. The US “policy about issues relating to Israel at the UN is clear and will not change.”
“We will continue to speak out strongly for Israel’s right to self-defense and to oppose efforts to single Israel out unfairly for criticism,” he added.
The comments came as the Gaza Strip is far from recovering from the January 2008-September 2009 Israeli raids which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians.
The UN headquarters in New York is, meanwhile, set to host a review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The meeting is expected to make mention of Israel’s non-membership of the treaty despite its widely-reported ownership of hundreds of nuclear warheads. Analysts, though, dismiss the prospects of any anti-Israeli progress, citing Washington’s guardianship of Tel Aviv’s interests.
Response to Falasha demonstration against discrimination in blood donation
Palestine Information Center – 30/04/2010
NAZARETH — An Israeli kindergarten in Beir al-Saba’ (Beersheba) in southern occupied Palestine was reported in the Israeli media to segregate Jewish children of Ethiopian descent from the rest of Jewish children.
Israeli channel 2 television reported that the kindergarten uses two separate rooms for the two groups of children and that the room used for the children of Ethiopian descent is much smaller than the room used for the other group.
Ethiopian Jews suffer discrimination in Israeli society basically because of the colour of their skin. Sometime ago they discovered that the blood they donate is disposed of and not used fearing that it is infected with aids.
Palestinians aside, Ethiopian Jews, or Falashas fare worst on the Israeli scale of discrimination, other Jewish groups such Mizrahis and Sephardis do suffer from discrimination too.
Press TV – May 1, 2010
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s decision to attend the upcoming non-proliferation conference in New York has prompted the US to take measures to counter the move.
On Monday, which is the opening day of the conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak third after the opening remarks by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and a Non-Aligned Movement representative.
Representatives from over 180 countries will be attending the gathering, which is being held at the UN Headquarters in New York.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will speak at the gathering Monday afternoon. She will be the highest-ranking US diplomat to attend the talks in 10 years. Pundits say the decision to have Clinton participate in the conference was made to prevent the event from becoming a forum for countries of the Global South that are opposed to the calls to impose a new round of UN sanctions on Iran.
According to a report in the April 28 edition of The New York Times, the United States and its allies want to avoid negotiating Iran sanctions at the time of the conference to prevent the Iranian nuclear issue from becoming a rallying cry for non-nuclear states.
Non-nuclear states assert that the NPT has been misinterpreted and misused by the nuclear states to keep their club exclusive.
At the NPT talks, Washington will be seeking more authority and money for the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher said on Friday. She referred to Obama’s recently-crafted Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), under which the US commits to never use nuclear weapons against states that do not possess nuclear arsenals, with the exception of Iran and North Korea.
The New York Times quoted Obama as saying that the loophole would apply to “outliers” like Iran, which is an NPT member, and North Korea, which has withdrawn from the treaty and tested nuclear warheads.
The UN secretary general did not comment on the US president’s nuclear threats against two UN members.
Iran is a signatory to the NPT and has repeatedly declared that its nuclear program is peaceful and is being pursued within the framework of international regulations. In addition, the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.
By Jeff Blankfort
Kevin Barrett’s interview with Jeff Blankfort
Who Makes up the Lobby?
It is important to note that the Israel lobby is much more than AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), which primarily focuses on Congress and directs funding from Jewish PACs and individuals to those politicians it considers to be deserving. Its other more visible components are the biggest Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress, but there are also a number of others, not the least of which is the extreme right wing Zionist Organization of America, which at the moment is extremely influential in Washington.
All of these organizations form part of the Council (www.conferenceofpresidents.org) Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, whose current president is Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the NY Daily News and US News and World Report. Its job is to lobby the President. At the grass-roots you have hundreds of local Jewish federations and councils that cultivate the support of city councilors and supervisors and select the more promising among them to run for Congress, assured that they will be solid votes for Israel.
While not officially part of the lobby, since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the AFL-CIO has been one of its most solid cornerstones. It has provided millions of dollars for pro-Israel Democrats; it has blocked all international efforts to punish Israel for its exploitation and abuse of Palestinian workers, and it has encouraged its member unions to invest millions of dollars of their pension funds in State of Israel Bonds, thereby linking their members’ retirement to the health of the Israeli economy. Over the past year, the lobby has cemented ties with the Christian evangelical right, which gives it clout in states where there are few Jews and access to hundreds of thousands of new donors to Israel cause. – Jeff Blankfort
—
It was 1991 and Noam Chomsky had just finished a lecture in Berkeley on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was taking questions from the audience. An Arab-American asked him to explain his position regarding the influence of America’s Israel lobby.
Chomsky replied that its reputation was generally exaggerated and, like other lobbies, it only appears to be powerful when its position lines up with that of the “elites” who determine policy in Washington. Earlier in the evening, he had asserted that Israel received support from the United States as a reward for the services it provides as the US’s “cop-on-the-beat” in the Middle East.
Chomsky’s response drew a warm round of applause from members of the audience who were no doubt pleased to have American Jews absolved from any blame for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, then in the fourth year of their first Intifada.
What is noteworthy is that Chomsky’s explanation for the financial and political support that the U.S. has provided Israel over the years is shared by what is generically known as the Israel lobby, and almost no one else.
Well, not quite “almost no one.” Among the exceptions are the overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress and the mainstream media and, what is equally noteworthy, virtually the entire American Left, both ideological and idealistic, including the organizations ostensibly in the forefront of the fight for Palestinian rights.
That there is a meeting of the minds on this issue between supporters of Israel and the Left may help explain why the Palestine support movement within the United States has been an utter failure.
Chomsky’s position on the lobby had been established well before that Berkeley evening. In The Fateful Triangle, published in 1983, he assigned it little weight:
The “special relationship” is often attributed to domestic political pressures, in particular the effectiveness of the American Jewish community in political life and in influencing opinion. While there is some truth to this it underestimates the scope of the “support for Israel,” and it overestimates the role of political pressure groups in decision making. (p.13) 1
A year earlier, Congress had applauded Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon, and then appropriated millions in additional aid to pay for the shells the Israeli military had expended. How much of this support was due to the legislators’ “support for Israel” and how much was due to pressures from the Israel lobby? It was a question that should have been examined by the left at the time, but wasn’t. Twenty years later, Chomsky’s view is still the “conventional wisdom.”
In 2001, in the midst of the second intifada, he went further, arguing that “it is improper — particularly in the United States — to condemn Israeli atrocities,” and that the “US/Israel-Palestine conflict” is the more correct term, comparable with placing the proper responsibility for “Russian-backed crimes in Eastern Europe [and] US-backed crimes in Central America.” And, to emphasize the point, he wrote, “IDF helicopters are US helicopters with Israeli pilots.”2
Prof. Stephen Zunes, who might be described as a Chomsky acolyte, would not only relieve Israeli Jews from any responsibility for their actions, he would have us believe they are the victims.
In Tinderbox, his widely praised (by Chomsky and others) new book on the Middle East, Zunes faults the Arabs for “blaming Israel, Zionism, or the Jews for their problems.” According to Zunes, the Israelis have been forced to assume a role similar to that assigned to members of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe who performed services, mainly tax collection, as middlemen between the feudal lords and the serfs in earlier times. In fact, writes Zunes, “US policy today corresponds with this historic anti-Semitism.” 3 Anyone comparing the relative power of the Jewish community in centuries past with what we find in the US today will find that statement absurd.
Jewish power has, in fact, been trumpeted by a number of Jewish writers, including one, J. J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly Forward, who wrote a book by that name in 1996.4 Any attempt, however, to explore the issue from a critical standpoint, inevitably leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, as Bill and Kathleen Christison pointed out in their article on the role of right-wing Jewish neo-cons in orchestrating US Middle East policy, in Counterpunch (1/25/03):
Anyone who has the temerity to suggest any Israeli instigation of, or even involvement in, Bush administration war planning is inevitably labeled somewhere along the way as an anti-Semite. Just whisper the word “domination” anywhere in the vicinity of the word “Israel,” as in “U.S.-Israeli domination of the Middle East” or “the U.S. drive to assure global domination and guarantee security for Israel,” and some leftist, who otherwise opposes going to war against Iraq, will trot out charges of promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old czarist forgery that asserted a Jewish plan for world domination.5
Presumably, this is what Zunes would call an example of the “latent anti-Semitism which has come to the fore with wildly exaggerated claims of Jewish economic and political power.”6 And that it “is a naive asumption to believe that foreign policy decision-making in the US is pluralistic enough so that any one lobbying group can have so much influence.”7
This is hardly the first time that Jews have been in the upper echelons of power, as Benjamin Ginsberg points out in The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State; but there has never been a situation anything like the present. This was how Ginzberg began his book:
Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade’s corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2 % of the nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation’s largest newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, the New York Times.8
That was written in 1993. Today, ten years later, ardently pro-Israel American Jews are in positions of unprecedented influence within the United States and have assumed or been given decision-making positions over virtually every segment of our culture and body politic. This is no secret conspiracy. Regular readers of the New York Times business section, which reports the comings and goings of the media tycoons, are certainly aware of it. Does this mean that each and every one is a pro-Israel zealot? Not necessarily, but when one compares the US media with its European counterparts in their respective coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the extreme bias in favor of Israel on the part of the US media is immediately apparent.
This might explain Eric Alterman’s discovery that “Europeans and Americans differ profoundly in their views of the Israel/Palestine issue at both the elite and popular levels, with Americans being far more sympathetic to Israel and the Europeans to the Palestinian cause”9
An additonal component of Chomsky’s analysis is his insistence that it is the US, more than Israel, that is the “rejectionist state,” implying that were it not for the US, Israel might long ago have abandoned the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians for a mini-state.
Essential to his analysis is the notion that every US administration since that of Eisenhower has attempted to advance Israel’s interests in line with America’s global and regional agenda. This is a far more complex issue than Chomsky leads us to believe. Knowledgeable insiders, both critical and supportive of Israel, have described in detail major conflicts that have taken place between US and Israeli administrations over the years in which Israel, thanks to the diligence of its domestic lobby, has usually prevailed.
In particular, Chomsky ignores or misinterprets the efforts made by every US president, beginning with Richard Nixon, to curb Israel’s expansionism, to halt its settlement building and to obtain its withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.10
“What happened to all those nice plans?” asked Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery. “Israel’s governments mobilized the collective power of US Jewry — which dominates Congress and the media to a large degree — against them. Faced by this vigorous opposition, all the presidents; great and small, football players and movie stars — folded, one after another.”11
Gerald Ford, angered that Israel had been reluctant to leave the Sinai following the 1973 war and backed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, not only suspended aid for six months in 1975, but in March of that year made a speech calling for a “reassessment” of the US-Israel relationship. Within weeks, AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), Israel’s Washington lobby, secured a letter signed by 76 senators “confirming their support for Israel, and suggesting that the White House see fit to do the same. The language was tough, the tone almost bullying.” Ford backed down.12
We need to only look at the current Bush presidency to see that this phenomenon is still the rule. In 1991, the same year as Chomsky’s talk, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir asked the first Bush administartion for $10 billion in loan guarantees in order, he said, to provide for the resettlement of Russian Jews. Bush Sr. had earlier balked at a request from Congress to appropriate an additional $650 million dollars to compensate Israel for sitting out the Gulf War, but gave in when he realized that his veto would be overridden. But now he told Shamir that Israel could only have the guarantees if it freezes settlement building and promised that no Russian Jews would be resettled in the West Bank.
An angry Shamir refused and called on AIPAC to mobilize Congress and the organized American Jewish community in support of the loans guarantees. A letter, drafted by AIPAC was signed by more than 240 members of the House demanding that Bush approve them, and 77 senators signed on to supporting legislation.
On September 12, 1991, Jewish lobbyists descended on Washington in such numbers that Bush felt obliged to call a televised press conference in which he complained that “1000 Jewish lobbyists are on Capitol Hill against little old me.” It would prove to be his epitaph. Chomsky pointed to Bush’s statement, at the time, as proof that the vaunted Israel lobby was nothing more than “a paper tiger. It took scarcely more than a raised eyebrow for the lobby to collapse,” he told readers of Z Magazine. He could not have been further from the truth.13
The next day, Tom Dine, AIPAC’s Executive Director, declared that “September 12, 1991 is a day that will live in infamy.” Similar comments were uttered by Jewish leaders, who accused Bush of provoking anti-Semitism. What was more important, his friends in the mainstream media, like William Safire, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer, not only criticized him; they began to find fault with the economy and how he was running the country. It was all downhill from there. Bush’s Jewish vote, which has been estimated at 38% in 1988, dropped down to no more than 12%, with some estimates as low as 8%.14]
Bush’s opposition to the loan guarantees was the last straw for the Israel lobby. When he made disparaging comments about Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in March, 1990, AIPAC had begun the attack (briefly halted during the the Gulf War). Dine wrote a critical op-ed in the New York Times and followed that with a vigorous speech to the United Jewish Appeal’s Young Leaders Conference. “Brothers and sisters,” he told them as they prepared to go out and lobby Congress on the issue, “remember that Israel’s friends in this city reside on Capitol Hill.”15 Months later, the loan guarantees were approved, but by then Bush was dead meat.
Now, jump ahead to last Spring, when Bush Jr. forthrightly demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdraw his marauding troops from Jenin, saying “Enough is enough!” It made headlines all over the world, as did his backing down when Sharon refused. What happened? Harsh criticism boomed from within his own party in Congress and from his daddy’s old friends in the media. George Will associated Dubya with Yasser Arafat and accused Bush of having lost his “moral clarity.”1617 Junior got the message and, within a week, declared Sharon to be “a man of peace.”18 The next day, Safire suggested that Bush was “being pushed into a minefield of mistakes”and that he had “become a wavering ally as Israel fights for suvival.” Since then, as journalist Robert Fisk and others have noted, Sharon seems to be writing Bush’s speeches.
There are some who believe that Bush Jr. and Presidents before him made statements critical of Israel for appearances only, to convince the world, and the Arab countries in particular, that the US can be an “honest broker” between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But it is difficult to make a case that any of them would put themselves in a position to be humiliated simply as a cover for US policy.
A better explanation was provided by Stephen Green, whose Taking Sides, America’s Secret Relations with Militant Israel, was the first examination of State Department archives concerning US-Israel relations. Since the Eisenhower administration, wrote Green in 1984, “Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American Presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with the tactical issues.”19
A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but former US Senator James Abourezk (D-South Dakota) echoed Green’s words in a speech before the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee last June:
That is the state of American politics today. The Israeli lobby has put together so much money power that we are daily witnessing US senators and representatives bowing down low to Israel and its US lobby.
Make no mistake. The votes and bows have nothing to do with the legislators’ love for Israel. They have everything to do with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is that at least $6 billion flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year. That money, plus the political support the US gives Israel at the United Nations, is what allows Israel to conduct criminal operations in Palestine with impunity.20
That is a reality that has been repeated many times in many forms by ex-members of Congress, usually speaking off the record. It is the reality that Chomsky and the left prefer to ignore. The problem is not so much that Chomsky has been wrong. He has, after all, been right on many other things, particularly in describing the ways in which the media manipulates the public consciousness to serve the interests of the state.21 However, by explaining US support for Israel simply as a component of those interests, and ignoring the influence of the Israel lobby in determining that component, he appears to have made a major error that has had measurable consequences. By accepting Chomsky’s analysis, the Palestinian solidarity movement has failed to take the only political step that might have weakened the hold of Israel on Congress and the American electorate, namely, by challenging the billions of dollars in aid and tax breaks that the US provides Israel on an annual basis.
The questions that beg asking are why his argument has been so eagerly accepted by the movement and why the contrary position put forth by people of considerable stature such as Edward Said, Ed Herman, Uri Avnery and, more recently, Alexander Cockburn, has been ignored. There appear to be several reasons.
The people who make up the movement, Jews and non-Jews alike, have embraced Chomsky’s position because it is the message they want to hear; not feeling obligated to “blame the Jews” is reassuring. The fear of either provoking anti-Semitism or being called an anti-Semite (or a self- hating Jew), has become so ingrained into our culture and body politic that no one, including Chomsky or Zunes, is immune. This is reinforced by constant reminders of the Jewish Holocaust that, by no accident, appear in the movies and in major news media on a regular basis. Chomsky, in particular, has been heavily criticized by the Jewish establishment for decades for his criticism of Israeli policies, even to the point of being “excommunicated,” a distinction he shares with the late Hannah Arendt. It may be fair to assume that at some level this history influences Chomsky’s analysis. But the problems of the movement go beyond the fear of invoking anti-Semitism, as Chomsky is aware and correctly noted in The Fateful Triangle.:
[T]he American left and pacificist groups, apart from fringe elements, have quite generally been extremely supportive of Israel (contrary to many baseless allegations), some passionately so, and have turned a blind eye to practices that they would be quick to denounce elsewhere.22
The issue of US aid to Israel provides a clear example. During the Reagan era, there was a major effort launched by the anti-intervention movement to block a $15 million annual appropriation destined for the Nicaraguan contras. People across the country were urged to call their Congressional representatives and get them to vote against the measure. That effort was not only successful, it forced the administration to engage in what became known as Contragate.
At the time, Israel was receiving the equivalent of that much money on a daily basis, without a whimper from the movement. Now, that amount “officially” is about $10 million a day and yet no major campaign has ever been launched to stem that flow or even call the public’s attention to it. When attempts were made they were stymied by the opposition of such key players (at the time) as the American Friends Service Committee, which was anxious, apparently, not to alienate major Jewish contributors. (Recent efforts initiated on the internet to “suspend”military aid – but not economic – until Israel ends the occupation have gone nowhere.)
The slogans that have been advanced by various sectors of the Palestinian solidarity movement, such as “End the Occupation,” “End Israeli Apartheid,” “Zionism Equals Racism,” or “Two States for Two Peoples,” while addressing key issues of the conflict, assume a level of awareness on the part of the American people for which no evidence exists. Concern for where their tax dollars are going, particularly at a time of massive cutbacks in social programs, certainly would have greater resonance among voters. Initiating a serious campaign to halt aid, however, would require focusing on the role of Congress and recognition of the power of the Israel lobby.
Chomsky’s evaluation of Israel’s position in the Middle East admittedly contains elements of truth, but nothing sufficient to explain what former Undersecretary of State George Ball described as America’s “passionate attachment” to the Jewish state.23 However, his attempt to portray the US-Israel relationship as mirroring that of Washington’s relations to its client regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, has no basis in reality.
US involvement in Central America was fairly simple. Arms and training were supplied to military dictatorships in order for their armies and their death squads to suppress the desires of their own citizens for land, civil rights and economic justice, all of which would undermine US corporate interests. This was quite transparent. Does Israel fit into that category? Obviously not. Whatever one may say about Israel, its Jewish majority, at least, enjoys democratic rights.
Also, there were no Salvadoran, Nicaraguan or Guatemalan lobbies of any consequence in Washington to lavish millions of dollars wooing or intimidating members of Congress; no one in the House or Senate from any of those client countries with possible dual- loyalties approving multi-billion dollar appropriations on an annual basis; none owning major television networks, radio stations, newspapers or movie studios, and no trade unions or state pension funds investing billions of dollars in their respective economies. The closest thing in the category of national lobbies is that of Miami’s Cuban exiles, whose existence and power the left is willing to acknowledge, even though its political clout is miniscule compared to that of Israel’s supporters.
What about Chomsky’s assertion that Israel is America’s cop-on-the-beat in the Middle East? There is, as yet, no record of a single Israeli soldier shedding a drop of blood in behalf of US interests, and there is little likelihood one will be asked to do so in the future. When US presidents have believed that a cop was necessary in the region, US troops were ordered to do the job.
When President Eisenhower believed that US interests were threatened in Lebanon in 1958, he sent in the Marines. In 1991, as mentioned, President Bush not only told Israel to sit on the sidelines, he further angered its military by refusing to allow then Defense Sectretary Dick Cheney to give the Israeli air force the coordinates it demanded in order to take to the air in response to Iraq’s Scud attacks. This left the Israeli pilots literally sitting in their planes, waiting for information that never came.24
What Chomsky offers as proof of Israel’s role as a US gendarme was the warning that Israel gave Syria not to intervene in King Hussein’s war on the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Jordan in September 1970.
Clearly, this was done primarily to protect Israel’s interests. That it also served Washington’s agenda was a secondary consideration. For Chomsky, it was “another important service” for the US.25 What Chomsky may not be aware of is another reason that Syria failed to come to the rescue of the Palestinians at the time:
The commander of the Syrian air force, Hafez Al-Assad, had shown little sympathy with the Palestinian cause and was critical of the friendly relations that the PLO enjoyed with the Syrian government under President Atassi. When King Hussein launched his attack, Assad kept his planes on the ground.
Three months later, he staged a coup and installed himself as president. Among his first acts was the imprisonment of hundreds of Palestinians and their Syrian supporters. He then proceeded to gut the Syrian sponsored militia, Al-Saika, and eliminate the funds that Syria had been sending to Palestinian militia groups. In the ensuing years, Assad allowed groups opposed to Yasser Arafat to maintain offices and a radio station in Damascus, but little else. A year after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, he sponsored a short, but bloody intra-Palestinian civil war in Northern Lebanon. This is history that has fallen through the cracks.
How much the presence of Israel has intimidated its weaker Arab neighbors from endangering US interests is at best a matter of conjecture. Clearly, Israel’s presence has been used by these reactionary regimes, most of them US allies, as an excuse for suppressing internal opposition movements. (One might argue that the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and Abdel Karim Kassem in Iraq in 1963, had more of an impact on crushing progressive movement in the region.)
What Israel has provided for the US to their mutual benefit have been a number of joint weapons programs, largely financed by US taxpayers and the use by the US of military equipment developed by Israeli technicians — not the least of which were the “plows” that were used to bury alive fleeing Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War. Since high levels of US aid preceded these weapons programs, it is hard to argue that they form the basis of US support.
Another argument advanced by Chomsky has been Israel’s willingness to serve the US by taking on tasks which past US administrations were unable or unwilling to undertake due to specific US laws or public opinion, such as selling arms to unsavory regimes or training death squads.
That Israel did this at the request of the US is an open question. A comment by Israeli minister Yakov Meridor’s comment in Ha’aretz, at the time, makes it unlikely:
We shall say to the Americans: Don’t compete with us in Taiwan, don’t compete with us in South Africa, don’t compete with us in the Caribbean area, or in other areas in which we can sell weapons directly and where you can’t operate in the open. Give us the opportunity to do this and trust us with the sales of ammunition and hardware. 26
In fact, there was no time that the US stopped training death squads in Latin America, or providing arms, with the exception of Guatemala, where Carter halted US assistance because of its massive human rights violations, something that presented no problem for an Israeli military already steeped in such violations. In one situation we saw the reverse situation. Israel provided more than 80% of El Salvador’s weapons before the US moved in.
As for Israel’s trade and joint arms projects, including the development of nuclear weaponry, with South Africa, that was a natural alliance: two societies that had usurped someone else’s land and saw themselves in the same position, “a civilized people surrounded by threatening savages.” The relationship became so close that South Africa’s Sun City became the resort of choice for vacationing Israelis.
The reason that Israeli officials gave for selling these weapons, when questioned, was that it was the only way that Israel could keep its own arms industry functioning. Israel’s sales of sophisticated weaponry to China has drawn criticism from several administrations, but this has been tempered by Congressional pressure.
What Israel did benefit from was a blanket of silence from the US anti-intervention movement and anti-apartheid movements, whose leadership was more comfortable criticizing US policies than those of Israel’s. Whether their behavior was due to their willingness to put Israel’s interests first, or whether they were concerned about provoking anti-Semitism, the result was the same.
A protest that I organized in 1985 against Israel’s ties to apartheid South Africa, and its role as a US surrogate in Central America, provides a clear example of the problem.
When I approached board members of the Nicaraguan Information Center (NIC) in San Francisco and asked for the group’s endorsement of the protest, I received no support. NIC was the main group in solidarity with the Sandinistas and, despite Israel’s long and ugly history, first in aiding Somoza and, at the time of the protest, the contras, the board voted well, they couldn’t vote not to endorse, so they voted to make “no more endorsements,” a position they reversed soon after our rally. NIC’s board was almost entirely Jewish.
I fared better with GNIB, the Guatemalan News and Information Bureau, but only after a considerable struggle. At the time, Israel was supplying 98% of the weaponry and all of the training to one of the most murderous regimes in modern times. One would think that an organization that claimed to be working in solidarity with the people of Guatemala would not only endorse the rally but be eager to participate.
Apparently, the GNIB board was deeply divided on the issue. Unwilling to accept another refusal, I harassed the board with phone calls until it voted to endorse. Oakland CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) endorsed. The San Francisco chapter declined. (A year earlier, when I had been quoted in the San Francisco Weekly criticizing the influence of the Israel lobby on the Democratic Party, officials from the chapter wrote a letter to the editor claiming that I was provoking “anti-Semitism.”) The leading anti-apartheid organizations endorsed the protest but, again, after lengthy internal debate.
The protest had been organized in response to the refusal of the San Francisco-based Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice, (Mobe), a coalition of movement organizations, to include any mention of the Middle East among the demands that it was issuing for a march opposing South African apartheid and US intervention in Central America.
At an organizing meeting for the event, a handful of us asked that a plank calling for “No US Intervention in the Middle East” be added to the demands that had previously been decided. The vote was overwhelmingly against it. A Jewish trade unionist told us that “we could do more for the Palestinians by not mentioning them, than by mentioning them,” a strange response which mirrored what President Reagan was then saying about ending apartheid in South Africa. I was privately told later that if the Middle East was mentioned, “the unions would walk,” recognition of the strong support for Israel that exists among the labor bureaucracy, as well as the willingness of the movement to defer to it.
The timing of the Mobe’s refusal was significant. Two and a half years earlier, Israel had invaded Lebanon and its troops still remained there as we met that evening. And yet, the leaders of the Mobe would not let Tina Naccache, a programmer for Berkeley’s KPFA, the only Lebanese in the large union hall, speak on behalf of the demand.
Three years later, the Mobe scheduled another mass march. The Palestinians were in the first full year of their intifada, and it seemed appropriate that a statement calling for an end to Israeli occupation be added to the demands. The organizers, the same ones from 1985, had already decided on what they would be behind closed doors: “No US Intervention in Central America or the Caribbean; End US Support for South African Apartheid; Freeze and Reverse the Nuclear Arms Race; Jobs and Justice, Not War.”
This time the Mobe took no chances and canceled a public meeting where our demand could be debated and voted on. An Emergency Coalition for Palestinian Rights was formed in response. A petition was drawn up and circulated supporting the demand. Close to 3,000 people signed it, including hundreds from the Palestinian community. The Mobe leadership finally agreed to one concession. On the back of its official flyer, where it would be invisible when posted on a wall or tree, was the following sentence:
Give peace a chance everywhere: The plight of the Palestinian people, as shown by the recent events in the West Bank and Gaza, remind us that we must support human rights everywhere. Let the nations of our world turn from building armies and death machines to spending their energy and resources on improving the quality of life — Peace, Jobs and Justice.
There was no mention of Israel or the atrocities its soldiers were committing. The flyer put out by the unions ignored the subject completely.
Fast forward to February, 2002, when a new and smaller version of the Mobe met to plan a march and rally to oppose the US war on Afghanistan. There was a different cast of characters, but they produced the same result. The argument was that what was needed was a “broad” coalition, and raising the issue of Palestine would prevent that from happening.
The national movement to oppose the extension of the Iraq war has been no different. As in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War, there were competing large marches, separately organized but with overlapping participants. Despite their other political differences, what the organizers of both marches agreed on was that there would be no mention of the Israel-Palestine conflict in any of the protest literature, even though its connections to the situation in Iraq were being made at virtually every other demonstration taking place throughout the world. The movement’s fear of alienating American Jews still takes precedence over defending the rights of Palestinians.
Last September, the slogan of “No War on Iraq – Justice for Palestine!” drew close to a half-million protesters to Trafalgar Square. The difference had been presciently expressed by a Native American leader during the first Intifada. “The problem with the movement,” he told me, “is that there are too many liberal Zionists.”
If there is one event that exposed their influence over of the movement, it is what occurred in the streets of New York on June 12, 1982, when 800,000 people gathered in front of the United Nations to call for a ban on nuclear weapons. Six days earlier, on June 6th, Israel had launched a devastating invasion of Lebanon. Its goal was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in that country. Eighty thousand soldiers, backed by massive bombing from the air and from the sea were creating a level of death and destruction that dwarfed what Iraq would later do in Kuwait. Within a year there would be 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese dead and tens of thousands more wounded.
And what was the response that day in New York? In recognition of the suffering then taking place in his homeland, a Lebanese man was allowed to sit on the stage, but he would not be introduced; not allowed to say a word. Nor was the subject mentioned by any of the speakers. Israel and its lobby couldn’t have asked for anything more.
Twenty-one years later, Ariel Sharon, the architect of that invasion, is Israel’s Prime Minister, having been elected for the second time. As I write these lines, pro-Israel zealots within the Bush administration are about to savor their greatest triumph. After all, they have been the driving force for a war which they envision as the first stage in “redrawing the map of the Middle East,” with the US-Israel alliance at its fore. 27
And the Left? Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a long-time activist with impeccable credentials, assured the Jewish weekly, Forward, that United for Peace and Justice, organizers of the February 15th anti-war rally in New York, “has done a great deal to make clear it is not involved in anti-Israel rhetoric. From the beginning there was nothing in United for Peace’s statements that dealt at all with the Israel-Palestine issue.”28
Editors Note: A version of this article was first published in Left Curve Issue 27, May 2003, and recently re-published in IfAmericansKnew.org
Jeffrey Blankfort was raised in a Jewish non-Zionist family. He produces a radio program on KZYX, the public radio station for Mendocino County in Northern California and has written extensively on the Middle East. He was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. His photographs of the Anti-Vietnam War and Black Panthers Movements have appeared in numerous books and magazines. “In February 2002, he won a lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was found to have had a vast spying operation directed against American citizens opposed to Israel’s policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza and to the apartheid policies of the government of South Africa and passing on information to both governments.” –IfAmericansKnew.org
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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