East al-Quds only open to ‘non-Palestinian’ Christians
Press TV – April 1, 2010
Only non-Palestinian Christians will be allowed to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in East Jerusalem (al-Quds) on Saturday, when eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate “Saturday of Light.”
Israeli security officials informed church officials that only international pilgrims would be allowed to access the Old City and the church located in the site.
Saturday of Light is held the day before Easter with Christians lining in the streets of the Old City and holding bunches of candles in anticipation of the miracle fire.
Worshipers in the church light their candles and spread the fire to waiting pilgrims who take the miracle fire back to their homes as a symbol of community, hope and renewal. The Israeli restrictions are the latest in a wave of prohibitions targeting Christian Palestinian worshipers in the Easter season.
On Palm Sunday, West Bank Christians were prevented from taking part in the Triumphal Entry procession, which traces the path believed to have been taken by Jesus on his return to the holy city before his crucifixion. West Bank Christians were initially granted Easter permits to access the area, but a closure announced a day before the week-long Jewish event of Passover shut down checkpoints for permit holders.
On Palm Sunday, hundreds of international activists, Muslim supporters and Christians in Bethlehem (al-Quds) marched toward the 300 checkpoint that Israeli officials had closed earlier in the day. Israeli soldiers detained 10 protesters including Abbas Zaki, member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee. It is unclear whether the restrictions would stand for Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Israel also imposed harsh access limitations on Palestinian Muslims during Ramadan last year.
When it comes to East Jerusalem, ‘NPR’ misleads and misinforms
By Henry Norr on March 26, 2010
It’s been almost two weeks since I wrote to National Public Radio’s senior Washington editor, Ron Elving, and to the network’s ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, to ask why Elving used an Israeli formulation – “disputed” area – to characterize East Jerusalem, instead of calling it “occupied,” the term used by the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and virtually every other international body. So far, neither has replied.
While I wait, I’ve spent some time looking a little more deeply into NPR’s coverage of East Jerusalem since Israel’s announcement of plans to build 1,600 new housing units there put the area in the spotlight. The network posts transcripts of all its stories, interviews, and talk shows on the Middle East (and nowadays most other stories, too) on its website, and it has a pretty good search engine, so it wasn’t hard to review all 22 broadcasts that have discussed East Jerusalem since the controversy exploded. (NPR doesn’t transcribe its hourly headlines, so they’re not included. Neither are the Associated Press reports and Foreign Policy articles it posts on its website but doesn’t read over the air.)
Here’s some of what I found anyone depending on NPR for information about the issue would have gathered about East Jerusalem:
1. It’s part of Israel’s capital. Regular listeners have heard Jerusalem described that way in at least eight stories. In five of those cases the city was called Israel’s “undivided capital;” once the phrase was “unified capital.” When NPR’s reporters say it (as opposed to when they’re quoting Netanyahu or Michael Oren, for example), they scrupulously precede these phrases with something like “the Israelis have proclaimed” or “Israel considers” the whole city their capital. But since NPR reporters hardly ever even hint that anyone except the Palestinians disputes this claim, these are essentially throw-away words. (The closest they come to questioning the Israel position is the statement, which I found in two stories, that “The international community believes that the final status of the city should only be determined through negotiations.”)
2. Israel has a deep historical claim to all of Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s assertion in his AIPAC speech that “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago” was quoted in three separate stories. Twice listeners have been told that Israelis consider the city – implicitly the whole thing – just as much theirs as Tel Aviv. On “Talk of the Nation” they heard an Israeli analyst explain that no government would agree to a construction freeze because Jerusalem is “the heart and soul of the Jewish people.” Weekend news analyst James Fallows informed listeners that the Israeli public considers the government’s East Jerusalem policy “necessary for their survival.”
3. Ramat Shlomo, the East Jerusalem settlement where the government plans to add the 1,600 new units, is an idyllic “neighborhood” (a word NPR reporters have used at least eight times in this context) or “community” on a hilltop. It’s “tranquil” or even “very tranquil,” full of pious Jews who “focus on their religious studies and pay little attention to the outside world.” Their only problem is that they have large families and therefore “housing needs;” this “housing crunch” explains the government’s decision to build the 1,600 units.
4. As for the Palestinians, including the roughly 250,000 who live in East Jerusalem, they are presented to NPR listeners not as people whose roots in Jerusalem go back millennia – who, legally, own East Jerusalem – but as people who, for some unexplained reason, lay claim to what Israel has: they “want” East Jerusalem, they “claim” it, they “hope” it will be part of their “future state,” they “aspire” to make it their capital. In the meantime, unlike the “unfazed” Jewish residents of Ramat Shlomo, they can barely contain their emotions: they are “angry,” “frustrated,” “incensed.” Some of them even think Israel wants to push them out of the city, but the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem is promptly called upon to dismiss this charge, and he’s given the last word.
Now, some things NPR listeners have not been told about Jerusalem since the [latest escalation of] controversy flared :
1. Except Israel, no government in the world, even the U.S., recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Not a single country, even the U.S., has an embassy there. Under the U.N.’s 1947 partition plan, it was not to be part of Israel at all, but a separate entity – a “corpus separatum” – under U.N. administration.
2. In legal terms, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory by the United States government, the United Nations, the European Union, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the International Court of Justice, including even the American judge who was the one holdout when the ICJ in 2004 ruled the separation Wall in East Jerusalem and the West Bank illegal. (In fairness, weekend host Guy Raz noted in passing on March 13 that East Jerusalem is “an area Israel has occupied since 1967,” and in one report Garcia-Navarro said that Ramat Shlomo is “on land captured by Israel during the 1967 war.”)
3. Under international law (specifically, the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention) occupying powers are clearly prohibited from transferring their civilians into such territories.
4. The “international community” has repeatedly and forcefully rejected Israel’s claim to East Jerusalem. In the aftermath of Israel’s seizure of the area as well (as the rest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights) during the 1967 war, the U.N. Security Council, including the U.S., adopted several resolutions reaffirming that “acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible” In 1971 Security Council Resolution 298, adopted with U.S. support, declared that “al1 legislative and administrative actions taken by Israel to change the status of the: City of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties, transfer of populations and legislation aimed at the incorporation of the occupied section, are totally invalid and cannot change that status.”.In 1980, when Israel adopted the “Jerusalem Law,” through which it attempted to formalize its annexation of East Jerusalem and surrounding areas and to declare the city its “”eternal and indivisible” capital, Security Council Resolution 478 said the law’s adoption constituted “a violation of international law” and “a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” declared it “null and void,” and asserted that it “must be rescinded forthwith.” (This resolution was adopted by a vote of 14-0; the U.S. abstained but declined to use its veto power.)
5. In recent days U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has on at least two occasions declared publicly that East Jerusalem, like the West Bank, is occupied territory and that Israel’s settlement expansion plans are “unacceptable.” “Let us be clear,” he said on March 20. “All settlement activity is illegal anywhere in occupied territory and must be stopped.” NPR has completely ignored Ban’s statements on these issues.
6. The 1,600 Jewish housing units planned for Ramat Shlomo are only a small part of Israel’s plans to “Judaize” East Jerusalem. Ha’aretz and other reputable sources reported on March 11 that some 50,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem are in various stages of the Israeli planning and permitting process. Coming on the heels of the Biden visit and the flap about the 1,600 units, this report got wide circulation around the world. NPR hasn’t mentioned it.
7. Much of the Israeli settlement construction in East Jerusalem is organized and financed by ultra-right-wing Zionist organizations such as Elad and Ateret Cohanim, which openly proclaim their intention to evict Jerusalem’s Palestinians. These groups are funded largely by tax-deductible donations from American Jews, most notably Miami doctor and bingo billionaire Irving Moskowitz. Yet NPR has never once – not just this month, but never, as far back as its archives go – mentioned Irving Moskowitz or Ateret Cohanim; Elad was mentioned only once, last September, as the funder of archaeological digs in the Silwan section of East Jerusalem – which host Robert Siegel referred to only as “the City of David,” the patently ideological name the Zionists recently bestowed upon the area.
Likewise, NPR has never reported on the recent expulsions of Palestinian families from homes built for them in the 1950s by the U.N. in the Sheikh Jarrah section of East Jerusalem – nor on the growing non-violent movement that’s brought thousands of Palestinians and Israelis together to protest these evictions.
8. Even as it repeats Netanyahu’s assertion that “the Jewish people” were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, NPR has not raised any question or qualification about this claim. If ancient history is to be considered grounds for sovereignty, there are several issues that deserve attention: Many mainstream archaeologists doubt that there was such a thing as a Jewish people or even a Jewish religion 3,000 years. Whoever may have been building there 3,000 years ago, today’s Palestinians have a considerably stronger claim to be their descendants than Ashkenazi Jews like Netanyahu. As Juan Cole has recently pointed out, Jews have ruled Jerusalem for only a few brief moments in its history; Muslims have ruled the city and done most of the building there over the last 1,500 years.
9. If the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are angry and frustrated, one reason is because Israel treats them like second- or third-class citizens – except that they’re not even citizens. They can’t vote in national elections, and they’re not entitled to Israeli passports. They’re prohibited from engaging in political activity, and Israel has repeatedly barred celebrations of their national culture. Thousands of them have had their Jerusalem residency rights revoked for such “offenses” as spending too much time outside the city. If a Jerusalem Palestinian marries someone from elsewhere in the occupied territories – even from, say, Bethlehem or Ramallah, which are just a few miles away – they’re not permitted to live together, either in Jerusalem or in the territories.
Meanwhile, social and economic conditions in East Jerusalem are miserable and rapidly deteriorating, in part because the giant separation wall Israel has built within and around East Jerusalem cuts the area off from the rest of the Palestinian population and economy. 68.4 percent of the population of East Jerusalem live below the poverty line, yet only 22 percent receive any government social services. While the Palestinians make up 32 percent of Jerusalem’s total population, and the municipality collects around 30 percent of its tax revenue from them, less than ten percent of the municipal budget is spent on services for them. The municipality spends four times as much per pupil on primary schools in West Jerusalem as in East Jerusalem, which suffers from a drastic shortage of classrooms. Entire Palestinian neighborhoods are not connected to a sewage system and do not have paved roads or sidewalks. Almost 90 percent of the city’s sewage pipes, roads, and sidewalks are found in the western part of the city. West Jerusalem has 1,000 public parks, East Jerusalem has 45. West Jerusalem has 34 swimming pools, East Jerusalem has three. West Jerusalem has 26 libraries, East Jerusalem has two. West Jerusalem has 531 sports facilities, East Jerusalem has 33. And so on.
As for housing, NPR somehow hasn’t noticed that the Palestinians too have large families and suffer from a “housing crunch” far more drastic than that afflicting Ramat Shlomo. While the government works overtime to develop plans for additional Jewish settlement construction in East Jerusalem, it’s all but impossible for Palestinians to get construction permits, and if they build anyway, they’re at constant risk of having their homes demolished. (All Things Considered did run a reasonably good report by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro last November about “allegations” by East Jerusalem Palestinians that Israel is “intensifying a campaign to evict them from their homes.”)
10. NPR found time this month for a long story about an Israeli tariff that’s threatening the business of an Illinois company that exports carp for gefilte fish, but the last time the network’s listeners heard that Israel receives $3 billion a year in U.S. aid was when Stephen Walt mentioned it in a July 2006 interview. This month, even as debate about U.S. relations with Israel has boiled up, the network’s news shows haven’t bothered to mention U.S. aid at all. (The subject has come up briefly on Talk of the Nation – once mentioned by guest Ted Koppel, once in a quote from Gideon Levy read by host Neal Conan, and once when a caller from California observed that for $10 million a day, “You would think that would buy us a little more influence than it does” – to which Conan responded “Well, part of that is the billion dollars that we promised both to Israel and to Egypt, that’s included in the peace agreement that got those two people to recognize each other, which is a benefit that I think everybody can agree on.”)
A stark truth: Israeli arms, U.S. dollars
By Glenn Greenwald | March 23, 2010
One does not normally see this truth stated so starkly in places like Time Magazine — from Michael Scherer’s interesting article on AIPAC’s current strategy to “storm Congress”:
The third “ask” that AIPAC supporters will make of Congress on Tuesday is to once again pass the $3 billion in U.S. aid provided annually to Israel. “It’s a very tough ask this year,” [AIPAC lobbyist Steve] Aserkoff admitted, noting the U.S. domestic budgetary and economic challenges. Among other major purchases, the Israeli government has announced plans to replace its aging fleet of F-16 fighter jets with new, American-made F-35 fighters, a major cost that Israel hopes will be substantially born for [sic] by American taxpayers.
Those would be the same “American taxpayers” who are now being told that they have to suffer cuts in Medicare and Social Security because of budgetary constraints, who are watching as the most basic social services (the hallmark of being a developed country) are being rapidly abolished (from the 12th Grade to basic care for children, the infirm and elderly), and are burdened with a national debt so large that America’s bond ratings are being degraded by the minute. Why should those same American taxpayers bear the enormous costs of Israel’s military purchases (as Israel enjoys booming economic growth)? Especially if the issue is presented as cleanly and honestly as Scherer did here, and especially if Israel continues to extend its proverbial middle finger to even the most basic U.S. requests that it cease activities that harm American interests, how much longer can this absurdity be sustained?
On a related note, a new Rasmussen Poll found that only 58% of Americans now view “Israel as an ally” — down from 70% just nine months ago. The same poll found that 49% of Americans believe Israel should be “required” to stop building settlements, with only 22% disagreeing. That’s why the primary objective now of AIPAC and its bipartisan cast of Congressional servants is — as Scherer put it — “to pressure the Obama Administration to avoid airing disagreements publically [sic].” Indeed: you can’t have the American people knowing anything about the U.S./Israel relationship and the ways in which the interests of the two countries diverge.
Having these issues discussed openly and having the American citizenry be informed might shatter all sorts of vital myths, which is exactly what has happened over the last month, which has, in turn, led to this change in public opinion (that, along with the fact that the Israeli Government, by being viewed as the opponent of Obama, has incurred the wrath of large numbers of Democrats who are loyal to Obama and automatically dislike any of his critics or opponents). That’s why their overriding goal is to hide all these differences behind a wall of secrecy — “the Administration, to the extent that it has disagreements with Israel on policy matters, should find way[s] to do so in private,” demanded Democratic Rep. Steve Israel — because an open examination of this “special relationship,” how it really functions, and the costs and benefits it entails, is what they want most to avoid. It’s common in a democracy for government officials to openly air their differences with allies; why should this be any different?
Israelis are behaving like spoiled rich brats
Haaretz | 21 March 2010
The terrifying specter of non-violent resistance to the occupation and the apartheid regime is hovering over the State of Israel, and all the state’s dignitaries have been recruited to battle it.
This non-violent resistance operates both in areas under Israel’s reign of control, in the form of a popular struggle on both sides of the green line, and across the globe, through the Israeli and international affirmative response to the Palestinian call for boycotts, divestment and sanctions on Israel, until it ends the occupation and grants full equality to people from both nations living under its rule.
As an act of solidarity with the subjugated Palestinian people, a group of Jewish Israelis has decided to join those Palestinians who have chosen the non-violent struggle for civic and national justice.
This act has given politically conscientious Jewish Israelis a golden opportunity to join a campaign against their own government without forsaking their own people. Indeed, this act leads the way towards a broader joint struggle with the oppressed people, through a rebuilding of our fundamental human values, enabling us to do away with the friend/foe dichotomy, which lies at the root of Israeli racism and anxiety.
One should hope that this non-violent resistance, led by a popular Palestinian leadership, will evolve into a binational Palestinian-Jewish front for an equitable and egalitarian political solution.
Right-wing groups and government organs have joined forces with all their might at the face of this new adversary who has risen up to challenge the decades-long racist theft of land from one ethnic group and its transfer into the hands of another. This is not surprising.
It is the hysterical reaction coming from so-called “leftist” circles which ought to be considered more surprising. Those “liberals” prefer to march, shamed and humiliated, alongside the Netanyahu-Barak-Lieberman triangle, than associate themselves with enlightened Palestinians.
From their viewpoint, violating a Tel Avivian’s right to listen to Elton John in concert here is equivalent to, and possibly worse than, violating a Palestinian farmer’s right to cultivate his land. They accuse the “radicals” of opposing dialogue, though the support for the non-violent struggle and the boycott campaign is precisely what has breathed new life into the cooperation between action groups from both nations.
The call issued to rock musicians not to perform in Israel, which has elicited angry responses in Israel, is aimed at thwarting the normalization of occupation and apartheid, a normalization reflected in the insouciant everyday life of the city of Tel Aviv.
The majority of Jewish Israelis are complicit in the perpetuation of the current state of affairs. When growing groups of conscientious people refuse to play the game of building a fictitious democratic sand castle on the shores of the Mediterranean, the Israeli Jew behaves like a spoiled rich brat, who would rather destroy his own castle than see natives share his world and his dreams.
As long as the Jewish settler who is sitting on the plundered land of Bil’in, and the contractor from uptown Tel Aviv who is making a fortune from building on that land, are free to go to the Pixies concert, while the original inhabitants of Bil’in are prevented from doing so, simply because they are Arab – the concert should be regarded as an apartheid concert.
Neither establishment-drafted artists nor the President of the Israel’s Supreme Court can erase this sign of infamy from the collective face of Israeli society. Only those modest, yet determined, groups of individuals who have joined the non-violent Palestinian struggle can succeed in this. On that day, instead of smearing them as “irrelevant”, “puritan”, “condescending” and “self-hating”, the following statement will apply to them: never was so much owed by so many to so few.
‘US knows construction in al-Quds is as in Tel Aviv’
Press TV – March 21, 2010
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says construction policies in Jerusalem al-Quds are the same as in Tel Aviv and that the regime has informed Washington of that in writing.
“Construction in Jerusalem (al Quds) is like construction in Tel Aviv and we have clarified that for the American government,” Haaretz quoted Netanyahu as saying on Sunday at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.
The Israeli prime minister also said that Israeli policy regarding construction in Jerusalem (al-Quds) has remained unchanged for different Israeli administrations.
Netanyahu has repeated his refusal to freeze settlement expansions in al-Quds. Just over a week ago, the premier approved the construction of another 1,600 settler units on occupied Palestinian land.
The remarks comes as there have been reports of an alleged row between the two allies [sic] over Israel’s settlement activity and US officials criticized Tel Aviv over the issue.
The Israeli prime minister is scheduled to leave for Washington Sunday night with Defense Minister Ehud Barak to attend the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington. Opposition leader MK Tzipi Livni and Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau will also accompany him.
Rampant patriotism breaches on America’s right
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com | March 19, 2010
During the Bush years, the Bush-following Right’s Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, frequently accused opponents of the Iraq War of being “unpatriotic,” endangering the Troops, and committing treason: “They’re not so much ‘antiwar’ as just on the other side,” he often wrote. Today, the same Glenn Reynolds wrote (emphasis added):
If I were the Israelis, not only would I bomb Iran, but I’d do so in such a way as to create as much trouble for China, Russia, Europe and the United States as possible.
Calling on a foreign country to act in a way that creates “as much trouble as possible” for your own country seems to be the very definition of being “on the other side,” does it not? (and his cover sentence — “Are the Israelis less obnoxious than me? I guess we’ll find out soon enough . . . .” — changes nothing). That’s especially true since the action Reynolds is endorsing — Israel’s bombing of Iran — likely would, according to America’s top military official, directly result in the deaths of American soldiers:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, warned last Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran might lead to escalation, undermine the region’s stability and endanger the lives of Americans in the Persian Gulf “who are under the threat envelope right now.”
By Reynolds’ own standards, blithely endorsing such outcomes would seem, definitively, to place one “on the other side.” But over the last week, as the U.S./Israel dispute has blossomed, the American Right generally has engaged in much conduct that they have always denounced as disloyal and treasonous. Almost unanimously, they have adopted what Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously condemned as a “Blame America First” attitude, with super-patriots such as National Review and Charles Krauthammer, among many others, heaping all blame on America and siding with the foreign government. According to these Arbiters of Patriotism, this dispute is The Fault of America; indeed, when it comes to American conflicts with Israel generally, as Kirkpatrick put it in her famous refrain: “somehow, they always Blame America First.”
Along those lines, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman yesterday formally condemned Gen. David Petraeus for warning that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians increases anti-American hatred and endangers American troops due to a “perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel.” Foxman attacked Petraeus’ remarks as “dangerous and counterproductive” — and, indeed, they are: “dangerous and counterproductive,” that is, for those (like Foxman and the neocon Right) who want the U.S. to blindly support Israeli actions even when doing so directly harms American interests. As Andrew Bacevich explained in Salon yesterday, the fact that Petraeus has now linked U.S. support for Israel to harm to U.S. interests will make it impossible for Israel-centric neocons to stigmatize that linkage ever again, and is thus “likely to discomfit those Americans committed to the proposition that the United States and Israel face the same threats and are bound together by identical interests.” Isn’t it Barack Obama’s overriding duty as Commander-in-Chief to listen to his military commanders and take aggressive action against anything which undermines America’s war effort and Endangers the Troops — including Israel’s settlement expansions?
Beyond that, wasn’t it only recently that attacking Gen. David Petraeus the way the ADL has done was deemed so unpatriotic that it merited formal, bipartisan Congressional condemnation? As Joan Walsh proposed yesterday, shouldn’t Congress now be preparing to condemn the ADL and Foxman for their attack on Petraeus, launched at him as he commands brave American men and women in harm’s way, fighting for our country? After all, Petraeus is responsible for the safety of those troops and is trying to alert government leaders about policies which endanger those troops and undermine the American war effort. What kind of person would attack Gen. Petreaus for doing that, all in the name of serving the interests of a foreign government? One hasn’t seen attacks on Gen. Petraeus this vicious since he condemned torture and called for the closing of Guantanamo, thereby provoking the unhinged wrath of America’s Right.
And then we have what I thought was the patriotic standard that one should not attack the President in his conduct of foreign policy during a time of war. What happened to Joe Lieberman’s solemn 2005 warning that “in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril“? This is the same Joe Lieberman who, along with his conjoined twin, John McCain, this week went to the Senate floor to rail against President Obama for the crime of Excess Criticism of Israel. Isn’t Al Qaeda going to be emboldened if they see the Commander-in-Chief being weakened and attacked by these U.S. Senators as inept and our country riddled with internal divisions of this sort? That was the argument made by these same right-wing super-patriots for years (and, indeed, is now being echoed — not ironically but earnestly — by their mirror images on the dissent-hating, Beltway version of the “Left,” such as Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter). But for the neocon Right, that uber-patriotic standard seems to have been suspended as of January 20, 2009, and (like so many standards) is revoked altogether when it comes to Israel.
Whatever else is true, the American Right is now openly siding with a foreign government against their own, and bitterly Blaming America for these problems. They’re protecting this foreign government’s actions even though our top Generals say those actions undermine our war effort and directly endanger American troops. They’re advocating policies — such as the Israeli bombing of Iran — which America’s Joint Chiefs Chairman has gravely warned will seriously impede our wars and lead to the deaths of our soldiers. They’re demeaning the top American General with command responsibility for two theaters of war. And, in a Time of War, they’re attacking the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief — and relentlessly depicting him as weak and inept — all because he’s prioritizing American interests over those of a foreign country. All of that seems to severely breach the standards of Patriotism they have long advocated and which have long prevailed, to put that rather mildly.
Why Israel Always Prevails
A Crisis in U.S. / Israeli Relations? Sure. But …
By JEFFREY BLANKFORT | March 19, 2010
If the State Department had issued travel advisory warnings to US government officials about to travel to Israel, Vice President Joe Biden would have no doubt ignored them. A better friend to Israel could not have been found in the 36 years that Biden represented Delaware in the US Senate and there was speculation that his popularity among Jewish voters and major Jewish donors was the primary reason he was added to the Democratic ticket. According to all reports, Biden’s trip was to mend fences with the Israeli officials and with the Israeli Jewish public which had become disenchanted with the Obama administration where the president’s popularity is measured in the low single digits.
Indeed, even a day after having been blind-sided by the announcement that Israel would build 1600 new and exclusively Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem, Biden was still trying. In a prepared speech, he once again bragged, this time to a Tel Aviv university audience, that he was a Zionist and that, “Throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States,” a statement that should raise questions about dual loyalties and which, curiously, was omitted from all reports on his speech in the US press.
In addition, Biden repeated what he said on his arrival in Jerusalem, that, “There is no space — this is what they [the world] must know, every time progress is made, it’s made when the rest of the world knows there is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space. That’s the only time when progress has been made.” Biden did not offer any examples of such progress and would have had a hard time doing so.
It was not until the end of his speech, after he had thoroughly regurgitated the standard Israeli line on the threats to its existence from Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, that he felt safe to offer words of criticism for his treatment at the hands of his hosts. The words of condemnation issued the previous day, however, were patently missing. Almost apologizing for doing so, Biden told his audience:
“Now, some legitimately may have been surprised that such a strong supporter of Israel for the last 37 years and beyond… as an elected official, how I can speak out so strongly given the ties that I share as well as my country shares with Israel. But quite frankly, folks, sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth.
“And I appreciate… the response your Prime Minister today announced this morning that he is putting in place a process to prevent the recurrence of that sort of that sort of events [sic] and who clarified that the beginning of actual construction on this particular project would likely take several years … That’s significant, because it gives negotiations the time to resolve this, as well as other outstanding issues. Because when it was announced, I was on the West Bank. Everyone there thought it had meant immediately the resumption of the construction of 1,600 new units.”
What, of course, Biden meant was not that Israel should not be able do as it pleases in East Jerusalem, but that announcements of its plans should be handled in a more tactful manner, when, presumably, he, or other US officials are several thousand miles away.
Biden, of course, was patently ignoring repeated statements by Netanyahu that Israel’s decisions to build in East Jerusalem will not be subject either to pressure from Washington or negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
Moreover, as Ha’aretz noted, those projected 1600 units are only a small part of 50,000 units planned for the eastern part of the city, which was annexed in 1967, and which are designed to preclude it not only from becoming the capital of a Palestinian state but also to prevent Palestinian residents of the city from traveling to the West Bank.
According to Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s most widely read newspaper, Biden had privately complained to Netanyahu that Israel’s behavior was “starting to get dangerous for us.” “What you’re doing here,” he reportedly said, “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.” That Biden made such a statement has been denied by the White House, but it follows closely an earlier memorandum sent by General Petraeus to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his testimony before a US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
In his prepared statement, Petraeus depicted the Israeli-Arab conflict as the first “cross cutting challenge to security and stability” in the CENTCOM area of responsibility [AOR]. “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR.”
Treading in an area where few members of the US military have dared to go before, Petraeus observed that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.” It should be noted that neither the NY Times’ Elizabeth Bumiller nor the Washington Post’s Anne Flaherty included any reference to these comments by Petraeus in their coverage of his testimony.
In other words, in the view of Gen. Petraeus, resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is critical to the US national interest and that, plus his reference to the “perception” of Washington’s pro-Israel bias, is what may have been what, for the moment, occasioned President Obama through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ratchet up the criticism and publicly brand Israel’s treatment of Biden as “insulting.”
Rather than letting the issue die, she had her office publicize the fact that she had given a piece of her mind to Netanyahu in a 43 minute phone call in which, according to her spokesperson, P.J. Crowley, she described the planned units in East Jerusalem as sending a “deeply negative signal about Israel’s approach to the bilateral relationship and counter to the spirit of the vice president’s trip” and that “this action had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America’s interests.”
Moreover, she made three demands of Netanyahu that were spelled out in the Israeli press but which were only alluded to in the US media: cancelling the decision to approve the 1600 units, making a “significant” gesture to the Palestinian Authority to get it back to the bargaining table, and issuing a public statement that the indirect talks will deal with all the core issues, including Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. Pretty heady stuff for those used to see Clinton falling all over herself to show her loyalty to Israel.
To emphasize the US position, the Obama administration cancelled the scheduled visit of Middle East envoy George Mitchell who had planned to meet with Israelis and Palestinians in what had been touted by the administration as “proximity talks.”
The gravity of the situation was not lost upon Israel’s new ambassador, American-born historian, Michael Oren, who, in a conference call with Israel’s US consulates, reportedly expressed the opinion (which he now denies) that this was the worst crisis in US-Israel relations since 1975 when Pres. Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly blamed Israel for the breakdown of negotiations with Egypt over withdrawing from the Sinai. As a consequence, Ford announced that he was going to make a major speech calling for a reassessment of Israel-US relations. Although hardly the powerhouse that it has become today, AIPAC, the only officially registered pro-Israel lobby, responded to the threat by getting 76 senators to sign a harsh letter to Ford, warning him not to tamper with Israel-US relations. Ford never made the speech and it would not be the last time that AIPAC got three quarters of the US Senate to sign a letter designed to keep an American president in check.
Others point to the nationally televised speech on September 12, 1991 of the first President Bush, who, upon realizing that AIPAC had secured enough votes in both houses of Congress to override his veto of Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, went before the American public depicting himself as “one lonely man” battling a thousand lobbyists on Capitol Hill. A national poll taken immediately afterward gave the president an 85 per cent approval rating which sent the lobby and its Congressional flunkies scuttling into the corner but not before AIPAC director, Tom Dine, exclaimed at that date, Sept. 12, 1991, “would live in infamy.” Following the election of Yitzhak Rabin the following year and up for re-election himself, Bush relented and approved the loan guarantee request.
There are those who, while aware of what happened to Ford and of the subsequent humiliations visited by Israel upon American presidents and secretaries of state, view the Biden affair as a charade designed to placate the heads of Arab governments as well as their respective peoples and give the impression that there is a space between Israel and the US when it comes to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict when, they assert, none exists.
Viewing the unrelenting expansion of Jewish settlements and settlers in the West Bank through one US administration after another for the past four decades they would appear to have a solid argument. It is undermined, however, by one obvious fact: while the rest of the world considers the Israel-Palestine conflict to be a foreign policy concern, for Washington and both Democrats and Republicans it has been and remains primarily a domestic issue. In that arena there is only one player, the pro-Israel “lobby” which is represented by a multitude of organizations, the most prominent of which is AIPAC.
As if it needed more help, flocking to Israel’s side in increasing numbers over the past several decades have come the majority of America’s Christian evangelicals whose doomsday theology fits in nicely with that of Israel’s ultra right wing settler movement. The result is that in each election cycle anyone with any hope of being elected to a national political office, be it in the White House or Congress, whether incumbent or challenger, feels obligated to express his or her unconditional loyalty to Israel by shamelessly groveling for handouts from Jewish donors and the nod from Jewish voters who make up critical voting blocs in at least six states.
This being the case, it is not so strange that a string of leading elected American officials would willingly submit to public humiliation by a country so politically and militarily dependent on the U.S. and whose population is less than that of New York City or Los Angeles County, even when doing so has made the U.S. seem weak in the eyes of a world in which Washington has other, more pressing interests, than pleasing Israel. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Barack Obama whose stature as leader of “the world’s only superpower” has been severely undercut by repeated verbal face-slappings at the hands of Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers.
It clearly has been in the US interest that the Israel-Palestine conflict be peacefully resolved. There is nothing in the proposed “two-state solution” that would interfere with Washington’s regional objectives. On the contrary, the creation of a truncated Palestinian statelet, allied and dependent, politically and financially on the US, as it most certainly would be, would be a boon to US regional interests and ultimately viewed as a setback for anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. It was not just to expend some US taxpayers’ money that the GW Bush administration built a four story security building for the PA in Ramallah (that Sharon later destroyed), brought PA security personnel to Langley, VA for training with the CIA, and had Gen. Dayton build a colonial army to maintain order.
Israeli officials view all of this from a very different perspective, as should be obvious, and will do everything they can to prevent any kind of a Palestinian entity from coming into existence since this would interfere not only with its expansion plans but would also create a junior competitor for US favors in the region. This was why Sharon targeted the US built institutions on the West Bank and the CIA trained personnel during the Al-Aksa Intifada despite the fact that they were non-participants, which raised the hackles at CIA headquarters, as reported at the time in the Washington Post.
What the insult to Biden was clearly designed to do, as were the previous humiliations, was to remind the current and future occupants of the White House that when it comes to making decisions concerning the Middle East, it is Israel that calls the tune. As Stephen Green spelled it out in “Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with Militant Israel” (Morrow, 1984) a quarter century ago, “Since 1953, 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 tactical issues.”
That Netanyahu was also taken unawares by the announcement concerning the housing units as he claimed is questionable, particularly since he has apologized only for its timing, not its content and the offending minister remains unpunished. Netanyahu was surely cognizant that next week he will be coming to Washington to speak before AIPAC’s annual policy conference where he will find a greater degree of support than anywhere in his own country. Last year’s conference attracted a record 7,000 attendees plus half of the US Senate and a third of the House and it is likely to be ever larger this year in response to the administration’s perceived hostility to Israel.
Netanyahu will no doubt happily recall that before he met with President Obama for the first time last year, 76 US senators, led by Christopher Dodd and Evan Bayh, and 330 members of the House, sent AIPAC- crafted letters to the president calling on him not to put pressure on the Israeli prime minister when they met. The only report of this in the mainstream media was by a Washington post blogger who noted the AIPAC tagline on the pdf that was circulated among House members. Netanyahu will also be succored by memories of the House’s near unanimous support of Israel’s assault on Gaza and by its 334 to 36 vote condemning the Goldstone Report in its aftermath.
In addition, during last year’s Congressional summer recess, 55 members of the House, 30 Democrats led by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and 25 Republicans, led by Eric Cantor, the House’s lone Jewish [Republican] member, visited Jerusalem. Both groups met with Netanyahu and afterward held press conferences in which they expressed their solidarity with Israel, particularly with its claims on East Jerusalem, at a time when the Obama administration was calling for a settlement freeze. These visits, too, went unreported in the mainstream media.
Under the present circumstances, we can expect to see AIPAC extend every effort to make this year’s event the largest and more successful yet and there should be no doubt that those attending will give a far more rousing welcome to Netanyahu and to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is also on the AIPAC program, than to Secretary of State Clinton.
AIPAC is already posting statements on its website from members of Congress who are taking the Obama administration to task for making its differences with Israel public and for keeping the issue alive when the focus should not be on Jewish settlements but on the growing threat of a nuclear Iran which has been at the top of AIPAC’s agenda since the beginning of the Iraq War.
Nevertheless, given that the Democratic Party remains dependent on wealthy Jewish donors for the bulk of its major funding, estimated to be at least 60 per cent, and that this is an election year, we can expect Clinton to reach out and once again embrace Israel as she did at the 2008 AIPAC conference when, Biden-like, she said, “I have a bedrock commitment to Israel’s security, because Israel’s security is critical to our security….[A]ll parties must know we will always stand with Israel in its struggle for peace and security. Israel should know that the United States will never pressure her to make unilateral concessions or to impose a made-in-America solution.”
For those with short memories, here is a sampling of past humiliations of US presidents and secretaries of state at the hands of our loyal ally:
March, 1980, President Carter was forced to apologize after US UN representative Donald McHenry voted for a resolution that condemned Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem and which called on Israel to dismantle them. McHenry had replaced Andrew Young who was pressured to resign in 1979 after an Israeli newspaper revealed that he had held a secret meeting with a PLO representative which violated a US commitment to Israel and to the American Jewish community.
June, 1980 After Carter requested a halt to Jewish settlements and his Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie, called the Jewish settlements an obstacle to peace, Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced plans to construct 10 new ones.
In December, 1981, 14 days after signing what was described as a memorandum of strategic understanding with the Reagan administration, Israel annexed the Golan Heights “which made it appear that the US either acquiesced in the move or else has absolutely no control over its own ally’s actions. In both cases the US looks bad….he has once again poked his ally, the source of all his most sophisticated weapons and one third of his budget in the eye.” (Lars Erik-Nelson)
In August, 1982, the day after Reagan requested that Ariel Sharon end the bombing of Beirut, Sharon responded by ordering bombing runs over the city at precisely 2:42 and 3:38 in the afternoon, the times coinciding with the two UN resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
In March, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker complained to Congress that “Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process.., I have been met with an announcement of new settlement activity… It substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process, and creates quite a predicament.” In 1990, he had become so disgusted with Israel’s intransigence on the settlements that he publicly gave out the phone number of the White House switchboard and told the Israelis, “When you’re serious about peace, call us.”
In April 2002, after Pres. George W Bush demanded that Ariel Sharon pull Israeli forces out of Jenin, declaring “Enough is enough!,” he was besieged by a 100,000 emails from supporters of Israel, Jewish and Christian and accused by Bill Safire of choosing Yasser Arafat as a friend over Sharon and by George Will, of losing his “moral clarity.” Within days, a humiliated Bush was declaring Sharon “a man of peace” despite the fact that he had not withdrawn his troops from Jenin.
In January 2009, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly boasted that he had “shamed” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by getting President Bush to prevent her from voting for a Gaza cease-fire resolution at the last moment that she herself had worked on for several days with Arab and European diplomats at the United Nations.
Olmert bragged to an Israeli audience that he pulled Bush off a stage during a speech to take his call when he learned about the pending vote and demanded that the president intervene.
“I have no problem with what Olmert did,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Forward. “I think the mistake was to talk about it in public.”
That episode and Foxman’s comment may have summed up the history of US-Israel relations.
Jeffrey Blankfort can be contacted at jblankfort@earthlink.net
Palestinian classes held at Israeli army checkpoint
By Haitham Sabbah | Ma’an News | March 18, 2010
Israeli soldiers prevent students and others from crossing a checkpoint between their homes and schools on the edge of the West Bank city of Qalqiliya on 17 March 2010. Some teachers used the checkpoint as a makeshift classroom and held studies despite the closure, which was linked to clashes elsewhere in the occupied territories.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
University of California faculty support arrested Muslim students
By Cecilie Surasky | March 17, 2010
If you keep heckling the Israeli ambassador to the US during a talk at UC Irvine, the school has a right to throw you out of the room. And if you violate school standards, they have a right to take you to task on such violations as long as they consistently apply the standards to all students. Any student protester knows this and makes the choice to risk those outcomes when they choose disruption over, say, really uncomfortable questions.
But do they have the right to arrest you?
Amazingly, 11 Muslim students at UC Irvine weren’t handed the usual disciplinary action for violating student codes (they each got up, made a statement and then would walk to the door to be escorted out by police). NO, they were actually arrested.
I remember doing almost the exact same thing when I was that age- a bunch of liberal students repeatedly interrupted former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft at a campus talk-only we weren’t so mad. People we knew hadn’t been killed or imprisoned. We recited Jabberwocky and got hauled out. Our punishment? Nothing.
Just change the names: “11 members of the Young Israel Alliance were arrested for heckling the Palestinian ambassador at UC Berkeley today.” No matter who it is, there’s something not right here and the answer to the over-reaction is likely outside pressure (which students who are genuinely concerned about Jewish-Muslim relations report tends to polarize and hinder, not help.)
Apparently, conservative students who committed a similar disruption last year got very different treatment. No arrest for them.
LA Jewish Journal reports in: UC Riverside Faculty Voice Support for Protesters Against Oren
Faculty at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), joined voices at UC campuses statewide in support of 11 students arrested for heckling Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren during his Feb. 8 speech at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
Thirty-one professors and graduate students from several UCR departments signed a “Statement on Free Speech, Palestine and the ‘UC Irvine 11,’ ” drafted by Dylan Rodriguez, chair of the university’s Ethnic Studies department. The March 11 pronouncement calls on the UC administration and the Orange County district attorney’s office to drop disciplinary and punitive action against eight UCI and three UCR students, which it calls “discriminatory, cynical, and politically and intellectually repressive.”
The UCI students have been charged with violations of the student codes of conduct. Officials at UCR could not confirm whether action would be taken against their students.
“We believe that this is a cynical and opportunistic attempt at political repression that reflects the racial criminalization of young Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim men and women as actual or potential ‘terrorists.’ By way of contrast, Ethnic Studies faculty have taught courses in Ethnic Studies in which classroom proceedings were disrupted by students with opposing views, and the university administration did not pursue any disciplinary or punitive measures against them. In fact, we have sometimes been told that such disruptions are an expression of academic free speech,” the statement said.
Rodriguez said the statement was intended to take issue with the tendency, since at least 2001, to affiliate Muslim men with terrorism within popular discourse, as well as to challenge what he sees as selective enforcement of codes of conduct by university administrators.
“People protesting is something to be expected,” he said, noting that UCR administrators did not take disciplinary action against what he called “conservative” student protesters following a similar incident last fall. “When people get selectively subjugated to enforcement of codes of conduct, it has a chilling affect on political discussion and freedom.”
It remains to be seen whether UC Irvine administrators can prove that this is a routine response to such disruptions, or exceptional treatment consistent with our undeniable and absolutely shameful criminalization of Muslims and Arab Americans.
Meanwhile, to his credit, Michael Oren has offered to come back and have a dialogue with students. I hope the arrested students, some of whom lost close relatives during the attack on Gaza, will take him up on his offer. I really do. It would take an incredible amount of courage and character to sit down face to face with a man who defends a massive military attack that killed your family members and destroyed schools and hospitals. If I were in their place, I’m not sure I would have that kind of inner strength. But what a meeting it could be.
Israel Is Boss
By Margaret Kimberley – 03/16/2010
The United States may invade and occupy Iraq, undermine elected presidents in Haiti and throw its weight around in numerous ways in numerous parts of the world. Yet there is one country it does not dare to confront. Of course, the nation in question is Israel.
Israel and its allies in the United States make certain that no president, no political party, no congressional leader nor any citizen who wishes to be in any way influential, will dare to step outside the lines of proscribed behavior and discourse. The American public, either because they are aware of the pro-Israel grip on power, or because they have swallowed the propaganda whole, remain cowed and silent.
Israel can do whatever it wants not only with the United States, but with other western nations as well. Mossad agents succeeded in murdering Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabouh in Dubai last month by using doctored British, Irish, French, Australian and German passports and credit cards issued to an Israeli-run bank located in South Dakota. None of the nations involved has uttered more than the slightest peep after having their sovereignty violated in such an obvious manner.
Just in case there was any doubt about who is in charge, Israel insulted Vice President Joseph Biden and the United States government when Biden made a recent visit to Jerusalem. Biden made the pro forma journey to go through the motions of requesting that the peace process continue. The Israelis could have nudged, winked and gone through the pretense of moving forward on a just peace process. Instead they announced that more Jewish housing will be constructed on Palestinian land, embarrassing the Vice President and his boss, who wanted to pretend to be even handed when they and the rest of American political leadership are anything but. The Obama administration, like every other presidential administration in the last sixty years, does what Israel wants it to do. There shouldn’t be any reason for Israel to yank the Americans’ chain so hard and so publicly, but why follow the rules of diplomatic niceties when doing otherwise has been so successful?
The only thing worse than the obvious slap in the face, is the phony outrage surrounding it. No one gets anywhere near a presidential nomination without first swearing obedience to the Zionists and their lobby. If Obama and Biden and Hillary Clinton were truly upset with the Israelis, it is only because they were so blatant in making them all look like chumps.
Just a few weeks before Obama was sworn into office, George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice were the victims of an Israeli public beat down. Bush was literally pulled off a stage where he was about to give a speech and forced to take a phone call from then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. Rice had worked on a Security Council resolution which merely called for a cease fire in Israel’s massacre of thousands of people in Gaza. Olmert bragged in a press conference, “I said, ‘I don’t care; I have to talk to him.’” Not content to tell the world that he ordered the American president to follow his orders, he took a swipe at Rice too. “He gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it — a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed, and abstained on a resolution she arranged.” It isn’t surprising that Israel would repeat the humiliation just a year later with a different president.
It doesn’t matter if David Axelrod goes on the Sunday morning news shows and fakes outrage about Israel’s settlements. It matters that Israel continues to steal Palestinian land and it matters that only those willing to go along with the crime are allowed to entertain any idea of having a role in United States foreign policy decisions.
Far from being angry at Israel, the United States government is actually becoming more and more like that nation. The Obama administration claims the right to carry out extra judicial assassinations just like their Middle East partner in crime. The temporary embarrassment and damage control pronouncements are not worthy of anyone’s attention.
The only lesson to learn from this sorry episode is that nothing new has taken place between the United States and Israel. All Americans are still made complicit in the joint criminality and earn the enmity of most of the world as a result. So don’t believe the hype. There is nothing to see here, just move along.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.
Joe Biden’s Empty Desert
By BOUTHIANA SHAABAN | March 16, 2010
Vice President Biden’s speech in Israel on March 11 sounded like an official American statement, providing absolute support to all the crimes committed by Israel. Biden’s speech was full of anachronisms aimed at polishing the image of Zionism tarnished by the blood of civilians, particularly children. Biden was not hypocritical like most Western politicians. He was candid and transparent.
In his speech, Biden said: “I had said in a speech in the United States some years ago for which I got some criticism, if I am not a Jew, I would be a Zionist. And it got a lot of national publicity, how could I say that, until I was reminded by my father you need not be a Jew to be a Zionist”. I do not know why the Vice-President should feel proud about being a Zionist and what are the achievements of Zionism that make Biden want to belong to it. Is it the displacement of millions of Palestinians from their homeland, Palestine, the incarceration of millions of others in the big prison called Israel, where they are subjected daily to ethnic cleansing and where their children, women and elderly killed and imprisoned?
There are 321 children imprisoned by Israel with the only charge against them being throwing stones at armed Israeli settlers who attacked their homes and neighborhoods, insulted them and killed their families. The people of Gaza are still suffering hunger, disease and poverty after a war described by all investigators as a crime against international humanitarian law. Nevertheless, Israel prevented even the EU foreign policy commissioner and others from visiting Gaza so that they do not see the real face of Israeli Zionism.
Vice-President Biden sees Israel’s history as “a tale of remarkable accomplishment, on a perilous patch of desert with sparse natural resources”. When was Palestine an empty desert? Isn’t it the land of milk and honey which was coveted by invaders like the Romans, the Crusaders and the Zionists? Isn’t it the cradle of Jesus Christ, the prophets and messengers? Was it ever an empty desert, or rather part of ancient Arab civilizations from which the West learnt trade and mathematics, architecture and electricity, arts and literature? Wasn’t Jerusalem a place of pilgrimage for the followers of the three monotheistic religions for centuries? This is as if the Vice-President has not seen the olive trees, hundreds of years old, in Palestine, and as if he is ignorant of the arts and letters developed by Palestinians for centuries and taken back by the Crusaders who returned to a Europe fully swamped at the time by fanaticism and ignorance.
The Vice-President attacked all Arabs – without discrimination between the non-compliant and the moderates – for calling for the destruction of Israel, while “every day, Israel faces bravely threats no country should have to endure.” He adds that the US stands shoulder to shoulder in facing these threats. This is as if Biden does not know that the Arabs have made an initiative for a just and comprehensive peace; and he ignored Egypt and Jordan which made peace with Israel decades ago without this preventing the latter from attacking its neighbors. Biden has ignored the whole Arab reality as if it were “an empty desert”.
Biden thinks that his audience is stupid to the extent that they believe that what is between Israel and the Palestinians is simply a “difference of opinion”. What racism inhabits the minds of Zionists when they believe that Palestine is an “empty desert”? Does Biden think that five million Palestinians do not exist?
No doubt the American Vice-President has not read about the twelve year old child Hasan al-Muhtasib, who was put on trial by the Israelis, and while in court, he was given a red balloon by a lawyer to play with. He has not read about his Zionist friends running over Palestinian children with their cars on a daily basis. Maybe he supports the Zionists when they arrest sleeping children.
The only prisoner mentioned by the Vice-President was Gilad Shalit, while the eleven thousand Palestinian prisoners are part of the “empty desert” which Biden cannot see; and that is why their life and suffering has no value. He even decided that Hamas is responsible for the misery of the people of Gaza, while all investigations and international reports written by the Justice Richard Goldstone and the UN’s Richard Falk, accuse Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza and using internationally-banned weapons against unarmed civilians to kill Gaza’s inhabitants, destroy their schools and institutions over their heads and violate international law.
But on the other hand, if Biden is proud of his Zionism, although he is not Jewish, and goes against the facts of history and geography to justify his support for the crimes committed against unarmed civilians in Jerusalem, Nablus, Hebron and Gaza, where are the rulers of Arab and Muslim countries? Where is the sense of solidarity with their Muslim brethren and with al-Aqsa mosque? Have they left the whole issue to the children of Jerusalem?
Representatives of Arab countries squabble for hours over an expression in order not to upset Israel and its Zionist allies. They end up considering the confiscation of Arab land mere “settlement units”, ethnic cleansing against Palestinians as “demographic change”, the brutal attacks against unarmed Palestinians praying in al-Aqsa mosque and its sanctuary as “clashes”, and brutal Israeli attacks against unarmed women and children in their homes and neighborhoods as mere “confrontations”.
The Zionist perspective, which is essentially an annihilation of Arabs and their rights from existence, deserves an Arab stand in support of Palestinians who have been courageous fighters for the cause of freedom and justice. If building fifty thousand colonial settlement units in East Jerusalem does not deserve an assertive position by all Arabs and Muslims; if it does not deserve withdrawing ambassadors and changing history, what does?
Bouthaina Shaaban is Political and Media Advisor at the Syrian Presidency, and former Minister of Expatriates. She is also a writer and professor at Damascus University since 1985. She has been the spokesperson for Syria. She can be reached through nizar_kabibo@yahoo.com
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Mossad ‘in contact from very beginning’ with killers of Italian PM, reporter reveals
By Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | October 5, 2025
A roving reporter who covered Italy’s top politicians explains to The Grayzone how his country was reduced to a joint US-Israeli “aircraft carrier,” and raises troubling questions about an Israeli role in the killing of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
For years, Israel’s Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.
Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in 2010 called Mossad Base Italy. … continue
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