To get a sense of how badly the regime in Iran wants sanctions relief for the Iranian people, you have to do more than contemplate the major concessions it has made in negotiations with the United States and the rest of the P5+1. Not only is Iran willing to dismantle a major part of its peaceful civilian nuclear program, to submit to the most intrusive inspections, to redesign a reactor, to eliminate two-thirds of its centrifuges, to get rid of much of its enriched uranium, and to limit nuclear research — it must do all this while being harangued by the nuclear monopolist of the Middle East — Israel — which remains, unlike Iran, a nonsigner of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and faces no inspections or limits on its production of nuclear weapons.
This is something out of Alice in Wonderland. The Islamic Republic of Iran, born in 1979, has not attacked another country. (With U.S. help, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980.) In contrast, Israel has attacked its Arab neighbors several times since its founding, including two devastating invasions and a long occupation of Lebanon, not to mention repeated onslaughts in the Gaza Strip and the military occupation of the West Bank. Israel has also repeatedly threatened war against Iran and engaged in covert and proxy warfare, including the assassination of scientists. Even with Iran progressing toward a nuclear agreement, Israel (like the United States) continues to threaten Iran.
Yet Iran is universally cast as the villain (with scant evidence) and Israel the vulnerable victim.
You’d never know that Iran favors turning the Middle East into a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone (a nuclear-weapons-free zone was first proposed by the U.S.-allied shah of Iran and Egypt in 1974), and beyond that, Iran over a decade ago offered a “grand bargain” that contained provisions to reassure the world about its nuclear program and an offer to recognize Israel, specifically, acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative. The George W. Bush administration rebuffed Iran.
At the last NPT review conference in 2010, Iran renewed its support for the zone, the BBC reported at the time: “Tehran supports the ‘immediate and unconditional’ implementation of the 1995 resolution [to create the zone], declares the [then] president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
The United States and Israel claim in principle to support having the Middle East free of nuclear weapons — but not just yet. The Israeli government said in 2010 that implementation of the principle could occur “only after peace agreements with all the countries in the region.” ABC News quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that Israel might sign the NPT “if the Middle East one day advances to a messianic age where the lion lies down with the lambs.”
That is classic Netanyahu demagoguery. As noted, the Arab League in 2002 — and again in 2007 — offered to recognize Israel if it accepted a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and arrived at a “just solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” At that point the Arab countries would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region”; i.e., they would “establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.”
Thus Netanyahu’s position is a sham. He could have peace treaties in short order if he wanted to. But, as he said before the recent elections, he will never allow the Palestinians to have their own country.
For its part, the United States “broadly agrees with Israel that conditions for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone do not yet exist in the Middle East,” the BBC reported. In other words, the Obama administration slavishly takes the Israel-AIPAC line.
While politicians and pundits lose sleep over an Iranian nuclear-weapons program that does not exist — are they having nightmares of the United States being deterred by Iran? — they support Israel, the nuclear power that brutalizes a captive population, attacks its neighbors, threatens war against Iran, and refuses to talk peace with willing partners.
The sudden cancellation of an academic conference on Israel, as well as the lack of outcry from ‘mainstream’ media, demonstrates once again the skewed limits to ‘free speech’ in ‘advanced’ Western democracies. ‘Je suis Charlie’ already feels like ancient history. It certainly does not apply when it comes to scrutiny of the state of Israel.
The conference, titled ‘International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’, was to be held at the University of Southampton from 15-17 April 2015. Planned speakers included Richard Falk, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Gabi Piterberg, a historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, Israeli academic Ilan Pappé and Palestinian historian Nur Musalha.
The meeting was billed as the ‘first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine.’ The approach would be scholarly with ‘multidisciplinary debate reflecting diverse perspectives, and thus genuine disagreements’. Rather than being a coven of political extremists and violent hotheads, this was to be a serious gathering of respected and authoritative academics with in-depth knowledge of Israel and Palestine.
But intense pressure from the Israel lobby about the airing of ‘anti-Semitic views’ has torpedoed the University of Southampton’s earlier stated commitment to uphold ‘freedom of speech within the law’. In a classic piece of bureaucratic hand-wringing, the university issued a corporate-style statement on 1 April that leaned heavily on the pretext of ‘health and safety’ to kill off the conference. This happened a mere two weeks before the conference, planned months earlier in consultation with the university, was due to begin.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews was among those Zionist groups that had been urging the university to cancel the event. Its president, Vivian Wineman, said:
‘It is formulated in extremist terms, has attracted toxic speakers and is likely to result in an increase in anti-Semitism and tension on campus.’
The Telegraphreported that ‘at least two major patrons of the university were considering withdrawing their financial support. One is a charitable foundation, the other a wealthy family.’
There was also fierce criticism from several politicians at Westminster. Mark Hoban, the Conservative MP for Fareham, described the conference as a ‘provocative, hard-line, one-sided forum that would question and delegitimize the existence of a democratic state.’ Caroline Nokes, MP for Romsey and Southampton North, said the university risked bringing itself into disrepute by hosting what she described as ‘an apparently one-sided event’.
A senior government minister even got involved. Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities, derided the conference as a ‘one-sided diatribe’. He went further:
‘There is a careful line between legitimate academic debate on international law and the actions of governments, and the far-left’s bashing of Israel which often descends into naked anti-Semitism.’
This was outrageous high-level political interference in free speech. When the university confirmed that it was cancelling the conference, the decision was predictably welcomed by the Israeli embassy in London:
‘This was a clear instance of an extremist political campaign masquerading as an academic exercise, and it is only right to recognise that respecting free speech does not mean tolerating intolerance.’
Michael Gove, the Government Chief Whip and former Secretary of State for Education, could barely contain his glee:
‘It was not a conference, it was an anti-Israel hate-fest.’
The ‘Health And Safety’ Pretext
On April 2, the conference organisers responded to the university’s sudden reversal of its earlier commitment to hold the conference. The organisers, who include Israeli-born law professor Oren Ben-Dor, said that they were ‘shocked and dismayed’ at the university’s about-turn. This was especially disappointing given that the police had given assurances that they would be ‘able to manage the demonstrations’.
The organisers noted that ‘general sensitivity following recent terrorist events in Europe’ had been ‘misused to inflate the risks’ of the conference going ahead. More widely, warned the organisers, the implications for academic freedom would be dire:
‘The stakes for academic public space, for academic freedom and for freedom of speech are too high. The message it sends to other academic institutions and to students all over the world is grave and depressing. It will potentially make campuses obedient and depoliticised, distant and docile corporate spaces.’
An inadvertent clue to the reality underlying the university’s rhetoric on ‘security’ and ‘health and safety’ could be found in a report last month in the Jewish Chronicle. Board of Deputies of British Jews president Wineman told the Chronicle that:
‘When we had a meeting with the university vice-chancellor they said they would review it [the conference] on health and safety terms.
‘The two lines of attack [sic] possible were legal and health and safety and they were leaning on that one.’
The ‘line of attack’ about ‘health and safety’, then, appears to be cover for the university caving in to pro-Israel pressure. This fits a wider pattern of the pro-Israel lobby’s fear of increasing global condemnation of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and international law. As Ben White, an authoritative freelance journalist on the Middle East, reported last month, the British ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, recently met with UK university heads to discuss Israel and the limits of ‘freedom of speech’. Also present were representatives of at least three pro-Israel organisations: the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Union of Jewish Students.
Southampton University’s refusal at the time to buckle under pro-Israel lobby pressure was cited in the meeting. White noted:
‘This stubborn commitment to freedom of speech has clearly angered Britain’s Israel lobby, but the bigger question here is why a UK ambassador was involved in the first place.’
When pressed to explain this, a Foreign Office spokesperson told White that ‘part of Matthew Gould’s role involves outreach to the British Jewish Community.’ White added:
‘The spokesperson did not elaborate on whether lobbying British universities was part of the ambassador’s remit.’
The conference organisers have now lodged an injunction at the High Court in London in an attempt to prevent the university from curtailing their right to freedom of speech. The legal argument is that in unfairly withdrawing permission for the conference, the university has capitulated to the pro-Israel lobby. ‘This is blatant censorship under the guise of a specter of campus being overrun by violent hordes, which is patently groundless,’ said Mark McDonald, a public interest lawyer from the chambers of Michael Mansfield QC.
Many academics have protested the university’s decision. David Gurnham, the Director of Research at the university’s School of Law, wrote in an email to vice-chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam:
‘It seems to me outrageous that you seem to have allowed the bullying and threats of the Israeli lobby to prevent the perfectly lawful and legitimate exercise of free speech and academic debate. I understand that the police had reported that they would be perfectly able and willing to deal with any security concerns at the event: this ought to be good enough.
‘Cancelling the event in this way makes the University look weak, spineless and reactionary. I am proud to be a member of academic staff here, but your decision to withdraw support for a conference in this manner makes me, and I’m sure very many others like me, seriously question the University’s commitment to open and free debate.’
(More letters of protest from academics can be read here.)
All this comes at a time when the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is gathering strength. A recent debate at the Cambridge Union Society even passed the motion that ‘This House Believes Israel Is A Rogue State’.
At the time of writing, a petition calling for the University of Southampton to uphold free speech has attracted almost 10,000 signatures in just one week (it took a Zionist petition in favour of cancelling the conference one month to reach around 6,500).
An earlier petition in support of the conference was signed by round 900 academics around the world.
All of this must make the pro-Israel lobby deeply uncomfortable. As Ben White observed:
‘Whatever the final outcome, this story is significant for the way in which it illustrates not so much the pro-Israel lobby’s power, but its weaknesses.’
No More ‘Je Suis Charlie’
Media coverage of the cancellation of the conference has been almost non-existent. We found just three news articles in the national press: one in the Guardian, one in the Telegraph and one in the Express.
But what is even more glaring than the lack of news coverage is the editorial silence on the pro-Israel lobby’s bullying and intimidation. What happened to all those grand declarations from editorial offices, under the banner ‘Je suis Charlie’, to uphold freedom of speech and the ‘right to offend’? The journalists and cartoonists who were murdered at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris were, we were told, ‘martyrs for freedom of speech’. The atrocity was ‘a war declared on civilisation’, ‘an attack on the free world’, ‘an assault on journalists and free speech’. A Guardian editorial proclaimed:
‘If there is a right to free speech, implicit within it there has to be a right to offend. Any society that’s serious about liberty has to defend the free flow of ugly words, even ugly sentiments.’
Where is the outpouring of dismay now from liberal commentators across the British media at the actions of the pro-Israel lobby? Where are the comment pieces decrying this latest attack on free speech? When it comes to Israel, the ‘right to offend’ is quietly dropped.
Moreover, why should it be ‘toxic’ to examine critically the founding ideology of Israel, a state that was built on one of the largest forced migrations in modern history? As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé documented in his acclaimed 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the establishment of Israel in 1948 was ‘Nakba’ – a catastrophe – for the Palestinians. More than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, were uprooted, and over 500 Palestinian villages destroyed.
Nakba largely remains a taboo subject for ‘mainstream’ coverage of the Middle East. Indeed, notes Pappé, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Israel is a ‘crime [that] has been erased almost totally from the global public memory’. This crime, he continues:
‘has been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.’ (Ibid., p. xiii)
Sadly, the fear of offending the powerful pro-Israel lobby remains a major factor in British politics, cultural debate and media reporting of Israel and Palestine (see Peter Oborne’s Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 in 2009). As one senior BBC television news producer revealed to Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group:
‘We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis.’
‘The Specious Slur Of Anti-Semitism’
In a moving piece of personal testimony, Professor Suleiman Sharkh of the University of Southampton, one of the conference organisers, published an open letter. He said:
‘I grew up in Gaza, but my family is originally from a town called Majdal Asqlan (now called Ashkelon by Israel). In November 1948, six months after the establishment of the State of Israel and after the wars had ended, the town was bombed and many people were killed. Those who survived were herded towards Gaza, crawling on their hands and knees in the thorny field. Since then we have lived in squalid refugee camps. I walked around in the sand soiled by the open sewers with my bare feet. I got my first shoes when I went to school at the age of six.’
Professor Sharkh then explained the relevance and importance of the conference to Palestinian people:
‘International Law was responsible for our misery. It was used to legalise the theft of our homes and it continues to be used to legalise the ongoing oppression of my people by the State of Israel. The questions asked by the conference are therefore questions that I have been asking all my life. They are important questions that need to be answered.’
The conference is now likely to go ahead at an alternative venue to be publicised soon.
The journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, whose powerful documentary Palestine Is Still The Issue is a must-see, told Media Lens (email, April 3, 2015):
‘Israel is a gangster state. It holds the world record in the breach and defiance of international law. It regularly massacres and terrorises the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, which even David Cameron has described as an “open prison”. Its courts uphold racism as state policy. It has re-elected a congenital liar as its prime minister. Its historians have long revealed the criminality of its beginning — the theft of land, the murder and brutalising of the indigenous population.’
He continued:
‘What Israel has, however, are powerful collaborators, who, even at the lowest rung, are able to intimidate institutional bureaucrats and others with the specious slur of anti-Semitism. In Britain, the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies operate this barely disguised smear as efficiently as a metronome. They, and others, have now helped silence a much needed conference on Israel at the University of Southampton. But they should not be wholly blamed. The collusion of the university authorities as they run up the false flag of “security concerns” is to blame; and the memory of every murdered child in Gaza is now their spectre. And along with the so-called “lobby”, they cannot win.’
Pilger concluded:
‘The rest of humanity has long recognised the truth about Israel, as every international survey shows. With exquisite timing, student unions across the UK are joining the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that is sweeping country after country, including the United States. The craven decision of Southampton will speed its progress; nothing is surer.’
Suggested Action
Please sign this petition in support of the conference.
Yossi Sarid, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, seems to think so. In a February 2015 Haaretzcolumn, Sarid wrote:
In these very moments, the protocols are being rewritten. Rich Jews are writing them in their own handwriting. They, in their wealth, are confirming with their own signatures what anti-Semites used to slander them with in days gone by: We, the elders of Zion, pull the strings of Congress, and the congressmen are nothing but marionettes who do our will. If they don’t understand our words, they’ll understand our threats. And if in the past, we ran the show from behind the scenes, now we’re doing it openly, from center stage. And if you forget our donations, the wellspring will run dry.
The candid admission is one of many from Israeli politicians and Jewish commentators who openly boast of their power over the United States government, media and financial world.
Believing themselves to have a ‘divine right’ to rule, these Old Testament fundamentalists apparently want us to know we are nothing more than serfs and cotton-pickers on a global Zionist slave plantation.
As one of Israel’s chief religious leaders Ovadia Yosef put it, “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.”
The University of Southampton is facing a public outcry and discontent from staff over its cancellation of a conference on Israel and international law.
After months of pressure from pro-Israel advocacy groups, university officials announced last week that the event would not take place due to concerns over ‘health and safety’.
Since organisers revealed that Southampton was pulling the plug, more than 9,300 people have signed a petition calling for the university to “uphold free speech & allow the conference on Israel and international law to proceed.”
Within the university itself, more than 30 researchers, lecturers and professors at Southampton have joined a list of some 900 academics expressing support for the conference.
The Southampton signatories include David Gurnham, the School of Law’s Director of Research, Professor Michael Kelly OBE, Head of Modern Languages, and Professor Malcolm H Levitt FRS.
In addition, the Vice-Chancellor has received emails from a number of staff unhappy about the decision to drop the conference, some of whom have published their letters publicly.
Among them was an email from Dr. A.M. Viens, Associate Professor in Law and the interim director of the Law School’s Centre for Health Ethics and Law (HEAL). Dr. Viens urged the administration to reconsider, so as to “take a strong stance of academic freedom.”
In a sign of the growing dissatisfaction, Chief Operating Office Steve White has asked staff to channel concerns through their line manager, “who should reassure them that the University will be monitoring and responding to any developments.”
Any “further concerns” are to be directed to a “HR hotline.”
Meanwhile, the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) has called the cancellation “unprecedented”, and condemned the University for “allowing political pressure to determine its academic activities.”
According to Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, chair of BRICUP, “in living memory no academic conference at a UK university has been cancelled due to external political pressure.” He added: “Southampton’s decision sets an atrocious precedent that must be reversed. If not it deserves to be treated as a pariah by the rest of the academic community.”
Organisers are currently pursuing a legal challenge, with further developments expected this week.
The Israeli army uses Palestinians as targets for their training, Haaretz reported a former soldier as saying.
In an article entitled “From an Israeli combat soldier to conscientious objector”, Haaretz said that “after two years in the Israel Defence Forces, Yaron Kaplan, 21, of Lod, is declaring himself a conscientious objector and is refusing to continue his service because of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”
“From the moment I began my training I understood how violent this place is,” he said. “It was a totally traumatic experience. Every time we would do shooting practice, we would be ‘executing’ someone – ‘Now we shoot Mohammed; now we shoot at Ahmed’,” he said.
Kaplan said that he joined the army immediately after he graduated from the military college, but has now quit. He explained this is because of the “violent nature of the army”.
Ruling out any chance of a peaceful solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he said: “I can’t expect or demand from a person that he be my partner, or that he should really see me as a partner for dialogue as long as I am imposing a military regime on him.”
Kalan said he would not return to his army service after Passover, he will present himself at his base and expect to be imprisoned.
“I am fully aware of the ramifications of this, what the path before me looks like – a lot of prison, including lengthy terms,” he said. “I have no doubt that this is the right thing to do. The emotional price and the price to my conscience that I would have to pay for the mental suffering of being in the army are too heavy from my perspective.”
Thursday’s agreement between the P5+1 countries and Iran has been hailed as a victory for peace. Its opponents, led by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, are terrified that the agreement may lead to a more peaceful and stable Middle East in which Zionist expansionism and genocide would be unsustainable.
But the agreement is not just a step toward peace. It also represents a step toward truth. And truth, even more than peace, is what truly terrifies Netanyahu and his neoconservative allies.
The Myth of “Iran nuclear crisis”
The whole “Iran nuclear crisis” is a myth. To put it more bluntly, it is a lie. And that lie was meticulously constructed by neoconservative Zionists to serve their interests, according to their philosophy of governance, which worships big lies and views truth-speaking as dangerous to society.
In reality, there is no “Iran nuclear crisis.” Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. Both the current Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and his predecessor, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, have issued and repeatedly confirmed edicts that absolutely ban – on religious grounds – the development of nuclear weapons.
The American CIA and Israeli Mossad essentially acknowledge this. Both agencies have issued reports stating that there is no evidence Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
Claims to the contrary are fraudulent. Gareth Porter’s book Manufactured Crisis shows that the same neoconservative and Israeli networks that fabricated fake evidence of Iraqi WMD also forged phony documents purporting to show an Iranian interest in nuclear weapons. Both forgeries were designed to trick America into fighting wars for Israel.
Such swindles and forgeries are “noble lies” in the eyes of neoconservatives. Their “noble lies” about 9/11-anthrax and Iraqi WMD led to the deaths of more than a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan, the creation of many millions of refugees, the long-term poisoning of those countries with depleted uranium, the rise of the so-called Islamic State, the destruction of America’s international reputation, and a groundswell of well-justified vitriolic hatred of America and Israel all over the world. The neocon claim that the ends justify the means is preposterous in light of these facts.
If US President Obama and the other P5+1 leaders had fully faced these facts and declared them openly, it would have been a smashing victory for truth. Unfortunately, hypocrisy is the way of the world and especially the way of the West. So they are retiring the “Iranian nuclear crisis” myth quietly by pretending that their hard-won agreement has saved the world from being destroyed by (nonexistent) Iranian nuclear weapons.
The P5+1 leaders are fighting a big lie with a smaller lie – a risky strategy. By refusing to expose the false premise of an “Iranian nuclear threat,” the P5+1 leaders are leaving the door open for neocons to try to revive the myth.
In hopes of preventing such retrenchment, Obama and his realist faction of the P5+1 are firing warning shots across Netanyahu’s bow – and across the bows of Israeli assets in Congress. They have officially exposed the Israeli nuclear weapons program by declassifying US government documents showing Israel has been making and stockpiling nuclear weapons for decades, unmasking Netanyahu as the worst imaginable hypocrite. And they have exposed Congressional collusion with Netanyahu that violates US Constitutional law.
Let us briefly review the case for charging Congressional representatives with violating the Constitution of the United States. According to reports apparently leaked by the US Administration, Netanyahu spied on the negotiations and fed secret information to his stooges in Congress in an attempt to torpedo an agreement with Iran.
By accepting information classified as secret under US law, provided by a foreign (Israeli) intelligence service, as part of an effort to undermine the President’s negotiations with a foreign power (Iran), numerous pro-Israel Senators and Representatives clearly violated Article II Section 2 of the American Constitution. That section holds that the power to negotiate treaties is vested solely with the President; the Senate’s role is merely “advice and consent.” In the Federalist Papers No. 64, the framers of the Constitution explain that the purpose for reserving this power to the President is to ensure that diplomacy can be conducted in secret, so that the contents of treaties can remain secret until they are submitted to the Senate for ratification.
Collaborating with a foreign intelligence service to spy on the President’s secret negotiations in order to publicize and wreck those negotiations clearly violates Article II Section 2. And if we face the unpleasant fact that Israel is an enemy of the United States, given that it has repeatedly waged war on the US by attacking US targets and mass-murdering Americans, from the Lavon Affair of 1954 to the USS Liberty massacre of 1967 to the controlled demolitions of September 11th, 2001, we have no choice but to admit that these Congressmen are guilty of treason as well.
Would the Obama Administration really consider charging Israeli assets in Congress with violating the Constitution . . . or even treason? Might Obama even consider revealing to the American people that Israel, which has essentially stolen more than a trillion dollars from America, is not America’s friend, but its worst enemy?
Senator Diane Feinstein, a wealthy liberal Zionist close to the Obama Administration, recognizes that Netanyahu’s actions are endangering Israel. In a recent interview she said she wished Netanyahu would “contain himself” because his rash actions could “backfire.”
If Netanyahu’s out-of-control chutzpah does backfire to the point that Israel’s crimes against America are fully exposed, truth will win a resounding victory.
Unfortunately, the Zionist stranglehold on mainstream media will probably prevent “big truth” from leaking out in a big way, at least in the near term. So we truth-seekers will presumably have to content ourselves with smaller victories. One such small victory is the impending “resolution” of the phony, nonexistent, Zionist-fabricated “Iran nuclear crisis.”
Shlomo Sand’s gracefully written and translated short book, How I Stopped Being a Jew, deals with a question many have wondered about but have been afraid to ask: What makes someone a Jew? While it has been a puzzle from time immemorial, it is more salient today as Israel welcomes all deemed Jewish, regardless of their nationality or religious beliefs (or lack of them). On the other hand, non-Jews (25% of Israelis), even if born and resident in Israel, are not quite full citizens of the Jewish state.
“If the United States of America decided tomorrow that it was not the state of all American citizens but rather the state of those persons around the whole world who identify as Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it would bear a striking resemblance to the Jewish State of Israel.” (p. 82)
Sand is an Israeli, and a secular and atheist Jew, defined by his parentage as Jewish by the state of Israel. He is a professor at Tel Aviv University, specializing in French history. He is best known as the author of two controversial books, The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012).
His major argument is that the claim that today’s Jews are descendants of the ancient Israelites is simply a myth, of considerable use to the Zionist cause. Sand’s theories are ably expounded in a CounterPunch article of February 14-16, 2014, by Paul Atwood.
Briefly, Sand contends that European Jews, and even many of the Middle Eastern ones, are descendants of converts to Judaism, with no biological connection to ancient Israelites. Yet the founders of Zionism, mostly secular and atheist Jews, while rejecting the supernatural aspects and miracles of the Old Testament, proposed its stories to be accurate history.
“To justify colonization in Palestine, Zionism appealed above all to the Bible, which it presented as a legal property title to the land. It then proceeded to depict the past of various Jewish communities not as a dense and varied fresco of the motley groups that converted to Judaism in Asia, Europe and Africa, but rather as a linear history of a race-people, supposedly exiled by force from their native land and aspiring for two thousand years to return to it.” (p. 48)
This provided a somewhat shaky justification of “return” to the “Promised Land,” in already inhabited Palestine, but it was adequate to persuade the great powers, which were feeling guilty about the fate of Jews in WWII, and also anxious to have an offshore place for the survivors to migrate.
In addition, it provided an identity and rationale for the secular and atheist Jews of the US and elsewhere who were urged to “return” to Israel to help develop and defend the land, by joining the kibbutzim and the military.
Sand, who identifies as an Israeli and wishes it were the only form of national identity for all inhabitants, rejects the historical as well as the cultural, racial, ethnic, and biological bases of Jewishness. He questions the orthodox definition of a Jew: a person born of a Jewish mother, who was herself thus born since time immemorial, “I have the increasing impression that, in certain respects, Hitler was the victor the Second World War… his perverted ideology infiltrated itself and resurfaced.” (p. 5)
He explores the idea of a common Jewish culture apart from religious belief, but finds no convincing evidence. Jews of Western Europe, Africa, and the Middle East may have practiced their religion, but in everyday life shared the culture and settlements of their fellow nationals. (p. 35) In contrast, the Yiddish speakers of Eastern Europe had a distinctive culture in dress, food, language, and religious fundamentalism. (p. 36) The children of these Jews often became atheist socialists, some of whom, rejecting the shtetl culture, founded the Zionist movement.
“The Yiddish colonists [of Israel], in fact, were very quick to discard their despised mother tongue. The first thing they needed was a language that could unite Jews the world over, and neither Theodor Herzl nor Edmond de Rothschild could communicate in Yiddish. The early Zionists subsequently aspired to create a new Jew, who would break with the popular culture of their parents and ancestors as well as with the wretched townships of the Pale of Settlement.” (p. 41)
Sand maintains that Jewish holidays serve only as nostalgia for secular Jews and do not honor their universalist culture. For example, the traditional Haggadah for Passover Seder includes an “explicit demand to exterminate all the peoples who did not believe in the God of the Jews and had dared to attack Israel. . .” (p. 67) In the book of Exodus (23:23), God promises to “exterminate all the inhabitants of Canaan in order to make room in the Promised Land for the sons of Israel.” (p. 72) The Old Testament command to love thy neighbor as thyself was applied only to fellow Jews. (p. 70) The Talmud states: “You shall be called men, but the idolaters are not called men.” (p. 71)
Sand provides a long list of Jews who adopted a universalistic morality (from Karl Marx to Naomi Klein) and also distanced themselves from the Jewish religious tradition. (p. 73)
Sand refutes those who claim that what binds all Jews is their history as unique victims of persecution: “Zionist rhetoric [insists that] there are hosts of murderers like Hitler, while there have never been and never will be victims like the Jews.” (p. 63) Yet millions of non-Jews were killed by the Nazis; persecution, genocide and ethnic cleansing have been and continue to be inflicted on many peoples.
Some critics of Sand argue that a motive for remaining Jewish despite enjoying nothing of its culture or religion is the ability to have legitimacy when criticizing Israeli policies, but this is a merely pragmatic basis for a major decision.
Sand concludes: “I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew.” (p. 97) Although he considers Israel “one of the most racist societies in the Western world” and the perpetrator of “cruel military colonization [of] weak and defenceless victims who are not part of the ‘chosen people,’” he remains “by everyday life and basic culture” an Israeli. (p. 98-99)
Others have resigned from Judaism in protest of Israeli policies; Sand has the additional motive of seeing no convincing basis for Jewish identity other than the religion. Contemporary concepts of free choice of religion and ideology are embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , and warmly championed by secular Jews. So why wouldn’t a person be able to resign from any or all religions and systems of belief? In contrast, one can’t resign from one’s ethnic background; Sand acknowledges that his is Austrian.
While I do not have the expertise to assess Sand’s historical assertions, the status of secular Jews is of personal significance and an issue independent of the exiles, migration, and conversions of people long ago. One problem with Sand’s choice is that Israeli authorities, Jewish religious leaders, the general public, and anti-Semites are not going to let him or others slip out of it so easily. Joining another religion makes resignation more convincing, even legally recognized in Israel, but Sand does not want to do this.
Another issue is how to have holiday celebrations, weddings, funerals, potluck suppers, youth groups, communities of shared values, etc., if you eschew the Jewish institutions. Religion has been a source of social justice activism and solace, despite its flaws. Many secular Jews remain in the faith without faith for these reasons. A solution is to join one of the religions (it means bind together) welcoming atheists, such as Unitarian Universalism, or the burgeoning atheist churches of England.
Sand’s fine accessible book is likely to provoke heated controversy, and it should.
Joan Roelofs, Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire can be reached at joan.roelofs@myfairpoint.net
GAZA CITY – The Gaza Strip electricity distribution company said Sunday that the Gaza Strip would return to the 8-hour program for electricity, in which power is supplied and cut off in 8-hour intervals.
Jamal al-Dardasawi, a spokesman for the company, told Ma’an that it has started to receive the first batches of electricity generated by the local generation station which returned to work Sunday evening.
Al-Dardasawi said the first 24 hours of the new schedule would be confusing, but the schedule would be balanced in all areas with a day.
The return to the program comes after the government’s decision to exempt the station of tax on fuel for three months.
The plant, Gaza’s sole power station, was to be supplied with fuel on Sunday after more than a month-long closure when the Gazan energy authority ran out of funding.
Nathmi Muhanna, PA director of border crossings in the Gaza Strip, said that 10 trucks carrying 400,000 liters of fuel would be passing though the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing on Sunday, and that a regular supply of fuel would be resumed during the week.
On Mar. 2, the Hamas-run energy authority closed the plant after they were unable to afford the taxes demanded by the PA for importing fuel into besieged Gaza.
In December last year, Qatar stepped in and donated $10 million to the PA to cover the tax, effectively exempting Hamas from paying it, but by March that money dried up.
The plant requires 550,000 liters of fuel per day to produce at capacity, the energy authority says.
Even with the plant running, Gaza has only been able to supply about 12 hours of electricity to residents each day, and that it was believed that would fall to just 6 hours after the plant’s shutdown.
Gaza’s energy authority has been plagued by supply problems due to the Israeli blockade, in place since 2007 and upheld by Egypt, as well as devastation caused by war.
Last summer the plant was targeted during the 50-day Israeli offensive on Gaza, completely knocking it out of commission. The Gaza power authority said at the time that the damages from the attack could take up to a year to fix completely.
Both Israel and Egypt also feed electricity into Gaza, but the extent of this supply is severely limited as part of the blockade.
Many individual homes have their own generators, and households can purchase, expensively, fuel that comes into Gaza for private consumption.
US President Barack Obama says he is not seeking to weaken Israel, adding a vulnerable Tel Aviv would be a failure of his presidency.
Obama made the remakes in a 45-minute video interview with New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman, a staunch supporter of Israel and its policies, on Saturday. The interview was posted on Sunday.
“I would consider it a failure on my part, a fundamental failure of my presidency, if on my watch or as a consequence of work that I’ve done, Israel was rendered more vulnerable,” Obama told Friedman.
Referring to the differences between Washington and Tel Aviv over the recent mutual understanding between the P5+1 and Iran over its nuclear energy program, Obama said Israel has reason to be concerned.
Obama said that no disagreements between Israel and the United States can break their mutual bond.
He also said that America’s defense of Israel is unshakable. He said the Switzerland understanding had a clear message that if anyone messes with Israel, America will be there.
Obama once again defended the understanding achieved on issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, calling it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”.
On Thursday, the P5+1 group – the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany – reached an outline of a potentially historic agreement with Iran over Tehran’s civilian nuclear work that would lift all international sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic in exchange for certain steps Tehran will take with regard to its nuclear program.
Obama has hailed the “historic understanding” with Iran, saying that it paves the way for a final agreement in three months.
Israeli officials have called it a “historic mistake which will make the world far more dangerous.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN on Sunday that the nuclear understanding reached in Switzerland last week was a “bad deal” which would endanger Tel Aviv’s survival.
“It doesn’t roll back Iran’s nuclear program. It keeps a vast nuclear infrastructure in place,” Netanyahu said. “Not a single centrifuge is destroyed. Not a single nuclear facility is shut down including the underground facilities…. Thousands of centrifuges will keep spinning enriching uranium. That’s a bad deal.”
A new report has revealed that Israel forces intentionally shelled a United Nations watchtower in southern Lebanon, which left a Spanish peacekeeper dead back in January.
The El Pais newspaper article published on Sunday cited extracts from a confidential Spanish military report on the incident, saying the Israeli forces corrected the trajectory of the artillery fire to hit the UN post. Thirty-six-year-old corporal Javier Soria Toledo was killed in the attack.
According to the report, Corporal Ivan Lopez Sanchez, a Spanish soldier stationed near the post, told investigators it was clear that the UN position was being targeted, noting, “Every time, they corrected the trajectory from Majidiye to the 4-28″ post, where the United Nations Interim Force Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers were stationed.
A second Spanish solider confirmed Sanchez’s report, saying the first salvo of shells landed some 500 meters north of the UN post and then Israel “corrected the trajectory towards the position.”
A third solider added that the fragmentation bombs used in the attack targeted the post’s main watchtower.
The newspaper also quoted a UN report as saying that around 20 artillery shells, 90 mortar grenades and five projectiles were fired at the UN post during the attack.
Spain and Israel have agreed to carry out a joint investigation into the incident.
The UNIFIL has some 10,000-troops, from 36 nations, which include some 600 Spanish soldiers.
The estimable McClatchy News Service says President Obama “scored a decisive win” by negotiating an agreement that “will prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon” and termed it “a personal triumph for the President.”
Not surprisingly, the painfully negotiated pact was denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has repeatedly, and illegally, threatened Iran over its alleged desire to build an atomic bomb. But Obama’s rebuff of Netanyahu’s position was well deserved, given Israel’s record of stealing American military secrets and spying on private American talks with its allies.
If Iran had been guilty of such crimes, the American public would now be deaf from the outcry of the Republicans in Congress. Americans need to remember that Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American civilian naval intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1987 to selling classified information to Israel. At least 800 documents were snitched. Pollard, who became an Israeli citizen, sits in a U.S. prison today in Butner, N.C., serving a life sentence. Former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger said his espionage “would cause the greatest harm to our national security.”
Israel admitted its role in Pollard’s theft. Israel had him on a monthly payroll, the better to enable him to do his dirty work. When the spying was disclosed, Israel apologized for its role. So sorry, right? Maybe so, but just two weeks ago Adam Entous of The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel spied on the recent closed-door talks between the U.S. and its European allies concerning the Iranian negotiations. Do these repeated episodes of spying suggest that Israel is not exactly a trustworthy ally?
Not to our Congress, which keeps voting Israel $3-billion a year in military aid! According to the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, between 1949 and 2008 alone, Israel hauled in $56 billion in American military handouts. One could make a case that it was the American public that paid Mr. Pollard’s salary to steal American military secrets.
Now Mr. Netanyahu trumpets that no matter what agreement is reached, Israel will take action against Iran as it chooses. Of course, it’s illegal for one UN member to threaten another, much less attack it, but no matter.
Republicans in Congress might keep in mind that when Mr. Netanyahu addressed Congress last month he accused the Iranians of playing “a pretty good game of hide and cheat” but presented zero evidence of any sort to prove it. Here was a golden opportunity for him to show what his brilliant spy service had come up with. Yet all he produced were accusations.
If anyone is playing a game of “hide and cheat” with the UN inspectors it is Mr. Netanyahu, who does not allow them to enter Israel to inspect his nuclear facilities—reported to conceal between 80 or more (200?) atomic bombs. Iran lets the UN inspectors in, of course, but UN inspectors cannot get in to Israel.
What’s more, “Israelis who reveal details about the weapons program can face prosecution and lengthy prison terms,” wrote John Cassidy in The New Yorker on March 5, 2012:
“In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a former nuclear technician, gave photographs he had taken of the Negev Nuclear Research Center, near the city of Dimona, in the Negev desert, to the Sunday Times of London. After the publication of Vanunu’s story, Mossad agents snatched him from Rome, where he had been lured on vacation, and returned him to Israel. There he served eighteen years in jail, eleven of them in solitary confinement.”
If Netanyahu belittles the work of UN investigators by charging the Iranians are deceiving them, maybe that’s because they tell the truth—Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon and is not making one. In fact, the former Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that he had not seen “a shred of evidence” that Iran was “building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.”
ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient who spent 12 years at the IAEA, told Hersh, “I don’t believe Iran is a clear and present danger. All I see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran.” Hersh pointed out that the last two U.S. National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress “have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.”
Meanwhile, American spies in Iran are doing their very best to find any traces of military nuclear development. If they had found anything, most likely it would be on front pages globally by now. Hersh says some of the tactics our spies resorted to included:
# Surreptitiously removing street signs and replacing them with signs containing radiation sensors.
# Removing bricks from buildings suspected of containing nuclear enrichment activities and replacing them “with bricks embedded with radiation-monitoring devices.”
# Spreading high-powered sensors disguised as stones randomly along roadways where a suspected underground weapon site was under construction.
As for the Congressional critics of the new deal, McClatchy News quotes President Obama as saying, “Do you (critics of the deal) really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?”
Summing up: President Obama has not only made the right decision in negotiating an agreement with Iran but could strike another blow for peace by terminating U.S. military aid to Israel (and every other nation as well.) Dare we say it? America first! #
Sherwood Ross can be reached at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
Ami Ayalon, the former chief of Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet, told Charlie Rose in a 2012 interview that Israel hoped to foster a ‘Sunni coalition’ led by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to assail Shia Muslims of the region led by Iran.
Ayalon told Rose that, “Iran is a huge threat. We cannot live with Iran having nuclear military power. We should not accept it.”
“How much time do we have and what do we do?” the Israeli spook asked.
“[We need to create] a kind of a Sunni coalition … with Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia… who understand that the major conflict is with Shia [Muslims] led by Iran.”
Interestingly, such a coalition has indeed formed in recent weeks with the Saudi-led bombing offensive in Yemen against the Iran-aligned Shia Houthi rebels who have seized power in the war-torn country.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt and other Sunni-oriented dictatorships and Western-backed quisling regimes have formed a ‘coalition’ to stamp out the Shia rebellion in Yemen.
ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other extremist groups currently fighting to topple the Shia/Alawite Assad regime in Syria may also be considered part of this ‘Sunni coalition’ that Ayalon speaks of. The Wahhabi militants who have besieged Syria and who previously attacked Libya were and continue to be subsidized and supported by Washington’s regional puppets (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Turkey).
In a 2014 interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the US should strive to weaken both Sunnis and Shias by letting them fight each other.
In a 2013 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, revealed that Israel’s main goal was to break down the Shia alliance of Damascus, Tehran and the Lebanese Hezbollah by siding with the Wahhabist radicals of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
“The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” Oren said.
Reports of Israel aiding and abetting anti-Assad militants, including those of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, are abundant and well-founded.
Oren went on to remark with glee that the Gulf sheikhdoms have in recent years come to embrace Israel’s designs vis-a-vis Syria, Iran and even the Palestinian issue, saying:
In the last 64 years there has probably never been a greater confluence of interest between us and several Gulf States. With these Gulf States we have agreements on Syria, on Egypt, on the Palestinian issue. We certainly have agreements on Iran. This is one of those opportunities presented by the Arab Spring.
Ayalon’s admission confirms what many suspect is an Israeli-led divide and conquer strategy where Israel and the West are using Sunni and Wahhabi zealots, useful idiots, and sell-outs to do the bidding of the Zionist regime.
I doubt these professors have anything to fear from a food tax
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 19, 2016
A group of researchers in Oxford University, England have suggested that imposing a massive tax on carbon intensive foods – specifically protein rich foods like meat and dairy – could help combat climate change. […]
This proposal, from a group of people who have probably never missed a meal in their lives, is totally obscene. High income countries often have a lot of poor people who would be hard hit by increases in the price of food.
Needlessly exacerbating the risk poor people don’t get enough to eat, especially children and pregnant mothers, who are especially vulnerable to adverse health impacts from lack of protein in their diet – if this ghastly proposal is ever implemented, future generations will look upon it as a crime against humanity. – Read full article
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