Israel may ask for double its usual $3.8 billion from the U.S this year
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | April 26, 2020
Breaking Defense, a digital magazine that covers military issues, reports that Israel may ask for its U.S. aid early, possibly in a lump sum that could be as high as $7.6 billion.
This would work out to almost $21 million per day from American taxpayers, even though the U.S. is approaching a $4 trillion deficit (the largest in the world), and Israel typically has a lower unemployment rate than the United states.
The report is by Breaking Defense Israel correspondent Arie Egozi, an Israeli citizen who served in the Israeli military and is close to the Israeli security establishment.
Egozi’s article states that because of the coronavirus pandemic, “Israel’s Ministry of Defense and high command have hammered out an emergency plan for an appeal to Washington.”
The article, which carries a Tel Aviv dateline, reports: “Sources here say the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing Israel to ask Washington to make major changes to the [aid] agreement, including a request to receive the annual allocation $3.8 billion earlier than planned.”
U.S. aid to Israel is normally disbursed in October, in a lump sum that is deposited to an interest-bearing Israeli account in the New York Federal Reserve Bank. (Since the U.S. has been operating at a deficit, this means that the U.S. government borrows the money and pays interest on it long after it has gone out.)
Potentially $14,000 per minute from American taxpayers
In addition to receiving the aid earlier than usual, a “senior source” quoted by Egozi suggests that Israel may request that the aid expected for 2024 also be disbursed this year.
If that happens, it would work out to nearly $21 million per day, or $14,460 per minute to Israel from American taxpayers suffering from a devastating hit to the U.S. economy.
Moreover, it is highly likely that when 2024 comes around, the advance would be forgiven, as have numerous U.S. “loans” to Israel, and Israel would get the aid again.
The current aid to Israel is based on a 2016 agreement by the Obama Administration to give Israel $3.8 billion annually for the next 10 years – a total of $38 billion, touted as the largest such aid package in U.S. history. Overall, Israel has received more U.S. aid than any other country, on average, 7,000 times more per capita than others.
While the Obama Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is a non-binding agreement, Israel has received this sum every year since it was signed. Israel advocates in Congress are currently seeking to cement it into a law that would permit this amount to go even higher in the future.
A ‘wild idea’ that might not appeal to Americans
Egozi reports that the former president of Israel Aerospace Industries, Joseph Weiss, said asking for the money ahead of time is “a wild idea,” but said it “makes sense in the special conditions created [in Israel] by the pandemic.”
However, it’s unlikely that this would make equivalent sense to Americans, who have been at least as hard hit by the pandemic.
Over 26 million Americans so far have lost their jobs, and many U.S. companies are facing bankruptcy. A comment below Egozi’s article suggests how Americans would respond to a massive outlay to Israel this year:
“Why do Americans put up with all this money going to Israel when millions of them have no healthcare, no job, and are eating from food banks?”
To deflect such outrage, Israel partisans in the U.S. typically defend the aid by saying that it eventually goes to U.S. defense companies. However, they fail to mention that millions of the dollars go to Israeli companies that compete with American businesses, often leading to job losses in the U.S. No other country receiving U.S. military aid is allowed to do this.
In addition, many Americans feel that Israel should use its own money to purchase its weaponry, as the U.S. does. They point out that if Americans wished to subsidize weapons companies, the U.S. government could simply purchase items for American use.
Similarly, a growing number of Americans object to the uses Israel makes of U.S. weapons, regularly deploying them in violation of both international law and U.S. law (also this).
However, the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. is extremely influential in both political parties, and U.S. media rarely report on aid to Israel, so the lump sum could slip through without notice.
An administration official recently said that Israel would not need to worry about money “even if there is a depression.”
Petition by Council for the National Interest
A critic of the aid, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, points out that Israel is not an ally, and that it has often “done damage to the United States.” Giraldi, who is currently executive director of the Council for the National Interest (CNI), notes that Israel often spies on the U.S. and has stolen American technology. It also tried to sink a U.S. Navy ship, killing 34 Americans and injuring over 170.
Giraldi is asking people to sign a petition by CNI: “Stop the $3.8 Billion to Israel.”
The petition states: “… We need to take care of Americans and not send our tax money to a wealthy foreign country. Israel has already received billions of dollars from American taxpayers. It has received over $10 million per day, year after year. This year it’s time to keep our money home.”
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.
Two Palestinians wounded in violent Israeli raid on Kafr Qaddum, Settlers pitch tent in Bethlehem
Palestine Information Center – April 26, 2020
WEST BANK – Two Palestinian young men were badly injured during violent clashes on Saturday with the Israeli occupation forces in Kafr Qaddum town, east of Qalqilya.
Local activist Murad Shetaiwi said that a large number of Israeli troops stormed the town from different sides and embarked on intensively firing live and rubber bullets at local youths.
Shetaiwi added that two young men suffered rubber bullet injuries, one in his neck and the other in his face.
He also said that soldiers deliberately fired live ammunition at water tanks on rooftops of some houses, causing damage to them.
Every week, Palestinians and foreign activists stage a weekly march in the town of Kafr Qaddum to protest Israel’s closure of the village’s main street and settlement activities.
The Israeli occupation army blocked off the road after expanding the illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim in 2003, forcing village residents to take a bypass road in order to travel to Nablus, which has extended the travel time to Nablus from 15 minutes to 40 minutes, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
In a separate incident, a horde of extremist Jewish settlers on the same day deployed a tent on Palestinian land in al-Khinzeer area in Jab’a village, south of Bethlehem.
Recently, Jewish settlers living in illegal West Bank settlements escalated their violations in different areas of Bethlehem, where they set up a prefabricated house in the Palestinian area of Khilat al-Nahla and planted saplings on plots of land in the south of the city as part of their attempts to seize more lands.
Palestinians hunker down for Ramadan, facing a virus that doesn’t discriminate but an occupier that does
By Jonathan Cook | Palestine DeepDive | April 25, 2020
As the holy fasting month of Ramadan begins, the coronavirus outbreak in Israel and the Palestinian territories is proving how inevitably intertwined the two populations’ lives are, while also underlining the extreme differentials of power between them.
While 15,000 Israelis have tested positive for Covid-19 so far, the numbers infected in the occupied territories are still measured in the hundreds – though that, in part, reflects the difficulties for Palestinians of getting tested. The Palestinian Authority is desperately short of equipment, including testing kits, to deal with the virus.
Research suggests that most infections of Palestinians have originated in contacts with Israelis. Israel is much further advanced along the contagion curve because of its population’s access to international travel, the country’s greater exposure to tourism and its integration into the global economy.
Israel’s tight restrictions over Palestinians’ freedom of movement – from the complete blockade on Gaza to the walling-in of the West Bank – as well as its colonial-style control of the Palestinian economy have ensured the late arrival of Covid-19 to the occupied territories.
But it has also guaranteed that the Palestinian leaderships – both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank – will be weakly positioned to cope when contagion kicks in more forcefully.
And just such a major outbreak is all but inevitable in the West Bank. Ramadan may well provide the trigger.
In recent years about 80,000 Palestinians – from a West Bank population of nearly 3 million – have received permits to work either in Israel or in Israeli settlements, with a few tens of thousands more entering “illegally” through missing sections of the wall. For most families, such work is the only hope they have of earning a living.
The Palestinian economy is entirely dependent on Israel. Palestinians cannot leave the West Bank without permission from Israel, which is often hard to get.
Israel imposes costly and lengthy bureaucratic controls on Palestinian exports, making it nigh-impossible for Palestinian firms to compete in the global market-place.
And World Bank studies show that Israel has plundered most of the West Bank’s key resources, making it impossible for Palestinians themselves to exploit those resources. Israel even controls the flow of tourists into Palestinian areas.
But Palestinian workers’ dependence on Israel is now placing them in harm’s way. Although many are likely to catch the virus in Israel while working, Israel is refusing to take responsibility for their welfare.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is able to do little itself because many of the workers are from Area C, the two-thirds of the West Bank that Israel fully controls under the long-expired Oslo Accords. The PA has no access to these areas.
Difficult choice
The Ramadan holiday is likely to severely exacerbate the problem of the virus spreading in the occupied territories.
Last month, as Israel intensified its lockdown to prevent contagion in the run-up to its week-long Passover holiday in the second week of April, Palestinian workers were given a choice. Either they committed to continue working in Israel for several more weeks, often in jobs defined as “essential”, such as food production, or they had to stop work and return to the West Bank until the lockdown ended.
Many chose to keep working and stayed in Israel, while many more worked off-radar, without permits, by sneaking in and out through one of the many gaps in the wall.
This latter group, among the poorest members of Palestinian society, is posing a particular problem for West Bank officials. These workers are at high risk of catching the virus, and can spread it without the PA knowing.
For this reason, groups of Palestinians are reported to be patrolling the missing sections of wall to stop such workers entering Israel. Paradoxically, there are even cases of them trying to patch up breaks in the wall on Israel’s behalf.
The Israeli government has supposedly put in place regulations to keep the Palestinian workers safe: firms must take their temperatures daily, ensure social distancing is maintained on production sites, properly house workers and make sure no more than four sleep to a room.
But the government is leaving it to the firms to comply. There are no inspectors. Media investigations show that the rules are being widely flouted, leading to the rapid spread of the virus among Palestinian workers.
Any who try to leave Israel to avoid catching Covid-19 are being threatened by their employers that their work permits will be revoked, leaving them without work long term.
And now many are heading home to the West Bank to spend Ramadan with their families. Israel has refused to conduct any testing, so a proportion will be bringing – unknown to them – the virus home.
But these workers and their families are not just facing an imminent health crisis that Palestinian medical services are in no shape to withstand. They are also being hit harshly in the pocket by Israel’s lockdown policies.
Palestinians who work in Israel are often the only breadwinner, providing for an extended family that lives close to the poverty line. For the forseeable future there will be no income for the tens of thousands of workers who joined the lockdown in the West Bank before Passover, for those who caught the virus in Israel and were forced home, and for those returning for Ramadan.
Israel is also taking no responsibility for their welfare, even though many have worked for years in Israel and have had to pay a substantial proportion of their wages each month into a sick fund run by the Israeli government.
The fund amounts to more than $140 million, and has grown so large because Israel makes it almost impossible for Palestinians to make a claim.
Israeli human rights groups have pressed Israel to release the funds to Palestinians who are not able to work to help them through this health and economic emergency. So far the Israeli government has done nothing.
Trying to fill the void
The Palestinians under Israeli rule in occupied East Jerusalem face their own set of problems.
Despite claiming that all of Jerusalem – including the Palestinian parts of the city – are Israel’s “united capital”, Israeli officials have continued an apartheid-like approach in the city that treats Palestinians, who are classified by Israel simply as “residents”, very differently from Jews, who are Israeli “citizens”.
The numbers of Palestinians who have officially tested positive so far in Jerusalem is still low, at several dozen, but that probably reflects the fact that until recently there were almost no clinics carrying out testing in Palestinian neighbourhoods.
Many Palestinian areas have not been sanitised by cleaning crews, as Jewish areas have been, nor has there been significant enforcement by Israeli police of lockdown measures or mask-wearing regulations – a surprise given that Israeli police are usually very diligent in patrolling Palestinian areas and making arrests.
Israeli authorities have also been slow to put out information in Arabic about the virus and on safety measures – either for 330,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem or for the 1.8 million Palestinians who live inside Israel and have a very degraded form of Israeli citizenship.
Experts say the lack of an awareness-raising campaign in Palestinian areas will likely lead to a rapid rise in cases over Ramadan, if extended families follow traditional practice and spend more time together.
Palestinian officials in Jerusalem have tried to fill the void by disseminating information, organising sanitisation operations and helping to set up a testing clinic. Israel has cracked down on any such activities, including by violently arresting the Palestinian governor of Jerusalem and the PA’s Jerusalem affairs minister.
Instead Palestinian charities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have formed into a “Jerusalem Alliance” to try to pick up the slack left by Israel.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem are likely to be especially vulnerable to disease. Three-quarters live below the poverty line, and less than half are formally connected to the water network. Planning restrictions mean there is widespread overcrowding.
East Jerusalem’s three Palestinian hospitals are also in poor shape, bedevilled by large debts courtesy of Donald Trump, who cut $25 million in financial aid in 2018.
The Israeli health ministry has also failed to provide protective equipment and funds to these hospitals to deal with the coronavirus crisis. They have found an unusual ally in Jerusalem’s mayor, Moshe Leon. He has berated the Israeli government, apparently fearful that West Jerusalem hospitals will be overwhelmed if Palestinians cannot get help from their own hospitals.
More precarious still is the situation of Palestinian neighbourhoods, like Kfar Aqab, that were effectively split off from East Jerusalem after Israel built a wall putting them on the West Bank side. That has made city services difficult to access for some 100,000 Jerusalem residents.
Israel has been progressively abandoning responsibility for these areas – in an effort to raise the Jewish majority in the rest of Jerusalem.
Nonetheless, it has been reluctant to allow the PA to fill the void. The Covid-19 crisis is gradually revealing Israel’s intention towards these “outside” neighbourhoods of Jerusalem. On Thursday, Israel sent in the army to pull down coronavirus information notices that had been put up by the PA.
The Israel army has no role in Jerusalem, but does operate in the West Bank. The new action suggests Israel is preparing to formally reclassify areas like Kfar Aqab as no longer part of Jerusalem.
Apartheid wins out
Things are only slightly better for the fifth of Israel’s population who belong to its Palestinian minority. These 1.8 million second-class citizens are descended from Palestinians who managed to avoid Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations in 1948, when Israel was established on the Palestinians’ homeland.
Israel has created a strange hybrid apartheid system, in which Jewish citizens live almost entirely separate from Palestinian citizens. The two populations are educated separately, and many areas of the economy are segregated too.
But one area where Palestinian and Jewish citizens are highly integrated – coming into regular contact – is in the health sector.
In fact, Palestinian citizens are over-represented in the medical professions, in large part because it is one of the few significant areas of the economy that is not defined in security terms and is therefore relatively open to the Palestinian minority.
One in five doctors in Israel is a Palestinian citizen, a quarter of nurses are, and a half of all pharmacists.
But despite the strong showing of Palestinian citizens in health services, the Israeli government’s apartheid instincts have won out.
In February Israel established an emergency team to handle the pandemic. It devised a national strategy for testing, quarantines, hospitalisations, awareness-raising and the lockdown policy.
However, not one expert from the Palestinian minority – or from the occupied territories – was included on the committee, leaving it entirely ignorant of the special conditions relevant to Palestinian society, in either Israel or the occupied territories.
The Israeli health ministry also refused to meet with the minority’s own national health committee, established by Palestinian doctors and researchers in Israel to help tackle the virus in the Palestinian community.
These failures explain the long delay in Israel producing any information on the virus in Arabic, and the similar delay in setting up testing stations in Palestinian communities. Limited action came only after concerted protests from Palestinian legislators in the parliament.
After a very low initial rate of infection, Palestinian citizens are now the fastest growing group in Israel testing positive for the virus – and that despite continuing low levels of testing.
Ramadan is expected to exacerbate that upward trend dramatically as families shop for food and eat meals with extended families. Mosques are already closed, and Muslim leaders have told worshippers to pray at home. In a last-minute effort to avert a new epidemic, the Israeli government has banned shops and businesses opening during the hours of darkness, as would normally occur during Ramadan.
As in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Palestinians in Israel are vulnerable. Two-thirds of families live below the poverty line – more than three times the rate of Jewish families. There is massive overcrowding in Palestinian communities, after decades in which Israel has refused new building permits for Palestinians.
And health services are poor or non-existent in many Palestinian communities, especially in dozens of Bedouin villages Israel has refused to recognise. In these communities, Bedouin are also denied water and electricity.
Further, Israel’s main ambulance service, Magen David Adom, rarely operates in Palestinian communities, though its staff alone have training to deal with coronavirus. It is unclear how the private companies serving Palestinian communities will cope if there is a major outbreak.
And as is the case in other Palestinian communities, Palestinian families in Israel are also particularly exposed to the economic consequences of lockdown. Many work as casual labourers, and have lost their work during the past weeks.
The coronavirus outbreak was a test of Israel’s ability to put aside its security and demographic obsessions and deal with the Palestinians not just as fellow human beings but also as allies in a struggle for the health of both peoples. In that test, Israel has failed dismally.
Israel and World Jewry
By Evan Jones | American Herald Tribune | April 24, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic hits the world. Undeterred, the Israeli forces of Occupation (including the settlers) escalate the rampage and the outrages. Murders, harassment and arrests, home demolitions, destruction and/or theft of virus aid equipment and food and brutalizing of aid workers, Gaza crop poisoning on a grand scale, West Bank crop destruction, etc. Spitting on Palestinians is now de rigueur. Business as usual. Sadism on a grand scale. Whence the motivation? And the collective psychological reward? The Jewish God is a militant deity.
Israel is a pariah state. It is an apartheid state in its construction, [1] from its inception as an ethnocracy, not one for which the label ‘apartheid’ is merely a dangerous prospect on the horizon with a completely colonized West Bank.
How does Israel survive as such, given that apartheid South Africa has disappeared into history. It survives essentially because of support from the institutionalized structures of establishment world Jewry. Period.
Don’t talk Christian Zionists, as they are a side issue, crazies succoured to dilute the central causal lineage.
The US umbrella is tangibly of enormous importance. But behind the White House compliance is the Zionist lobby, from Truman onward (albeit with occasional wobbles). The Zionist lobby owns Congress; those members they don’t own they simply extrude (starting with William Fulbright in 1974, Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, Cynthia McKinney, etc.). The massive role of the US in supporting Israel is a product of institutionalized American Jewry – now centred on the peak body AIPAC.[2] The argument that US support of Israel is an instrumental means of projecting US power in the Middle East is diversionary; the posited hierarchy of master and proxy won’t wash. Cui bono?
The Zionist lobby only recently destroyed what was left of the integrity of the British Labour Party, installing a functionary at its head. The British state is Zionist-occupied territory; ditto that of France, Germany (hobbled by the Jewish holocaust), Canada and Australia.
Israel, as a racist state, is engaged in criminality sui generis. It was a guaranteed outcome known from the start. Theodore Herzl noted (1896):
‘An infiltration [of Jewish migrants to Palestine] is bound to end badly. It continues to the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened … Immigration is consequently futile unless based on an assured supremacy’. Violence was implicit in Zionism from the outset.[3]
The native population felt itself threatened immediately, but the Zionist movement found solace and then salvation in the arrival of World War, the Balfour Declaration and subsequently the British Mandate over Palestine. Until the Zionists could muster the firepower to create its ‘promised land’ unilaterally by terrorism. That firepower was acquired from British training en masse, just prior to World War II (to quell the Arab rebellion) and during the War itself.
As David Hirst notes, regarding the massacres and bombings by Jewish forces in response to the MacDonald White Paper of May 1939: [4]
‘The ideological roots of ‘gun Zionism reach back to Theodor Herzl himself. It was inevitable, as he foresaw, that armed force would eventually come into its own as the principal instrument of a movement which, in its earlier and weaker phase, could only rely on the protection of an imperial sponsor. That phase was now drawing to a close.’
Israeli criminality must be sheeted home to the personnel within the institutions of the Israeli state – politicians, the military and intelligence services, the judiciary, etc. They are crimes of individuals, groupings, institutionalized, the personnel being uniformly Jewish.
Isn’t this criminality bad for world Jewry and what it means to be Jewish? Apparently not. Establishment Jewish institutions, with one voice, sign up for Israel’s crimes. More, support of Israel is their raison d’être – all while simultaneously shedding crocodile tears about anti-Semitism. The global Jewish community, whether Jewish individuals like it or not, is implicated in Israeli criminality by the dominant Jewish organizations who claim to speak for national Jewish communities.
The Wikipedia entry of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), clearly sanctioned by its subject, notes: ‘The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, represents the interests of the Australian Jewish community to …’. Here’s a representative conflation of the interests of the state of Israel and of a national Jewish community in its entirety.
John Lyons was Middle East correspondent for The Australian newspaper during 2009-15. His Balcony Over Jerusalem [5] is notable for the attention paid to the lobby. Like all budding Middle East correspondents, Lyons was inevitably the subject of attempted seduction and, failing that, subsequently the subject of escalating attacks for his endeavour to fulfil his role as independent reporter. A senior Israeli military officer observed to Lyons: ‘The Israel lobby in Australia is the most powerful lobby in the world in terms of impact it has within its own country’.
The nation-based lobby works to ensure that its own government (whichever Party is in power) remains complacent, acquiescent, if not blood red in support. It also works tirelessly to control the information flow. Because Israel stinks, disinformation (lies, counter-narratives, fairy stories) and censorship have to be an integral part of the lobby’s activities. Lyons recounts how, in particular, AIJAC’s Colin Rubenstein constantly pressured senior management at The Australian to close down his reporting. (Senior management of the Murdoch-owned paper supported Lyons, in spite of the attempted scuttling by a middle level editor).
The other major Australian media chain, Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment), owner of the major Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra dailies, has faced the same pressure. Ditto the publicly-owned television stations ABC & SBS. Fairfax/Nine has persistently caved in, granting privileged access to the opinion and letters pages to pro-Israel apologists. An ex-Fairfax journalist, friend, confirms that the pressure of the lobby on management was relentless and intolerable.
In early January, in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age we have Rubenstein glorifying the assassination of Qasem Soleimani as ‘arch-terrorist’, presiding over a claimed multi-tentacled terrorist expansionist reach of Iran in the Middle East, destabilising everything in its wake. Rubenstein even has Iran behind the assassination of Lebanon’s Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Surprisingly, the online comments editor allowed multiple responses from ‘woke’ readers to Rubenstein as an Israel front man, whereas editors scrupulously deny such feedback in the print version of the newspaper. In the same issue of the papers we have an AIPAC flunkey claiming on cue that the essential issue behind US-Iran escalating tension is ‘the pressing need to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons’, bizarrely accusing Iran of undermining the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.
Rubenstein was in the Herald again in late January, claiming that plenipotentiary Jared Kushner’s ‘Middle East Peace Plan (sic)’, in the formulation of which no Palestinian authorities were invited, is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Thus are Australians fed the regular odious drip, very rarely opposed in print, of the innate necessity and justice of Israel’s criminality.
Rather than the association between Israel and its global Jewish community support being severed as the daily brutality of the Israeli forces of Occupation accumulates, the association has recently been reinforced. The notable vehicle for this reinforcement has been the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism. The Definition skirts over ‘Holocaust Remembrance’ but pays majority attention to the treatment of Israel.
Thus we find that rational criticism, driven by conventional humanitarian principles, of Israel’s criminality is labelled anti-Semitic. More, IHRA personnel and Jewish organizations flog this definition, pressuring, pressuring national governments into submission to accept the definition and to act as repressive agents against free-thinking citizens of those countries.
And to those who object? The issue is concisely contained in a recent skirmish in faraway New Zealand. The brief report on stuff.nz deserves quoting at length. It turns out that the Wellington Jewish Council had requested New Zealand’s capital city to adopt the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. But the Wellington Progressive Synagogue objected, claiming that the definition ‘had the potential to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism (opposition to the state of Israel), as it had already done overseas’. Too kind – not ‘potential’, as the point of the definition is precisely to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Said Progressive Synagogue spokespersons: ‘Its new effect is to regulate the speech of people like ourselves: law-abiding non-Zionists who call for the unexceptional application of law and human rights in Israel/Palestine; Jews and non-Jews alike’. Quite.
The NZ Jewish Council responded that ‘the IHRA definition explicitly stated criticism of Israel could not be regarded as antisemitic’. A dishonest retort. The text includes the sentence ‘… criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. But this is transparently a ruse to deflect from the substance of the definition’s text for which the sentence is an aberration. And the meaning of ‘similar to that levelled against any other country’? Criticisms of Israel are aimed precisely at structures and practices that set it apart from other countries, including some countries that are utterly on the nose. The IHRA mob mean – we will be the arbiters of what is acceptable criticism. But, in truth, what is ‘acceptable’ criticism is an empty set.
But here’s the clincher. The Jewish Council continues: ‘The writers of the opinion piece were “fringe” and did not have a mandate to speak on behalf of the Jewish community – unlike the Jewish Council’.
‘Fringe’? ‘Mandate’? This is it in a nutshell. If you don’t support Israel 100 per cent, you aren’t a real Jew. And on what basis does the Jewish Council’s presumed ‘mandate’ rest?
Michelle Weinroth, author and member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, nails the fraud and duplicity behind the IHRA push:
‘If the IHRA definition turns a blind eye to the veritable culprits of heinous racism, it nonetheless targets the anti-racist defenders of Palestinian human rights, many of whom are conscientious Jews. … it masquerades as an innocuous, educational, and preventative measure while acting as a penal code that aggresses the advocates of human rights, silencing them with veiled threats. … At its heart sits a false equation between the state of Israel and Jews more generally.’
A false equation between Israel and Jews ‘more generally’. Here’s another one. Recently brought to light, an earlier tussle took place in September 1991 when Israel demanded a $10 billion loan guarantee, which President George H Bush viewed as a means of undermining the forthcoming Madrid peace conference (Blankfort, fn.2). Bush Sr threatened to deny Israel the loan guarantees if the large contingent of migrants from the Soviet Union were to be directed into West Bank settlements. Philip Weiss reports:
‘The Israel lobby group the American Jewish Committee (AJC) decided to support the Israeli government against the White House in 1991 over illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank, even though many officials at the organization privately backed the president. The AJC reasoned that a leading Jewish organization in Washington had a “primary responsibility” to stand up for Israel because the country represents the “collective will” of the Jewish people, an AJC official says.’
Israel represents the collective will of the Jewish people? Were ‘the Jewish people’ consulted?
One of the more remarkable attempts to associate Israel with the ‘collective will’ of the Jewish people, via the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, is a statement by one Robert Wistrich to the UN Commission on Human Rights, published on 10 September 2004.[6] Wistrich’s parents’ lives were blighted by anti-Semitism, and his subsequent stellar academic career was devoted to this very subject. Yet this statement is a wretched mishmash, devoid of logic and history, and conveniently oblivious to Israeli criminality. And this during the Prime Ministership of noted humanist Ariel Sharon. Wistrich claims:
‘Much of the mobilizing power of “anti-Zionism” derives from its link to the Palestinian cause. Since the 1960s, the [Palestine Liberation Organization] has worked hard to totally delegitimize Zionism and the policy has largely succeeded: this anti-Zionism involves a total negation of Jewish nationhood and legitimate Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel …’
Legitimate sovereignty in Eretz Israel? Sure. Wistrich’s tribalism has overridden his rigorous academic training. Curious, there are no Jewish dissenters in his grab bag of mad dog anti-Semites in a pragmatic coalition all aimed at the destruction of Israel.
Wistrich couldn’t really avoid this elephant in the room, so he grabbed the bull by the horns in a 2014 issue of Commentary (preaching to the converted). [7] Well-known Jewish intellectuals who don’t toe the Party line are accused of having been mentally and morally captured by infantile Marxism, etc., and/or anti-Americanism, their left-wing blinkered obsessions then finding its next object of abuse post-Vietnam in Israel. Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Howard Zinn (‘Hatred for America, the West, and Israel thrives beneath the cloak of human rights and social justice’), Eric Hobsbawm, Shlomo Sand, Ilan Pappé – all are excoriated for their sins.
In particular, Wistrich couldn’t have ignored Shlomo Sand, whose cannon volleys in The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012) blasted Wistrich’s self-assured self-righteousness to shreds. Wistrich dismisses Sand (‘his pseudoscientific delegitimization of Israel’) as merely having ‘revived long-discredited theories – such as Arthur Koestler’s deranged notion that Ashkenazi Jews sprang from Khazars who converted in the 10th century C.E.’. Wistrich ignored that Sand, in genuine scholarly fashion, put Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) into context with a considerable literature on the same theme.
The rhetoric of these contemptible lefties, claims Wistrich, ‘divorced from historical truth and geopolitical reality, negates any possibility of reform or redress concerning genuine grievances’. Genuine grievances? A chink in the armour? How could there be grievances against Israel that were genuine (the ‘empty set’ again), and who would decide? Evidently not the Palestinian victims or their Jewish sympathizers.
We have a comparable affair when French elder statesman Robert Badinter addressed UNESCO in December 2016,[8] appropriating Holocaust remembrance to plug Israel as synonymous with Jewry per se. Badinter played the same card as Wistrich:
‘What is certain is that in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anti-Semitism has once again spread widely under the name of anti-Zionism. We must have the lucidity to recognize that under this label that refers to Zionism, it is indeed the Jews, and Jews everywhere, who are targeted. And I would say that anti-Zionism under the surface is nothing but the contemporary expression of anti-Semitism, namely, hatred of the Jews.’
The ‘not in my name’ communities, declining to join wholeheartedly the cause of Israel über alles, have been written out of the story. Einstein, Freud, Arendt, camp survivors like Hajo Meyer; individual authors, bloggers and/or activists; non-compliant Jewish organizations; Israeli human rights organizations; etc. It’s the Spinoza syndrome – ignored if too famous; otherwise excommunicated because ‘self-hating’ Jews, ‘fringe’ elements, etc.
When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem,[9] highlighting the bureaucrat over the monster, even her fame didn’t save her from damnation. Daniel Maier-Katkin highlights the ongoing character assassination and its character:[10]
‘[A] campaign against the memory of Hannah Arendt continues, and the ideology that rationalizes and justifies ad hominem attacks and menacing gestures against Jews who dare to criticize Israel persists. As Rabbi [Michael] Lerner and Justice [Richard] Goldstone have learned, a Jew who fears that Israel is on a path that leads to destruction, or who is skeptical of a “divine mission to possess the land,” or concerned about the legality or morality of unrelenting military strategies to secure regional domination, will be attacked as self-hating and anti-Semitic.
‘To hate oneself is ipso facto pathological, and this, it is asserted, leads to irrational hatred of Israel, which is seen as the embodiment of the Jewish people. Thus, defenders of Israeli policies aim to exclude Jewish critics from public discourse by defining them as crazy persons, driven to anti-Semitism by self-loathing. In this way Lerner’s criticism of Israel, or Goldstone’s, or Arendt’s is dismissed as arising from psychological or spiritual disturbance rather than reasoned argument or an ethical posture. Calumny, an old-fashioned blend of slander, distortion, and innuendo, has been a recurring instrument of intimidation in post-Holocaust Jewish politics.’
In sum, Israeli state and settler criminality persist because it is supported uniformly by dominant national Jewish bodies, with de facto support and/or passivity from sections of the Jewish population. This institutionalized structure never fails to claim that it acts for Jewry in its entirety. Dissidents from the demand for unqualified support are cast aside from the tribe.
Is it not then possible, indeed probable, that some cool-headed people will reason that it is appropriate to become an anti-Semite? A stance rooted not in a time-worn shibboleth, but on the seeming support of the vast majority of world Jewry for Israeli criminality and inhumanity? Ersatz anti-Semitism (criticism of Israel), manufactured by the Zionist lobby as cover-up, thus potentially fosters substantive anti-Semitism. The real thing.
The Canadian (Jewish) philosopher Michael Neumann earlier nailed the implications:[11]
‘Inflating the meaning of ‘anti-Semitism’ to include anything politically damaging to Israel is a double-edged sword. … The more things get to count as anti-Semitic, the less awful anti-Semitism is going to sound. …
‘Since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be anti-Semitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of anti-Semitism becomes morally obligatory. It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labelled anti-Semitic… The more anti-Semitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks.
‘Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism is a moral obligation.’
The ‘not in my name’ communities, in their myriad dimensions and considerable expenditure of energy, have made not a jot of difference to Israel’s project. Why?
Gideon Levy, long-time Haaretz journalist providing a window into Israel’s soul, has honed in on the denial, conscious amongst its leaders, subliminal amongst the bulk of the populace, that accompanies Israel’s ongoing criminality. And behind it? Here is Levy in March 2018 (he said the same in an Australian lecture tour in November 2017):
‘There are three core values of Israeli culture that enforce the totalitarian discourse.
‘The first value: we are the chosen people. Secular and religious will claim it. Even if they don’t admit it they feel it. If we are the chosen people, who are you to tell us what to do. The second very deeply rooted value: we are the victims, not only the biggest victims, but the only victims around…. I don’t recall one occupation in which the occupier present himself as the victim. Not only the victim– the only victim….
‘There is a third very deep rooted value. This is the very deep belief again everyone will deny it but if you scratch under the skin of almost any Israeli you will find it there, the Palestinians are not equal human beings like us. They don’t love their children like us. They don’t love life like us. They were born to kill, they are cruel, they are sadists, they have no values, no manners… This is very, very deep rooted in Israeli society. And maybe that’s the key issue. As long as this continues, nothing will move. We are so much better than them, so much more developed than them, more human than them.’
One of Sydney’s Jewish schools, Moriah College, has as its ‘core values’ (not atypical):
‘We strive to foster critical thought, cultural interests, tolerance, social responsibility and self-discipline. … Moriah not only aspires to achieve excellence in academic standards, but maintains and promotes among its students an awareness of and a feeling for Jewish traditions and ethics, an understanding of and a positive commitment to Orthodox Judaism and identification with and love for Israel.’
Critical thought, tolerance, social responsibility, and identification with and love for Israel? Take your pick. You can’t have both.
Endnotes
[1] vide Uri Davis’ Apartheid Israel, 2004; itisapartheid.org.
[2] Jeffrey Blankfort has meticulously documented the rise of AIPAC from the 1950s to its current status as the key determining force in US Middle East foreign policy. ‘Rendering unto AIPAC’, Counterpunch magazine, January 2014.
[3] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 1977, third edn., p.140.
[4] Hirst, p.221.
[5] John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir, with Sylvie Le Clezio, 2017.
[6] The Statement is reproduced in the Jewish Political Studies Review, Fall 2004, and made available online.
[7] Wistrich, ‘Judeophobia and Marxism’, Commentary, December 2014.
[8] Robert Badinter, ‘Antisémitisme: tirer les enseignements de l’histoire’, UNESCO, 6 December 2016, reproduced to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January. The speech in English, ‘Anti-Semitism: Learning the lessons of history’, is reproduced here.
[9] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963.
[10] Daniel Maier-Katkin, ‘How Hannah Arendt Was Labeled an “Enemy of Israel”’, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 2010.
[11] Michael Neumann, ‘What is Anti-Semitism?’, in Cockburn & St.Clair (eds.), The Politics of Anti-Semitism, 2003.
Israel to Seize Ibrahimi Mosque Land in Hebron
Ibrahimi Mosque in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron
Palestine Chronicle | April 22, 2020
Israeli government’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit yesterday approved the expropriation of Palestinian land adjacent to the Ibrahimi Mosque in occupied West Bank city of Hebron (Al-Khalil).
According to Arab48, after Mandelblit’s approval, the Palestinian land will be under the control of Defence Minister Naftali Bennett.
The land belongs to the Islamic charitable trust in the Palestinian city, which oversees the Ibrahimi Mosque.
The occupation will use the land to allow disabled visitors to access a synagogue near the mosque.
Israeli media reported the Israeli Ministry of Justice saying in a statement that the decision was made in collaboration with the Civil Administration.
The statement said that this land would be used to build an elevator and ramp to allow people with disabilities, including tourists and Jewish worshippers, to access a synagogue.
Commenting on this step, the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Waqf and Religious Affairs said: “The decision is an assault on the Muslims’ ownership of the Ibrahimi Mosque and the endowments that surround it, which are numerous in the city of Hebron.”
Renouncing Israel on Principle
How to answer the question, “Do you affirm Israel’s right to exist?”
By Steven Salaita | December 9, 2019
When anti-Zionists discuss the Middle East, the topic of Israel’s existence rarely arises. It’s almost exclusively a pro-Israel talking point. We’re focused on national liberation, on surviving repression, on strategies of resistance, on recovering subjugated histories, on the complex (and sometimes touchy) relationships among an Indigenous population disaggregated by decades of aggression. That a colonial state—or any state, really—possesses no ontological rights is an unspoken assumption.
“Do you recognize Israel’s right to exist?” pretends to honor the downtrodden, but it is an altogether different proposition, transforming sophisticated ideas of liberation into a crude test of political respectability. Prioritizing the state as worthy of relief, as something to which we automatically owe deference, subsumes life to the imperatives of capital.
The fundamental goal of the question is to attribute a sinister position to dissidents. It accomplishes that goal even when the dissidents haven’t promoted destruction. Mere defense of Palestinian life is enough to evoke the settler’s existential fear. For people socialized into orthodoxy, Israel is synonymous with progress, technology, and production. Affirming its existence is an endorsement of the status quo; no matter how ludicrous as a moral premise, in capitalist spaces it is a perfectly sensible demand.
There are plenty of reasons to eschew the demand. The first reason is practical: we don’t advocate for the destruction of human communities, but of ideologies conducive to racism and inequality. It’s both insidious and unethical to conflate Jewish people (of any national origin) with the existence of a violent, rapacious polity. That sort of conflation is a grave disservice to activists and intellectuals devoted to a better world—and to the communities for whom a better world is a necessity of survival. Nobody has ever asked me to affirm another nation-state’s existence, a demand I would likewise decline. Zionists constantly single out Israel for special treatment.
Moreover, it is remarkably impudent for champions of a state founded on the destruction of Palestine and now in its eighth decade of ethnic cleansing to ask the victims of its malevolence for recognition. Even worse, recognition is only the tip of the demand. We’re also being asked to legitimize apartheid and ignore the routine commission of war crimes. The upshot is to validate Israel as a militarized object of Western imperialism—in other words, to affirm the existence of a deeply antihuman entity.
Let’s consider the demand in context of North America, where it’s most frequently issued. Those of us operating in this geography haven’t the authority to abdicate nearly 80 (and arguably 100) percent of historical Palestine. It’s not any Westerner’s prerogative to relinquish Palestine under the pressure of a spuriously humanistic insistence by Zionists that their perfidy be excused because it will somehow make us more responsible citizens.
I am happy, eager even, to affirm the right of Jewish people to live in peace and security, wherever that may be, a right all humans deserve in no particular order of worthiness. But I won’t ratify Israel’s bloody founding or its devotion to racial supremacy. Ultimately, when Zionists demand that you affirm Israel’s right to exist, what they really seek is affirmation of Palestinian nonexistence.
Beyond these philosophical, political, and practical factors, there’s a worthy psychological reason to refuse the demand. Zionists are the bully in this supposed conflict and enjoy nearly universal support in centers of political and economic power. They have more funds, access to corporate media, and the backing of the US military. Palestinians, however, hold one form of power that doesn’t require money, platforms, or weaponry: the ability to withhold legitimacy from Israel. It is a small power, without a material apparatus, but it is power, nevertheless, one that only a fool or opportunist would relinquish. When an oppressor makes submission the basis of civic responsibility, insolence is the only dignified response.
A Postmortem on Bernie Sanders and Palestine
Now that the Sanders campaign has ended, Palestinian Americans should reflect on why our organizations so readily abandoned anti-imperialism.
By Steven Salaita | April 15, 2020
Let me start with a story about the Democratic primary. Now, I’m no operative, so this story has nothing to do with voting choices or electability. It’s about how Palestine disappears in US electoral discourses, even when people who identify as Palestinian purport to make it visible.
Sometime ago, I was added to an online group of Palestinian Americans organizing for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The specific identity of the group is immaterial. Many such groups existed and as far as I can see the outcome of their work fit a standard template: we’re Palestinian (and thus purport to speak for all Palestinians from within the United States); Bernie’s not perfect (but he really is kinda perfect); Bernie’s by far the best on Palestine (trust us); this isn’t merely about Palestine (Palestine is merely the pretext); we’ll be sure to hold him accountable (even though we just finished giving him unqualified support). I don’t want to put Palestinians on the spot; all statements supporting presidential candidates look more or less the same. Let’s call it a limitation of the genre and leave it at that.
So, members of this group were working on a statement explaining why Palestinians should support Sanders. Somebody put up a shared document with various points exaggerating Sanders’ record as an advocate for Palestinian rights and some fantasizing about Palestine’s future under a Sanders presidency. Again, pretty typical stuff, which is to say a whole lot of bullshit.
In the margin of the document, a user asked, “Is Sanders a Zionist?,” to which another person replied, “Yes he is.” No discussion ensued. The question and answer hung in silence until the document went public, at which point any consideration of Sanders’ Zionism had been scrubbed.
I’m less interested in the question of Sanders’ Zionism than I am in the reasons for scrubbing Zionism from the conversation about Sanders. Sanders doesn’t call himself a Zionist, and the label can flatten a pretty wide range of thought, but if we examine Sanders’ positions against what the Palestine solidarity movement understands to be Zionism, then Sanders unambiguously fits the description. He constantly affirms Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He opposes right of return. He treats Netanyahu as the aberration from a humanistic norm. Yeah, he’s a Zionist. This fact wasn’t lost on his Palestinian American champions. It just didn’t seem to bother them very much.
But let’s leave the question of Sanders’ Zionism to the side, for it has proved effective at putting colleagues at loggerheads. Whatever Sanders or any other politician thinks about Palestine should have no influence on how Palestinians think about Palestine. In fact, according to the mythography of electoralism, it’s the community’s duty to educate the politician. In order to accomplish that goal, the community needs to convey principles it considers nonnegotiable. For Palestinians, those principles would include right of return and full equality in all of historic Palestine.
That’s not what happened in the various statements of support. Instead, their authors instrumentalized Palestine as an abstract commitment—an idea mobilized through performances of ethnic verisimilitude—in order to boost a campaign extraneous to the actual work of decolonization. Rather than pressuring the politician, they made demands of the audience and assured people opposed to Zionism that voting for someone pledging to uphold Israel’s “Jewish character” wasn’t a pragmatic concession, but an act of virtue, a feat of devotion to Palestine.
What does it mean that groups visibly and proudly identifying as Palestinian felt it necessary to scrub Zionism in order to boost a politician jockeying to supervise US Empire? By what moral calculus did those groups take vital demands off the table? Did they have the consent of refugees for whom right of return is sacrosanct? Of rank-and-file Palestinians in the United States? Or was it an exercise in unilateral leadership by the diasporic professional class?
I know what the response is: we didn’t mythologize anyone; we regularly pointed out his weaknesses. Well, not really. (I didn’t see you pointing out that Sanders is a Zionist, for example.) Exerting tremendous energy to conceptualize Sanders as a benevolent uncle figure and then occasionally saying “he needs more work on this issue” or “we need to keep pushing him” was a cardinal feature of mythologization, as was running interference with points of view more palatable to the mainstream when fellow anti-Zionists dissented from the consensus. Saying “he’s the best on Palestine even though he’s not perfect” was the rankest kind of mythmaking. It confused “being better than a terrible field” with “being good.”
I saw in these statements a yearning to matter, a desire to at long last be taken seriously after decades of abuse and disregard. It’s a normal response to subordination, to the pain of continuous betrayal, but no amount of high-minded talk about an electoral revolution will compel sites of power to care about Palestinian Americans. They shouldn’t be our audience, anyway. Palestinians are admired by people around the world who value justice and resilience and dignity. Let’s not forgot our place, which isn’t among consultants and technocrats, but with the ignominious, the surplus, the unbeloved.
During the primary, and during the 2016 election cycle, whenever I expressed skepticism about deploying Palestine in service of a presidential campaign, other Palestinian Americans quickly intervened: “Well, I mean Steve’s making an, ahem, important point, but, here, let me butt in and do it, you know, more responsibly.” I found it to be a pathetic move. The idea was to keep radicalism in check, or to snuff it out. Decolonization, however, is inherently radical in the metropole. The interventions were thus a form of ostracism: we don’t want disreputable elements of our community running a bus over this good foot we’re trying to put forward. The limits of US electoralism came to define the parameters of Palestinian liberation.
Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral practice. The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent. That’s how compromise works under capitalism. Every time, every single time, it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised. Never the candidate’s position. Never the system’s inherent conservatism. Never the ongoing march of settler colonization. We’re volunteering to be captured by the settler’s notion of common sense.
And what would have happened if your guy won? You already gave up right of return. A one-state solution. Anti-imperialism. Nobody was talking about general strikes until the pandemic. And nobody ever talks about armed struggle. How did you plan to get these things back on the table after having surrendered them to a person whose first, second, and third priority is appeasing power? You gave up something Palestinians have struggled and died for over the course of decades, and for what? Just to make the apocryphal and frankly useless point that this politician is a more tolerable Zionist than the other ones?
And when your guy loses? This is the question of the moment, isn’t it? You gave up all that leverage for nothing (except for individual benefits). What happens next? God knows I can’t answer that question. I’m not saying don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t be interested in a candidate. That’s not the point. I dislike coercive forms of persuasion. I’m simply trying to convince you not to give up the idea of freedom as it’s articulated by the downtrodden. Not for any reason. Certainly not for a goddamn politician.
There’s a question you ought to ask as necessary (which is to say constantly): what happens to Palestine? When we humor a system calibrated to exclude us, when we pretend that liberation is possible on the margins of a hostile polity, when we imagine liberal Zionism as a prelude to freedom, then what happens to Palestine?
Raising this kind of skepticism is a good way to get branded a hater. (Treating the recalcitrant as irrational is a central feature of electoral discipline.) I hate this sensibility precisely because I’m not a hater, because I recognize that defiance is a priceless asset in conditions of loss and dispossession. Let’s please abandon this smug idea that skepticism ruins the party for sensible people. It’s an ugly form of internal colonization. Recalcitrance can be a deep, abiding act of love, in this case a devotion to life realized in the form of a simple question: what happens to Palestine?
The system you deign to reform ranks nothing above ruling class accumulation—the system, in other words, is designed to betray, and performs its mandate with brutal efficiency. And so the answer to that timeless question never changes: Palestine goes away. Any group that doesn’t facilitate a flow of capital into the imperial core is fit for disappearance. Our mandate, in turn, isn’t to seek the approval of our oppressor, but to earn his contempt.
Instrumentalizing the persecuted is a critical feature of electoralism. Promoting a Zionist presidential candidate and remaining faithful to the core tenets of anti-Zionism? Forget it. It’s not happening. It can’t happen. Electoralism is salted against insurgency. It’s not a space for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy. Liberation has always required tremendous imagination. That’s not on offer when David Sirota is authoring the narrative.
You have no cause to be angry with Sanders. Not now. He hasn’t broken a single pledge. He never hid his intentions. There was plenty of reason for concern when he kept repeating liberal Zionist platitudes. It was you, not Sanders, who folded Palestine into a campaign that always promised to maintain the status quo. The outcome was easy to predict because it has many decades of precedent. Palestinians, victim of a million betrayals, should know this better than anyone. We also know that struggle has no easy trajectory. Mass movements predicated on voting make for attractive sources of relief. Then they go up in smoke and you’re left to find the next shiny figure to exploit, the next fount of excitement and pageantry and social capital. This isn’t a serious politics. It’s terminal naivete, or industrial self-promotion.
And now what? You disposed of the most radical members of our community, systematically excluding so many brethren from the life-sustaining pleasure of shared resistance, in order to assuage a bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose of you, all that love sacrificed for no reward beyond some retweets and an evanescent sense of importance, your moment of being accepted by the polity now replaced by angry regret for having again succumbed to the gravitational pull of authority, of the state and its functionaries, of the very institutions that maintain our dispossession. But our nation, Palestine, is neither temporary nor ephemeral. Our politics should match the condition.
If Coronavirus Overwhelms Gaza, Israel Alone will be to Blame
What is already a crisis in the territory barely needs a nudge from Covid-19 in order to be tipped into a health disaster
By Jonathan Cook | The National | April 14, 2020
The Palestinians of Gaza know all about lockdowns. For the past 13 years, some two million of them have endured a closure by Israel more extreme than anything experienced by almost any other society – including even now, as the world hunkers down to try to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.
Israel has been carrying out an unprecedented experiment in Gaza, using the latest military hardware and surveillance technology to blockade this tiny coastal enclave by land, air and sea.
Nothing moves in or out without Israel’s say-so – until three weeks ago, when the virus smuggled itself into Gaza inside two Palestinians returning from Pakistan. It is known to have spread to more than a dozen people so far, though doctors have no idea of the true extent. Testing equipment ran out days ago.
Unless Gaza enjoys a miraculous escape, an epidemic is only a matter of time. The consequences hardly bear contemplating.
Countries around the world are wondering what to do with their prison populations, aware that, once it takes hold, Covid-19 is certain to spread rapidly in crowded, enclosed spaces, leaving havoc in its wake.
Gaza is often compared to an open-air prison. But even this analogy is not quite right. This is a prison that the United Nations has warned is on the brink of being “uninhabitable”.
In the prison of Gaza, many inmates are undernourished, and physically and emotionally scarred by a decade of military assaults. They lack essentials such as clean water and electricity after repeated Israeli attacks on basic infrastructure. And the 13-year blockade means there is only rudimentary medical care if they get sick.
Social distancing is impossible in one of the most crowded places on earth. In Jabaliya, one of eight refugee camps in the enclave, there are 115,000 people packed together in little more than a square kilometre. Comparable population density nearby in Israel is typically measured in the hundreds.
There are few clinics and hospitals to cope. According to human rights groups, Gaza has approximately 60 ventilators – most of them already in use. Israel has 15 times as many ventilators per head of population.
There is little in the way of protective gear. And medicines are already in short supply or unavailable, even before the virus hits. Gaza’s infant mortality – an important measure of medical and social conditions – is more than seven times higher than Israel’s. Life expectancy is 10 years lower.
Unlike a normal prison, Gaza’s warden – Israel – denies responsibility for the inmates’ welfare. Since it carried out a so-called “disengagement” 15 years ago, dismantling illegal settlements there, Israel has argued – against all evidence – that it is no longer the occupying power.
That should have been proved an obvious lie when Palestinians, choking on their isolation and deprivation, began rallying in protest two years ago at the perimeter fence that acts as a cage locking them in. Demonstrators were greeted with live fire from Israeli snipers.
Around 200 people were killed, and many thousands left with horrific injuries, mostly to their legs. Medical services are still overwhelmed by the need for long-term surgery, amputations and rehabilitation for the disabled protesters.
What is already a crisis barely needs a nudge from the coronavirus to be tipped into a health disaster.
And with most of the population already below the poverty line, after Israel’s blockade destroyed Gaza’s textile, construction and agricultural industries, the economy is no shape to withstand an epidemic either.
Most governments, including Israel’s, maintain a degree of control even in the face of this most unexpected emergency. They could prepare for it, even if many were slow to do so. They can marshall factories to produce ventilators and protective equipment. And they have the resources to rebuild their health services and economies afterwards.
If they fail in these tasks, it will be their failure.
But Gaza is entirely dependent on Israel and an international community preoccupied with its own troubles. Even if health authorities can secure ventilators and protective equipment in the current, highly competitive global market, Israel will decide whether to let them in. Equally, it could choose to seize them for its own use, in order to placate growing domestic criticism that it is short of vital equipment.
The blame for Gaza’s plight – now and in the future – lands squarely at Israel’s door.
Israel should be helping Gaza, but it is doing the precise opposite. Last week, Israeli planes sprayed herbicide to destroy the crops of Gaza’s farmers – part of a policy to keep clear sight-lines for Israeli military forces.
Moreover, in this time of crisis, Gaza’s food insecurity is only set to deepen. For the past year, Israel has been starving both Gaza and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank of the taxes and duties it collects on their behalf and that rightfully belong to the Palestinian people. Many families have no money for food.
The US has aggravated this financial crisis by cutting funds to the United Nations refugee agency, UNRWA, which cares for many of Gaza’s families expelled by Israel from their homes decades ago and forcibly crowded into the enclave.
The little influence retained by Hamas relates to the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held illegally in Israel. Hamas wants them out, especially the most vulnerable, aware of the danger the virus poses to them in Israel, where the contagion is more advanced.
It is reported to be trying to negotiate a release of prisoners, offering to return the corpses of two soldiers it seized during Israel’s infamous attack on Gaza in 2014 that killed more than 500 Palestinian children.
If Israel refuses to trade, as seems likely, or denies entry to much-needed medical supplies, Gaza’s only other practical leverage will be to fire missiles into Israel, as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has threatened. That is the one time western states can be expected to notice Gaza and voice their condemnation – though not of Israel.
But if plague does overwhelm Gaza, the truth about who is really responsible will be hard to conceal.
Modelling the horrifying conditions in Gaza, Israeli experts warned last year of an epidemic like cholera sweeping the enclave. They predicted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians storming the fence to escape contagion and death.
It is the Israeli army’s nightmare scenario. It admits it has no response other than – as with the fence protests – to gun down those pleading for help.
For decades Israel has pursued a policy of treating Palestinians as less than human. It has minutely controlled their lives while denying any meaningful responsibility for their welfare. That deeply unethical and inhumane stance could soon face the ultimate test.
Ashrawi: While the world works on saving lives, US and Israel working on killing peace
WAFA – April 12, 2020
RAMALLAH – Member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hanan Ashrawi, said today that Israel was “cynically exploiting” the international community’s focus on protecting humanity from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement its extraterritorial and expansionist colonial agenda.
She said the Israeli politicians “are busy negotiating a coalition agreement centered on permanent colonization and annexation at the expense of Palestinian lives, land, and rights.”
“While the world is preoccupied with combating COVID-19, the joint Israeli-US committee set up to implement the US administration’s disastrous so-called plan has found the time and energy to work on annexation and prioritize it over saving lives,” Ashrawi said in a statement.
“The clear support and sponsorship of the US administration of these dangerous plans is further proof of the disruptive and irresponsible role of the Trump administration at all levels.”
She blamed the US administration’s “partnership with Israel on the issues of annexation and permanent occupation for making the situation on the ground completely untenable.”
Following is the full text of Ashrawi’s statement:
Israel is cynically exploiting the international community’s focus on protecting humanity and the world economy from the devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement its extraterritorial and expansionist colonial agenda.
Israeli politicians are busy negotiating a coalition agreement centered on permanent colonization and annexation at the expense of Palestinian lives, land, and rights.
While the world is preoccupied with combating COVID-19, the joint Israeli-US committee set up to implement the US administration´s disastrous so-called plan has found the time and energy to work on annexation and prioritize it over saving lives. The clear support and sponsorship of the US administration of these dangerous plans is further proof of the disruptive and irresponsible role of the Trump administration at all levels.
Israeli annexation is not a possibility the world should be worried about. It is a reality unfolding on the ground to the grave detriment of future generations in the region and at the expense of the standing and relevance of multilateral efforts and international law. Israel is taking practical steps to permanently and irreversibly undercut the realization of the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to freedom and independence, thus ensuring permanent conflict in the region.
Israel has scaled up land grab, settlement and Wall construction, nightly raids and other illegal measures and crimes to satisfy the insatiable appetite of colonial expansion. This agenda is now the common ground on which unity government discussions are based, dissolving any pretension that main Israeli political actors have differences on the policies of ensuring permanent colonization, enacting annexation, and enforcing apartheid-like policies. This dangerous agenda is neither new nor surprising.
It is what the Palestinian leadership has warned from for years. Regrettably, the international community has abdicated its responsibilities to hold Israel accountable for its pervasive illegal actions and shameful impunity. This inaction has emboldened and empowered the Israeli political establishment to abandon all pretense of commitment to the internationally agreed-on solution of two states on the basis of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.
The current US administration’s ideological and practical partnership with Israel on the issues of annexation and permanent occupation has made the situation completely untenable.
Despite its focus on combating the COVID-19 pandemic, the international community is well aware of what is transpiring on the ground, including Israel’s obstruction of Palestinian efforts to combat the virus effectively.
This was evident in the recent European Union statement announcing increased assistance to Palestine to help fight the virus. However, rhetorical diagnosis of the threat to peace and international obligations will not be enough to avert the complete breakdown of the world agenda for peace. Serious and deterrent international action is required to stop Israeli actions and plans. Time has run out on complacency and platitudes.
World Vision Gaza Director Detained in Israel is in Serious Health Condition Due to Torture
Palestine Chronicle | April 11, 2020
Palestinian humanitarian worker Mohammad al-Halabi, who worked with the American World Vision organization, is in serious health condition due to torture by his Israeli interrogators, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Commission.
Al-Halabi, 42, from Jabalya refugee camp, was in charge of the Gaza Strip office of World Vision and is now suffering from serious headaches. After losing hearing, he may also lose sight in his eyes due to the torture he underwent after his arrest in Israel.
On June 15, 2016, Al-Halabi was arrested by Israeli occupation forces at the Beit Hanoun (Eretz) Crossing which separates besieged Gaza from Israel, in a joint operation carried out by the Shin Bet security service, the Israeli army and Israeli police.
Since then, he appeared in Israeli courts 135 times in what the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees’ Affairs refers to as “one of the longest trials in the history of the Palestinian captive movement”.
“Now, Mohammed has been transferred, once again, this time to Rimon Prison, where he is being held under extremely harsh conditions, still experiencing all sorts of torture and degradation,” wrote his father, Khalil, in a recent article.
“Israel has no evidence to indict my son. Thus, it resorts to physically and psychologically tormenting him to get exactly what it wants to hear,” Khalil added.
“By charging Mohammed, the Israeli government intends to indict all international charities so that they suffocate Gaza and its heroic people entirely.”
International Solidarity Movement statement on reported FBI probe
International Solidarity Movement | April 7, 2020
Recently, the Intercept published a report of a surveillance investigation conducted by the FBI on the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). The highly invasive investigation targeted ISM activists, their associates, and other organizations ISM worked with, from 2004 – 2006, using informants as well as physical and telecommunications surveillance.
We, at the International Solidarity Movement, denounce this shameless abuse of power and misuse of public funds in an attempt to criminalize Palestinian solidarity and anti-occupation activism, as well as the current ongoing campaign in some American states to criminalize the BDS movement. ISM activists have been secretly spied on and targeted by various intelligence services, including British, Israeli, and U.S., for over 19 years, merely for standing up for the rights of Palestinians.
We call on those who believe that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity to take action and raise awareness about local, state, and national attempts to criminalize nonviolent resistance such as BDS and Palestinian advocacy, and boycott those profiting off the Occupation of Palestine.
According to the Intercept report, an FBI investigation was launched after an American volunteer with ISM was shot and wounded by Israeli forces at a protest in Occupied Palestine. Instead of investigating the foreign army that injured an American citizen exercising his First Amendment-protected right to peaceful protest, the FBI’s response was to probe the survivor. While the 2 primary investigations were launched by the Los Angeles and St. Louis FBI Field Offices, agents from at least 11 cities were involved in spying on various ISM activists and related organizations. Using far right and extremist news sources, the investigation attempted to link ISM to international terrorism.
After two years of investigation, multiple rights and privacy violations, hundreds of pages of reports and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars wasted, the investigation only proved what we have always maintained: ISM is a non-violent movement committed to ending the Occupation of Palestine through non-violent means.
Notably, the investigation began in March 2004, shortly after the murder of American Rachel Corrie and Briton Tom Hurndall (2003) by the Israeli army. The probe coincided with an Israeli government campaign to de-legitimize ISM and discredit Palestinian rights activists. It also reflects the increase in recent years of FBI investigations into non-violent activist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antiwar.com. Today, lobby groups, politicians, and leaders in the United States continue to violate First Amendment-protected rights to free speech through criminalizing non-violent Palestinian activism, such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“The fact that ISM was under this kind of extensive investigation is ridiculous and a complete waste of taxpayer money. ISM has always been open and transparent about who we are, what we do, and what we stand for, which is purportedly what this country stands for — freedom and human rights.” — ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf
“In Dr. King’s time, surveillance was justified in terms of alleged Communist influence; in recent years, surveillance has been justified by alleged association with terrorists. In both cases, U.S. citizens were employing nonviolent action to confront injustice and oppression.” — ISM activist spied on by the FBI, Mark Chmiel
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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