The administrative detention of two Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails was renewed on Sunday, 11 July; they are among nearly 750 Palestinians imprisoned without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders. Both former prisoners who have spent years in Israeli prison, their detentions without charge or trial were extended by military order.
Shadi Jarrar, 37, was ordered to four additional months in administrative detention; a former prisoner released in 2014 who has spent 13 years in Israeli prisons, he was arrested by Israeli occupation forces at a military roadblock near Nablus on 19 March and ordered to four months administrative detention without charge or trial.
Mohammed Al-Tabeesh of Dura, near al-Khalil, was also ordered to four additional months of administrative detention, the third renewal of the detention order against him. He has been jailed since 11 November 2015, also arrested by Israeli occupation forces at a military roadblock in Nablus.
Atabah is a student of Information Technology at An-Najah University in Nablus; he has spent seven years in Israeli prisons over various arrests. He is the brother of Ayman al-Tabeesh, former administrative detainee and long-term hunger striker who has spent 11 years in Israeli prisons, and participated in a previous hunger strike alongside his brother.
Administrative detention orders are issued for one to six months at a time without charge or trial, based on secret evidence. They are indefinitely renewable. Currently, Palestinian prisoner Bilal Kayed is on hunger strike to demand his freedom from administrative detention. Kayed finished his 14.5 year sentence in Israeli prisons on 13 June; instead of being released, he was ordered to administrative detention. Kayed, striking since 15 June, is being supported by hundreds of fellow prisoners, who fear that his case represents a new precedent of indefinite detention of Palestinians who complete their sentences in Israeli prison.
Palestinian resistance movements Islamic Jihad and Hamas have denounced remarks made by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, saying such remarks serve the Zionist occupation.
Faisal, who in the past served as Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, said at a conference of the Iranian opposition over the weekend that the Iranian regime supports Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine in order to cause instability in the region.
The Islamic Jihad said Faisal’s remarks serve the Israeli agenda that seeks to eliminate the Palestinian cause and open all the Arab and Islamic capitals to the Zionist entity.
“We tell those people: if you can’t stand up for Palestine and its people at least don’t stand by the Zionist entity to condemn the victim,” the Islamic Jihad movement said in a statement on Sunday.
“The Saudi Muslim people won’t accept to pave the way for the Israelis to reach Mecca and Medina.”
For its part, Hamas condemned the remarks, saying they were “baseless.”
“Everyone knows that Hamas is a Palestinian movement fighting the Zionist occupation in the land of Palestine, and has only a Palestinian agenda … and it adopts the concept of moderate Islam,” said a statement by the group.
Hamas further accused Faisal of saying things that serve the “Zionist occupation and provide it with further pretexts to carry out aggression against the Palestinian people.”
The Chilcot Report was released on Wednesday, and a hard copy can be yours for just £767 (though I would suggest reading it free online here), and while there will doubtless be many and varied autopsies of the evidence and documents, this early observation is an interesting one.
An eagle-eyed reader brought the following documents to our attention, as they contain many sections that hint war with Syria may have been on the NATO/US agenda as far back as October 2001.
… The uncertainty caused by Phase 2 seeming to extend to Iraq, Syria etc because it seems to confirm the UBL [Osama Bin Laden] propaganda this is the West vs Arab [sic]. Tony Blair, letter to GW Bush, 11/10/01
This quote suggests that Syria and “etc.” (Lebanon or Iran, at a guess) were already in the crosshairs. Interestingly, it is followed by:
Incidentally, the leaders all warned about treating Syria like Iraq.
It’s safe to say the warnings of these “leaders” (their names are all redacted), were not heeded by the subsequent administrations.
…urgent pressure on Syria and Iran to crack down on terrorists as a quid pro quo for a warmer relationship with the West and getting a Middle East peace process going – with the unstated threat that risk becoming the next target for military action if they do not co-operate…
And then this from a memo entitled “The War against Terrorism: The Second Phase”, dated December 4th 2001:
If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once. I favour giving these two a chance at a different relationship…
This quote is interesting, because while it sets out that the British position seems to be in favour of a “different relationship”, the fact that it references “hitting all three at once” very strongly implies that such a recourse was suggested (probably by the US).
While there is nothing absolutely concrete here, there is certainly enough to smoke to suggest a little fire. It definitely adds a little weight to the famous claim of the Gen. Wesley Clark that the Project for a New American Century planned to “take out 7 countries in 5 years.”
BETHLEHEM – Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett advocated on Thursday for Israel to kidnap Palestinians to be used as leverage to obtain the release of two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two soldiers held in the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported.
In an interview with Radio Darom, Bennett — who leads the far-right Jewish Home party — discussed the issue of releasing Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to obtain the return of Israeli citizens Avraham Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, as well as the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, two soldiers killed during Israel’s 2014 offensive on Gaza.
“My policies are consistent over the years: complete opposition to disproportionate deals to free terrorists, and certainly in exchange for bodies,” The Times of Israel quoted Bennett as saying.
According to Israeli news outlet The Jerusalem Post, Bennett then advocated for the kidnapping of Palestinians to pressure for the release of the slain soldiers and missing Israelis.
“We should do what the State of Israel once did,” he said. “What we once did in such situations was we would go and kidnap from the other side, and create new leverage against the other side, rather than releasing more and more terrorists.”
The Jerusalem Post quoted Bennett’s spokesperson as specifying that the far-right political leader was suggesting kidnapping “terrorists,” not Palestinian civilians.
It remained unclear from Bennett’s statement whether he advocated the kidnapping of Palestinians to use as a bargaining chip to exchange with Israelis, in contradiction of his earlier statement, or as an intimidation tactic to coerce those holding the Israelis in Gaza into releasing them.
It was also unclear whether Bennett was pushing for Israel should detain more Palestinians in addition to the 7,000 currently held in Israeli prisons, or hold them completely extrajudicially.
Spokespeople for the Education Ministry and Bennett’s office were unavailable for comment on Friday, the weekend in Israel, to clarify the minister’s statements.
Bennett is well known for his incendiary rhetoric vis-a-vis Palestinians.
In the wake of several attacks last week which killed two Israelis, including a 13-year-old girl, and three Palestinians, Bennett advocated for a number of measures which have been denounced by rights groups as constituting collective punishment.
These proposed measures, many of which have been implemented, included increased settlement construction; stepping up Israel’s policy of demolition of Palestinian property built without permits; full Israeli military control over the entirety of the occupied West Bank; military closures of suspected attackers’ hometowns; the detention of suspected attackers’ family members; and cutting off internet and cellular access to the southern West Bank district of Hebron.
Qalandia Refugee Camp, Occupied Palestine – The holy month of Ramadan has come to an end. But in Palestine, as in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and too many other places, Muslim families are not able to enjoy this special time of the year in peace and comfort. On Sunday night at 11pm, more than 1000 Israeli soldiers, according to locals’ estimations, entered Qalandia Refugee Camp in the Occupied West Bank. The huge military incursion sparked clashes in which 15 Palestinians were shot. Occupation Forces used live ammunition and rubber coated steel bullets on civilians while firing tear gas and stun grenades at approaching ambulances, preventing Palestinian Red Crescent medics from reaching the wounded.
Red Crescent ambulance damaged by Israeli forces
Among the injured was a 19 year old girl and a 15 year old boy, each shot with live ammunition and brought to the hospital in serious condition. The army entered the camp to demolish the homes of the families of two young men, Anan Habsah and Issa Asaaf, both 21, who carried out knife attacks and killed one soldier in East Jerusalem on December 23rd last year. Both were killed by soldiers while carrying out the attacks, so the demolition of the homes comes only as a form of collective punishment to terrorize the families and the people in Qalandia, who repeatedly suffer from night raids and house demolitions as well as beatings and arrests by the Israeli occupation forces.
Anan’s family first evacuated their home in January when the Israeli high court announced their decision to demolish the houses. The displaced family members lived spread across the area, staying at friends’ and family’s homes in Ramallah and elsewhere in Qalandia for two months until the lawyer suggested they could move back in in March. The father, Abu Saleh, refused to leave his home during the two month period however, staying in a tent outside the building. Three weeks ago the two families were yet again told to evacuate their homes and were informed that the demolition would take place within five days. However, the exact date of the demolition was not disclosed. Sunday night it finally happened without advance notice, and only two days before the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid celebrations.
In the ruins of his family home
Issa and his family have experienced severe trauma at the hands of occupation forces before, when he and his two younger sisters were brutally assaulted by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near East Jerusalem. The incident left one of Issa’s sisters unable to speak for three months, and caused the Assaf family significant distress and anguish.
Both Issa and Anan were imprisoned for significant periods of time; Anan at age fifteen for a period of eight months, and Issa for seven months in the year before his death.The families’ suffering did not end there, however. In the week following Issa’s release from prison, he was again assaulted at his home in Qalandia when soldiers dragged him from his home in the middle of the night and beat him in the street without justification.
The Habsah family also bears the long lasting scars of pain and trauma. Anan’s imprisonment as a child devastated the family, and they say their boy was never the same afterwards. “I know he did not want to die … but when a boy is put in jail, deprived of sleep, and deprived of his childhood, something in him changes,” said Anan’s uncle.
Inside the Asaaf family home
When we arrived on Monday morning, neighbors and relatives had already begun to gather in support of the families. Anan’s aunt explained to us that this is the third time her family had been forcibly displaced; first in 1948, when the family was expelled from their home in West Jerusalem, and later again in 1975 when their modest home in the refugee camp was destroyed for the first time.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness condemned the demolitions on Monday, stating that punitive home demolitions “inflict distress and suffering on those who have not committed the action which led to the demolition, and they often endanger people and property in the vicinity.” A 2005 study by the Israeli army itself concluded that home demolitions are not effective as a deterrent or punitive measure, but the practice still continues. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, about fifty thousand residential structures have been destroyed by Israel since 1967.
“This is psychological warfare. In the whole camp of more than ten thousand people, no one slept [last night], and they did not go to work today,” Adnan Habsah, the uncle of Anan said. Qalandia Refugee Camp has long been subjected to various forms of collective punishment by Israeli forces, and is severely affected by all aspects of the Illegal Occupation. The camp is located within area “C” and greater (East) Jerusalem, near the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem and beside the apartheid wall. According to the UNRWA, the construction and expansion of the Wall in the early 2000s has drastically affected the economic situation in the camp by isolating it from the Israeli job market and Jerusalem. According to the most recent data, Qalandia’s unemployment rate is as high as 40 percent, compared to Occupied Palestine’s overall rate of 26.6 percent.
The Camp was originally established to house some 5,000 Palestinians who were displaced by the 1948 Nakba. Today, according to Afaq Environmental Magazine, the population of Qalandia Refugee Camp has reached about 14,000. Under the 1993 Oslo Agreement, the whole territory of Qalandia Refugee Camp is classified as area “C,” where Israel retains full control over security and administration related to the territory; however, Qalandia camp, like other Palestinian refugee camps, is under the administrative control of UNRWA.
As the uncle of Anan said when we spoke to him on Monday, “This is a UN refugee camp. The whole world owns this place. You cannot destroy it.”
Bakari Sellers, the 31 year-old former South Carolina state lawmaker who became a paid CNN shill for Hillary Clinton in 2015, following the Charleston massacre, is also a longtime operative for AIPAC, the deep-pocketted, cutthroat lobby for Israel. In a letter to Democratic Party officials, last month, Sellers claimed to have gathered the signatures of 60 “lifelong” Black Democrats urging rejection of any changes to the party’s slavishly pro-Israel 2012 platform positions, denouncing as “anti-Semitic” the global movement against Israeli oppression of Arabs in Palestine and the nearly 50-year-long occupation of the West Bank. “Since the last platform was approved, anti-Semitism has been on the rise and it has taken a new form – the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS,” said the letter, much of which consisted of quotes from Hillary Clinton, including, “In Israel’s story, we see our own.” Clinton’s vision is clear, in one respect: the U.S. was once the largest of the world’s apartheid states; today, Israel is the last one standing.
Clinton’s minions on the platform committee brushed aside Bernie Sanders delegates’ planks on Israel, as well as the TPP pro-corporate trade deal, single payer healthcare, a carbon tax, and linking a $15 an hour minimum wage to inflation.
The names on Sellers’ list have not yet been made public, but there is no shortage of Black apologists for Israel. In 2014, the entire Congressional Black Caucus joined in a unanimous U.S. House resolution affirming the Zionist state’s right to “defend itself” – even as Israeli bombs were slaughtering over 2,100 men, women and children in Gaza.
Despite his relative youth, Bakari Sellers is a veteran operative for AIPAC, the American Israel Political Action Committee, Israel’s strong-arm lobby. According to the web site Electronic Intifada, Sellers was recruited back in 2004, when AIPAC had just begun a massive campaign at historically Black colleges and among even younger students of color, nationwide. Sellers was a real catch for AIPAC; not only had he just been elected student body president, he is also the son of Cleveland Sellers, a former leader of SNCC, the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, who was wounded in the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre when state police killed three Black college students protesting segregation. The elder Sellers is now president of Voorhees College. SNCC’s stand in solidarity with Palestinians in 1967, the year of Israel’s Six Day War and its seizure of Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, is widely believed to mark the beginning of the deepening between Black political activists and Zionism.
Bakari Sellers’ service to AIPAC is a repudiation and perversion of SNCC’s internationalist and humanitarian values. He has eagerly deployed himself as one of Zionism’s Black up-and-coming political stars. In return, AIPAC has helped bankroll his political career. “The way I’m able to communicate, the exposure, the people that I’ve met – a lot of people I’ve met at the AIPAC policy conference became a huge part of my fundraising base,” Sellers told an AIPAC leadership seminar for college students, in 2008.
Sellers has found that AIPAC money and Wall Street funding go hand in hand – and he’s in it up to his elbows. “Looking forward to giving the address tonight @Aipac Annual Wall Street Dinner in Manhattan,” he tweeted, mentally scooping up cash with both hands.
A prime duty of white people’s – or Zionist’s – Black surrogates, is to act as torpedoes against troublesome Black activists. Sellers’ assignment is to be a counterpoint to anti-corporate, anti-imperialist critics of Israeli policy, like Dr. Cornel West, one of Bernie Sanders’ delegates on the platform committee. When CNN trotted Sellers out to defend Clinton’s 1990s record of spreading racist hysteria against Black male “super-predators,” West admonished him to remember “the legacy of your blessed father… look at his example. He was not just fighting against racism – he was fighting against a class system as well,” said West. “You can’t do that as a Wall Street Democrat.”
Sellers looked beaten, but he could not be shamed, because he and the rest of his Black Misleadership Class are utterly shameless in their relentless pursuit of favor from the rich and powerful. As Dr. West told Sellers, the Black political elite “confuses the gravy train with the freedom train.”
Back in the early 2000s, when the BAR team was working at The Black Commentator, we toyed with the idea of creating a Trojan Horse Watch to keep track of the growing number of Black politicians that were succumbing to the siren song of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Leadership Council. The flood of corporate money into grassroots Black electoral politics – a new phenomenon – had not yet turned into a tsunami. One guy stood out above the rest: Cory Booker, the 31 year-old, one-term Newark, New Jersey, city councilman who was mounting his first challenge to Mayor Sharpe James. Booker made his national debut at a power luncheon of the Manhattan Institute, a star think tank in the right-wing, corporate constellation. He would sometimes arrive at campaign stops in a caravan of Hasidic Jews, although there was no significant Hasidic community in Newark. On deeper examination, it became clear that Booker was not your ordinary Black politician, grubbing for money as best he could, from whoever was giving it. Booker was a true zealot for Zionism, and a hard core corporate ideologue. The decades of leadership by a Black political class that chose the “gravy train” over the “freedom train” had produced a new breed of Black political striver that is totally at home with corporatism, imperialism and Zionism, and is eager to be deployed by his masters as a political weapon.
Jeff Halper is an Israeli, based in Israel, and an activist for Palestinian rights, being head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. On 29 June he posted an article on Facebook, without title, on some issues facing the pro-Palestine movement. The connection between the issues is tenuous: it’s hard to see how Mahmoud Abbas can influence anti-Zionist groups in the US, but this is afterall Facebook, and in its way the article is groundbreaking.
The Problem of Mahmoud Abbas
Halper rightly sees Mahmoud Abbas as a hurdle in terms of obtaining a just solution for Palestine. ‘Say what you will about Israel, justice for Palestinians will be achieved only after the ineffectual, downright collaborationist regime of Abbas falls, once and for all…. But we who actively support the Palestinian cause … desperately need direction from our Palestinian partners.’
I have sympathy with anyone who criticises Mahmoud Abbas, and I view with trepidation the idea of Abbas negotiating a settlement for Palestine at Camp David with Netanyahu and Hillary Clinton. However Halper appears to be overlooking the fact that Abbas is supported by the American and Israeli government: he represents those parties, not Palestine. He has to be viewed as one of many problems imposed on Palestinians, not as a symptom of Palestinian ‘failure’. As one William James Martin replied to Halper’s post, ‘It is easy to take out one’s frustrations on Abbas. But the problem is Israel and the US, not the Palestinians’.
It is perhaps worth noting that Halper finishes his article by suggesting, ‘For all the success of BDS, unless we begin advocating a vision and program of our own, we will lose’. Which invites the question, who is ‘we’?
Conspiracy theories and antisemitism
Throughout the Palestine movement there pervades a belief that a special concern of Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists should be the fight against antisemitism. Jeff Halper clearly subscribes to this belief, and indeed the bulk of this article is devoted to just this issue. Halper is concerned that without strong leadership ‘the Palestinian issue will deteriorate into crazy and, yes, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’. Bizarrely, he points to Gilad Atzmon as guilty in this regard. As Atzmon replied to Halper’s post, ‘I argue that there are NO Jewish conspiracies. You people do it all in the open whether it is Goldman Sachs wiping out Greece or Jeff Halper attempting to kosherise the discourse of the oppressed’. And in truth, Atzmon has never concerned himself with the theories that traditionally cause the ire of protectors of Jewish sensibilities, relating to the JFK assassination for example, or 9/11. Nor has he written about the type of ‘conspiracy theories’ that Halper is concerned with here, and which are discussed below.
Atzmon’s sins lie elsewhere. The traditional position of Jewish and Israeli organisations promoting Palestinian rights and ‘the left’ in general is that criticising Israel is not antisemitic, while criticising Jewish elites, or Jewish communities for their support of Israel, or analysing why they do, is exactly that. This is the primary reason for labelling Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli Jew who writes about Jewish power, as an antisemite.
Investigating conspiracy theories which implicate Israel in criminal activities abroad, such as 9/11, is also deemed to be antisemitic, even though this contradicts the professed view that ‘criticising Israel is not antisemitic’. One extrapolates from this that, in the view of the gatekeeping faux left, one may criticise Israel, but only in respect of its treatment of Palestinians, not for its wider activities.
In his article Halper extends the traditional notion of what constitutes an antisemitic conspiracy theory. He cites a recent claim that a settler rabbi endorsed poisoning the wells of West Bank Palestinians. The veracity of the claim is under question, and Richard Silverstein, for one, has written in Tikun Olam that he believes it to be a hoax. Halper is inspired by this story to suggest that it constitutes an ‘antisemitic conspiracy theory’. He goes on to address the problem of the increasing number of ‘conspiracy-peddling hate groups’. Halper is not talking about hate against Jews, but hate against Israel, and his example is an organisation with the self-explanatory and fairly precise title ‘Americans Against Genocide in Gaza’.
Now, there is substantial evidence that supports the perception that the Israeli government and sections of Israeli society are intent on eliminating Palestinians from their homeland, and if that involves physically exterminating them so be it. The actions of the government in bombing Gaza in 2014, the ongoing blockade of goods that would allow, for example, repair of the sewage system, and therefore safe drinking water, and the large number of extrajudicial shootings of young people all show a breathtaking indifference to Palestinian life. Whether or not this is technically genocide, to refer to it as such is hardly some off the wall antisemitic conspiracy theory.
In the case of the discredited story of the genocidal rabbi mentioned above, Silverstein explains that ‘there is ample past evidence of settlers poisoning Palestinian wells by throwing dead animals and soiled diapers into them’. That one claim may be false does not prove bad faith in those who react, or overreact, to such a story – as Silverstein comments ‘If true, this would be yet another outrageous, racist, even genocidal statement in a long line from such settler rabbis.’ A search on Google will show that such views are commonly expressed by senior Israeli rabbis, and not just on the West Bank. Given that Palestinian concerns are valid in principle, Halper’s approach has to be seen as an attempt to stifle criticism of Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
Another convention popular with the liberal left is that although to refer to ‘Jews’, or even to ‘the Jewish lobby’ may be considered racist, it is acceptable to speak of Zionists or Zionist Jews – ‘anti-Zionism is not antisemitism’ (the mission statement of Jewish Voices for Peace stresses that being Jewish is not synonymous with Zionism). This is another assumption that Halper throws out the window. Halper takes exception to a video entitled What Do Famous People Think of Zionist Jews? I had as much interest in watching this as I had in watching the equivalent produced for the NO side of the Scottish independence referendum, but I trawled through it nonetheless. It turned out to be a fairly substantial production, not without interest – I was particularly moved by Louis Farrakhan’s spirited defense of Kanye West (1:21:07). While most statements were focused on the crimes of Israel, there were indeed one or two which struck me as racist, ie they could be read as implying that all Jews are innately bad. A number of segments would fit the standard faux left definition of antisemitism, in that the speaker talked about Jewish power, such as the influence Jews have in Hollywood, or questioned the facts of the holocaust.
It appears, however, that Halper himself had watched little or nothing of the video – it is difficult to understand otherwise why he sneers at the description of the participants, who include people like Nelson Mandela, Norman Finkelstein, Mel Gibson, Jeremy Corbyn and Malcom X, as ‘famous’. The inescapable deduction therefore is that Halper is not so much concerned with antisemitism as usually defined by the left, but by the very idea of campaigning so specifically against Zionism, and feels no need to inquire further. The view that it is acceptable to criticise Zionists and Zionism is no longer valid. Anti-Zionism is now antisemitic.
Halper exemplifies the ‘soft’ or ‘anti-Zionist’ Zionist, in that he is involved in the Palestinian cause but puts a limit on criticism of Israel and/or the Jewish lobby, and to that end openly declares eradicating antisemitism as a top priority. The effect of this is to suppress criticism of external supporters of Israel. Halper’s outlook is shared by certain non-Jewish organisations and individuals in the Palestine movement, who are unkindly referred to by Gilad Atzmon as sabbos goyim (a sabbas goy being someone who does the work of a Jew on the Jewish Sabbath).
Not content with prioritising the suppression of antisemitism themselves, anti-Zionist Zionists and sabbas goys use their position in the Palestine movement to ensure that Palestine activists and Palestinians do so as well, ignoring the outrage expressed by some Palestinians. Palestinians, despite themselves, find themselves complicit in the campaign to prioritise Jewish sensibilities and to prevent criticism of the external forces dedicated to supporting and furthering the Zionist occupation of their land.
What is more, Halper is taking his gatekeeping to a new level. Forget the mantra, so beloved of anti-Zionist Zionists and the faux left, that ‘criticising Israel is not antisemitic’. Not only is it forbidden to question the activities of Israel and its intelligence services outside of Israel, but it is now apparently unacceptable to use the word Zionist negatively, and even to question the actions of Israel against Palestinians, within Palestine itself, is antisemitic. Halper has closed further the narrow gap between the relative positions of hardline Zionists and the ‘soft’ Zionists of the Palestine movement – criticising Israel is antisemitic.
An obvious and oft-sighted criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize is just how many of its recipients have virtually no connection to the cause of peace or its advancement. If anything often it seems a reward for its negation. Henry Kissinger, recipient in 1973, would have to be the gold standard here. That very year saw Kissinger orchestrate the destruction of democracy in Chile and that was only after the secret bombing of Cambodia was concluded. Of Course stretch it forward and backward a couple of years and Kissinger’s trail of destruction extends from Bangladesh to East Timor.
A few years later Mother Theresa made an odd choice given the extra pain deliberately inflicted on the poor in her clinics and her support for Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties and in 1994 the triumvirate of Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin can hardly be deemed inspiring. Barack Obama got the nod less than a year into his presidency. It’s a good bet there are many in Pakistan, Yemen, and Honduras that would question the wisdom of that selection.
The year 1986 saw the Nobel go to recently deceased Elie Wiesel. Wiesel was famous for his novel/memoir Night and for being, according to the Nobel Prize’s webpage, ‘the leading spokesman on the Holocaust’, therefore seemingly by definition an alleged spokesman on human rights. A quick scan through many of the obituaries written for Wiesel the past couple of days show this quote from his Nobel acceptance speech given prominent status:
I swore never to be silent whenever human beings
Endure suffering and humiliation. We must always
Take side. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
A noble sentiment indeed but not one that seemed to inspire Wiesel to live up to his peace prize, in fact evidence suggests Wiesel had a soft spot for war, at least war in the Middle East. Four years before giving his acceptance speech of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, where even an Israel commission found the Israeli military indirectly responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, “I support Israel-period. I identify with Israel-period.” When asked to comment of the massacre: ‘I don’t think we should even comment’, then commenting he felt ‘sadness with Israel, not against Israel’ with nary a peep about the actual victims. Some years later Wiesel would be wheeled into the spotlight by the Bush administration to endorse the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. His statement at the time read: ‘Isn’t war forever cruel, the ultimate form of violence…. And yet, this time I support President Bush’s policy of intervention when, as is this case because of Hussein’s equivocations and procrastinations, no other option remains’.
In the midst of another Israeli operation in Lebanon, this one in 2006, Wiesel stood in front of a crowd in Manhattan (along with then Senator Hillary Clinton) and declared “Israel defends herself, and we must say to Israel ‘Go on defending yourself.’” His final years didn’t slow him down. Wiesel took out a full page ad in newspapers across the country during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict fully supporting Israel’s effort (Human Rights Watch went on to document several instances of war crimes by the Israeli military) without a syllable about diplomacy except that ‘before diplomats can begin in earnest the crucial business of rebuilding dialogue… the Hamas death cult must be confronted for what it is’. That ad was criticized by a large group of Nazi holocaust survivors in a subsequent ad in the New York Times which stated ‘Furthermore we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and murder more than 2000 Palestinians, including hundreds of children.’
If being consistently hawkish on matters in the Middle East wasn’t enough for the press and governing elites to question Wiesel’s peace credentials, after all there aren’t too many wars the estates don’t get behind, it is hard to believe Wiesel wasn’t pushing his luck with some of his pieces in the Times over the years. Consider his 2001 piece Jerusalem in My Heart. Wiesel began with the following:
As a Jew living in the United States, I have long denied myself the right to intervene in Israel’s internal debates. I consider Israel’s destiny as mine as well, since my memory is bound up with its history. But the politics of Israel concern me only indirectly.
Strange as it was to be claiming neutrality not only in the face of his constant support for wars involving Israel and in light of his famous stand of neutrality as evil, Wiesel goes on in the same essay to renounce any such neutrality on the question of Jerusalem.
Now, though the topic is Jerusalem. Its fate affects not only Israelis, but also Diaspora Jews like myself. The fact that I do not live in Jerusalem is secondary; Jerusalem lives in me… That Muslims might wish to maintain close ties with this city unlike any other is understandable.
But for Jews it remains the first. Not just the first; the only.
This ode to fundamentalist thought, enhanced further by Wiesel pointing out that Jerusalem is mentioned more than 600 times in the Bible (a statement that ignores the fact that up to a fifth of Palestinians are Christians, and it’s worth asking how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the Torah if this line of thought is to be pursued), is followed by the blatant lie, long universally known to be false, that “incited by their leaders 600,000 Palestinians left the country (in 1948) convinced that, once Israel was vanquished, they would be able to return home”.
Wiesel then ended with a call to defer the question of Jerusalem until all other pending questions are resolved, perhaps for 20 years to allow “human bridges” to be built between the two communities- which would figure to leave the city completely in Israeli hands until these bridges are built or at least until the rest of the world accepts that it belonged there all along.
About five years later (August 21, 2005) Wiesel was at it again with a bizarre piece titled The Dispossessed. It was another putrid effort that spoke of peace while covertly praising the worst of Zionist mythology. The title referred to the last holdouts of Israeli settlements in Gaza and reading between the lines Wiesel hints that the evacuation, where the settlers received generous compensation packages from the government, had the aura of a pogrom.
The images of the evacuation itself are heart-rending. Some of them unbearable. Angry men, crying women. Children led away on foot or in the arms of soldiers who are sobbing themselves.
Those “dispossessed” by Israeli soldiers were the hardcore remnant of a Greater Israel ideology more committed to fleeting territorial dreams than individual homes- most of the Gaza settlers saw the writing on the wall and left prior to the events Wiesel describes with such anguish. Of course Israel has long subsidized its settlements that have been declared illegal by the international community (including the U.S.). But of this remnant Wiesel reminds his readers: “Let’s not forget: these men and woman lived in Gaza for 38 years in the eyes of their families they were pioneers, whose idealism was to be celebrated”. Given the complete lack of interest Wiesel displays to Palestinian feelings on the same issue can it be reasonably assumed that Wiesel shares that same sentiment?
And here they are, obliged to uproot themselves, to take their holy and precious belongings, their memories and their prayers, their dreams and their dead, to go off in search of a bed to sleep in, a table to eat on, a new home, a future among strangers.
When Wiesel does turn to the Palestinians it is to criticize a lack of gratefulness in the face of noble Israeli concessions:
And here I am obliged to step back. In the tradition I claim, the Jew is ordered by King Solomon “not to rejoice when the enemy falls”. I don’t know whether the Koran suggests the same… I will perhaps be told that when the Palestinians cried at the loss of their homes, few Israelis were moved. That’s possible. But how many Israelis rejoiced?
After this demonization, ‘perhaps be told’ of ‘possible’ Palestinian suffering (and King Solomon may have been correct about not rejoicing when enemies fall but that isn’t quite how one recalls the conquering of the Canaanites as recorded by scripture), Wiesel again ends his essay with a call for a “lull” to allow “wounds to heal”- during which time Israel can presumably redraw the borders of the West Bank making a functional Palestinian state impossible. Again, like in the previous, essay he mentions the sadness he feels over Palestinian hatred of Jews; so much for neutrality.
All this reactionary thought, the worst of which would find few defenders outside the extreme Zionist right, didn’t make its way into Obama’s statement on Wiesel’s death (‘He raised his voice, not just against anti-Semitism, but against hatred, bigotry, and intolerance in all its forms’), nor did the fact that Wiesel opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran (again with a full page ad in the Times). The Times itself conveniently overlooked the words Wiesel wrote for the paper in its very long obituary. If it is a timeless truism that the greatest gift modern marketing can bestow on anyone in its graces is the luxury of being judged by reputation and not by actual words and deeds, is it ever truer than for another Nobel ‘Peace’ prize winner?
The tenure of Margaret Sullivan as Public Editor of the New York Times (NYT) ended on April 16, 2016, with her column “Public Editor No. 5 Is Yesterday’s News.” This followed four years of challenging work and the 691 columns and blogs she produced in carrying out her role, which she describes as “spokesperson for readers.” Sullivan was the fifth and best of the paper’s public editors, but there were serious limits to what she did or could do in that position, and she must have known and accepted them in advance. The Times officials who hired her would have vetted her carefully–she had edited the Buffalo News for over a decade– and known that she would operate within acceptable limits. She is moving on to the position of media columnist at the Washington Post (WP), And her NYT replacement, Elizabeth Spayd, worked for some years at the WP and comes directly from the editorship of the Columbia Journalism Review. Both the NYT and WP are top level establishment institutions: both supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003; both have been durable supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance and Israeli policy; and neither has paid significant attention to the war on, and slow decline of, labor unions in the United States over the last 35 years.
Sullivan claims that the NYT has and should maintain “abiding attention to society’s havenots.” To the war on labor and decline of labor unions, which they have scanted for years? She doesn’t speak about treatment of this society’s external victims and those of our client states, which are so commonly treated in the NYT and elsewhere as “unworthy” victims, but Sullivan does mention the importance of “values,” “journalistic integrity,” “balance,” and the “core mission… to find and tell the truth ‘without fear or favor’.” These are fuzzy and leave lots of room for ideological and other forms of bias. She also stresses the danger of pushing news defined by the algorithms and priorities of the increasingly important news operations of social media. This is a good point, but more important is the threat of accepting as news and specific interpretations of the news alleged facts and interpretations that are pushed by governments and powerful interest groups in their own perceived interest. Recall once again “the lie that wasn’t shot down” by the NYT in 1983 on the shooting down of KAL-007, in service to a Cold War propaganda program. There is a very good case that this same kind of lie has been pushed by the NYT as regards the July 17, 2014 shooting down of Malaysian airliner MH-17 over southeastern Ukraine.1
Where powerful political interests are involved and a party line has been established, ”balance” and “truth telling …without fear or favor” go out the window. The war party, which includes the members of the military-industrial complex and pro-Israel interests, led to the party-line acceptance by the NYT and WP of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction threat in 2002-2003 and the major aggression that followed. For many years Israel has been able to engage in a steady and theoretically illegal process of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, punctuated by major acts of war and war crimes, with the steady support of the United States and its allies, and hence the NYT and WP.
There was no “balance” in the news or editorial coverage of this process. Language was adapted to support this political bias—most notably, the Israelis “retaliating” to the “terrorism” of the victimized and terrorized unchosen people who regularly upset a mythical “peace process.” The evidence of imbalance in the NYT coverage is massive. Take this small pair of illustrations: First, in the course of a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Israel on May 5, Major-General Yair Golan, deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, gave a speech in which he denounced “revolting trends” that occurred in Nazi Germany and were now taking place “among us, in 2016.” These remarks caused an uproar in Israel, with Golan both denounced and defended. His statement was made shortly after a judicial exoneration of an Israeli soldier who had shot dead a wounded Palestinian prisoner. The shooting and decision were widely condemned, but also widely praised. In this context, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who had denounced this assassination and decision, and said of their supporters that they “don’t back our laws and values,” resigned, with his defense portfolio given to the extremist rightwinger Avigdor Lieberman.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak entered this controversy, stating on a TV interview that “extremists have taken over Israel” and that the country has been “infected by the seeds of fascism.” This was reported by Haaretz on May 20, which, among other things, published a satirical piece by one of their regular contributors, B. Michael, entitled “Why would that general compare Israel to 1930s Germany? Hmm…” (May 16). Michael goes on to list 25 possible reasons that might have passed through “that anti-Semitic general’s head” when he made his comparison: To take just two as illustrative—“(13) The brilliant legal sophistry that prohibits the ‘unchosen’ from purchasing state lands. Only the chosen people may do so.…. (24) A state that insists it is the ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East, whereas it is actually the only ‘military theocracy’ in the entire world.”
The NYT failed to mention the much debated Golan statement, or the followup remarks of Ehud Barak. They also failed to reprint Michael’s piece!
The second illustration is the small Israeli controversy over the Independence Day festival’s soldiers’ performance where the soldiers formations depicted a peace dove, a Star of David, and then suddenly formed the phrase: “One Nation, One People.” Some observers found this disquieting, too close to the old Nazi formula of “One Nation, One People, One Fuhrer.” There is a large minority non-Jewish population in Israel, and a majority in the occupied territories that Israel has gradually and de facto absorbed into a greater Israel. In this connection it is notable that Culture Minister Miri Regev, who organized the ceremony, said that ”The phrase ‘one people, one nation’ is an expression of the just aspiration of the Zionist movement since its inception to establish a Jewish state.” This would seem to make the link to Nazi usage more salient. Commentators in Israel, while mainly stressing the great distance of Israel from the Nazi model, are more frequently calling attention to the threat of trends in the same direction, as did Yair Golan and Ehud Barak.2 The NYT chose to play dumb on this story.
It is not just an angry Israeli critic like B. Michael you are not likely to see in the NYT, you will very very rarely see those outstanding Haaretz reporters Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, or U.S. analysts like Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and Norman Finkelstein. Of these five, there was a single byline by Amira Hass in 2001 and one each for Chomsky and Falk in the years from January 1, 2000 to May 30, 2016 (grand total, 3). On the other hand, strong supporters of the Israeli establishment and Israeli policy Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross and Bernard-Henri Levy had 19, 16 and 9 bylines in the paper during the same period, for a grand total of 44. Balance anyone?
This imbalance and bias is not confined to the opinion pages. Another important Times-related source on Israel and Palestine is the web site TimesWarp, run since late 2012 by retired journalist Barbara Erickson. She has produced a steady stream of critiques of NYT news coverage of Israel/Palestine, her rather short pieces appearing roughly once a week. Her latest at time of writing is “The NY Times Plays the Israeli Army’s Game: Hyping Threats, Shielding Criminals” (May 30, 2016). The first three paragraphs proceed as follows:
The New York Times reports today that Israel faces ‘monumental security challenges’ and is now caught in a debate over just how tough the military should be with those who threaten to harm its soldiers and civilians.
The story, by Isabel Kershner, is framed around ‘months of Palestinian attacks’ that have left some 30 Israelis dead. She makes no mention anywhere of the more than 200 Palestinians killed by security forces over the same time period, nor does she say anything about the brutal conditions of the occupation that provide the impetus for Palestinian assaults.
Kershner briefly notes that Palestinian and human rights groups have accused the Israeli military of ‘excessive force,’ but she fails to say that the charges go beyond this vague reference: In fact, numerous groups have accused Israel of carrying out ‘street executions’ of Palestinians who posed no real threat to soldiers or civilians.
Erickson’s critiques of the NYT news reporting have been detailed and crushing, yet they have not had any observable impact on the paper’s coverage of this area, and Erickson’s name has never been mentioned in print by the public editor. Israel’s ethnic cleansing is protected by the United States and thus by the editors of the Newspaper of Record. This is how a unified and effective power system does its job.
See Robert Parry, “More Game-Playing on MH-17 ?” Consortiumnews.com, May 24, 2016
See Asher Schechter, “’One People, One Nation’: A Visual Representation of the Ignorance That Threatens to Consume Israel,” Haaretz.com, May 13, 2915
On Sunday the Israeli Cabinet approved the expansion of several Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, adding an additional 800 new units to the existing thousands of units constructed in Jewish-only settlements in direct contravention of international law.
Israeli officials say that the approval of 800 new housing units is meant to somehow ‘balance’ the implementation of a court ruling that 600 construction permits be approved for Palestinian families in Beit Safafa.
But while the Israeli officials may have political reasons for making such a claim, Palestinian analysts point out that there is no legal justification or comparison between the court decision about Beit Safafa and the announcement Sunday of the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements constructed on illegally-seized Palestinian land.
In the case involving Beit Safafa, an Israeli court ruled last month that the Israeli government had provided no sufficient evidence to back its claim that the Palestinian residents’ building permit applications should be denied, and ordered that construction could begin. But the Israeli government has, for the past month, prevented the court decision from being implemented.
The announcement Sunday that 800 new settlement units would be constructed in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank colonial settlement of Ma’ale Adumim came just two days after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu approved the expansion of another colonial settlement in Hebron by 42 additional units.
All Israeli settlements constructed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal under international law, as they involve the direct transfer of Israel’s civilian population into areas seized by military force.
But the Israeli government considers many of these colonial settlements to be ‘legal’ under Israeli law, and provides infrastructure including water, sewage, electricity, policing and fire services to the majority of the hundreds of settlements that have been constructed on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In the case of Beit Safafa, the Israeli government had put together a plan to completely encircle the Palestinian town with several Jewish-only settlements, thus cutting off the town from the rest of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The plan had involved the expansion of a small trailer park currently housing Ethiopian immigrants to Israel, on a hilltop in Beit Safafa. The trailer park, dubbed ‘Givat HaMatos’, was slated for massive expansion by the Israeli government until Palestinian residents of Beit Safafa took the government to court to challenge the expansion.
In a surprise victory a month ago, the Palestinian residents of Beit Safafa won their court battle. but the Israeli government failed to implement the decision before now.
Upon the announcement that the court’s decision would be carried out, the Israeli Minister for Jerusalem, Ze’ev Elkin, stated, “Anyone who is concerned about the Jewish majority in Israel’s capital cannot push a building plan just for Arabs [in Givat HaMatos]… You cannot just approve construction for Arabs in Givat HaMatos without also approving at the same time building for Jews in the same planned neighborhood.”
The plan to encircle Beit Safafa, while currently under scrutiny by international media and bodies, is just one part of the larger E1 Jerusalem plan, which would encircle East Jerusalem, kick out most of its Palestinian residents, and claim all the ‘conquered’ territory for the state of Israel. The plan was first introduced in the early 2000s, and has expanded since then.
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
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The administrative detention of two Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails was renewed on Sunday, 11 July; they are among nearly 750 Palestinians imprisoned without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders. Both former prisoners who have spent years in Israeli prison, their detentions without charge or trial were extended by military order.
Mohammed Al-Tabeesh of Dura, near al-Khalil, was also ordered to four additional months of administrative detention, the third renewal of the detention order against him. He has been jailed since 
