An immoral army
By Roman Bronfman, Ha'aretz 12/30/2003
Shaul Mofaz is by all means worthy of admiration for the series of positions he held during his long period of military service. In his last position in uniform, Mofaz will be remembered mainly for the immense efforts he invested in the media arena, when he sought to underscore the IDF's image as "the most moral army in the world." Last Friday's events, in which soldiers of "the most moral army in the world" used live fire to disperse demonstrators protesting the separation fence, casts heavy doubt on the accuracy of the image that Mofaz sought to impart to the organization he led. It may have been an innocent coincidence, or perhaps a tragic error, but the grave events are taking place under the baton of Mofaz, this time as defense minister.
Of course, out of a sense of fairness, we should wait for the findings of the investigation that was called in the aftermath of the events, and hope that those responsible for issuing a blatantly illegal order to shoot with prior warning at persons who did not pose a danger to the soldiers' lives, and most certainly not to state security, will be put on trial.
It can only be hoped that they will indeed be placed on trial and will also be given heavy penalties for a mistake in judgment that nearly led to loss of life. For that to happen, a serious and independent investigation is necessary, and it is therefore preferable that it be conducted by external parties.
Criticism of Israel is not Anti-Semitism
By Michael Neumann, CounterPunch 12/30/2003
There Are Much Larger Threats -- Jewish and non-Jewish commentators alike have deplored a recent upsurge in anti-Semitism. In Europe, journalist Andrew Sullivan says, "Not since the 1930s has such blithe hatred of Jews gained this much respectability in world opinion."
Yet, Jews like myself and the Israeli journalist Ran HaCohen feel quite differently. He writes in Antiwar.com: "It is high time to say it out loud: In the entire course of Jewish history, since the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC, there has never been an era blessed with less anti-Semitism than ours. There has never been a better time for Jews to live in than our own."
Why would a Jew say such a thing? What is anti-Semitism, and how much of a danger is it in the world today?
If both sides agree on anything, it's that the definition of "anti-Semitism" has been manipulated for political ends. Leftists accuse ardent Zionists of inflating the definition to include--and discredit--critics of Israel. Zionists accuse the left of deflating the definition to apologize for covert prejudice against Jews.
It's a sterile dispute. Even in this age of intellectual property, no one owns the word. But the definitional sparring does have its missteps and dangers.
The first tells against deflationists who claim that anti-Semitism is really hatred of Semites (including Arabs), not just Jews. This confuses etymology with meaning. You might as well say that, in reality, lesbians are simply those who live on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Building a Counter-AIPAC
By Josh Ruebner, Alternative Information Center 12/30/2003
Henry David Thoreau, arguably the greatest American philosopher and practitioner of nonviolent resistance to injustice, recognized that the U.S. political system is particularly prone to the pernicious influence of foreign interests. In his classic essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Thoreau wrote: "I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless."
Indeed, could there be a more apt definition of the role played by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the rest of the American Jewish community's misrepresentative leadership in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict? (Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was fond of declaring that there is a "collective obligation of all national Zionist Organizations to aid the Jewish state under all circumstances and conditions even if such an attitude clashes with their respective national authorities.")
For decades, AIPAC and other neoconservative American Jewish organizations masquerading as mainstream have worked unflaggingly to align U.S. diplomatic, economic and military foreign policy with Israel's oppressive military occupation of the Palestinian land and people. Together with some anti-Semitic Christian evangelicals who view the Jewish people as pawns in their plans to bring about Armageddon, and an American arms industry which benefits materially from the continuation of the conflict in the form of a yearly $2 billion subsidy from U.S. arms grants to Israel, AIPAC has helped to create an interlocking and overlapping set of interests--an "unholy triple alliance" of sorts--which together serves to make the U.S. complicit in denying fundamental human, political, social and economic rights to an entire people.
Something's afoot along the fence
By Ze'ev Schiff, Ha'aretz 12/30/2003
Along the route of the fence being built to separate Israel from the occupied territories important changes are afoot. These will reroute the fence in certain sensitive places after senior political and Israel Defense Forces leaders reached an understanding. On the main concept of the fence, it is clear that those who advocate priority for the military and security considerations have suddenly gained the upper hand. On the practical side, this means there is no need for all the enclaves and the double fences that make life very difficult for Palestinians.
This is not about any backtracking on government decisions for the route of the fence. All these decisions remain in force with no formal changes, but the politicians accept the army's concerns with understanding. The defense establishment will continue to build the fence with security considerations as the priority. In most cases - though not in all - this means the fence will be built closer to the Green Line.
Incidentally, [our] investigations revealed something strange - the planning department at General Staff Headquarters was not at all involved in planning the route of the fence. There will be changes in two places that attracted much attention - the first in the Baka al-Garbiyeh region, inside Israeli territory, and at Baka al-Sharkiya, in the West Bank.
There will be no double fences to the east and west of Baka al-Sharkiya. The inhabitants of the village and the immediate area will not be included in Israel. In this region the fence will pass through the area between the two villages, in the general vicinity of the Green Line, even though the houses between the villages are adjacent to one another.
The Same Game, the Same Players
By Ghassan Andoni, International Middle East Media Center 12/30/2003
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz both signed the order, paving the way for the four settler's illegal (unauthorized) outposts to be removed.
The Palestinian Authority on Monday criticized Israel's decision to remove the four illegal settlement outposts, saying the move was a publicity stunt.
"I think the world is sick and tired of these public relations stunts - Israelis moving a caravan here and a caravan there," Palestinian Negotiating Minister Saeb Erekat told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
In an unexpected move, Housing and Construction Minister Effi Eitam said Monday that his National Religious Party would support Sharon to fast track the removal of four "unauthorized" outposts, if no way could be found to authorize them.
Benhas Valirshtien, head of Benjamin settler's council denounced the order as unjust, threatening that settlers will defend the outposts.
Peace Now representative Sali Resheve, in an interview Monday with Al Jazeera TV, described the government move as "not serious".
The same story, the same scenario, the same players, and even the same wordings are repeated every few months as the government of Israel initiates the process of removing few settlers' outposts. So far, the process was never completed and by the end of it the West Bank is left with more settlers' outposts....
Is There Hope? – Where to Look for It
By Ran HaCohen, Antiwar.com 12/29/2003
There can be little doubt that something has changed in Israel's public discourse in the past two or three of months. Israel's rejectionism – the ideology of the Army, turned into a state dogma when, PM Barak, the Trojan horse, destroyed the Israeli peace camp from within, and then consolidated by Sharon – has been showing serious cracks.
We first had the 27 refusing Israeli air force pilots, "opposed to carrying out illegal and immoral attacks of the type carried out by Israel in the territories"; new waves of refusing soldiers are following. We had former speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg (Labor), who, in an article that attracted a lot of attention especially outside Israel, described it as a "nation [that] rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice." We had the influential interview with four former Secret Service heads, warning that Sharon is leading Israel to "a point where it will not be a democracy or a home for the Jewish people" and criticizing the settlements, the Apartheid Wall, the assassination policy, the daily humiliation and harassment of the Palestinians, and the demagogic abuse of "preventing terrorism" as "an excuse for doing nothing" to end the occupation. We had Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron-Forer's book describing how he had "become an animal" while serving at a checkpoint in the occupied territories. We even had the Israeli army admitting that it had intentionally lied to the media about operational details of an attack in Gaza that ended in a bloodbath. And we had senior mainstream analyst Yoel Marcus of Ha'aretz calling on PM Sharon to resign (18.11).
On top of all that, the two most important political developments are the overwhelmingly successful media launching of the so-called Geneva Accord, as well as senior Likud politician Ehud Olmert's call for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal form most of the occupied territories, including dismantling settlements, which gained significant support even within the Likud. The recent long-awaited speech of PM Sharon, threatening with "moving" (not removing!) some settlements while strengthening other if and when the Road Map "fails," can be seen as his response to these challenges, which seem to show that the Israeli public is not as keen on "letting the Army win" as the junta was hoping.
The Vanunu Story
Miftah/The U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu 12/29/2003
Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, is now serving the last year of an 18-year sentence in an Israeli prison for blowing the whistle on his government's secret nuclear weapons program. Captured by Israeli agents on September 30, 1986, he spent more than 11 1/2 years in solitary confinement.
One of 11 children of Moroccan Jewish parents who emigrated to Israel in 1963, when he was 9 years old, Vanunu served in the Israeli army and then went to work as a young man in the Dimona nuclear "research center" in the Negev Desert near his home at Beersheba. The facility harbored an underground plutonium separation plant operated in strictest secrecy. As the years went by he grew increasingly troubled as he realized his work was part of Israel's nuclear bomb program. In 1985, before leaving Dimona, he took extensive photographs inside the factory in order to document the truth for his fellow citizens and the entire world.
Traveling through Asia with the film in his backpack, Vanunu made his way to Sydney, Australia, where he found companionship in an Anglican church social justice community with whom he shared the story of his nuclear background. In Sydney he also converted to Christianity and was baptized in July, 1986. A British newspaper, the London Sunday Times, learned of his story and sent a reporter to Sydney to check it out. The newspaper then flew Vanunu to England, where his photos and facts were further checked by British scientists familiar with nuclear weapons. Vanunu's story, published October 5, 1986, gave the world its first authoritative confirmation that tiny Israel had become a major nuclear weapons power, with material for as many as 200 nuclear warheads of advanced design.
Looking for Someplace to Call Home
By Anton Shammas, Miftah 12/29/2003
In the opening sequence of ''In Search of Palestine,'' a 1998 BBC documentary about Edward Said's return to Jerusalem, his birthplace, he is sitting at a table in his house in New York, pensively thumbing through a family album. He holds up a wedding picture of his Palestinian parents, reminiscing that they were married in Nazareth, where his mother was born. Many years later, he recalls, his mother, lying on her deathbed in Washington, would moan that she wanted to go back to Nazareth. But she never could. His father, who died 20 years before her, wanted to be buried in Dhur Shueir, a Lebanese mountain village where for years he took the family to spend the summer. His wish was thwarted by Lebanese religious rivalries, and he was buried in a cemetery in Beirut. ''In a way,'' Said says wryly, with a faint tremor in his voice, ''it's sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.''
Said, a literary theorist and a public intellectual, died this September in New York, where he lived for most of his life. But he ended up, like his parents, ''somewhere unexpected and far away.'' On the 1st of November, friends and family members held what they called a secular service in Said's memory at the American University of Beirut, a couple of days after his ashes were buried, at his wife's request, in Brummana, a small town some 10 miles east. In the packed Assembly Hall, built in 1891 by American Protestant missionaries, his friends and relatives read excerpts from his books, translated into Arabic. There was also a video recording of a commencement speech he gave at the university years before and a talk he delivered in Arabic on another occasion. I arrived in Beirut for a conference the previous night, my first visit to an Arab city, and was standing outside the hall with a friend, watching the ceremony on a video screen, as all seats had been taken. In a daze of jet lag, I was further disoriented by hearing Said's words not in English, the language in which he felt at home, but in Arabic.
Don't shoot the settlers
By Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz 12/29/2003
IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon acted properly when he promised, at Gil Na'amati's hospital bedside, to thoroughly investigate the circumstances of the incident in which Israeli soldiers shot at Israeli peace activists. But in order for the investigation to be truly thorough, the chief of staff should also direct the attention of the investigating officers to two key phrases in a document published only 10 days ago: "Yasser Arafat and his leadership are not partners to the two-state idea. Arafat and his leadership launched the intifada, and they prefer to keep the conflict going, on the assumption that terror and demography will lead to the disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state."
....How should a 20-year-old officer who heard these statements interpret the words of his supreme commander - that the sponsors of the Geneva Accord and former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon, who refuse to burn the chief of staff's power-oriented diskette into their brains, are thrusting a knife in his back and in the backs of his comrades in the unit? That leftists, who prefer to use a program that seeks out windows of opportunity for dialogue with Yasser Abed Rabbo, Sari Nusseibeh and Jibril Rajoub, constitute a danger to the public?
How should a corporal treat people demonstrating against the fence that splits Palestinian villages and families, when the chief of staff says that the fence was built solely to protect the lives of that soldier's own family and friends? How is the soldier to know that the order to fire on demonstrators who "make it harder to cope with terrorism," in the chief of staff's words, is completely illegal?
How to live without a solution in the Occupied Territories
By Geoffrey Aronson, Daily Star 12/29/2003
In June 1977, then Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan explained why the presumption that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians could be “solved” was fundamentally flawed. There was no territorial division of the West Bank acceptable to both parties, he argued. “The question,” explained Dayan, “is not: ‘What is the solution?’ but ‘How do we live without a solution?’”
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is a loyal heir to this heritage. He too believes that the antagonistic passions and interests driving Israel and the Palestinians can be permanently solved only through the surrender of one of the parties namely the Palestinians. Dayan, the architect of Israeli occupation and settlement policy during the critical years from 1967-1977, championed a system of open bridges, open borders and unhindered movement of people. “Living together forever” was adopted as the best instrument, not to solve but to manage the problem, in order to preserve Israeli hegemony in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
Sharon, a loyal student of Israel’s founding generation, has chosen another instrument separate development, disengagement, call it what you will. While tactically at odds with that adopted by Sharon’s forbears, it is also strategically consistent with it. In his speech at Herzliya last Thursday, the prime minister gave voice to Israel’s policy of formalizing the physical exclusion of Palestinians from Israel, and from each other, begun by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the Oslo accords and today symbolized by the construction of separation barriers between and around Arab areas of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
In Pursuit of Survival and Dominance
Editorial, Miftah 12/30/2003
Since coming into power, Ahmad Qurei, much like his predecessor, has had only one plan, which centers on achieving a unilateral Palestinian ceasefire, with the hopes that this would lead to a truce with the Israelis. Skepticism regarding the ability to bring Hamas in line led many to declare the Cairo talks a failure, as Hamas appeared resolute in continuing its militant activities. Yet, most of the media and many analysts failed to realize that while Hamas remains relatively young and inexperienced, its long term goal has always been to grow into the more prestigious realm of politics.
Hamas has always used its attacks to further its political ambitions and likewise it will refrain from attacking if this was seen beneficial to the overall survival and continued development of its organization. Therefore, it was not a surprise when on Friday, it was reported that Hamas had taken a strategic decision to call off attacks inside Israel.
Doubtlessly, three main factors are influencing Hamas in this direction. The first consideration on Hamas’ mind is its desire to curb Israeli assassination operations, in order to protect its top echelons. The second reason for wanting a ceasefire is to ease world attention on its militant activities and hence relax the urgency with which the international community has been freezing the movement’s funds. This was clearly communicated in a meeting on Sunday with Steve Cohen, a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, who was told by Hamas that it wants the US to remove it from the list of terrorist organizations and lift the financial sanctions that have been imposed on the movement in return for a halt on attacks inside Israel. Finally, Hamas is eager to distance itself from the various militant groups that appear to be imitating the movement, in search of power that Hamas must be reluctant to share.
The Categorical Imperative
By Uri Avnery, Arabic Media Internet Network 12/28/2003
....I have always supported an individual’s right to refuse. But I myself was not ready to call upon young people to follow this line. My position was that persons must decide for themselves where they will best serve the fight against the occupation – inside or outside the army.
But I feel that my position is changing.
First of all, many soldiers have convinced me that it is almost impossible to withstand the pressure inside the army. The brainwashing is intense and unrelenting; those in the higher ranks are more and more like robots with blunted senses, the products of the occupation; not to mention the members of the religious academies connected with the army, Arab-haters and settlers with “knitted kippas” (associated with the extreme right-wing national-religious party.)
Second, the occupation itself has become a monster that nobody can serve without losing his humanity. When the members of the “cream of the Israeli army”, the Sayeret Matkal (General Staff commandos) say so and refuse to go on, their testimony is persuasive. When the Airforce combat pilots revolt against their commander, who has said that he "feels nothing but a slight bump” when he releases a bomb that kills women and children, respect is due to them. When five 19-year old youngsters choose to go to prison rather than enjoy the freedom of the occupiers, Kant himself would have saluted them. The protest against an immoral regime is a categorical imperative.
Does this refusal prepare the ground for the refusal of right-wing soldiers? There is, of course, no symmetry between freedom-lovers, who refuse to take part in an ongoing injustice, and the settlers, who are themselves part of the injustice. But if one recognizes the right to refuse for reasons of conscience, one must apply Kant’s principle to them, too. If there ever is an evacuation of the settlements, the right of a soldier to refuse to take part for reasons of conscience must be assured.
Is this a blow against democracy? Most certainly. But this is a blow for the good. Israeli democracy is being whittled away with every day of occupation. We are witnessing an continuous decline: the government has become Sharon’s kindergarten, the Knesset attracts general contempt, the Supreme Court has largely become an instrument of the occupation, the media are marching in step. It is the refusers who have introduced a moral dimension into the public discourse.
The Sharon Evacuation Horror Show
By Lev Grinberg, Arabic Media Internet Network 12/28/2003
"If you want to shoot, shoot, don't talk", recommends the bad guy in the Western movie after killing his innocent victim. The lesson is clear: if you want to take action against the other, you don't need to waste your time on talks that might eventually prevent your action.
In Israel, everybody is talking about dismantling settlements in the Occupied Territories, but no one has yet removed even one settler. This intensive talking has replaced the need to take action. These clearly contradictory policies were initiated by Yitzchak Rabin's administration and continued by Ehud Barak, and we all know the sad and violent end of both these administrations. Now the over-talking about evacuation has spread to the Likud party, and even though we have no idea where Sharon might end up, it is obvious that over-talking about removing settlements is the substitute for actually evacuating them.
I am not arguing that there will never be a showcase attempt to remove a settlement, as promised. Instead, I argue that a sincere intention to remove the settlements needs not talking about it, but above all, planning and effective implementation. That approach has never been tried in Israel.
Why does the government need thousands of soldiers in order to dismantle a settlement? Why should the government invite the resistance to the evacuation to organize and entrench themselves in advance? Sharon has been the producer and director of the evacuation horror show of Yamit in 1982, and now he is producing a rerun in the West Bank. The political purpose of such a horror show is obvious: it is designed to preclude any further evacuations. It is planned in such a way that the international media would show the entire world just how difficult and impossible the task of evacuation really is.
The fundamental problem of the Israeli government is that the reality is exactly the opposite: dismantling settlements is very easy. ...
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