By William Pfaff

The laws of physics say that actions produce equivalent counteractions, and in international relations these may not be what’s expected.

American policy in the Middle East under George Bush and Condoleezza Rice has sought to polarize the region’s forces in the belief that it benefits by promoting a clear confrontation between those, as President George W. Bush said in 2001, “who are with us and those who are against us.” Washington reckons that it wins because it is, in conventional terms, the more powerful.

But suppose the situation is not a conventional one, and the application of power produces ricochet, indirect or asymmetrical reactions. Take the case of Lebanon, whose modern history is one of compromise among the communities that make up the country, which are not automatically hostile to one another but have distinct and divergent interests, and historically have also been the object of foreign intervention and attempts to set the communities against one another.

American policy has never acknowledged the fact that, to exist as a nation, the divided Lebanese have to compromise. Washington and Israel have both consistently seen Lebanon as a country that could be divided, polarized and toppled into their camp, or made to serve their interests inside the Arab camp.

Both have promoted policies intended to put the Christians in power over the Muslims, and if that proved impossible (as it has), to promote an alliance of Sunni Muslims, Druze and Christians against the Syrian- and Iranian-supported Hezbollah.

Take what has just happened. Hezbollah, the movement that has mobilized what historically has been the poorest and least powerful Lebanese community, that of the Shiite population, has seen its power and prestige vastly increased by recent Israeli actions. Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Lebanon in 2006, provoked by Hezbollah, intended by Israel to destroy or decisively weaken Hezbollah by causing the other communities to hold it responsible for the war, was a failure.

This did not happen. Hezbollah was hailed as the victor over Israel. Lebanon nonetheless has since been in a political stalemate between what usually has been described as the “American-backed” prime minister and the hostile Shiite sympathizers of Hezbollah, over nomination of a new president.

In May, the prime minister ordered dismantlement of a secret Hezbollah-controlled communications network, clearly built to improve Hezbollah’s military performance in another war. Another crisis ensued, during which Hezbollah and allied Amal armed militants displayed their military strength by occupying western Beirut, and their political sophistication by going no further. They accepted a proposal by the secretary-general of the Arab League and the emir of Qatar for talks to settle the crisis.

This Arab intervention was an unpleasant surprise to Washington, but produced agreement for a new government under a new president, the former head of the carefully neutral Lebanese army. He has been sworn into office.

(Continue reading: Truthdig)

Carter, who in his 2006 book likened Israeli policies to ‘a system of apartheid’, described the inclusion as ‘very important’ because it helps us hear the views of Hamas leaders.

“There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if Israel is ever going to find peace with justice concerning the relationship with their next-door neighbors, the Palestinians, that Hamas will have to be included in the process,” he said in an interview with ABC, which was pre-recorded and aired on Sunday.

The former US president arrived in Israel on Sunday as part of a nine-day trip to the Middle East in order to study the situation for peace talks.

“We’ll be meeting with the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudi Arabians, and with the whole gamut of people who might have to play a crucial role in any future peace agreement that involves the Middle East,” Carter said of his trip.

Carter is to be shunned in Israel by senior Israeli officials including premier Ehud Olmert, foreign minister Tzipi Livni and war minister Ehud Barak. Israeli officials have cited ’scheduling problems’ as the reason.

But the main reason is apparently Carter’s reported plan to meet with Hamas political Chief Khalid Mashaal in Syria.

“I’ve not confirmed our itinerary yet for the Syrian visit, but it’s likely that I will be meeting with the Hamas leaders,” Carter said in the interview.

On Thursday, the US State Department had also advised Carter against meeting with Hamas officials.

Carter, who reportedly plans to meet exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in Syria, said he viewed Hamas’s inclusion in peace talks as “very important” and stressed he was not travelling as an official US negotiator.

“It’s very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians,” Carter told ABC news.

“There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if Israel is ever going to find peace with justice concerning the relationship with their next-door neighbours, the Palestinians, that Hamas will have to be included in the process,” he said in the interview, which was pre-recorded and aired on Sunday.

Carter arrived in Israel Sunday and held talks with President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem before meeting the parents of an Israeli soldier who was abducted in June 2006 by Gaza militants and is being held by Hamas.

Israel and Hamas have been holding secret, indirect negotiations to secure the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit as part of a prisoner exchange deal.

Carter’s study mission that runs until April 21, will also take him to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, his Atlanta-based Carter Center said.

Media reports that Carter plans to hold talks with Meshaal in Damascus sparked a furore in the United States. Carter’s office would neither confirm nor deny the reports, and the former president has remained vague about the details.

Israel on Sunday urged the US ex-president not to meet Meshaal.

Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip last June after routing Fatah forces loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, is considered a terrorist organisation by Israel, the United States and the European Union.

However, the 83-year-old Carter pointed out during the ABC interview that he was not travelling in any official capacity.

“I’m not going as a mediator or a negotiator,” he said. “I’ve been meeting with Hamas leaders for years.”

Carter said his most recent talks came after Hamas’s win in January 2006 elections. At that time, he said Hamas expressed willingness to declare a ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank and allow Abbas to negotiate on behalf of all Palestinians.

“I intend to find out if these are their prevailing thoughts now,” he said.

“Carter is going to visit places we do not wish to associate ourselves with. He also never made an official request to meet Olmert,” a senior government official told AFP.

The US State Department on Thursday advised him against meeting Hamas because Washington supports Abbas in new peace talks with Israel and backs the Jewish state’s bid to isolate the Islamists.

Carter’s 2006 book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” infuriated some Jewish and zionist groups who accused him of racism and anti-Semitism.

/press tv + afp

by R.H. LOSSIN

The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to keep track. But in this season of fifth-year anniversaries, one largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago this month, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)–one of the oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.”

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who requested protection from the GI’s were told, “We are soldiers, not policemen” or “our orders do not extend to protecting this [building].” American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s secret police.

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.

Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of the society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long tradition of resurrection from the ashes of war. The world’s first library was located in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the 7th century BCE and produced the first known catalog in history. In 1927 a British archeological team unearthed it and, for “purposes of preservation”, carried off many of its artifacts–including the oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of world literature.

Iraq’s intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) whose capital was established at Baghdad. In 832, the construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) established the new capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and intellectual exchange.

The tradition of research there brought advances in astronomy, optics, physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-Khawarizmii, labored among its scrolls. It was here that many of the Greek and Latin texts we accept as the foundation of Western thought were translated, catalogued and preserved. And it was from Baghdad that these works would eventually make their way to medieval Europe and help lift that continent from its benighted, post-Roman intellectual torpor.

In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries into the Tigris, ending the city’s scholarly preeminence enjoyed for nearly 500 years. “Hence the legend developed,” as one scholar wrote, “that the river ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in this manner, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city’s slaughtered inhabitants.”

But under the Ottoman Empire, the Library recovered and carried on. And despite decades of repression and deprivation under Saddam, intellectual accomplishments were still regarded as a major aspect of Iraq’s cultural identity.

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. The current Director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as “60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba’ath era documents…. [and] approximately 25 percent of the book collections were looted or burned.” Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar fates.

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq’s educational and informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005, not having “the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire something as simple as bookshelves.” His position was left empty.

When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, “asked for $1.2 billion to make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he received $9 million. He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and received 8,000.”

So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to Baghdad’s booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95 percent of the books purchased to replace the looted collection of Iraq’s National Library and Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by a car bomb in March of 2007.

In a speech to the Internet Librarian International conference in 2004, Dr. Eskander described the state of the INLA: “When I was officially appointed as the new DG, NLA faced several challenges. It was the most damaged cultural institution in the country. The building was in a ruinous state; there was no money, no water, no electricity, no papers, no pens, no furniture (apart [from] 50 plastic chairs). The morale of employees [was] very low. Three departments out of 18 were half-functioning.”

Despite this state of near-total ruin, the budget awarded by the CPA for the INLA in 2004, was only $70,000.

In addition to material and financial obstacles, Dr. Eskander has had to contend with the problems arising from the immaterial legacy of a totalitarian dictatorship. In sharp contrast to the de-Baathification of Iraqi society by the CPA, a purely negative process of removing ranking members of the party from civil service positions, the INLA has adopted a comprehensive approach to restructuring institutional relations.

“I removed all corrupt and lazy elements from positions of responsibility, while promoting a number of qualified young female staff to higher positions…The culture of taking orders was dominant,” Eskander said. “Staff members were unable to and sometimes afraid of taking initiative. I have encouraged them to be proactive and creative. The new culture has begun gradually but steadily to take root in the internal life of NLA. I radically changed the mechanisms of decision-making and implementation by democratizing them. Now, librarians and archivists elect their own representatives who will participate at the meetings of the council of managers, where decisions are made. These representatives can monitor all activities within NLA and meet the DG anytime they want.”

The INLA now provides transportation for all of its 425 employees (up from 95 and not counting a security staff of 36) despite the rising costs of private security. It houses a functional nursery in order to maintain its female staff. (American libraries, whose staff is 85 percent female and whose directors are 45 percent male, could take a cue.)

Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars, a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the cooperation of a handful of private corporations. In 2005 the American Library Association issued a resolution on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation never extended much further than the bullet points.

The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library, which provides access to a large number of health and science databases to institutions throughout the country. But Internet access, like electricity, is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after all, a largely collapsed society.

Many other more promising projects have been abandoned or left in a state of limbo for lack of funding. Efforts at book donation have become ever more challenging as the security situation worsens and thus have largely stopped.

The British National Library has provided recently published English language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its colonial administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But the replacement of physical documents largely ends here.

It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq’s infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war. The disdain for cultural institutions does not stop at the border–bombs there, budget cuts here.

That said, the lack of solidarity from the American community of librarians and scholars for their Iraqi counterparts is shameful. Rousseau suggested that empathy is the basis of language and communication.

If the raison d’être of the library profession is the preservation and dissemination of information, and thus the communication of ideas and the promotion of open discourse, then this question of empathy and solidarity should be the profession’s guiding purpose. Books might seem like an afterthought for people facing violent death, poverty and shattered future, yet the library now receives 750 patrons a month. If there is any hope for stability and reconstruction in Iraq, a little more library solidarity is due.

Source: The Nation

Arabs keen to see the end of George W. Bush’s presidency fear that a win for likely Republican candidate John McCain will bring little change to U.S. policies they blame for destabilizing the Middle East.

For Arab politicians who have gained from U.S. policy in countries including Iraq and Lebanon, continuity may be a good thing.

But Bush’s many critics in the Arab world worry that McCain will continue current U.S. policies, which they fault for unleashing chaos in Iraq and providing unflinching support for Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians.

McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq until it is more stable, setting him at odds with Democratic rivals who want to withdraw from a country which has been wracked by violence since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein five years ago.

During a Middle East tour this month, McCain’s statements on Israel also sounded alarm bells for Arabs who have long criticized Washington for not exercising enough pressure on the Jewish state to withdraw from occupied Arab land.

“The first time McCain started to catch attention was when he visited … Israel and committed himself to recognizing Jerusalem (as its capital) and not pressuring Israel,” Mohamed al-Sayed Said of Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies told Reuters in Cairo.

“This confirms the natural inclination of Arabs to think that whatever the next administration is, it will be a tool of the Israelis.”

But while Arabs see little difference between candidates when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict — with all repeatedly committing themselves to Israel’s interests and security — Iraq is seen as a different story.

IRAQ

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion, which was opposed by Washington’s Arab allies including Egypt, empowered Shia factions such as the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council — a group with longstanding ties to Shia Iran.

Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, a cleric and senior member of the group, said a McCain presidency would be a good thing. “I believe it is a positive matter if the Republican candidate wins in the coming election. We know now how the Republicans think.”

“McCain is so close to the Bush administration and they both adopted the same policy.”

McCain, speaking during a visit to close U.S. ally Jordan, said that a premature withdrawal from Iraq would enhance Iran and Sunni Islamist militant group al Qaeda — both foes of America — and endanger the region.

But Mudhafer al-Aani, a senior member of the largest Sunni bloc in Iraq’s parliament, urged a correction of “the great mistakes of the administration.”

“McCain’s statements on the U.S. presence in Iraq represent the same policy as the current president’s,” he said.

An Iranian political analyst, who declined to be identified, said that while the authorities were publicly keeping their distance from the U.S. election campaign, their preference appeared to be for Democratic candidate Barak Obama.

“I guess they look at McCain as some sort of continuity of the present situation. I can’t say for sure, but from their positions, I gather they will not like a repetition of Republican rule,” the analyst said.

“McCain has confirmed the American intention to keep American troops in Iraq. This is something that is against the wish of Iran. They want the Americans to be gone, and the issue to be sorted our regionally, in which Iran will play a big part,” the analyst said.

Syrian political commentator Thabet Salem said McCain’s pro-Israeli stance and comments against Syria, as well as a commitment to keep U.S. troops in Iraq could lead to more Middle East instability.

“McCain has exhibited little willingness to depart from the foreign policy of the neocons, which encourages spread of fundamentalism and terrorism,” he said.

//reuters//

The modern Israeli state was forged in the fires of the first Middle East war in 1948-1949, but from the beginning it was a state without clear borders.

In the 1990s Israel agreed borders with Jordan, but not the Palestinians

The fact that complete, permanent borders still haven’t been drawn 60 years later is testimony to the rancour of Israel’s relations with neighbouring Arab states.

Peace talks have taken place – Jordan and Egypt signed treaties with Israel turning 1949 ceasefire lines into state borders.

But the absence of a final settlement with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians mean Israel’s borders and the state itself remain inherently unstable.

OBSTACLES TO PEACE History of negotiations Jerusalem Water Refugees Borders and settlements

In 1948, when British rule of Palestine ended, Israeli forces managed to push most of the Arab forces that joined the war to the former Mandate boundaries, which became temporary ceasefire lines.

The exceptions were what we now know as the West Bank, which remained under Jordanian control, and the Gaza Strip, which was controlled by Egypt.

Thus Israel came into being on 78% of the former Palestine, rather than the 55% allocated under the UN partition plan.

Parts of Israel’s central region were just 15km (9 miles) wide, and strategic Jordanian-held territory overlooked the whole coastal region.

Exceptions

Fast forward to 1967, when Israel captured both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.

STABLE AND UNSTABLE BORDERS Egypt-Israel treaty, 1979 Article II of peace treaty defines border along Egypt-Mandate frontier Jordan-Israel treaty, 1994 Annex I: Border along Yarmouk and Jordan river; Demarcation of frontier from Dead Sea to Gulf of Aqaba Key Mid-East maps

Israeli-controlled land now stretched from the Jordan Valley in the east and the Suez Canal to the west; it completely enclosed the Sea of Galilee in the north, and gave it a foothold on the Straits of Tiran in the Red Sea.

The Sinai was exchanged for peace with Egypt in the early 1980s (at about the time Israel occupied south Lebanon, where it remained until withdrawing unilaterally in May 2000).

So it was more than 30 years after the foundation of Jewish state that it acquired its first recognised international border with an Arab neighbour.

Jordan became the second treaty holder with Israel, agreeing river borders in the north and a demarcated desert border south of the Dead Sea.

The boundary between Jordan and the occupied West Bank was agreed, but “without prejudice to the status of the territory”.

But such deals are the exception, and the state of Israel and its neighbours have had to live with the insecurity of moveable boundaries and an assortment of different coloured lines (“green”, “purple” and “blue”).

Consolidation

Politically, the most important of the Green Lines – as the 1949 ceasefire lines were called – is the one dividing Israel from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Occupying the West Bank in 1967 was an important strategic gain in Israeli eyes, and successive governments have ignored the Green Line and built numerous Jewish settlements on the territory.

SETTLEMENT FACTS More than 430,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, alongside 2.5 million Palestinians 20,000 settlers live in the Golan Heights Settlements and the area they take up cover 40% of the West Bank There are about 100 settlements not authorised by the Israeli government in the West Bank Guide: West Bank barrier

The settlements are illegal under international law, but Israel disputes this and has pressed ahead with its activity despite signing agreements to limit settlement growth.

Today, about 400,000 settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The land is strategically significant, but in Judaism is also religiously and historically so.

The first settlers were religious Jews who remained in Hebron after celebrating Passover there in 1968.

The settlement movement has become closely affiliated to Jewish religious nationalism, which claims boundaries of modern Israel based on Genesis 15:18: “God made a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates’.”

On both political and religious grounds, therefore, it is extremely risky for any Israeli politician to dabble in land-for-peace deals or unilateral pullbacks from occupied territory.

This is especially true after the 2006 war over Lebanon, when Hezbollah militants showed the effectives of rocket attacks as a terror weapon from the north, given Israel’s vulnerability at the centre.

State solutions

From the Arab viewpoint, the acceptable territorial solution for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement is withdrawal from all the 1967 land.

Saudi Arabia has proposed such a formula in return for Israel gaining normal diplomatic relations with all Arab countries.

The wall could be meant as a future border, but Israel denies it

Israel has sought to ring-fence East Jerusalem from any territorial retreat, and it hopes to annex the largest settlement blocs on the east side of the Green Line, which house a large majority of settlers.

This would involve adjustments to the Green Line, perhaps involving Israel swapping its territory for the settlements Ariel, Modiin Illit, Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion, etc.

Removing thousands of hardline settlers from other smaller, more isolated outposts would be a difficult task, however, even for the most secure of Israeli governments.

Further territorial compromises by the Palestinians (having already been squeezed into 22% of pre-1948 Palestine) could be a bitter pill for their leadership to swallow as well.

Then a Palestinian state could be established in the West Bank and Gaza, from which Israel pulled troops and settlers in 2005.

Not all Palestinians, however, want a two-state solution.

Hamas, which won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election, wants at all costs to avoid a peace deal with Israel that involves drawing permanent borders, because its wider aim is to establish a single, Islamic state within the borders of pre-1948 Palestine.

They argue that such a state, with the return of 1948 refugees, would have an impregnable and growing Arab, Muslim majority, spelling the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

In the long term, therefore, Israel’s reluctance to accept the existing Green Line in many ways plays into the hands of militant Islamist groups such as Hamas.

via//BBC News

Mr Bush’s statement is the diplomatic highlight of his visit US President George W Bush has said Israel must end occupation of Arab land to enable the creation of a viable Palestinian state. He also urged a solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees that would involve paying them compensation. It is thought to be Mr Bush’s strongest public statement pressing Israel to give up land it seized in the 1967 war. He was speaking in Jerusalem following two days of separate talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. He has been trying to encourage the two sides into peace talks.

Mr Bush said in a statement: “These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure recognised and defensible borders and they must ensure the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent.

“It is vital that each side understands that satisfying the other’s fundamental objectives is key to a successful agreement.

“Security for Israel and viability for a Palestinian state are in the mutual interests of both parties.”

Two homelands

And he added: “Agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people.”

Mr Bush did not give details of precisely what a final agreement might contain – but his statement set out parameters within which he expected negotiators to work.

“Now is the time to make difficult choices,” he said. But he gave clues to some issues.

On Palestinian refugees – a key issue for Arabs since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 – he said an international mechanism would need to be set up involving compensation.

His diplomatic language indicates that the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps around the Middle East should give up hopes of returning to their former homes in what is now Israel.

Instead, they could expect some kind of cash payment.

He also said a peace agreement would require mutually agreed adjustments to the pre-1967 boundaries “to reflect current realities” – a reference to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

And he called on Arab states to reach out to Israel – a step he said was “long overdue”.

Mr Bush goes on to Gulf states on Friday, some of which have been less hostile to Israel than other Arab states.

Earlier, Mr Bush said he believed the two sides would be able to sign a peace deal before he leaves office in January 2009.

via//BBC News

Mark Cohen

Jewish-Muslim relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-Semitism on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born of political, rather than religious factors. When the Islamic caliphs ruled large swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected status their brethren in Christian Europe – victims of anti-Semitism – never thought possible.

Today, Muslim apologists have distorted this age of coexistence. They appropriate an old Jewish myth about an “interfaith utopia” in the Middle Ages and blame the Jews and Zionism for destroying the traditional harmony between the two peoples.

In response, there is a new Jewish “counter-myth” that claims that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins and that anti-Semitism is endemic in the religion. This counter-myth has been propagated by Jewish writers in the Diaspora especially since the 1970s. It parallels a similar conviction among some Oriental Jews in Israel. Seeking to find their place in a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by centuries of Christian persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they claim that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication, they have a past of suffering like the Ashkenazim, including dislocation from their ancient homelands, and are thus eligible for a larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazic founding fathers of Israel have granted them.

THE HISTORIC plight of Oriental Jewry falls somewhere between these two extremes. To discover it, one must move past the layers of propaganda and mutual recriminations that have obscured our view of history.

First of all, however, let us not make the mistake of thinking that Jews lived in the Middle Ages as the equals of Muslims. They were second class citizens, at best. They were classed along with other religious minorities as unbelievers who did not recognize the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the Koran. But this kind of unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewish unbelief was to Christians, for unbelief in Christianity means rejection of Jesus as Messiah and as God, a greater affront to the dominant faith than Jewish unbelief was to Islam because it challenged the theological basis of the whole religion.

Moreover, restrictions on Jewish (and Christian) life – they were not to build new houses of worship and were required to wear distinctive garb, avoid Muslim honorific titles, and so forth – were intended not so much to exclude them from society as they were meant to reinforce the necessary hierarchical distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims within a single social order.

Non-Muslims were to remain “in their place,” avoiding any act, particularly any religious act, that might challenge the superior rank of Muslims or of Islam. Non-Muslims, however, occupied a definite rank in Islamic society – a low rank, but a rank nevertheless. They managed to co-exist more or less harmoniously with the higher-ranking dominant Muslim group because both sides recognized and accepted the place of the other – whether superior or inferior – and this facilitated interaction with a minimum of conflict.

THE FLIP SIDE of the discriminatory regulations imposed upon Jews is that they (as well as Christians) were a “protected people,” ahl al-dhimma or dhimmis in Arabic, who enjoyed security of life and property, religious freedom, freedom from forced conversion, communal autonomy, and equality in the marketplace. For all its religious exclusivity and hostility towards the Jews, expressed in the Koran and in other Islamic literature, Islam contains a nucleus of pluralism that gave the Jews in Muslim lands greater security than Jews had in Christian Europe. For other important reasons, too, Jews in the Islamic orbit were spared the damaging stigma of “otherness” and anti-Semitism suffered by Jews in Europe. They were indigenous to the Near East – not immigrants, as in many parts of the Christian West – and largely indistinguishable physically from their Arab-Muslim neighbors.

Moreover, Jews were one of two and in some place three non-Muslim minority religions, which also diffused the natural hostility towards the “other.” The contrast with the Christian West is revealing. Although for a few centuries in the early Middle Ages (up to the 11th century) Jews enjoyed a more or less secure place in the natural hierarchical order of Christian society, as well as substantial economic rights, a combination of factors led to the expulsion of most of western Jewry by the end of the 15th century. These factors include the loss of the pluralism that had marked the Germanic, “barbarian” early Middle Ages; the spread of Christianity to the masses by the 11th century; the commercial revolution that relegated Jews to a few, despised economic activities like money lending; the erosion of the old doctrine of St. Augustine that Jews must be allowed to live in Christian society as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity; and, finally, the gradual political unification of European countries, especially England, France, and Spain, which left the Jew even more of an outsider than in the past.

ISLAM AND Judaism had (and continue to have) much more in common than Judaism has with Christianity. This mutual recognition of religious similarities includes monotheism, which made Islam more tolerant of Jews than of Christians, whose Trinity smacked of polytheism, the greatest sin in Islam, and made Jews more tolerant of Islam for much the same reason. Another well known commonality are laws concerning animal ritual slaughter and other kashrut/halal practices. Partly because of shared religious beliefs, Islamic polemics against Judaism and the Jews in the Middle Ages were minimal and banal compared to the large body of anti-Jewish polemics in the Christian world. In the 13th century this led to the burning of the Talmud in France – an act of aggression against Judaism that had no parallel in the Muslim world and which was accompanied by other violent excesses like the blood libel that wrought the anti-Semitism whose tragic outcome in the 20th century is all too well known.

In the Muslim world, Jews retained for centuries their substantial security as well as their recognized place in the natural hierarchical social order. They did so by acknowledging, at least by their behavior in public, the superiority of Islam, by adhering to the prescribed restrictions of Islamic law, by paying an annual head tax called jizya, and by refraining from serving in government offices, where they might be in a position of superiority over Muslims. To be sure, there were periodic outbursts of violence, though they were almost always directed against dhimmis as a category, and not against Jews per se. These excesses occurred when the dhimmis were seen to be violating the terms of the dhimma arrangement; or when a particular ruler was pressured by Muslim clerics – the ulama – to crack down on the violators; or when Islam as a polity came under attack from the outside, as happened from the late 11th century on during the Crusades (the Crusade against the Muslims in the Holy Land and the Crusade to reconquer Spain from the Muslims) and during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.

Jews were, however, rarely forced to convert to Islam (the Koran forbids compulsion in religion) and, with two major exceptions proving the rule, they were not expelled from Muslim lands. One expulsion took place in the Hijaz, the holy sanctuary of Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina, shortly after the death of the Prophet, and the other, in Yemen in the 17th century.

AGAIN, TO understand the relatively decent Jewish-Muslim relations in the medieval period, one needs to contrast them with the Christian world, where, from about the 12th century on, Jews were subject to a shaky adherence to an older commitment to protect the Jews and to guarantee their freedom of religion, as well as their liberty to practice any economic walk of life they wished – all of these things, of course, a function of time and place and the policies of particular secular rulers or the Church.

In Christian society, moreover, hostility was focused on one, “evil” non-Christian group, the Jews, paving the way for what was to become – beginning in the 12th century – anti-Semitism, understood as a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, later on infused, in its modern, secular form, with racism and the belief that there is a Jewish conspiracy against mankind.

This kind of anti-Semitism did not exist in the medieval Muslim world. It did not make its appearance there until the 19th century, when it was fostered by European Christian missionaries living in the Middle East.

ALL THIS adds up to one thing: Jews and Muslims got along better in the Middle Ages than they do today. But the co-existence of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages could not easily be maintained in the modern era. Colonial disruption of Muslim society, conflicting nationalisms, Arab belief that Zionism is just another form of European colonialism robbing them of their own right to self-determination in a modern state, and Jewish fear that Arab and Muslim enmity – and more recently, terrorism – might lead to something akin to another Holocaust, have dramatically degraded Muslim-Jewish relations. This has manifested itself in a new Muslim anti-Semitism, which is not, however, indigenous. It represents an Islamized version of its Christian roots. Muslim anti-Semitism has also provoked amnesia in Jews from Arab countries.

They (or most of them) no longer remember the friendships with Muslims that Arab Jews knew in the “old country.” They no longer remember the substantial exemption from Muslim violence that the Jews of the Islamic world enjoyed in most places until the events of the 20th century. And they have forgotten that until the 20th century, in some cases right up until the 1940s, many in the Arabic-speaking Jewish middle class were deeply embedded in Arab society and culture, much like their ancestors in the medieval world, who wholeheartedly embraced Arabic and the Islamic culture of philosophy, science, medicine, scriptural study, and poetry in what was not an interfaith utopia, but an era of co-existence that can stand as a distant mirror of what might yet be possible in our own time.

The writer is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author, among other works, of Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, which has been translated into Hebrew.

via//Jerusalem Post

Thus Spoke Equality

Why Israel Has No “Right to Exist” as a Jewish State

By OREN BEN-DOR

Yet again, the Annapolis meeting between Olmert and Abbas is preconditioned upon the recognition by the Palestinian side of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Indeed the “road map” should lead to, and legitimate, once and for all, the right of such a Jewish state to exist in definitive borders and in peace with its neighbours. The vision of justice, both past and future, simply has to be that of two states, one Palestinian, one Jewish, which would coexist side by side in peace and stability. Finding a formula for a reasonably just partition and separation is still the essence of what is considered to be moderate, pragmatic and fair ethos.

Thus, the really deep issues–the “core”–are conceived as the status of Jerusalem, the fate and future of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and the viability of the future Palestinian state beside the Jewish one. The fate of the descendants of those 750000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 from what is now, and would continue to be under a two-state solutions, the State of Israel, constitutes a “problem” but never an “issue” because, God forbid, to make it an issue on the table would be to threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. The existence of Israel as a Jewish state must never become a core issue. That premise unites political opinion in the Jewish state, left and right and also persists as a pragmatic view of many Palestinians who would prefer some improvement to no improvement at all.Only “extremists” such as Hamas, anti-Semites, and Self-Hating Jews–terribly disturbed, misguided and detached lot–can make Israel’s existence into a core problem and in turn into a necessary issue to be debated and addressed.

The Jewish state, a supposedly potential haven for all the Jews in the world in the case a second Holocaust comes about, should be recognised as a fact on the ground blackmailed into the “never again” rhetoric. All considerations of pragmatism and reasonableness in envisioning a “peace process” to settle the ‘Israeli/Palestinian’ conflict must never destabilise the sacred status of that premise that a Jewish state has a right to exist.

Notice, however, that Palestinian are not asked merely to recognise the perfectly true fact and with it, the absolutely feasible moral claim, that millions of Jewish people are now living in the State of Israel and that their physical existence, liberty and equality should be protected in any future settlement. They are not asked merely to recognise the assurance that any future arrangement would recognise historic Palestine as a home for the Jewish People.What Palestinians are asked to subscribe to recognition the right of an ideology that informs the make-up of a state to exist as Jewish one. They are asked to recognise that ethno-nationalistic premise of statehood.

The fallacy is clear: the recognition of the right of Jews who are there–however unjustly many of their Parents or Grandparents came to acquire what they own–to remain there under liberty and equality in a post-colonial political settlement, is perfectly compatible with the non-recognition of the state whose constitution gives those Jews a preferential stake in the polity.

It is an abuse of the notion of pragmatism to conceive its effort as putting the very notion of Jewish state beyond the possible and desirable implementation of egalitarian moral scrutiny. To so abuse pragmatism would be to put it at the service of the continuation of colonialism. A pragmatic and reasonable solution ought to centre on the problem of how to address past, present, and future injustices to non-Jew-Arabs without thereby cause other injustices to Jews. This would be a very complex pragmatic issue which would call for much imagination and generosity. But reasonableness and pragmatism should not determine whether the cause for such injustices be included or excluded from debates or negotiations. To pragmatically exclude moral claims and to pragmatically protect immoral assertions by fiat must in fact hide some form of extremism. The causes of colonial injustice and the causes that constitutionally prevent their full articulation and address should not be excluded from the debate. Pragmatism can not become the very tool that legitimate constitutional structures that hinder de-colonisation and the establishment of egalitarian constitution.

So let us boldly ask: What exactly is entailed by the requirement to recognise Israel as a Jewish state? What do we recognise and support when we purchase a delightful avocado or a date from Israel or when we invite Israel to take part in an international football event? What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What precisely is that Jewish state whose status as such would be once and for all legitimised by such a two-state solution?

A Jewish state is a state which exists more for the sake of whoever is considered Jewish according to various ethnic, tribal, religious, criteria, than for the sake of those who do not pass this test. What precisely are the criteria of the test for Jewishness is not important and at any rate the feeble consensus around them is constantly reinvented in Israel. Instigating violence provides them with the impetus for doing that. What is significant, thought, is that a test of Jewishness is being used in order to constitutionally protect differential stakes in, that is the differential ownership of, a polity. A recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is a recognition of the Jews special entitlement, as eternal victims, to have a Jewish state. Such a test of supreme stake for Jews is the supreme criterion not only for racist policy making by the legislature but also for a racist constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court.The idea of a state that is first and foremost for the sake of Jews trumps even that basic law of Human Freedom and Dignity to which the Israeli Supreme Court pays so much lip service. Such constitutional interpretation would have to make the egalitarian principle equality of citizenship compatible with, and thus subservient to, the need to maintain the Jewish majority and character of the state. This of course constitutes a serious compromise of equality, translated into many individual manifestations of oppression and domination of those victims of such compromise–non-Jews-Arabs citizens of Israel.

In our world, a world that resisted Apartheid South Africa so impressively, recognition of the right of the Jewish state to exist is a litmus test for moderation and pragmatism. The demand is that Palestinians recognise Israel’s entitlement to constitutionally entrench a system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights, differential capital investments, differential investment in education, formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and debate.

In the Jewish state of Israel non-Jews-Arabs citizens are just “bad luck” and are considered an ticking demographic bomb of “enemy within”. They can be given the right to vote–indeed one member one vote–but the potential of their political power, even their birth rate, should be kept at bay by visible and invisible, instrumental and symbolic, discrimination. But now they are asked to put up with their inferior stake and recognise the right of Israel to continue to legitimate the non-egalitarian premise of its statehood.

We must not forget that the two state “solution” would open a further possibility to non-Jew-Arabs citizens of Israel: “put up and shut up or go to a viable neighbouring Palestinian state where you can have your full equality of stake”.Such an option, we must never forget, is just a part of a pragmatic and reasonable package.

The Jewish state could only come into being in May 1948 by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous population–750000 of them. The judaisation of the state could only be effectively implemented by constantly internally displacing the population of many villages within the Israel state.

It would be unbearable and unreasonable to demand Jews to allow for the Right of Return of those descendants of the expelled. Presumably, those descendants too could go to a viable Palestinian state rather than, for example, rebuild their ruined village in the Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish young couple from Toronto who never set their foot in Palestine has a right to settle in the Galilee. Jews and their descendants hold this right in perpetuity. You see, that right “liberates” them as people. Jews must never be put under the pressure to live as a substantial minority in the Holy Land under egalitarian arrangement. Their past justifies their preferential stake and the preservation of their numerical majority in Palestine.

So the non-egalitarian hits us again. It is clear that part of the realisation of that right of return would not only be a just the actual return, but also the assurance of equal stake and citizenship of all, Jews and non-Jews-Arabs after the return. A return would make the egalitarian claim by those who return even more difficult to conceal than currently with regard to Israel Arab second class citizens. What unites Israelis and many world Jews behind the call for the recognition of the right of a Jewish state to exist is their aversion for the possibility of living, as a minority, under conditions of equality of stake to all. But if Jews enjoys this equality in Canada why can not they support such equality in Palestine through giving full effect to the right of Return of Palestinians?

Let us look precisely at what the pragmatic challenge consists of: not pragmatism that entrenches inequality but pragmatism that responds to the challenge of equality.

The Right of Return of Palestinians means that Israel acknowledges and apologises for what it did in 1948. It does mean that Palestinian memory of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah, is publicly revived in the Geography and collective memory of the polity. It does mean that Palestinians descendants would be allowed to come back to their villages. If this is not possible because there is a Jewish settlement there, they should be given the choice to found an alternative settlement nearby. This may mean some painful compulsory state purchase of agricultural lands that should be handed back to those who return. In cases when this is impossible they ought to be allowed the choice to settle in another place in the larger area or if not possible in another area in Palestine. Compensation would be the last resort and would always be offered as a choice. This kind of moral claim of return would encompass all Palestine including Tel Aviv.

At no time, however, it would be on the cards to throw Israeli Jews from their land.An egalitarian and pragmatic realisation of the Right of Return constitutes an egalitarian legal revolution. As such it would be paramount to address Jews’ worries about security and equality in any future arrangement in which they, or any other group, may become a minority. Jews national symbols and importance would be preserved. Equality of stake involves equality of symbolic ownership.

But it is important to emphasis that the Palestinian Right of Return would mean that what would cease to exist is the premise of a Jewish as well as indeed a Muslim state. A return without the removal of the constitutionally enshrined preferential stake is return to serfdom.

The upshot is that only by individuating cases of injustice, by extending claims for injustice to all historic Palestine, by fair address of them without creating another injustice for Jews and finally by ensuring the elimination of all racist laws that stems from the Jewish nature of the state including that nature itself, would justice be, and with it peace, possible. What we need is a spirit of generosity that is pragmatic but also morally uncompromising in terms of geographic ambit of the moral claims for repatriation and equality. This vision would propel the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But for all this to happen we must start by ceasing to recognize the right Israel to exist as a Jewish state. No spirit of generosity would be established without an egalitarian call for jettisoning the ethno-nationalistic notion upon which the Jewish state is based.

The path of two states is the path of separation.Its realisation would mean the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalism for many years. It would mean that the return of the dispossessed and the equality of those who return and those non-Jew-Arabs who are now there would have to be deferred indefinitely consigned to the dusty shelved of historical injustices.Such a scenario is sure to provoke more violence as it would establish the realisation and legitimisation of Zionist racism and imperialism.

Also, any bi-national arrangement ought to be subjected to a principle of equality of citizenship and not vice versa. The notion of separation and partition that can infect bi-nationalism, should be done away with and should not be tinkered with or rationalised in any way. Both spiritually and materially Jews and non-Jews can find national expression in a single egalitarian and non-sectarian state.

The non-recognition of the Jewish state is an egalitarian imperative that looks both at the past and to the future. It is the uncritical recognition of the right of Israel to exist at a Jewish state which is the core hindrance for this egalitarian premise to shape the ethical challenge that Palestine poses. A recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state means the silencing that would breed more and more violence and bloodshed.

The same moral intuition that brought so many people to condemn and sanction Apartheid South Africa ought also to prompt them to stop seeing a threat to existence of the Jewish state as the effect caused by the refugee ‘problem” or by the “demographic threat” from the non-Jew-Arabs within it. It is rather the other way round. It is the non-egalitarian premise of a Jewish state and the lack of empathy and corruption of all those who make us uncritically accept the right of such a state to exist that is both the cause of the refugee problem and cause for the inability to implement their return and treating them as equals thereafter.

We must see that the uncritically accepted recognition of Israel right to exist is, as Joseph Massad so well puts it in Al-Ahram, to accept Israel claim to have the right to be racist or, to develop Massad’s brilliant formulation, Israel’s claim to have the right to occupy to dispossess and to discriminate. What is it, I wonder, that prevent Israelis and so many of world Jews to respond to the egalitarian challenge? What is it, I wonder, that oppresses the whole world to sing the song of a “peace process” that is destined to legitimise racism in Palestine?

To claim such a right to be racist must come from a being whose victim’s face must hide very dark primordial aggression and hatred of all others.How can we find a connective tissue to that mentality that claims the legitimate right to harm other human beings? How can this aggression that is embedded in victim mentality be perturbed?

The Annapolis meeting is a con. As an egalitarian argument we should say loud and clear that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.

Oren Ben-Dor grew up in Israel. He teaches Legal and Political Philosophy at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK. He can be reached at: okbendor@yahoo.com

Source: CounterPunch

Sen. Joe Lieberman, not content with two wars, is already picking his preferred target for a third. From his latest op-ed in (where else?) the Wall Street Journal:

The United States is at last making significant progress against al Qaeda in Iraq — but the road to victory now requires cutting off al Qaeda’s road to Iraq through Damascus. […]

When Congress reconvenes next month, we should set aside whatever differences divide us on Iraq and send a clear and unambiguous message to the Syrian regime, as we did last month to the Iranian regime, that the transit of al Qaeda suicide bombers through Syria on their way to Iraq is completely unacceptable, and it must stop.

TP highlights the many flaws in Lieberman’s approach.

Source: Crooks and Liars
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/08/20/lieberman-already-picking-the-next-target/

Meet Miss C.

By URI AVNERY

INTRODUCING Miss Calculatsia, that fashionable foreigner, the new star in Israeli discourse.

To a Hebrew ear, she sounds like a young beauty, like “Miss Israel”. But Miss-Calculatsia, the Hebrew version of “miscalculation”, is neither young nor beautiful, nor even female: just another pretentious foreign word taking the place of a perfectly good Hebrew one.

(In Latin, “calculus” is a small stone. These were built into the abacus, which was used by the Romans long before they ever dreamed of computers.)

The miscalculation spoken of is not a beauty queen, but a queen of ugliness: a war between Israel and Syria that may break out any minute – not because Israel wants it, nor the Syrians, but because one side misjudges a provocative act that will push the other into war.

Like all wars, it will be a campaign of death and destruction, with bereavement and refugees, suffering and misery for both sides. And nobody can foresee how it will end.

* * *ALMOST EVERY day the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense and their minions declare that Israel is not interested in war. Not at all. Perish the thought.

It rather reminds one of Hamlet’s comment about his unfaithful mother: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The more so as Ehud Barak makes his professions of peace while standing on the occupied Golan Heights, against a background of noisy tanks advancing in a war-like maneuver.

The Israeli army intelligence chiefs report that, according to their evaluation, Syria does not intend to start a war. According to them, war does not serve any Syrian interests at this time.

To complete the round, this week Hassan Nasrallah declared at a Beirut mass rally that Hizbullah, too, has no desire for war.

From “below” there is also no pressure for war. The Israeli public is afraid of it, and so, it seems, is the Syrian people.

So where does the daily talk about war come from? If nobody wants it, why is there so much talk about it? Why do the media, in Israel and throughout the world, report “tension on the Northern border of Israel”? Why is the Israeli army frantically conducting maneuvers on the Golan? Why are there reports about a rapid upgrading of Syrian weaponry and the hectic building of fortifications against Israel? Why is the Turkish government offering urgent mediation between Israel and Syria?

All very mysterious.

* * *IT SEEMS that the key to this mystery is not to be found in Jerusalem or Damascus, but in Washington.

When Ehud Olmert refuses to respond to the serenades of Bashar al-Assad, he hints that President Bush is forbidding any contact with the Syrians. Last year, America pushed Israel into the war in Lebanon, obstructed an early cease-fire and, so it seemed, was interested in extending the war into Syria.

Syria belongs, of course, to the “Axis of Evil” that exists in Bush’s mind. His Arab allies tell him, to no avail, that this is a mistake: Sunni Syria is no natural ally of the Iranian Shiites. It needs them only because the US is isolating it. Damascus uses the Shiite Hizbullah, so they explain, only to exert pressure on Beirut and on Jerusalem. Logic says that it is in the interest of the US to help make peace between Israel and Syria in order to pry Syria loose from the Iranian embrace. But Bush does not listen.

Perhaps he is pushing Olmert towards war with Syria in order to divert attention from his own Iraqi fiasco, which is worsening daily. Or perhaps he is interested only in some artificial tension, in order to bring about the fall of the Assad regime. The main thing is to set up another Arab democracy, on the lines of Egypt, Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

The question is: why is Israel taking part in this game?

* * *THE CENTRAL figure in this play is Ehud Barak. His connection with Syria didn’t start yesterday. Eight years ago, during his short and calamitous term as Prime Minister, he played with the idea of making peace with Syria. He negotiated with Hafez al-Assad and – surprise, surprise – the parties arrived at the threshold of an historic peace agreement. The Golan would have been restored to Syria, the settlers removed, another important Arab country would live in peace with Israel.

And then the whole thing fell apart. The pretext was that the old Assad wanted to dip his long feet in the waters of the Sea of Tiberias, instead of stopping a few hundred yards away from it. But the real reason concerned the feet of Barak himself: they got cold. He escaped at the very last minute, and started the irresponsible adventure of Camp David.

I called him, at the time, a “peace criminal” – a serial political offender against peace. After failing at Camp David – because of his overweening arrogance and appalling contempt for Arabs – he invented the mantra: “We have no partner”. So it was not he who failed, and not the conference which he initiated without proper preparation.

No. It is the partner that has failed. There can be no peace with the Palestinians, just as there can be no peace with the Syrians. In the immortal saying of the ultra-ultra-rightist, Yitzhak Shamir: “The sea is the same sea, and the Arabs are the same Arabs”.

“We have no partner”. That mantra destroyed the Israeli peace movement and caused damage that, it seems, can hardly be repaired.

* * *EHUD OLMERT is keeping Barak out of the play he is now engaged in with Mahmoud Abbas. Why present a gift to a competitor? In revenge, Barak dismisses the idea of peace with the Palestinians with a wave of the hand. He announces that the idea of peace is a non-starter, because the Palestinian state would shower Israel with missiles. What is happening today to Sderot would happen tomorrow to Ben Gurion airport, which is only a few miles away from the Green Line.

This means that peace can be made only when Israel has a system that will provide an impenetrable defense against short-range missiles. When will that happen? In a few years. (But by then, the Palestinians will probably have more advanced missiles, and we shall need more advanced defense systems.)

Peace in three years, or in thirty, or in three hundred?

* * *IN THE meantime, Olmert continues with his games. Almost every day a colorful new balloon goes up: peace proposals, “principles” for a peace that may come about at some indefinite time, a theoretical “peace agreement”. All these plans have one thing in common: they don’t touch reality, here and now. They belong to a distant rosy future, while very bad things are happening now on the ground.

It is President Bush, again, who is pushing Olmert in this direction. As much as he wants tension between Israel and the Syrians, he desires positive news about his “vision” of a “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians. Let them float virtual “peace processes”, discuss documents for the time the Messiah will come, smile at each other, embrace. All to prove that Bush is winning after all, his “vision” is taking shape. That is good for Bush, good for Olmert, good for Abbas.

For whom is it not good? For the Palestinians, who are collapsing under the yoke of the occupation. The misery in the Gaza Strip deepens every day, as the plan unfolds to bring about a total collapse, anarchy and the fall of Hamas. The situation of the West Bank population is not much better. The roadblocks are staying where they are, and so are the settlements and outposts. The road network “for Israelis only” is getting longer, the construction of the wall is in full swing.

The most grievous expression of the situation in the occupied territories under Olmert and Barak is the daily killing. Almost no day passes without a new atrocity. A pupil is run over, his injuries are critical, he is kept at the roadblock over an hour until he dies. The army issues a laconic statement: he was on the list of those “forbidden to enter Israel”. Five soldiers seize a boy waiting at a bus stop and beat him to death. A sick woman arrives at a roadblock and is detained there for no apparent reason until she dies.

Such stories have become routine and no longer cause a ripple. Two or three journalists do still get upset and report them, the rest just ignore them. Senses have been blunted. It’s not news.

* * *IT MIGHT have been expected that somebody would get angry at the empty games of the “peace process”. After all, every thinking person knows that if Abbas achieves no political results, Hamas will drive him out of the West Bank as they did in Gaza, and that is supposed to frighten Israelis.

They are not frightened. Hamas will take over? So what! All-Arabs-are-the-same.

Syria has missiles that can reach every point in Israel. Including Tel-Aviv. Including Dimona. A war with Syria will be no joy-ride.

So what? People don’t get upset. Barak says that there will be no war, but that perhaps there will be war. But that would be just a slight mis-calculatsia.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is o a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/avnery08202007.html

In an “editorial” published in the Boston Herald, neocon propagandist—and jackleg historian—Jonah Goldberg gives us a running history lesson on “al-Qaeda,” specifically its purported ideological founder, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. According to Goldberg, the late Azzam was “one of the founders of the jihadist movement that became al-Qaeda.” Indeed, this is true, although Mr. Goldberg, of course, does not bother to tell us the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might have it.

Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam ran Maktab Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-Arab, the recruiting arm of the CIA-ISI operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan, responsible for organizing 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East, as veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has noted. “Even conventional sources regard Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) as a CIA and ISI front organization. Moreover, MAK served as the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in the northern Pakistan city of Peshawar,” I wrote in January, 2006. As I have explained elsewhere, Azzam’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood is significant:

Azzam’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood is a significant factor, considering the Muslim organization was long ago penetrated and made to jump through hoops for the sake of MI6 and later the CIA. “According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955,” writes the Palestinian-born journalist and author Said K. Aburish. “When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East.” In 1957, the CIA and MI6 collaborated to use the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to destabilize Syria and assassinate its nationalist leaders (see Jean Shaoul, CIA-MI6 planned to assassinate Syrian leaders in 1957), a plan following the successful CIA-instigated overthrow of the popular and democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh by a few years.

Azzam was simply one of a number of CIA-ISI operatives and patsies:

As is often the case with useful but ultimately disposable Muslim fanatics, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was assassinated on November 24, 1989 and Osama bin Laden took his place. Indeed… “al-Qaeda” may be considered an outgrowth of MAK—or more precisely, an heir apparent as engineered by the CIA, ISI, and Saudi intelligence. MAK had served its purpose as a recruiter and proselytizer of Wahhabi fanaticism in Afghanistan and after the Soviets were ejected the services of Azzam were no longer required (and he was likely considered a danger to the next phase—the spawning and unleashing of “al-Qaeda” in the Balkans and Chechnya).

“MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK,” writes Norm Dixon, an indisputable fact admitted by MSNBC in August, 1998, before everything changed, including history as recited by neocons. Hekmatyar, closely associated with bin Laden and Azzam, according to Asia Times, was “an ISI stooge and creation” (see above link).

Lisa Beyer, writing for Time Magazine as the pall of toxic fumes lingered over Ground Zero in New York, tells us: “At the King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda, bin Laden, according to associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What’s more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity of all Arabs, but in a more ambitious pan-Islamicism, which reaches out to all the world’s 1 billion Muslims.”

Beyer, of course, does not tell us that it was British intelligence and the CIA and their corrupt clients in the Middle East behind the rise of “pan-Islamicism” at the expense of Arab nationalism. “The CIA was following the example of British Intelligence and sought to use Islam to further its goals,” explains Peter Goodgame (The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order). “They wanted to find a charismatic religious leader that they could promote and control and they began to cooperate with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. With the rise of Nasser the Brotherhood was also courted more seriously by the pro-Western Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They needed all the popular support that they could muster against the rise of Nasser-inspired Arab nationalism to keep their regimes intact.”

For Jonah Goldberg and the neocons, however, the instrumental beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood, MAK, and “al-Qaeda,” a name gleaned from an Afghan mujahideen database, are not worthy of mention, as some people would get the idea that “Islamic terrorism”—hardly a concern before the Brits, Americans, and Israelis took up interest for the sake of their own agendas—is something other than what the corporate media tells us it is.

Source: Another Day in the Empire
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=952

 
Christian Maronite leader General Michel Aoun (L), and leader of Hezbollah sheikh Hassan Nasrallah (R), in Beirut, Lebanon, 05 August 2007.

Sunday’s Lebanese parliamentary by-election was planned to strengthen the country’s U.S.-backed government against the ongoing campaign by opposition forces allied with Iran and Syria to bring it down. But once the votes were counted, the election appears to have strengthened the hand of the opposition and highlighted the weakness of the current power arrangement in an increasingly divided country.

The election was held to replace two assassinated legislators from the anti-Syrian ruling coalition of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. And the government comfortably won one of those seats — the one formerly occupied by the late Walid Eido, a Sunni member of parliament who was killed in June by a bomb set next to his favorite beach club. But holding Eido’s seat wasn’t much of a challenge: He had represented a strong Sunni Muslim district in West Beirut where support for Siniora is strong. The bombshell came in the majority Christian district known as the Metn in the mountains just north of Beirut: There, former President Amin Gemayel, one of the stalwarts of the anti-Syrian coalition, lost to a small-time opposition candidate, Camille Khoury, who is unrecognizable to most Lebanese. Though Gemayel was defeated by just 418 votes, the loss is all the more stunning because he was campaigning to fill the seat once held by his son, Pierre Gemayel, who was gunned down in the suburbs of Beirut in November.

Khoury’s victory is a reflection of the popularity of his patron, Michel Aoun, a charismatic and enigmatic former general who heads the country’s largest Christian political party, the Free Patriotic Movement. Aoun’s popularity confounds any attempt to read Lebanon as a battlefield in a “clash of civilizations,” because he and his party are openly allied with Hizballah, the Iran-backed Shi’ite Muslim political party and anti-Israeli militia that leads the opposition.

What could Lebanese Christians possibly have in common with Hizballah, the Islamist resistance movement? Perhaps it is the fact that Aoun’s Christian supporters and Hizballah’s rank and file are motivated by a shared animus towards Lebanon’s political elite, a handful of families such as the Gemayel, whose progeny resurface in government after government. In fact, many of the supporters of the current government are civil war-era militia leaders, who accommodated themselves rather nicely to the years of Syrian occupation, but who have now emerged wearing business suits and talking U.S.-friendly language about democracy and independence.

Of course, neither Aoun nor Hizballah is a poster child for democratic civil society. Aoun, as head of the Lebanese army in the early 1990s, launched a series of disastrous civil conflicts, while Hizballah sparked a pointless war with Israel last summer that resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 Lebanese, many of them children. Still, both popular movements tap into the general resentment of average people who have watched as a relatively small number of Lebanese — well represented in the anti-Syria ruling coalition — have cashed in on the post civil-war reconstruction of the country.

The latest election results and the wider campaign against the government reflects not so much an attack on democracy as it does the failure of the country’s sectarian system to resolve internal disputes. The system, which reserves the presidency for the Maronite Christians, the Prime Minister’s job for a Sunni, the speaker of parliament for a Shi’ite and generally distributes power on the basis of ethnicity and sect, was originally created to achieve stability through a careful balance of power. Instead, it has produced political deadlock and a system dominated by leaders whose domestic power is based on alliances with foreign powers.

Yes, Lebanon is a battlefield, but not in some global religious-ideological war. Instead, its politics reflects an old-fashioned power struggle between the fading regional superpower — the United States — and the rising power of Iran and its Syrian ally. And that’s a conflict that is not going to be settled by any Lebanese by-election.

Source: Time
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1650192,00.html

By Donald Neff

It was 33 years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. While a traumatized nation grieved for its youngest president, he was succeeded by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was to become the most pro-Israel president up to that time. A sea change was about to take place in America’s relations with Israel.

Johnson was quick to declare his support for the Jewish state. Shortly after being sworn in as president, Johnson reportedly remarked to an Israeli diplomat:

“You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.” Commented Isaiah L. Kenen, one of the most effective lobbyists for Israel in Washington: “ I would say that everything he did as president supported that statement.” ¹

Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his. Harry S. Truman, while remembered as a warm friend of Israel, was more interested in his own election than Israel’s fate. After winning office on his own in 1948 with the support of the Jewish vote, he seemed to lose interest in the Jewish state.²

Dwight D. Eisenhower was distinctly cool toward Israel, seeing it as a major irritant in America’s relations with the Arab world and U.S. access to oil. There were no powerful partisans of Israel in his administration and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was a frequent critic of Israel. Kennedy was considerably warmer toward the Jewish state and became the first president to begin providing major weapons to it, breaking an embargo in place since 1947.³ Yet he valued the U.S. position in the Arab world, particularly with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and as a result maintained a fairly even-handed policy despite having a number of pro-Israel officials in his administration.

All this changed dramatically under Johnson. Not only was he personally a strong supporter of the Jewish state but he had a number of high officials, advisers and friends who shared his view. These included officials within the administration such as McGeorge Bundy, Clark Clifford, Arthur Goldberg, Harry McPherson, John Roche, the Rostow brothers, Walt and Eugene, and Ben Wattenberg.

These officials occupied such high offices as the ambassador to the United Nations, the head of the National Security Council and the number two post at the State Department. They were assiduous in putting forward Israel’s interests in such memoranda as “What We Have Done for Israel” ⁴ and “New Things We Might Do in Israel” ⁵ and “How We Have Helped Israel.” ⁶

The president was repeatedly urged to distance America from the Arab world.

The president was repeatedly urged by Israel’s supporters to embrace Israeli policy, give the Jewish state increased aid, and distance America from the Arab world. So pervasive was the influence of Israel’s supporters during Johnson’s tenure that CIA Director Richard Helms believed there was no important U.S. secret affecting Israel that the Israeli government did not know about in this period.⁷

So closely allied were U.S. and Israeli interests in the mind of “Mac” Bundy, the special coordinator of Middle East policy during the 1967 war, that he once sought to buttress a recommendation to Johnson by remarking: “This is good LBJ doctrine and good Israeli doctrine, and therefore a good doctrine to get out in public.” ⁸ When initial war reports showed Israel making dramatic gains and several officials in the State Department Operations Room outwardly showed satisfaction, Undersecretary of State Gene Rostow turned to them with a broad smile on his face and said ironically: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, do not forget we are neutral in word, thought and deed.” ⁹ In the State Department’s summary of the start of the war, Rostow’s brother, Walt, the national security adviser, wrote on a covering letter to Johnson: “Herewith the account, with a map, of the first day’s turkey shoot.” ¹⁰

Beyond the administration’s supporters of Israel, one of Johnson’s closest informal advisers was Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, another warm friend of Israel’s. Two of Johnson’s closest outside advisers were Abraham Feinberg and Arthur B. Krim, both strong supporters of Israel. Feinberg was president of the American Bank & Trust Company of New York and the man whose “activities started a process of systematic fund-raising for politics [in the late 1940s] that has made Jews the most conspicuous fund-raisers and contributors to the Democratic Party,” according to a study by Stephen D. Isaacs, Jews and American Politics. Johnson routinely consulted Feinberg on Middle East policy.

Vocal Supporters of Israel

Feinberg was a vocal supporter of increased aid to Israel. Although an American, Feinberg at various times owned the Coca-Cola franchise in Israel and was a part-owner of the Jerusalem Hilton Hotel. When his bank fell into trouble in the 1970s and two of its officers were convicted of misappropriating funds, the Israeli Bank Leumi Company, in a generous act of reverse aid, purchased Feinberg’s American Bank & Trust Company.¹¹

Arthur Krim was president of United Artists Corporation of Hollywood, a New York attorney and another major Democratic fund-raiser. He served as chairman of the Democratic National Party Finance Committee and chairman of the President’s Club of New York, the most potent source of Johnson’s campaign funds. Krim was married to a physician, Mathilde, who in her youth had briefly served as an agent for the Irgun, the Jewish terrorist group led by Menachem Begin.

The Krims were so close to Johnson that they built a vacation house near his Texas ranch to be close to him on long weekends and were regular guests at the White House. Mathilde Krim stayed at the White House during much of the 1967 war and was a regular caller at the Israeli Embassy, passing reports and gossip back and forth. The Krims, like other Johnson friends, did not hesitate to advise the president on Middle East policy.¹²

How influential the Krims were in forming Johnson’s Middle East policy was hinted at by notes in the president’s daily diary for June 17, 1967. The notes reported that at a dinner with the Krims and others at Camp David, Johnson openly discussed a speech he was working on that was to establish the nation’s Middle East policy for the years ahead.

According to the notes, Johnson read from various drafts of the speech around the dinner table, “inserting additions and making changes, also accepting comments and suggestions from all at the table.” Thus two passionate partisans of Israel, the Krims, helped Johnson refine what was later called the “five great principles of peace,” the pillars of U.S. policy in the Middle East for the next two decades.

After Johnson delivered the speech on June 19, he received a report of an enthusiastic phone call from Abe Feinberg saying that the Jewish community was delighted with the speech. “Mr. Feinberg said he had visited with Israelis and Jewish leaders all over the country and they are high in their appreciation.” ¹³

Under Johnson, aid to Israel increased and the old arms embargo was completely shattered, portending the massive transfer of treasure, technology and weapons that began in the next administration of Richard M. Nixon. That, of course, was only the beginning of the age of total support of Israel, which has reached new heights under Bill Clinton.

RECOMMENDED READING

Donovan, Robert J., Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-1948, New York, W.W. Norton, 1977.

*Green, Stephen, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, New York, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984.

*Hersh, Seymour M., The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, New York, Random House, 1991.

Isaacs, Stephen D., Jews and American Politics, Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974.

Khalidi, Walid (ed.), From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, second printing, 1987.

Miller, Merle, Lyndon: An Oral History , New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.

*Neff, Donald, Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days that Changed the Middle East, New York, Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984.

*Neff, Donald, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995.

Rubenberg, Cheryl A., Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination , Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Wilson, Evan M., Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. came to Recognize Israel, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution Press, 1979.

FOOTNOTES

1 Miller, Lyndon, p. 477. This was generally the assessment in Israel as well; see Green, Taking Sides, pp. 184-86.

2 See for instance: Wilson, Decision on Palestine, pp. 148-49; Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest, pp. 9-10, 31; Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, pp. liii-lxvii; Donald Neff, “Palestine, Truman and America’s Strategic Balance, 4″ American-Arab Affairs, No. 25, Summer 1988, pp. 30-41.

3 Neff, Fallen Pillars, pp. 170-71.

4 State Dept., NEA/IAI:2/8/67; confidential, declassified 4/16/81.

5 W.W. Rostow, Memorandum for the President, 5/21/66; secret, declassified 3/13/79.

6 Unsigned, White House papers, 5/19/66; secret, declassified 3/13/79.

7 Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, p. 110.

8 Ibid., p. 273.

9 Ibid., p. 213.

10 Rostow to the President, 6/5/67, secret.

11 Isaacs, Jews and American Politics, p. 83. Detailed information on Feinberg, including his aid to Israel’s nuclear program, is in Hersh, The Samson Option, pp. 93-111.

12 Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, pp. 83, 156-58.

13 “Marvin to the President,” memorandum, 6:30 PM, 19 June 1967, reprinted in Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, pp. 307-08.

Source: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/1196/9611096.htm

40 Years of Lies

Believe It or Not in the Middle East

By ROBERT FISK

When I was a schoolboy, I loved a column which regularly appeared in British papers called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”. In a single rectangular box filled with naively drawn illustrations, Ripley – Bob Ripley – would try to astonish his readers with amazing facts:

“Believe It or Not, in California, an entire museum is dedicated to candy dispensers … Believe It or Not, a County Kerry man possesses an orange that is 25 years old … Believe It or Not, a weather researcher had his ashes scattered on the eve of Huricane Danielle 400 miles off the coast of Miama, Florida.” Etc, etc, etc.

Incredibly, Ripley’s column lives on, and there is even a collection of “Ripley Believe It or Not” museums in the United States.

The problem, of course, is that these are all extraordinary facts which will not offend anyone. There are no suicide bombers in Ripley, no Israeli air strikes (“Believe It or Not, 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon”), no major casualty tolls (“Believe It or Not, up to 650,000 Iraqis died in the four years following the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq”). See what I mean? Just a bit too close to the bone (or bones).

But I was reminded of dear old Ripley when I was prowling through the articles marking the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Memoirs there have been aplenty, but I think only the French press – in the shape of Le Monde Diplomatique – was prepared to confront a bit of “Believe It or Not”.

It recalled vividly – and shamefully – how the world’s newspapers covered the story of Egypt’s “aggression” against Israel. In reality – Believe It or Not – it was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and ordered UN troops out of Sinai and Gaza following his vituperative threats to destroy Israel. “The Egyptians attack Israel,” France-Soir told its readers on 5 June 1967, a whopper so big that it later amended its headline to “It’s Middle East War!”.

Quite so. Next day, the socialist Le Populaire headlined its story “Attacked on all sides, Israel resists victoriously”. On the same day, Le Figaro carried an article announcing that “the victory of the army of David is one of the greatest of all time”. Believe It or Not, the Second World War – which might be counted one of the greatest of all time, had ended only 22 years earlier.

Johnny Hallyday, France’s undie-able pop star, sang for 50,000 French supporters of Israel – for whom solidarity was expressed in the French press by Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette GrÈco, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, ValÈry Giscard d’Estaing and FranÁois Mitterand. Believe It or Not – and you can believe it – Mitterand once received the coveted Francisque medal from PÈtain’s Vichy collaborationists.

Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel “is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions – and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called ‘terrorism’”. This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur – to the effect that “Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests”. And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.

I owe it to the academic Anicet MobÈ Fansiama to remind me this week that – Believe It or Not – Congolese troops from Belgium’s immensely wealthy African colony scored enormous victories over Italian troops in Africa during the Second World War, capturing 15,000 prisoners, including nine generals. Called “the Public Force” – a name which happily excluded the fact that these heroes were black Congolese – the army mobilised 13,000 soldiers and civilians to fight Vichy French colonies in Africa and deployed in the Middle East – where they were positioned to defend Palestine – as well as in Somalia, Madagascar, India and Burma.

Vast numbers of British and American troops passed through the Congo as its wealth was transferred to the war chests of the United States and Britain.

A US base was built at Kinshasa to move oil to Allied troops fighting in the Middle East.

But – Believe It or Not – when Congolese trade unions, whose members were requisitioned to perform hard labour inside Belgium’s colony by carrying agricultural and industrial goods and military equipment, often on their backs, demanded higher salaries, the Belgian authorities confronted their demonstrations with rifle fire, shooting down 50 of their men.

At least 3,000 political prisoners were deported for hard labour to a remote district of Congo. Thus were those who gave their blood for Allied victory repaid. Or rather not repaid. The four billion Belgian francs which was owed back to the Congo – about £500m in today’s money – was never handed over. Believe It or Not.

So let’s relax and return to Ripley reality. “Believe It or Not, Russell Parsons of Hurricane, West Virginia, has his funeral and cremation instructions tattooed on his arm! … Believe It or Not, in April 2007 (yes, these are new Ripleys) a group of animal lovers paid nearly $3,400 to buy 300 lobsters from a Maine fish market – then set them free back into the ocean! … Believe It or Not, in a hospital waiting room, 70 per cent of people suffer from broken bones, 75 per cent are fatigued, 80 per cent have fevers. What percentage of people must have all four ailments?” Believe It or Not, I don’t know. And oh yes, “Geta, Emperor of Rome AD189-212, insisted upon alternative meals. A typical menu: partridge (perdix), peacock (pavo), leek (porrum), beans (phaseoli), peach (persica), plum (pruna) and melon (pepone).”

I guess after that, you just have to throw up.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Fisk’s new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

Source: CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk06092007.html

The British National Union of Journalists has voted for a trade boycott of Israel, and Britain’s University and College Union, representing 120,000 instructors, has urged its members to shun Israeli counterparts. Unison, the public employee union which, with 1.3 million members, is Britain’s largest, will take up a boycott resolution at its June 13 annual conference. It’s all because, the boycotters say, Palestinians are in a bad way, as indeed they are, and no wonder.

When the United Nations in 1947 created Israel in a small part of the Palestine Mandate, Israel, as expected, declared independence and the Arab nations attacked. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Jews fled hostile Arab states.

Israel created an absorption program that integrated Jewish refugees into its population, but with the honorable exception of Jordan, Israel’s neighbors shunted Palestinian refugees into festering camps, where most of their descendants remain.

When the Arabs states ganged up again on Israel in 1967, they lost the West Bank and Gaza, which Jordan and Egypt, respectively, had annexed at Israeli independence.

Those populations have lingered in Israeli occupation thanks mainly to the proclaimed Arab-Palestinian preference for an armed, not a negotiated, solution, a preference that spawned repeated intifadas and terrorism.

Through the years, Arab leaders — and Syrian and Persian — have found the Palestinians’ genuine wretchedness a handy casus belli when they have wanted to start another war.

And Israel’s refusal now to commit demographic suicide by letting in the few still living refugees and their descendants, numbering more than 4 million, offers a useful Arab alibi for rejecting the two-state solution Israel has repeatedly endorsed.

The boycott fad — favored by some U.S. Christian denominations and at several colleges — is the natural child of the It’s-all-Israel’s-fault school of Middle East studies.

That proposition was given a nice little boost recently by Jimmy Carter’s wildly one-sided book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” wherein the former president declared, “Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law?”

Israel has sometimes been hardnosed needlessly. Its justified 1982 invasion of Lebanon to quash the terrorist Palestinian ministate there, which was attacking northern Israel, was recklessly extended toward Beirut in a failed stab at regime change. And the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza have been worse than a bad idea.

But the Palestinian Authority in 2000 turned down the best deal for a Palestinian state it will ever see, and Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza two years ago, instead of inspiring Palestinians to create a model that would validate their ambitions, set them at one another’s throats and sparked new rocket attacks on Israel. Israel’s corollary plan to begin unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank is a collateral casualty.

Perhaps Israel would feel able to adopt decorum more pleasing to the sensibilities of Jimmy Carter and the righteous boycotters if — speaking of international law — the Palestinians and Arab states would respect the United Nations’ vote which set up a sovereign Israel 60 years ago.

Tom Teepen is a syndicated columnist.

Source: The Day
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=f21206e5-ba89-4b71-a55f-5eb023d77f36