U.S. Cancels Joint Missile War Games With Israel

Israeli media is full of a major news story: that a major war games exercise planned for April which involved thousands of U.S. troops joining the IDF for missile exercises simulating an Iranian attack on Israel have been cancelled. This would’ve been among the most elaborate exercise the two countries had ever implemented. It would’ve involved 3,000 U.S. troops, Patriot missile batteries and naval warships and brought a U.S. admiral to Israel to witness them. The Jerusalem Post reports:


The drill was supposed to include the simulation of various missile defense scenarios with the objective of creating a high level of interoperability so that, if needed, US missile defense systems would be able to deploy in Israel and work with local defense systems during a future conflict.

The official version is that the exercise has been postponed till this coming summer. But it seems clear that they were cancelled. Now the question is why.

Did the U.S. cancel them to show displeasure to Israel? And if so, why? Does Obama know something about Israeli intentions we don’t know? Are plans underway to strike Iran? Is Obama seeking to show his displeasure? Or is he trying to soothe Iran by not going through with a highly provocative military exercise which would’ve placed thousands of U.S. troops in the heart of Israel as a show of solidarity with Israel in its crusade against Iran? Another related option being suggested in the Israeli media is that the U.S. is signalling its displeasure over the latest Iranian assassination by the Mossad. If this is the case, then the U.S. is saying that such black ops programs are a sideshow that achieve little and could serve as the catalyst to send the entire region into cataclysm.

Maariv adds that the reason involved:

“broad IDF operational considerations, including military preparations for achieving complex objectives.”

I don’t know if this means that Israel wanted them cancelled because it was preparing to attack Iran. Or because the IDF wants Iran to believe this.

Further, Naval Today reports that the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is steaming from Thailand to join the two carrier groups already patrolling off the Iranian coast. Again, the question is–is this designed to pressure Iran and show it we mean business, up to and including an attack on its nuclear facilities? Some observers expecting a U.S. attack presume that in preparation we would require force redundancy in case Iran succeeded in disabling or sinking a U.S. carrier. Or is it designed to tell Israel that we will prevent an Israeli attack?

In addition, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey is due in Israel Thursday to continue pressure on Israel to tell us what its plans are concerning Iran. Or if Israel has already decided to attack, presumably he would be consulting with them about what would be involved and letting them know what the U.S. would or would not allow to happen.

Source: http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/01/15/u-s-cancels-joint-missile-war-games-with-israel/

Omertà, Mainstream Media-Style: The Oath of Silence When It Comes to Unfavorable News About Israel

On Jan. 11, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Economist Intelligence Unit released the results of a study of the security precautions taken by the 32 countries that possess nuclear materials able to fuel atomic bombs.

Later that morning, the New York Times Web site featured—briefly—a story on the study’s findings. The story appeared on page A6 of the next day’s print edition.

Noted reporter William J. Broad: “The study is full of surprises and potential embarrassments: for instance, Australia takes first place in nuclear security and Japan comes in at No. 23, behind nations like Kazakhstan and South Africa.

“The United States? It ties for 13th place with Belgium. Last place goes to North Korea,” Broad continued. Britain, with a security score of 79 out of a possible 100, came in top among “the nine countries known to possess nuclear arms.” The U.S. scored 78, Japan 68, Iran 46, Pakistan 41, and North Korea 37. (The lower the security score, the fewer precautions each country has in place.)

A New York Times reader wanting to know where Israel ranks, however, was out of luck. Not a word about the only nuclear-armed country in the volatile Middle East. For that one must go to the report itself—which, of course, we proceeded to do:

www.ntiindex.org/countries/israel/.

Turns out Israel earned a security score of 56, and ranked No. 25—like Japan, “behind nations like Kazakhstan and South Africa.” Moreover, it scored 0 (of 100) in the categories of “control and accounting procedures” and “nuclear security and materials transparency.”

So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

The Washington Report deems it fit to print the ranking and scores of all 32 countries surveyed:

RANK 1	COUNTRY Australia	SECURITY SCORE 94
2	Hungary	89
3	Czech Republic	87
4	Switzerland	86
5	Austria	85
6	Netherlands	84
7	Sweden	83
8	Poland	82
9	Norway	81
=10	Canada	79
=10	Germany	79
=10	United Kingdom	79
=13	Belgium	78
=13	United States	78
15	Ukraine	76
=16	Argentina	74
=16	Belarus	74
=16	Italy	74
=19	France	73
=19	Mexico	73
=19	South Africa	73
22	Kazakhstan	71
23	Japan	68
24	Russia	65
25	Israel	56
26	Uzbekistan	55
27	China	52
28	India	49
29	Vietnam	48
30	Iran	46
31	Pakistan	41
32	North Korea	37

“=” denotesa tie among countries. 

"Price Tag" or Pogrom? West Bank Settlers Now Running Amok in Israel as Well

By Jonathan Cook

The interior of the mosque in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangariya in northern Israel was left charred and blackened in early October, its stacks of Qur'ans burned beyond recognition. On the outside walls, scrawled in charcoal, were the words "Revenge" and "Price tag." The extremist wing of the settler movement had left its calling card.

As part of their "price tag" policy—a euphemism for a campaign of terror—the settlers have for the past two years been intermittently setting fire to mosques in the West Bank. For much of the past decade, they have been mounting regular pogrom-style attacks against isolated Palestinian villages, beating the inhabitants, setting fire to fields, uprooting olive trees, killing livestock and poisoning wells. At this time of year, during the olive season, armed gangs of settlers roam the West Bank assaulting Palestinians trying to harvest their crops.

But this was the first time the settlers had torched a mosque in Israel. A few days later, two cemeteries—one Muslim, one Christian—were vandalized in Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Arab town next to Tel Aviv. The phrases "Price tag" and "Death to the Arabs" were sprayed on the headstones.

The "price tag" policy originally was devised as a way both to punish Palestinians for attacks on the settlements and to deter Israel from enforcing the rule of law on the settlers. On the rare occasions when the Israeli authorities have done so—by, for instance, removing a caravan from one of the more than 100 unauthorized settlement outposts dotted across the West Bank, or by arresting a lawbreaker—Palestinian villages have suffered the consequences.

More recently, however, the settlers' attacks have been intended to penalize Palestinians for the smallest political developments in peace talks. The hard-liners, in particular, are so blinkered by their religious-nationalist fundamentalism that they have failed to grasp the reality that Israel's leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, voided the peace process long ago.

It was almost certainly not a coincidence that the two attacks inside Israel came a short time after Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application for statehood to the United Nations, in defiance of both Israel and the U.S. The Palestinian Authority president raised the stakes on Palestinian statehood—and so did the settlers.

The attacks marked a dramatic escalation of a recent campaign by Jewish extremists to expand their low-intensity war against West Bank Palestinians to include Israel's 1.5 million-strong Palestinian minority. These latter Palestinians, descendants of those who remained on their land during the 1948 war, have Israeli citizenship—even if of a very inferior kind—and comprise a fifth of Israel's population (a higher percentage than that of African Americans in the U.S.).

The settlers' goal, according to analysts, is to generate a civil war, creating the momentum toward an apocalyptic confrontation that unites the Jewish population behind the settlers' vision of a Greater Israel by pitting Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line against the "Chosen people."

According to Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy organization inside Israel, "They [the settlers] want us to react. Then they can claim that the Arabs are trying to drive the Jews into the sea, and that no political solution is possible."

Since Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, disillusionment has grown among the extremist settlers, many of whom are convinced that they must intensify their struggle to stop further concessions in the peace process. The settlements, armed by the Israeli army for decades, are in a position to wreak havoc.

In recent years the most militant elements among the settlers have been increasingly focusing their energies on Palestinian Arab communities in Israel, with the intention of stoking tensions and provoking conflict. They have used a two-fold approach.

In Israel's half a dozen so-called mixed cities, where Jews and Arabs live in close proximity, even if usually in separate neighborhoods, religious extremists have been taking over areas within traditional Arab enclaves. Typically, they have begun by setting up a hesder yeshiva, a seminary where young Jewish men combine religious studies with military service. Effectively, the yeshivas are armed encampments within Arab neighborhoods. The settlers then seek to intimidate and drive out Arab residents so they can take over nearby buildings and gradually spread out, in a variation of the established Zionist tactic of the tower-and-stockade used by the first European Jewish immigrants to take over land in Palestine during the British Mandate.

But the settlers also have targeted some of the largest and most independent Arab towns in Israel. In recent years Baruch Marzel, one of the leaders of an ultra-nationalist group of settlers based in and around the West Bank Palestinian city of Hebron, has been leading provocative settler marches—with Israeli police protection—into Arab communities such as Sakhnin and Umm al-Fahm.

Sakhnin has a reputation as one of the most nationalist Arab communities in Israel, famous for its role in resisting a large state-organized land grab in the Galilee in 1976. In clashes the army killed six protesters, an event commemorated every year by Palestinians as Land Day.

Umm al-Fahm, meanwhile, is notorious among Israeli Jews as the hometown of Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the increasingly influential Islamic Movement. For similar reasons, the city is the primary target of a plan put forward by Israel's far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to swap Arab areas of Israel for the settlements in the West Bank under a future peace deal.

In this regard, the Jewish extremists chose the locations of their latest attacks carefully. They selected two Palestinian-Arab communities in Israel that have the opportunity and possible incentive to respond to the settlers' provocation with violence. Both communities are also distinctive for being surrounded by Jewish populations that have recently become rabidly anti-Arab.

Militant settlers hoped they were throwing a lit match on to a bonfire.

By contrast, Tuba Zangariya is one of a few fervently "loyal" Arab communities in Israel. While many Bedouin were expelled during the 1948 war that created Israel, the tribes of Tuba and Zangariya were given an area next to Jewish communities as a reward for fighting alongside Israel's armed forces.

Deprived of jobs and facing the same discrimination suffered by the rest of the country's Arab minority, many young men there still serve, like their grandfathers and fathers, in the Israeli army. After the mosque attack, a community leader boasted to an Israeli reporter: "We were among the founders of the state of Israel."

But as news of the mosque's desecration spread, enraged youths burned government buildings, fired their army-issue rifles into the air and clashed with police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The police claimed their tough approach was needed to stop the youths of Tuba from marching on to Rosh Pina and Safed, two Jewish towns only a few kilometers away.

Anti-Arab sentiments in Safed, in particular, have reached a boiling point under the town's chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, a municipal employee who has been leading a campaign to expel Safed's small Arab population, mostly students attending the local college. He has accused young Arab men of seeking to "corrupt" the town's Jewish women, and along with dozens of other rabbis signed a letter last year threatening reprisals against Jews who rented properties to non-Jews. There have been sporadic assaults on Arabs in Safed ever since.

The despoiling of the graves in Jaffa could have triggered a spiral of violence as well. A day after the attack, Molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue in the town.

Jaffa, once the commercial hub of Palestine, is now little more than a seaside suburb of Tel Aviv containing one of the most deprived Arab communities in the country. Most of the residents are descendants either of Palestinians forced out of their Jaffa homes at gunpoint in 1948 and corralled into a small neighborhood named Ajami, or of poor Palestinian laborers brought from the rest of the country to help build Tel Aviv.

Jaffa's Arab population, still penned up in Ajami and living precariously as tenants in neglected properties confiscated by the state decades ago, were brought to global attention in 2009 in an Oscar-nominated film called simply "Ajami." It portrayed the neighborhood as a breeding ground for crime and violence.

However, it did not show two further indignities currently being suffered by Ajami's Arab residents: a gentrification program that is demolishing areas of the neighborhood to attract wealthy Jews who prefer a beachfront residence to overcrowded Tel Aviv (see July 2008 Washington Report, p. 24); and the gradual infiltration of Jewish religious extremists, who have switched location from the settlements to Jaffa and other mixed cities.

In this pressure-cooker atmosphere, the graves' vandals presumably hoped they could fuel the mounting antagonisms on both sides of Jaffa's ethnic divide.
Fueling Antagonisms

Significantly, the attacks inside Israel suggested that militant factions among the settlers are now committed to a strategy that blurs the Green Line—the pre-1967 border between Israel and the occupied territories—in a way designed to make the citizenship status of Palestinians inside Israel irrelevant. More terror attacks on the minority can be expected.

An editorial in Israel's Haaretz newspaper noted that the settlers were exploiting the prevailing anti-Arab mood that has been generated both by two years of overtly discriminatory legislation from the Israeli parliament and by growing numbers of rabbis espousing trenchantly racist views. Reports of the arson attack on the mosque in Tuba Zangariya spawned anti-Arab graffiti across Israel.

The editorial also pointed out that such incitement and violence posed a severe challenge to Israel's professed democratic credentials and its image internationally. That is why Israel's political leaders, including Netanyahu, and its chief rabbis condemned the attacks with a haste and vehemence entirely missing from their reactions to Jewish terror aimed at Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The gauntlet thrown down by the settlers is directed mainly toward the security services, especially the Shin Bet internal intelligence agency. The police and Shin Bet have a woeful track record of solving crimes against Palestinians committed by the settlers, despite the increasing use of video cameras by Palestinians to record the attacks. The price tag campaign of recent years has come at almost no cost to the settlers.

The burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangariya neatly illustrated the double standards. A Jewish youth from a West Bank settlement was arrested a few hours after the attack, but released days later for lack of evidence. Meanwhile, the police arrested more than 20 youths from Tuba for firing their weapons into the air, and vowed they would be making many further arrests.

In September the Shin Bet claimed it was struggling to track down those responsible for the price tag attacks because they were religious zealots who had organized into a network of discrete terror cells to avoid infiltration and surveillance.

Yossi Melman, Haaretz's security correspondent, was dismissive of the reasoning: "The Islamic Hezbollah [in Lebanon] and Hamas organizations are also religious zealots. They, too, study their enemy, but nonetheless the Shin Bet and the intelligence agencies manage to infiltrate them and obtain accurate intelligence information about them."

The few Jewish extremists who had been arrested for attacks, Melman added, benefited from "the lenience of judges" and from "incompetence that appears to have been deliberate on the part of the police and the army."

A more probable explanation for the Shin Bet's failure is that its much-neglected "Jewish section," which investigates the settlers' security crimes and is overshadowed by a larger and better-funded "Arab section," draws many of its officers from among the ranks of the settlers.

The impunity granted the settlers is having serious consequences inside Israel, as even the Shin Bet has begun to notice. It has emboldened the extremists to widen their operations of late to include not only the Palestinian minority but also Israeli Jewish peace activists and, on a few occasions, Israeli soldiers.

A few days before the attack on Tuba Zangariya's mosque, a large group of West Bank settlers from Anatot, close to Jerusalem, assaulted and terrorized a group of left-wing Jews who had come to support a Palestinian couple trying to work their land. Many of Anatot's settlers work in the security services, and video shows police officers who were called to the scene standing by as the peace activists are beaten and some of the women sexually abused.

Despite its failure to trace the culprits of such crimes, the Shin Bet has warned that the most fanatical elements in the settler movement need restraining if there is not to be a rapid escalation of violence on both sides of the Green Line. In August it ordered 12 youths from Yitzhar, a notorious settlement close to Nablus, barred from the West Bank. A month later the government ignored the Shin Bet's advice to the Education Ministry to cut funding to Yitzhar's yeshiva, whose rabbis recently published a book advocating the murder of non-Jews, including children.

Because Israel's politicians so far have shown great reluctance to act against the militant settlers, their campaign of violence against Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line is sure to intensify.

--------------------------

Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of this year's Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is Disappearing Palestine.

Source: http://www.wrmea.com/home/374-2011-december/10906-the-nakba-continues-qprice-tagq-or-pogrom-west-bank-settlers-now-running-amok-in-israel-as-well.html

Haaretz Publishes Fraudulent Ad Supporting Settler Price Tag Attacks with Forged Peace Activist Names

There is a brewing media scandal inIsrael that has received scant attention.  Let’s try to change that. Earlier this week, a fictitious settler group published an ad in Haaretzsupporting price tag attacks.  One point they made in their support wasthe claim that price tag attacks are civil disobedience in the same sense thatIlana Hammerman’s group, We Do Not Obey,is.  She is the activist who began a protest movement by drivingPalestinian mothers and children from the West Bank into Israel in order totake them to the beach, amusement parks, zoos, etc.  For her efforts,she’s been rewarded by three police summonses for questioning including awarning of criminal prosecution.  It is illegal both for Palestinians toenter Israel without proper permits and it is illegal for Israeli citizens tobring such individuals into Israel.

We Do Not Obey acts in ways that aretotally non-violent and designed to promote tolerance and peaceful co-existencebetween Israelis and Palestinians while price tag is a violent, abusive andillegal form, not of civil disobedience, but of hooliganism and even terror.  Thevery comparison of the two is an act of outrageous chutzpah.

What is even more shocking about thead than the bogus logic of the argument offered in it, is the fact that the adpurported to be signed by settler women who support the price tag acts ofvandalism and defacement of Palestinian mosques, cemeteries, etc.  It alsolisted the purported settlements in which each endorser lived.  Inreality, every woman’s name included in the ad is a member of Ilana Hammerman’sgroup of peace activists.  In other words, the individual who created thead engaged in an act of fraud and Haaretz abetted the fraud by accepting the adand asking no questions to verify the authenticity of those names.  Nordid it verify the authenticity of the fake group which purported tosponsor the ad.

Further, after Haaretz discovered ithad been duped, it notified Hammerman that it would no longer accept any op-edpieces by her about her work with We Do Not Obey (as it had in the past). It appears that Haaretz, instead of blaming the person who perpetratedthe fraud, is washing its hands of Hammerman and her entire movement.  Aclear case if there ever was one of blaming the victim.  Instead ofshowing respect for fairness and freedom of speech, and apologizing for theirerror in helping defame these women, Haaretz takes a typically liberal approachand absconds from the entire controversy.

We now know who is the author of thefraud.  He is Benny Katzover, a notorious settleractivist.  Here is the audiotranscript of the interview in which he took credit for the ad.  Amonghis recent claims to fame (or better yet, infamy) is an interviewhe published in a Chabad journal, claiming the Israeli democracy hadoutlived its usefulness and should give way to a state governed by Jewish law(“We didn’t come here to establish a democratic state”).  Does anyonebesides me find it ironic (or possibly sociopathic) that a radical settler whorejects Israeli democracy defends price tag attacks as legitimate forms ofcivil disobedience?

We don’t know who paid for the$1,000-1,500 cost of the ad.  Haaretz knows, but I doubt they’re going totell.  A source I’ve consulted who is knowledgeable about the storybelieves that the funding came from either a settlement or a settler agency,which may mean that the State itself paid for the ad (either directly orindirectly).  In fact, a statementon the group’s Facebook page declares the ad was likely paid for throughpublic funds.  This would mean that this act of fraud was actuallyendorsed and paid for by a government entity and the taxpayers of Israel. Further, it would mean that public funds were used to endorse the acts ofhooliganism and lawlessness represented by the price tag movement.  In theevent that this claim is true, it would mean that while Israel’s leaders arepublicly decrying price tag pogromism, other parts of the Israeli government orits public agencies are actually endorsing it.  Does this surprise anyone?

It also shouldn’t surprise anyonethe government would smear Hammerman since her activism is considered a primeexample of delegitimization, the right-wing concept du jour.  YuliEdelstein’s Hasbara ministry is charged with combatting delegitimization andEdelstein himself is a prominent settler leader.  It wouldn’t be beyondthe realm of possibility that his agency could’ve played some role in theattack, though I’m still exploring this angle of the story.

The women of We Do Not Obey havebeen consulting an attorney to decide how to proceed.  It’s ironic thatthe draconian proposed defamation law that may shortly pass the Knesset andbecome law would greatly aid these women in their pursuit of justice.  Itwould allow them to personally win substantial financial compensation of up to$75,000 each (for 40 women) from Katzover without having to prove any financialdamage to them.  The Israeli far-right devised this cockamamie law to useagainst the Israeli NGO and peace activist community.  It never occurred tothem that it could be used against them as well by the Israeli left. That’s how smart these dullards are.

Source:http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/01/16/haaretz-publishes-fraudulent-ad-supporting-settler-price-tag-attacks-signs-names-of-peace-activists/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+richardsilverstein%2FZOfh+%28+Tikun+Olam-%D7%AA%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%9F+%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%9D%3A+Make+the+World+a+Better+Place%29

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

1. Settlements are illegal under international law as they violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of the occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. This illegality has been confirmed by the International Court of Justice, the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention and the United Nations Security Council.

2. Seizure of land for settlement building and future expansion has resulted in the shrinking of space available for Palestinians to sustain their livelihoods and develop adequate housing, basic infrastructure and services. Settlement expansion plans have led to extensive demolitions of Palestinian homes and the forcible displacement of people.

3. The failure to respect international law, along with the lack of adequate law enforcement vis-à-vis settler violence and takeover of land has led to a state of impunity, which encourages further violence and undermines the physical security and livelihoods of Palestinians. Those protesting settlement expansion or access restrictions imposed for the benefit of settlements (including the Barrier) are regularly exposed to injury and arrest by Israeli forces.

4. Israeli civil law is de facto applied to all settlers and settlements across the occupied West Bank, while Israeli military law is applied to Palestinians, except in East Jerusalem, which was officially annexed to Israel. As a result, two separate legal systems and sets of rights are applied by the same authority in the same area, depending on the national origin of the persons, discriminating against Palestinians.

5. Continuing settlement construction, expansion and encroachment on Palestinian land is an integral part of the ongoing fragmentation of the West Bank, including the isolation of East Jerusalem. This fragmentation undermines the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, which is to be realized with the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel.

AT THIS POINT I WAS ORDERED TO STOP SPEAKING

TALK FOR THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, DECEMBER 7, 2011 - SUNY Nassau Community College on Long Island

Mr. Chair, Mr. President, Members of the Board:

My name is Barry and I am addicted to the truth. I am a professor of English and coordinator of Jewish Studies.

I was raised in an atmosphere which had zero tolerance for lies and hypocrisy and maximum distrust of power.   You see, we lived in a period of great tension in which J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, told us school children that there were communists among us and they looked just like you and me.  But the message was redundant and unnecessary since we already knew that: they were our friends and relatives.  And they suffered for their beliefs.

What, you may ask, would create this atmosphere of vigilance on all sides, those who tenaciously supported the existing order as well as those who tenaciously clung to the vision that that order would be overthrown to be replaced by pure economic and social democracy, a classless society?

The answer is that we took two different messages from the war which had ended just before our childhood, WWII.  Those on the right gathered that the threat from Hitler had been the general threat of totalitarianism everywhere, of Big Brother, and that we were therefore obligated to eternal vigilance against the totalitarianism of our day, no matter what the cost.  But those on the left ascertained that Hitler had come to power in the traditional capitalist manner:  manipulating the buying public, buying cheap and selling dear.  They focused on his method of using nationalism, ‚Äúservice,‚Äù and ‚Äúduty‚Äù to the Homeland to justify setting classes against one another and sparking a crusade against ‚Äúracial inferiors‚Äù which ultimately led to the genocide known as the Holocaust.

Hitler became the paradigm for all monstrous evil.  But one thing all of us caught the gist of:  Hitler demanded and got total control over the means of communication. [NOTE: AT THIS POINT I WAS ORDERED TO STOP SPEAKING AND SIT DOWN.]  In his regime the media were reduced to puppetry; they were tamed parrots of the state, of the SS, of the Nazi Party.  As for those who disagreed, they were quickly eliminated first by being objectified and then by being executed.  The first step was the muzzling of free speech; all else followed.  As Heinrich Heine had said a century earlier, ‚Äúwhere they burn books now they will someday burn people.‚Äù  And so it was!

Members of the Board, we see the same first step being taken by the administration you have hired and rehired,the muzzling of today‚Äôs organ of free speech, email.  Pres. Astrab tells us that the argumentative and unreasonable interchanges on the campus intranet are somehow connected with threatening and even criminal activity.  Alas, absent any substantive proof, we can only view this explanation as an excuse for shutting us down, as the Reichstag fire was an excuse, as the staged Polish attack on the German border post was an excuse.  And most of us now know that the ‚ÄúSaint‚Äù Oskar Schindler was the businessman who provided the props for the ‚ÄúPolish attack‚Äù escapade, which led immediately to the greatest war in history.  Corporate greed, unless and until put aside in favor of humanity, can lead to this!

But threats to our basic liberties do not have to pass through Hollywood central casting.   Those who seek to muzzle free and open discussion of the issues vital to our professional, personal, and civic lives do not have to dress in black or brown and wear swastika armbands.    They can wear suits and speak the language of American corporate business.  But when they act to cut our tongues out, the result is the same as if they had been wearing the swastika and giving the stiff-arm salute!

Thank you,  Members of the Board.  You saluted the American flag before starting your session, the flag that stands for freedom of thought, speech, press, and peaceful assembly.  I know you will agree that these sacredrights should be upheld, by any means necessary!    I salute them!  I hope that you do too! 

Barry Fruchter

No freedom in the land of false prophets

I ask, how can the Jewish state find freedom as occupier?

Two occupations have eaten Israel where mosques burn and a faux Museum

Sits on desecrated Muslim tombs. They call it Museum of Tolerance, I call it

Muslim cleansing, killer of those deemed inferior.

False prophets, destroyer of 800.000 olive and citrus plants, subjugation.

Collective abuse, fishermen attacked likes vermin by Israeli killer boats.

Apartheid! Word we dare not whisper, write or speak.

Condemned by true believers, the Zionist story makes one shudder.

I’ve heard the racist words before, when Jews were driven from their homes and vilified.

Now I hear it all again from a big Rabbi contender for The Jewish Heroes competition.

Asked how Jews should treat their neighbors he said:

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way. Destroy the holy sites,

Kill men, women children and cattle.”

I remember another time, “No Jews Allowed.” Germany nearly succeeded.

Now false prophets decree Arabs not allowed, a Zionist story.

No Palestinians to live life with dignity for “We” are the chosen people.

It’s written in the Old Testament.

Lillian Rosengarten 11/29/11

The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy

Haaretz  

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/the-necessary-elimination-of-israeli-democracy-1.397625

Published 08:20 25.11.11 Latest update 08:20 25.11.11

The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy

Haaretz publisher and owner Amos Schocken says there is a difference between the apartheid of South Africa and what is happening in Israel and in the territories, but there are also similarities.

By Amos Schocken

Speaking in the Knesset in January 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said, "Iran is in the initial stages of an effort to acquire nonconventional capability in general, and nuclear capability in particular. Our assessment is that Iran today has the appropriate manpower and sufficient resources to acquire nuclear arms within 10 years. Together with others in the international community, we are monitoring Iran's nuclear activity. They are not concealing the fact that the possibility that Iran will possess nuclear weapons is worrisome, and this is one of the reasons that we must take advantage of the window of opportunity and advance toward peace."

At that time, Israel had a strategy - which began to be implemented in the Oslo accords, put an end to the priority granted the settlement project and aimed to improve the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens.

If things had gone differently, the Iran issue might look different today. However, as it turned out, the Oslo strategy collided with another, stronger ideology: the ideology of Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful*], which since the 1970s, apart from the Oslo period and the time of the withdrawal from Gaza, has established the concrete basis for the actions of Israel's governments. Even governments that were ostensibly far removed from the Gush Emunim strategy implemented it in practice. Ehud Barak boasted that, in contrast to other prime ministers, he did not return territory to the Palestinians - and there's no need to point out once again the increase in the number of settlers during his tenure. The government of Ehud Olmert, which declared its intention to move toward a policy of hitkansut (or "convergence," another name for what Ariel Sharon termed "disengagement" ) in Judea and Samaria, held talks with senior Palestinians on an agreement but did not stop the settlement enterprise, which conflicts with the possibility of any agreement.

The strategy that follows from the ideology of Gush Emunim is clear and simple: It perceives of the Six-Day War as the continuation of the War of Independence, both in terms of seizure of territory, and in its impact on the Palestinian population. According to this strategy, the occupation boundaries of the Six-Day War are the borders that Israel must set for itself. And with regard to the Palestinians living in that territory - those who did not flee or were not expelled - they must be subjected to a harsh regime that will encourage their flight, eventuate in their expulsion, deprive them of their rights, and bring about a situation in which those who remain will not be even second-class citizens, and their fate will be of interest to no one. They will be like the Palestinian refugees of the War of Independence; that is their desired status. As for those who are not refugees, an attempt should be made to turn them into "absentees." Unlike the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the War of Independence, the Palestinians in the territories should not receive Israeli citizenship, owing to their large number, but then this, too, should be of interest to no one.

The ideology of Gush Emunim springs from religious, not political motivations. It holds that Israel is for the Jews, and it is not only the Palestinians in the territories who are irrelevant: Israel's Palestinian citizens are also exposed to discrimination with regard to their civil rights and the revocation of their citizenship.

This is a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid. It ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights and the guarantees of equality enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence. It is a strategy of unlimited patience; what is important is the unrelenting progress toward the goal. At the same time, it is a strategy that does not pass up any opportunity that comes its way, such as the composition of the present Knesset and the unclear positions of the prime minister.

The term "apartheid" refers to the undemocratic system of discriminating between the rights of the whites and the blacks, which once existed in South Africa. Even though there is a difference between the apartheid that was practiced there and what is happening in the territories, there are also some points of resemblance. There are two population groups in one region, one of which possesses all the rights and protections, while the other is deprived of rights and is ruled by the first group. This is a flagrantly undemocratic situation.

Since the Six-Day War, there has been no other group in Israel with the ideological resilience of Gush Emunim, and it is not surprising that many politicians have viewed that ideology as a means for realizing personal political ambitions. Zevulun Hammer, who identified this ideology as the way to capture the leadership of the National Religious Party, and Ariel Sharon, who identified this ideology as the way to capture the leadership of Likud, were only two of many. Now Avigdor Lieberman, too, is following this path, but there were and are others, such as the late Hanan Porat, for whom the realization of this ideology was and remains the purpose of their political activity.

This ideology views the creation of an Israeli apartheid regime as a necessary tool for its realization. It has no difficulty with illegal actions and with outright criminality, because it rests on mega-laws that it has adopted and that have no connection with the laws of the state, and because it rests on a perverted interpretation of Judaism. It has scored crucial successes. Even when actions inspired by the Gush Emunim ideology conflict with the will of the government, they still quickly win the backing of the government. The fact that the government is effectively a tool of Gush Emunim and its successors is apparent to everyone who has dealings with the settlers, creating a situation of force multiplication.

This ideology has enjoyed immense success in the United States, of all places. President George H.W. Bush was able to block financial guarantees to Israel because of the settlements established by the government of Yitzhak Shamir (who said lying was permissible to realize the Gush Emunim ideology. Was Benjamin Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan University speech a lie of this kind? ). Now, though, candidates for the Republican Party's presidential nomination are competing among themselves over which of them supports Israel and the occupation more forcefully. Any of them who adopt the approach of the first President Bush will likely put an end to their candidacy.

Whatever the reason for this state of affairs - the large number of evangelicals affiliated with the Republican party, the problematic nature of the West's relations with Islam, or the power of the Jewish lobby, which is totally addicted to the Gush Emunim ideology - the result is clear: It is not easy, and may be impossible, for an American president to adopt an activist policy against Israeli apartheid.

Legalizing the illegal

Because of its inherent illegality, at least in democratic terms, an apartheid regime cannot allow opposition and criticism. The Gush Emunim ideology is obliged to eliminate the latter, and to prevent every effort to block its activity, even if that activity is illegal and even criminal, meant to maintain apartheid. The illegal activity needs to be made legal, whether by amending laws or by changing their judicial interpretation - such things have occurred before, in other places and at other times.

Against this background, we are now seeing the campaign of legislation against, and the unbridled slandering of the Supreme Court, against human rights organizations and against the press, as well as the so-called boycott law, which is aimed at preventing the possibility of dealing with Israeli apartheid in the way South African apartheid was dealt with. It is against this same background that legislation has been submitted that is directed against the Arab citizens in Israel, such as the Loyalty Law and the proposal for a "Basic Law of Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People." It is against this background that a campaign of incitement and intimidation is being waged against the necessary and justified critique being voiced by members of academia.

The Supreme Court, which permitted the settlement project and effectively collaborated with the Gush Emunim ideology, has now become an obstacle that needs to be removed - in the eyes of those who still adhere to that ideology - primarily because the court refuses to recognize the possibility of settling on privately owned Palestinian land and did not overturn the government decision to evacuate the settlements in the Gaza Strip. Because the land belongs to the Jews by divine decree and history (from this perspective, there are similarities between Gush Emunim and Hamas ), there is no choice but to elect to the Supreme Court justices who live on Palestinian land, possibly private land, and those who understand that there is no such thing as "land under private Palestinian ownership."

Similarly, this line of thinking goes, the Supreme Court's interpretation of human rights laws also requires its elimination in its present format. Judgments such as those relating to the Kaadan family (allowing an Arab family to build a home in a Jewish community ); the selling of Jewish National Fund land to Arab citizens of Israel; the amendment to the Citizenship Law (no ruling has yet been handed down, but there seems to be a possibility that a majority of justices will rule it illegal ); the opening of a highway to Palestinian traffic - all these rulings conflict with essential elements in Gush Emunim ideology: the discrimination between Jews and Palestinians (in Israel and the territories ) and the deprivation of the Palestinians' rights, which transform them into second-class people, absentees or, best of all, refugees.

Does an Israel of this kind have a future? Over and beyond the question of whether Jewish morality and the Jewish experience allow such circumstances to exist, it is clear that this is a flagrantly unstable and even dangerous situation. It is a situation that will prevent Israel from fully realizing its vast potential, a situation of living by the sword - a sword that could be a third intifada, the collapse of peace with Egypt and a confrontation with a nuclear Iran. Yitzhak Rabin understood that.

    

(*)Gush Emunim

Gush Emunim ( Block [of the] faithful) is an Israeli messianic and political movement committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank (biblical Judea and Samaria). The movement sprang out of the conquests of the Six-Day War in 1967, though it was not formally established as an organization until 1974, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. It encouraged Jewish settlement of the land Judaism maintains God gave to the Jewish people, according to the Torah.