Archive for February, 2009

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“Why the Only Solution for Jews and Palestinians is a One State Solution”

February 4, 2009

By Elie Elhadj, author of The Islamic Shield | Arab Democracy, Feb 3, 2009

For a durable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Bible and the Quran must be de-politicized. In political terms, de-politicization means a single secular democratic state for Jews and Palestinians.

De-politicize the Bible and the Quran

The Arab Israeli conflict has become a religious war. Politicizing the Bible’s Genesis 15:18 politicized the Quran. Genesis 15:18 declares: “The Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, unto thy seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.”

Defeated in 1948, powerless and humiliated in every war since that time, Arabs took refuge in Islam. They invoked hostile Quranic Verses (such as chapter 2: verse 65, 2:120, 5:51, 5:60, 5:78), recounted purported stories of the Prophet Muhammad’s troubled relationship with the Jewish tribes in Medina (Banu Qurayza, Banu Al-Nadir, and Banu Qainuqa), and drew lessons from the symbolism of substituting Friday for the Sabbath and of changing the direction during prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. Other Quranic verses urge jihad against Muslims enemies (2:191, 2:193, 8:60, 9:5, 9:29) and promise (2:82) the martyred the delights of paradise; wine (47:15), beautiful women (44:54), silk, brocade, and gold (18:31), etc… Combined, these verses made a jihadist’s career worthwhile. In the hands of jihadist leaders, these verses transformed political frustrations into religious crusades and the jihadists into walking bombs.

For thirteen centuries, however, these were non-issues. Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived harmoniously among Muslims in Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.

Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s first and thus far the only person of Jewish parentage to reach the premiership (1868 and 1874-1880), described in his novel Coningsby the “halcyon centuries” during the golden age of Muslim Spain in which the “children of Ishmael rewarded the children of Israel with equal rights and privileges with themselves.” Disraeli described glowingly how Muslims and Jews alike “built palaces, gardens and fountains; filled equally the highest offices of the state, competed in an extensive and enlightened commerce, and rivaled each other in renowned universities.”

In 1492 the Muslim Ottoman Sultan Bayezid-II (1481-1512) encouraged great numbers of Jews to settle in the Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal.

Islam venerates Judaism. Arabs believe they share a common ancestry with the Jewish people going back to the sons of Abraham, Ismail and Ishaq. The Quran praises Abraham as the first Muslim, describing Islam as the Religion of Abraham. The Quranic Chapter 14, with its 52 Verses is named after Abraham and to Joseph the Quran names Chapter 12, with its 111 Verses. Muslim men are allowed to marry Jewish women, without the need to convert them to Islam (the children must be Muslims). Today, Jewish-derived Arabic names like Daoud, Ibrahim, Ishaq, Mousa, Sara, Sulaiman, Yacoub, Yousef, Zakariyya are common in every Arab society.

Politicizing the Bible politicized the Quran. A vexing religious confrontation has been created pushing the moderates among Arab Muslims into orthodoxy and the orthodox into Islamism and Jihadism. The victory of Hamas in the January 25, 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as the popularity of Islamic Jihad, are reminders that this conflict has been delivering the Muslim masses into the hands of the Islamists. History suggests that this religious war could go on for a20thousand years. Military action alone against the Jihadists will breed more Jihadists. Experience suggests that, like its previous victories, Israel’s latest battle against Hamas in the Gaza strip that started on December 27, 2008 will strengthen jihadism.

Unless the Arab Israeli conflict is resolved politically and quickly, Islamism and Jihadism will continue on their march. Avraham Berg, speaker of Israel’s Knesset in 1999-2003 and former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, articulated in sobering terms what Israel should do in order to bring peaceful coexistence between the Jewish and Palestinian peoples.

The Bible and the Quran Must be De-politicized

For a durable solution to the Arab Israeli conflict, a single democratic and secular state for Jews and Palestinians needs to evolve. A single state promises a more durable long-term solution than the two-state solution, currently in vogue. The two-state solution is inherently unstable for four reasons:

1. First, demographically, a purely Jewish state is impossible to attain. Had Palestine been uninhabited at the time of Israel’s creation a refugee problem would not have arisen and a purely Jewish state could have been possible. However, around the time of Israel’s creation Palestine was a home to around 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs.

The Zionist dream of creating an exclusive state for the Jewish people in Palestine is unsustainable in the long-term. Presently, 1.4 million Palestinians are estimated to be citizens of Israel, or a quarter of Israel’s Jewish population. Due to their high population growth rates the Palestinian-Israelis will eventually become the majority. The Palestinian-Israelis are in addition to the 4.2 million Palestinians who live under Israel’s occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Outside Palestine, 2.6 millions are registered in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, plus 1.5 million scattered worldwide.

Unless the Palestinian-Israelis somehow vanish, Israel’s Jewish population will eventually become the minority and the Palestinian-Israelis the majority; the population growth rate of the Palestinian-Israelis is much greater than that of Israeli Jews. The number of Palestinians in Israel in 1948 was about 150,000. If Israel would allow the future Palestinian-Israeli majority full citizenship rights, they’ll control the government. If Israel subjects the majority to an apartheid regime, the system will eventually unravel. Apartheid regimes have short lives: Witness Rhodesia and South Africa.

2. Secondly, intractable issues stand in the way of a two-state solution: Jerusalem, borders, security for Israel and for Palestine, water rights, settlements, and the refugees’ right-of-return. Since the signing of the Oslo Agreement on September 13, 1993, none of the thorny issues has been resolved. When Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat attempted in July 2000 to tackle these issues at Camp David, the negotiations collapsed, leading to the second intifada and to Hamas’ gains in the 2006 parliamentary elections, which culminated by the take-over by Hamas of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, and Israel’s devastating war against Hamas eighteen months later.

3. Thirdly, even if a miracle patches up a two-state agreement the extremists on both sides would undermine the agreement. The extremists believe that they are divinely ordained to keep-up the struggle until they control the entirety of the land.

4. Fourthly, the Arab masses w ill shun a Zionist state. Judging from Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (March 26, 1979) and Jordan (October 26, 1994), relations among the Egyptian and Jordanian masses and Israelis failed to develop beyond small diplomatic missions.

Western democratic and secular ideals should inspire the development of a single, democratic, and secular state for Palestinians and Jews. There are three reasons in support of such a development:

1. First, the intractable obstacles that have bedeviled the two-state solution would disappear.

2. Secondly, a single state will commingle Palestinians and Jews into an inseparable mix. The Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, estimated at about half a million in more than 125 settlements, could become instruments of integration between Palestinians and Jews, not segregation; a mixture of Jews among Arabs as difficult to unscramble as removing the Palestinian Israelis from Israel. A single state would lead the Arab governments to recognize the new state. Muslims everywhere, Arabs especially, would no longer have an excuse to boycott their Jewish “cousins.” Economic, cultural, educational, and social interaction would follow. The two sides would quickly learn how much they could benefit from one other.

3. Thirdly, a single state solution would allow Arabs and Jews full access to the entirety of Palestine.

The secular democratic one-state solution has been gathering pace. A well attended conference by Arabs and Israelis at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was held on November 17-18, 2007 to address the various aspects of this concept.

Arab and Jew Can Live Together in Peace

Around the time of Israel’s creation, more than 850,000 Jews migrated from Arab countries, 600,000 going to Israel. The charge that the Jews migrated because of Arab maltreatment is an unfair political expediency. The migration happened in the course of Israel’s creation. During this period, 531 Palestinian villages were depopulated and 805,000 refugees lost their homes, according to Palestinian sources (650,000 to 700,000 refugees, according to Jewish sources).

Had Zionism adhered to the stipulation in the 1917 Balfour declaration: “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Muslim/Jewish conflict would not have developed.

Durable peace and the long-term prosperity of the Jewish people in the Arab World require the genuine welcome of the Arab masses. Smart bombs and nuclear weapons cannot force Arab peoples’ acceptance of a Zionist Israel. The 600,000 Jews, who had lived in Arab countries for centuries and are today a major proportion of Israel’s Jewish population, could become a positive link with the Arab World. They share with the Arab peoples many customs, habits, values, food, music, dance, and, for the older generation, the Arabic language.

Whether it would be a good bargain to exchange a partial and declining Jewish exclusivity in an unstable two-state solution for a durable single state embracing Jews and Muslims is a question Israel’s Jewish people alone can answer.

In provoking the enmity of their age-old Muslim friends, Zionism has disserved the long-term interests of the Jewish people.

Elhadj is the author of Elie Elhadj, author of The Islamic Shield: Arab Resistance to Democratic and Religious Reforms, and many articles which can be read here: www.daringopinion.com

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US Sold Phosphorus Shells to Israel

February 4, 2009

Among Israel’s Most Condemned Tactics in Gaza Was Enabled by Arkansas-Made Rounds

Antiwar.com

Posted February 3, 2009

The Pine Bluff Arsenal, a United States Army installation in Arkansas, specializes in chemical and biological weapons. The military touts them as the only facility in the Northern Hemisphere which fills white phosphorus munitions. That’s the important point here, as it once again ties the US military directly into the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, and one of its most unseemly practices.

State Department officials told the Associated Press that the United States provided Israel with white phosphorus rounds, and photos taken during the Israeli conflict show the military readying rounds with Pine Bluff Arsenal serial numbers.

The use of white phosphorus is not in and of itself a war crime, and is generally considered acceptable as a means of obscuring troop movements or illuminating areas. Its use in civilian areas however, even if not directed at the civilian population, is banned under the Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Preliminary investigations show indisputable evidence that Israel used white phosphorus in some of the most densely populated portions of Gaza, and still burning fragments were found after the war ended wedged into civilian buildings.

The Israeli military officially denied using such munitions during the war, though they eventually conceded to it. Their official story now is that the use was not illegal and that Hamas was the one committing war crimes by provoking such attacks. The treaty prohibits the use of such weapons against military targets in civilian regions however, and makes no exception allowing the nation violating it to transfer blame to others in case they really wanted to hit those targets. Related Stories • February 2, 2009 — Relative End to Gaza War Bolsters Israeli Right in Polls • February 1, 2009 — Israel Bombs Central Gaza as Olmert Vows ‘Disproportionate’ Response • January 30, 2009 — Israeli Envoy: Attack on Gaza a ‘Preintroduction’ to Attack on Iran compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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Why Are We Still at War?

February 4, 2009

Published on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Norman Solomon

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.

Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”

But the “war on terrorism” rubric — increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” — kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize — or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.

Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.

And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.

“This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced,” Norman Mailer wrote in his book “Why Are We at War?” six years ago. “It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void…”

Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: “This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. … There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist.”

And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just has there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.

It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America — but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.

For anyone who believes that the war in Afghanistan makes sense, I recommend the Jan. 30 discussion on “Bill Moyers Journal” with historian Marilyn Young and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey. A chilling antidote to illusions that fuel the war can be found in the transcript.

Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about “the war on terror.” Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed.

And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.

Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is “Made Love, Got War.” He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign.

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The tale of two apartheids

February 4, 2009

Israeli leaders are usually loath to admit that Israel is an apartheid-style state. Yet there have been moments of candor.

Socialist Worker, January 29, 2009 | Issue 689

IN APRIL 1976, John Vorster, president of the then-racist apartheid regime of South Africa, paid an official state visit to Israel, where he was given the red-carpet treatment.

Columnist: Paul D’Amato

Paul D'Amato Paul D’Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded.

Israeli television showed him on his first day, visiting the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At an official state banquet held for Vorster, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin toasted the “ideals shared by Israel and South Africa.”

Why was an outspoken member of a Nazi militia in South Africa during the Second World War and a leading member of the party that crafted official apartheid policies in South Africa being feted in Israel?

A statement in the South African government’s yearbook made two years after Vorster’s visit provides an answer: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

These close ties came from the identification that both states had for each other’s cause. Both were settler states that claimed to be bringing “civilization” to so-called backward peoples. And both were committed to using any and all means to maintain their regional domination over the “natives” that they had conquered–in South Africa, to create a white state based on the exploitation of Black labor; in Israel, to create an exclusively Jewish state through the systematic removal of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Victims of repression in South Africa and Palestine

In an excellent two-part article in the Guardian in 2006, Chris McGreal quotes Ronnie Kasrils, then the intelligence minister in the post-apartheid government led by the African National Congress. Kasrils, who is Jewish and had co-authored a petition protesting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, explained why such a close affinity could develop between the two countries:

Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity.

This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was “a land without people for a people without land,” so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

VORSTER’S VISIT signaled an acceleration of economic, diplomatic and military cooperation between the two countries, a collaboration that already had a lengthy history.

South African Gen. Jan Smuts, who had a close relationship with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, Israel’s first prime minister, had been instrumental in convincing Britain to sign the Balfour Declaration that agreed to the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” After 1948, South Africa was one of the first countries to recognize Israel.

N. Kirschner, a veteran South African Zionist leader, wrote in 1960 in an Israeli publication: “There exists a bond between Jewish aspirations and the aspirations of the people of South Africa.”

That bond was expressed chiefly in growing military and secret nuclear cooperation. Each country shared its intelligence and counterinsurgency techniques with the other, and South Africa purchased arms from Israel. Israel purchased nuclear materials from South African in order to develop its secret weapons program, and in return, Israel provided scientific and technical assistance to help South African build its nuclear bombs.

Hundreds of white South Africans graduated from Israeli military training schools. “It is a clear and open secret,” wrote an Israeli journalist in 1976, “that in army camps, one can find Israeli officers in not insignificant numbers who are busy teaching white soldiers to fight black terrorists, with methods imported from Israel.”

The parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa are striking. In South Africa, the white colonial settler minority conquered the Black majority, forcing them into Bantustans–so-called independent African homelands–that covered only 13 percent of the country. This allowed the whites to declare South Africa a white country.

Blacks, who outnumbered whites by 4-to-1, became the cheap labor that built South Africa’s economy, but they couldn’t be citizens.

Likewise, Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, sold the Jewish state to its potential imperial backers as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

Variations on statements such as this one from Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, can be found scattered throughout the writings of the founders of the state of Israel: “There is no room for both peoples together in this country…There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

These principles guided the Zionist armies and paramilitary gangs that used massacres and terror to drive 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 in order to create the state of Israel, and again led to the expulsion of 325,000 Palestinians from their land after the 1967 war.

These are not old, outdated views, but the deeply held conviction of leading Zionists today. Listen to the ravings of Israeli Professor Arnon Soffer, head of the Israel Defense Force’s National Defense College, speaking to the Jerusalem Post in 2004 about Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza:

We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Qassams, because they will know what’s waiting for them.

Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful.

It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist…Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace”–it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THERE ARE some differences between South African and Israeli apartheid.

Israel’s relationship to Arab labor was different than that of the South Africa rulers to the Black majority. Rather than exploiting cheap Arab labor, the early Zionist settlers in Palestine built their state-in-embryo by excluding Arab labor, under the slogan “Jewish Land, Jewish Labor.”

After the formation of the state of Israel, Arabs did become a source of cheap labor, but Israel has never been dependent on Arab labor–whereas in South Africa, strikes threatened to bring down apartheid because Black labor was its lifeblood.

Yet the similarities are more striking than the differences. If apartheid South Africa declared itself a white state by creating the fiction of Black “homelands” and implementing pass laws to severely restrict the movement of Africans, in Israel, an exclusively Jewish state was creating by expelling the majority of Palestinians from their lands and legally barring their return.

A battery of laws were put in place after 1948 that grant the state legal authority, in various ways, to seize Arab farms, orchards, homes and businesses if the owners are absent for any length of time, or for “security” reasons. At the same time, any Jew in the world was granted the legal right to enter Israel and become a citizen.

Today, Israel treats the Arab minority within its current borders as third-class citizens (behind the Mizrahim, or the Middle Eastern, as opposed to European, Jews). Palestinians receive lower wages and education funding, face routine harassment and police brutality, and are subjected to high incarceration rates; they are restricted from owning land, and are victims of land seizures and expulsions that continue to this day.

A paper on Israel’s Arab minority by Eric Gust of the Center for Contemporary Conflict explained that “advancement of Arabs within Israeli society, whether in the demographic, economic, political or educational sectors, is viewed as occurring at the expense of the Jewish population, and could be perceived as a threat to the Jewish nature of Israel.”

Israel is also an apartheid state in form, if not in legal terms, because it has turned the lands it occupied in 1967–the West Bank and Gaza–into South African-style Bantustans, whose inhabitants face economic blockade and routine assaults from the Israeli army and settlers, and whose towns and refugee camps are cut off from each other by an apartheid wall and a system of checkpoints, while special roads crisscross the West Bank that can only be used by Jews.

Any “two-state” solution that Israel accepts will merely put a legal stamp on this fact.

Israeli leaders are usually loath to publicly admit that Israel is an apartheid-style state. Yet there are moments of candor.

Former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Force, Gen. Rafael Eitan, speaking at a closed meeting of Israeli professionals in 1983, gave a presentation that considered South Africa’s Bantustan policy as a possible solution to the Palestinian problem.

Last November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a statement that if Israel was unable to implement a two-state solution, it would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He had warned four years earlier: “We don’t have unlimited time. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle–and ultimately, a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”

Israel leaders look with horror on the prospect of the struggle for a democratic, secular Palestine–a state for all its inhabitants–because the whole basis of the existence of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state would be destroyed.

For that same reason, those of us who oppose Zionism should welcome such a struggle with open arms.

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GAZA: The Attrition of Reason, Memory and Morality

February 3, 2009

Les Blough, Editor | AxisofLogic, Jan 28, 2009

The world can never really know thoroughness with which the Zionist killing machine ravaged Gaza and its people. Just as words and photographs can never really capture a beautiful mountain or ocean vista, no words or photographs can deliver the enormity of this war crime. One would need to have been there. Likewise, the world can never really know the numbers of Israeli soldiers killed and wounded by the indomitable Palestinian Resistance who were outgunned and out numbered by the killers. This is because the Zionist regime in Palestine are hiding the numbers of their own dead and wounded. Nor can we know the residual military strength and numbers of Hamas’ guerrilla fighters at this time. But of one thing we can be certain: the truly amazing spirit of the Palestinian Resistance has only been deepened in the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

Attrition of Reason: The Zionists and their Washington syncophants think that their war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq have eclipsed and subsumed their war crimes in Gaza. They think the “shock and awe” of these wars have numbed all that is truly good in the people of the world. They think their lies and obfuscations have left people questioning their own native intelligence and judgement. They think these holocausts have rendered the masses helpless, without the reason, will, heart or morality to fight back. This has been their biggest mistake. Arrogance and ignorance are joined from birth, like hapless twins, at the hip. Thus, arrogance blindly oversteps itself – always. This is the greatest of all the strategic and tactical mistakes that are being made by the Zionists.

Attrition of Memory: The Zionists and their Washington backers knew there would be worldwide outrage at their revolting handiwork. They are counting on the world to forget and allow their crimes to fade, relegated to an historical footnote in their march toward full spectrum dominance of the Middle East. They think memory of their war crimes will be controlled and squirreled away in another rathole by their revisionist historians. They also think their slaughters at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, their massacre in Jenin in 2002, their bombardments of Lebanon in 2006, killing and maiming thousands, and many other attempts at ethnic cleansing – have been effectively obscured and buried by their revisionists. But none of it is forgotten; instead, each of their crimes has entered the world’s irrepressible collective memory and consciousness.

Attrition of Morality: Somehow, against the backdrop of millions killed and utter destruction in Iraq, the thousands maimed and killed and the destruction of the Gazan infrastructure looms bigger. The world’s moral outrage – not against the Jews – but against the “state” of Israel has lain dormant in the hearts and minds of people around the world for decades. The slaughter in Gaza has taken the lid off that cauldron of bitter dissent for the first time in 60 years. Not even the powerful, Zionist-controlled media in the United States has been able to suppress, by obfuscation and deception, these truths. Neither can the morality and righteous indignation of the world be cowed by the tiresome and deceptive charges of “anti-semitism” this time.

We will not cooperate with the attrition of reason, memory, morality on which the Zionists so much depend. We urge all honest alternative media to do everything possible to keep the details and impact of these atrocities fresh in the minds of the public. We will be doing our part to deny any fading memory or distortions of these war crimes – accusations of “Anti-semitism” be damned.

In her 23rd report from Gaza since the Zionists launched their attacks on December 27, Hiyam Noir bears witness to the destruction and misery inflicted upon the Gazans from air, sea and land in Palestine. Read her latest report on the devastation of the Al-Attatra village.

© Copyright 2009 by AxisofLogic.com

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Remaking America: The Ambiguities of Obama

February 3, 2009

Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 250, Feb 1, 2009

Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, to the cheers of a vast majority of both the American people and the people of the rest of the world. In his inaugural address, he promised to “begin again the work of remaking America.”

In this short phrase, which was picked up by the world press in their headlines and analyses, Obama captured all the ambiguities of his presidential promises. The verb “remake” can mean quite different things. It can mean returning to a previous state that was better. And Obama seemed to indicate this possibility with another phrase, calling on American citizens “to choose our better history.” But “remaking” can also mean more fundamental change, creating a quite different kind of America than the one the world presently knows. The ambiguity is whether Obama proposes merely to tinker with the structure and the institutions of the United States and the world-system or to transform them fundamentally.

What should be clear to everyone by now is that the United States has not elected a Che Guevara as its president, despite the hysterical fears of the unreconciled rightwing of the Republican Party. Nor, however, has it elected another Ronald Reagan, despite the hopes of some of those who voted for him and the fears of his more intransigent left critics. What then has the United States elected? The answer is not obvious yet, precisely because of Obama’s style as a politician.

There are two questions to parse. One is what Obama would actually like to achieve as president. The second is what he can possibly achieve, given the realities of geopolitics plus a worldwide depression. Vice-President Biden described the latter on January 25 as “worse, quite frankly, than everyone thought it was, and it’s getting worse every day.”

What do we know, at this point, about Obama? He is unusually smart and well-educated for a political leader, and he is a poised, prudent, and very successful politician. But where does he really stand in the large gamut between wishing merely to tinker and fundamentally to change? Probably somewhere in the middle of this range. And probably what he will really do and achieve will be more a function of the constraints of the world-system than of his own choices, however intelligent they may be.

Up to now, we have had hints of where he is presently heading in five arenas: inclusive participation, geopolitics, the environment, internal social questions, and how to handle the depression. The initial verdict is very mixed.

Obviously, where he shines best is in inclusive participation. His own election is a measure of that. To be sure, electing an African-American president is merely the culminating act of a steady trend in the United States since 1945 – from President Truman’s integration of the armed forces to the Supreme Court’s decision on school desegregation, to Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court, to Colin Powell’s appointment as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Powell’s and Condoleezza Rice’s successive appointments as Secretary of State. Still, it marks a breakthrough that few expected two years ago. And it matters.

Obama will continue these efforts of inclusive citizenship. He, however, faces a major political test on the question of immigration. There is no indication yet as to how forcefully he will tackle this issue. He would have to struggle with a large part of his own political base. Given the extent of current and expected levels of unemployment in the United States, he may postpone doing anything. But the issue will not go away, and it will only get harder to resolve. Furthermore, not resolving this issue will have negative effects on the world’s ability to come through the depression with less pain.

Obama’s geopolitical posture is far less promising. The Israeli/Palestine conflict is probably unresolvable at the moment. The absolute minimum that needs to be done is to include Hamas in the negotiations. Quite possibly George Mitchell’s appointment as U.S. special representative presages doing that. But that will scarcely be enough to obtain a viable political solution. The Israelis are entrenched in their bunkers and not ready even to think about anything that Palestinian nationalists could accept.

I have no doubt that the Iraqis will make Obama keep his promise of withdrawal in 16 months. And I do not believe that Obama will do more than jostle verbally with the Iranians. But he has started down the path to disaster in Pakistan, seriously undermining its government in his first week in office. Pakistan’s government is weak and may soon fall. And, if it does, Obama will have no defensible options.

The basic problem is that Obama has not renounced the inflated language of a former hegemonic power. In his address, he said to the world: “Know that America is…ready to lead once more.” The world wants the United States to participate. It precisely does not want the United States to lead. I don’t think that Obama really understands that yet. Pakistan could well be his undoing.

In addition, he has started off on a bad foot in Latin America. He has played to the gallery on Chavez and, worse, he has not heard President Lula’s challenge that Latin America will not believe he stands for change until he lifts unconditionally the Cuban embargo.

His first steps on the environment are positive – in his appointments, in his executive decisions, and in his indications to other states that the United States is ready to take part in the collective measures that the scientists indicate are necessary. But here, as in other domains, the question is how boldly and rapidly he is ready to act.

The policy on internal social questions is again an uncertain mix. Obama has restored the policies on abortion that were those of the Clinton administration, and this clearly distinguishes him from the Reagan/Bush policies. He has decreed the closure of Guantánamo and the secret CIA prisons, while postponing for up to a year some decisions about what to do with those who are presently imprisoned. The degree to which he will revoke the vast network of government invasion of privacy within the United States is still a very open question. Nor is it yet clear to what degree he will fulfill his promise to the unions to undo the serious constraints the previous administrations had put on their ability to organize.

Finally, we come to the arena in which he has least leeway, the world depression. He is obviously ready to increase vastly government involvement in the economy. But so is virtually every other political leader throughout the world. And he is obviously ready to augment what might be called social-democratic measures to reduce economic pain to the working strata. But so is virtually every other political leader throughout the world.

The question here too is how bold the measures. He has nominated a bunch of very cautious Keynesians to all his key positions. He has not included any of the U.S. economists who are the left Keynesians – Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Alan Blinder, or James Galbraith. They are all saying that cautious measures won’t work, and that precious time is being lost. Maybe one year from now, Obama will reshuffle his team to include those who are calling for bolder action. But maybe too that will be a little late.

Obama is anxious to pull the Republicans in Congress along in his economic proposals. Partly this is his passion for choosing “unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” in the words of his inaugural address. Partly, it is clever politics, in the sense that he doesn’t want to be out on a limb as the economy further deteriorates. But the Republican leadership is shrewd enough to understand this, and will give him their votes only in return for gutting much of his program.

Obama is off to a very shaky start. The belief that he is ready to push for a fundamental remaking of America has weak evidence in its favor, despite his intelligence and his intellectual openness. The United States is getting good grammar. It needs bold remaking.

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Editorials: Gaza: Welcome initiative by ICC

February 3, 2009

Arab News, Feb 3, 2009

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is wisely reconsidering its decision last month that it was unable to mount a war crimes prosecution over Israeli savagery in Gaza because it did not have jurisdiction. Israel along with the United States (as well as China, Russia and India) does not recognize the ICC. Therefore it was initially argued that procedurally a case could not be brought against named Israeli soldiers and politicians. Yesterday the ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo revealed that he was investigating the possibility that because the “alleged” war crimes were committed on Palestinian territory and the Palestinian Authority had requested a prosecution, it was after all possible to bring a case. The UN is separately investigating the shelling of its Gaza schools. This change of heart may have come about because of a belated recognition of international outrage at the shelling of the Gaza ghetto, causing thousands of deaths and injuries among a totally trapped civilian population. There is also clear evidence that the Israelis used phosphorus munitions in dense built-up areas, which is an offense under the Geneva Conventions.

The ICC is still a fledgling international court. If it embarks on a prosecution of Israeli war criminals, it can expect to be heading on a collision course, almost certainly with Washington and very probably with a number of European capitals, whose governments busily condemned the barbarous onslaught but, as with the 2007 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, did precious little to try and stop it.

The reason why the ICC must bring a case against Israel is that it is time the court was seen to be prepared to prosecute any one from any country, without fear or favor. So far the ICC has acted over allegations involving developing countries such as Chad and Senegal, Sierra Leone and Rwanda. It has not challenged a modern state like Israel. Most certainly it should. It cannot afford to have the watching world believe that there is one law for poor, unsophisticated countries and another for advanced states enjoying US backing and protection. A war crime is just as heinous when committed by a modern, well-equipped and allegedly disciplined army as it is by fanatics with machetes in the African jungle. Israel’s wrongdoing is compounded in that the butchery of helpless Palestinians was clearly an obnoxious political ploy to try and save the Kadima-led Israeli coalition from defeat at the next week’s general election.

If the ICC does accept the Palestinian complaint and the Israelis refuse to cooperate, as has the Sudanese government over war crimes allegations in Darfur, it does not mean that the case falls. With Sudan the matter was referred to the UN Security Council, who though stopping short of accusing Sudan of genocide, as Washington had wished, condemned the government of President Omar Bashir. To the African Union’s concern, the ICC is now considering if the first international arrest warrant should be issued for a sitting head of state. The court should be no less robust in its early investigation of Israel’s abhorrent behavior in Gaza. War crimes do not cease to be war crimes just because they were committed by the victims of the Holocaust or their descendants.

Bad news from neighborhood

THE news that Israel has invested close to NIS 200 million in Mevasseret Adumim, a new Jewish neighborhood east of Jerusalem where 3,500 housing units are slated to be built, reveals the real intentions of the outgoing government, said the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

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Attorney General Holder: Hold Bush administration accountable

February 3, 2009

Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Sanders urges new U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to make sure the full truth is known about the Bush administration’s past criminal conduct, and those individuals responsible are tried in a court of law.

By Richard B. Sanders | The Seatle Times, Feb 2, 2009

Special to The Times

If the rule of law means anything, it must mean at least this: Those who act or are in positions of authority in our government are subject to the same laws as everyone else. This has been the American tradition, the crown jewel of a free society, a government of laws, not of men.

However, under the Bush administration, we learned we can no longer take the rule of law for granted.

If the top law-enforcement officer of the United States, our attorney general, chooses not to enforce the criminal law against government agents and officials committing crimes in the name of national security, the “rule of law” is rendered a quaint phrase shorn of substance. Unfortunately, our past attorney general, Michael Mukasey, and his predecessor, Alberto Gonzalez, did just that.

Mukasey even advised President Bush not to issue pardons since — Mukasey reasoned — no crimes were committed. He claimed that “national security” superseded other laws. This is the road to tyranny and a trap for the unwary

If no prosecutions are undertaken, Mukasey’s claim will have prevailed and history will imply no prosecution was possible because no crimes were committed.

Some take the position that we should forgive and forget or “look forward,” as President Obama ambiguously suggested. But “looking forward” without prosecution of past crimes brings the unsettling question of why prosecute future crimes of the same nature? After all, all criminal prosecutions are prosecutions for past acts, not future ones. And, make no mistake, these are real crimes: criminal prisoner abuse, criminal violations of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act involving illegal wiretaps, as well as grave violations of numerous treaties and conventions, which are war crimes as defined by federal statute.

Inaction sets a troubling factual precedent, if not a legal one. And as the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his dissent to the 1944 Korematsu opinion, which allowed the imprisonment of loyal Japanese Americans during World War II, the opinion may be discredited, but it is still lying about “like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”

Our new attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., is in the position not only to bring justice and accountability to past acts but to secure our future by making sure the full truth is known about past criminal conduct, and those individuals responsible are tried in a court of law. Truth and consequences are called for unless we are prepared to let history repeat itself. One could not say it better than Holder did in his address to the American Constitution Society last summer:

Although we did not respond to 9/11 by imprisoning Muslim Americans, our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance of American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that both violate international law and the U.S. Constitution.

Now, I do not question the motives or patriotism of those responsible for these policies. But this does nothing to mitigate the fact that these steps were wrong when they were initiated and they are wrong today. We owe the American people a reckoning.

Yes, Mr. Holder, you are right. Is it now time you stand by the words so well spoken in your confirmation hearing: “No one is above the law.”

Richard B. Sanders is a justice of the Washington Supreme Court.

Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company

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Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

February 3, 2009

By URI AVNERY | Counterpunch, Feb 2, 2009

A Spanish judge has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of a one ton bomb on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Apart from the intended victim, 14 people, most of them children, were killed.

For those who have forgotten: the then commander of the Israeli Air Force, Dan Halutz, was asked at the time what he feels when he drops a bomb on a residential building. His unforgettable answer: “A slight bump to the wing.” When we in Gush Shalom accused him of a war crime, he demanded that we be put on trial for high treason. He was joined by the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who accused us of wanting to “turn over Israeli army officers to the enemy”. The Attorney General notified us officially that he did not intend to open an investigation against those responsible for the bombing.

I should be happy, therefore, that at long last somebody is ready to put that action to a judicial test (even if he seems to have been thwarted by political pressure.) But I am sorry that this has happened in Spain, not in Israel.

* * *

ISRAELI TV VIEWERS have lately been exposed to a bizarre sight: army officers appearing with their faces hidden, as usual for criminals when the court prohibits their identification. Pedophiles, for example, or attackers of old women.

On the orders of the military censors, this applies to all officers, from battalion commanders down, who have been involved in the Gaza war. Since the faces of brigade commanders and above are generally known, the order does not apply to them.

Immediately after the cease-fire, the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, promoted a special law that would give unlimited backing by the state to all officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza war and who might be accused abroad of war crimes. This seems to confirm the Hebrew adage: “On the head of the thief, the hat is burning”.

* * *

I DO NOT object to trials abroad. The main thing is that war criminals, like pirates, should be brought to justice. It is not so important where they are caught. (This rule was applied by the State of Israel when it abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and hanged him in Israel for heinous crimes committed outside the territory of Israel and, indeed, before the state even existed.)

But as an Israeli patriot, I would prefer suspected Israeli war criminals to be put on trial in Israel. That is necessary for the country, for all decent officers and soldiers of the Israeli army, for the education of future generations of citizens and soldiers.

There is no need to rely on international law alone. There are Israeli laws against war crimes. Enough to mention the immortal phrase coined by Justice Binyamin Halevy, serving as a military judge, in the trial of the border policemen who were responsible for the 1956 massacre in Kafr Kassem, when dozens of children, women and men were mown down for violating a curfew which they did not even know about.

The judge announced that even in wartime, there are orders over which flies “the black flag of illegality”. These are orders which are “manifestly” illegal – that is to say, orders which every normal person can tell are illegal, without having to consult a lawyer.

War criminals dishonor the army whose uniform they wear – whether they are generals or common soldiers. As a combat soldier on the day the Israeli Defense Army was officially created, I am ashamed of them and demand that they be cast out and be put on trial in Israel.

My list of suspects includes politicians, soldiers, rabbis and lawyers.

* * *

THERE IS not the slightest doubt that in the Gaza war, crimes were committed. The question is to what extent and by whom.

Example: the soldiers call on the residents of a house to leave it. A woman and her four children come out, waving white handkerchiefs. It is absolutely clear that they are not armed fighters. A soldier in a near-by tank stands up, points his rifle and shoots them dead at short range. According to testimonies that seem to be beyond doubt, this happened more than once.

Another example: the shelling of the United Nations school full of refugees, from which there was no shooting – as admitted by the army, after the original pretexts were disproved.

These are ”simple” cases. But the spectrum of cases is far wider. A serious judicial investigation has to start right from the top: the politicians and senior officers who decided on the war and confirmed its plans must be investigated about their decisions. In Nuremberg it was laid down that the starting of a war of aggression is a crime.

An objective investigation has to find out whether the decision to start the war was justified, or if there existed another way of stopping the launching of rockets against Israeli territory. Without doubt, no country can or should tolerate the bombing of its towns and villages from beyond the border. But could this be prevented by talking with the Gaza authorities? Was our government’s decision to boycott Hamas, the winner of the democratic Palestinian elections, the real cause of this war? Did the imposition of the blockade on a million and a half Gaza Strip inhabitants contribute to the launching of the Qassams? In brief: were the alternatives considered before it was decided to start a deadly war?

The war plan included a massive attack on the civilian population of the Strip. The real aims of a war can be understood less from the official declarations of its initiators, than from their actions. If in this war some 1300 men, women and children were killed, the great majority of whom were not fighters; if about 5000 people were injured, most of them children; if some 2500 homes were partly or wholly destroyed; if the infrastructure of life was totally demolished – all this clearly could not have happened accidentally. It must have been a part of the war plan.

The things said during the war by politicians and officers make it clear that the plan had at least two aims, which might be considered war crimes: (1) To cause widespread killing and destruction, in order to “fix a price tag”. “to burn into their consciousness”, “to reinforce deterrence”, and most of all – to get the population to rise up against Hamas and overthrow their government. Clearly this affects mainly the civilian population. (2) To avoid casualties to our army at (literally) any price by destroying any building and killing any human being in the area into which our troops were about to move, including destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants, preventing medical teams from reaching the victims, killing people indiscriminately. In certain cases, inhabitants were warned that they must flee, but this was mainly an alibi-action: there was nowhere to flee to, and often fire was opened on people trying to escape.

An independent court will have to decide whether such a war-plan is in accordance with national and international law, or whether it was ab initio a crime against humanity and a war-crime.

This was a war of a regular army with huge capabilities against a guerrilla force. In such a war, too, not everything is permissible. Arguments like “The Hamas terrorists were hiding within the civilian population” and “They used the population as human shields” may be effective as propaganda but are irrelevant: that is true for every guerrilla war. It must be taken into account when a decision to start such a war is being considered.

In a democratic state, the military takes its orders from the political establishment. Good. But that does not include “manifestly” illegal orders, over which the black flag of illegality is waving. Since the Nuremberg trials, there is no more room for the excuse that “I was only obeying orders”.

Therefore, the personal responsibility of all involved – from the Chief of Staff, the Front Commander and the Division Commander right down to the last soldier – must be examined. From the statements of soldiers one must deduce that many believed that their job was “to kill as many Arabs as possible”. Meaning: no distinction between fighters and non-fighters. That is a completely illegal order, whether given explicitly or by a wink and a nudge. The soldiers understood this to be “the spirit of the commander”.

Continued >>

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Fidel Castro attacks Obama over Gaza

February 2, 2009
Al Jazeera, Jan 31, 2009

Castro says the US should return the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to Cuba [AFP]

Fidel Castro, the former Cuban president, has attacked Barack Obama, the US president, accusing him of supporting “Israeli genocide” against the  Palestinians.

Castro, who had recently praised Obama as “honest” and “noble”, said in a column posted on a government website that Obama was continuing the policies of George Bush, his predecessor, by supporting Israel.

The former Cuban leader, who was succeeded by his brother Raul as president in February, accused the US of having enabled Israel to become an “important nuclear power”.

He also accused the US of giving Israel military aid with which it “threatens extreme violence against the population of all the Muslim countries”.

Castro highlighted statements made by the Obama administration that reiterated its strong support for Israel, which recently carried out a 22-day assault on Gaza in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed.

Obama has repeatedly reiterated his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks by Palestinian fighters.

Guantanamo claim

Fidel Castro also criticised Obama for suggesting Cuba would have to make concessions before it considers returning the territory of the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

“Maintaining a military base in Cuba against the will of the people violates the most elemental principles of international law,” Castro said.

“Not respecting Cuba’s will is an arrogant act and an abuse of immense power against a little country,” he added.

Cuba indefinitely leased Guantanamo to the US in 1903 after the US occupied the country during the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Castro has claimed that the base at the south-eastern tip of Cuba was taken over illegally.

Obama said during his election campaign he was willing to consider holding talks with nations with poor relations with the US, such as Cuba and Iran.

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