Peace and Justice Post

By Alan Hart, Dissident Voice,  October 21st, 2010

At last somebody has said it in the most explicit way possible. The somebody also said: “The problem is Zionism and the solution is dismantling the Zionist framework and instituting a secular democracy that does not discriminate between Israelis and Palestinians.”

The somebody was Miko Peled, a Jewish peace activist who was born in Israel and lives in America.

He is the son of an Israeli war hero, Matti Peled, who was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967. After that war, General Peled signalled his own commitment to truth by rubbishing Zionism’s version of events. He did so with the statement that there was not a threat to Israel’s existence and that it was a war of Israeli choice (i.e. aggression not self-defense). General Peled was also one of a number of prominent Jews who called soon after the 1967 war for the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In his latest article from which my headline for this piece was extracted, Miko says that the two-state solution was clearly viable 40 years ago, but today…? He writes (my emphasis added):
“Now the West Bank is riddled with towns and malls and highways built on Palestinian land for Jews only and Israeli cabinet members openly discuss population transfers, or rather transfer of its non-Jewish population. The level of oppression and the intensity of the violence against Palestinians has reached new heights… Discussing the two-state solution now under these conditions shows an acute inability to accept reality… There is an illusion that a liberal, forward thinking government can rise in Israel and then everything will be just as liberal Zionists wish it to be. They will pick up where Rabin and Arafat left off and we will have the pie in sky Jewish democracy liberal Jews want so much to see in Israel. This illusion is shared by American Jews, liberal Zionists in Israel and around the world and in the West where guilt of two millennia of persecuting Jews still haunts the conscience of many. If only there were better leaders and if only this and if only that… But alas, reality continues to slap everyone in the face: Zionism and peace are incompatible. I will say it again, Zionism and peace are incompatible.”

Miko adds that serious study of the history of modern Israel shows that “the emergence of Netanyahu and Lieberman was perfectly predictable.”

I agree and offer this summary explanation of why.

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Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 21 – 27 October, 2010

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Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s famous quotation apparently justifying the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of the Washington- backed and UN-imposed sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s has often been remembered as a cold-blooded assertion of US policy objectives.

 

The aphorism came to mind again last week when US media reported that the United States had finally released its first official compilation of data on Iraqi casualties, more than seven years after its invasion of the country.

The report, posted on the US Central Command website in July, drew little notice until last Thursday, when media outlets published details showing that 63,185 civilians and 13,754 members of the Iraqi security forces had been killed from early 2004 to August 2008.

It is not clear why the figures did not include casualties from the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion in 2003, or from the period after August 2008. It is not clear either how the data were compiled and using what methodology.

The figures seem to represent a “policy engineered” anti-climax as the Obama administration, facing a mid- term election challenge, tries to bring an end to America’s misadventure in Iraq.

The number of Iraqis killed during the US-led invasion and its aftermath has long been hotly debated, estimates ranging from fewer than 100,000 to more than a million.

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by Malalai Joya, CommonDreams.org, Oct 2010

In the United States, many looked to the ballot box and hoped for real change when Barack Obama was elected President in 2008.

To be honest, I never expected that he would be any different for Afghanistan than President George W. Bush. The truth is that Obama’s war policies have turned out to be even more of a nightmare than most people expected. Obama talked a lot about hope and change, but for Afghanistan the only change has been for the worse.

After almost two years of Obama, the number of U.S. troops occupying Afghanistan has more than doubled. And the number of drone attacks in Pakistan has increased. Obama’s so-called surge of troops has resulted in increased Afghan civilian deaths.

The documents released by Wikileaks prove what we have been saying about war in Afghanistan. There are more massacres by NATO forces than they wanted us to believe. Now the whole world should know this war is a disaster.

All this is why, for our people, Obama is a warmonger, like another Bush. These are the reasons that throughout Afghanistan more and more people are taking to the streets to protest the U.S. occupation.

And Obama’s surge of the war has also put more U.S. soldiers at risk. And more Canadian troops have died. Why are Obama and Harper wasting so much money on this war when they cannot give jobs or even houses to their own poor people? There are many homeless in Vancouver, but instead Harper spends billions of dollars and new weapons of war…

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By Noam Chomsky, ZNet, Oct 20, 2010

Noam Chomsky’s ZSpace Page

The title of one of our earlier sessions was Cogito, “I think.” That may serve as a useful reminder that even more fundamental than the right of free expression is the right to think. And that has not gone unchallenged. Right here for example. I suppose the most famous case is that of Ismail Besikci, who has endured many years in prison on the charge of having committed “thought crimes.” And even worse, for having dared to put his thoughts into words, in his documentation of crimes against the Kurds in Syria, Iran, Iraq — and finally Turkey, the unpardonable offense.

I am sure you know the facts better than I do, so I will not review them. If this brave and honorable man had been suffering this ordeal in Russia, or Iran after the overthrow of the Shah, or some other enemy state, he would be internationally known and honored, and outrage about the savagery of his tormentors would know no bounds. But not in this case. One reason is that among his crimes is to have refused a $10,000 prize by the U.S. Fund for Free Expression in protest against Washington’s support for Turkish repression. Respectable people understand that this is a topic that “it wouldn’t do” to mention, to borrow from Orwell’s unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, which I mentioned yesterday. It certainly wouldn’t do to mention the fact that Clinton was supplying 80% of the arms as Turkish state terror in the southeast reached shocking levels through the 1990s, the flow increasing as the atrocities increased, peaking in 1997 when the US sent more arms to Turkey than throughout the entire Cold War period combined up to the onset of the insurgency. It particularly wouldn’t do to mention that in the same year, 1997, Clinton’s foreign policy entered a “noble phase” with a “saintly glow” according to a distinguished correspondent in the New York Times, his contribution to a chorus of self-glorification on the part of Western intellectuals that may well have no parallel in history. This disgraceful episode was a post-cold war contribution by the intellectual classes of the West to provide justification for expansion of NATO, and to provide some new pretext for intervention with the collapse of the traditional claim that the Russians are coming. Under the newly declared mandate, the self-designated “enlightened states,” directed by their noble leaders in Washington, must now discard the misguided “old anti-interventionist structure” instituted after World War II. They must be ready to act when they believe the cause to be just, and should not be “daunted by fears of destroying some lofty, imagined temple of law enshrined in the U.N. Charter’s anti-interventionist proscriptions.”

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Family criticises decision to allow soldier who drove bulldozer that killed daughter to give evidence from behind screen

Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem, The Guardian, Oct 20, 2010

There seems to be no end in sight to Washington’s campaign in the troubled land

• Gulf New, October 18, 2010

Amnesty International USA, 18 October 2010

Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize award has put the international spotlight on his persecution by the Chinese authorities, who sentenced him to 11 years in jail for â??inciting subversion of state powerâ?? after an unfair trial.

But Liu is just one of many Chinese human rights activists who currently languish in detention in the country. They are prisoners of conscience, jailed solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

The human rights defence movement in China is growing, but those who attempt to report on human rights violations or challenge politically sensitive government policies face serious risk of abuse. The authorities make frequent use of vaguely-worded charges to silence and imprison peaceful activists, such as â??endangering state securityâ??, â??subversion of state powerâ?? and â??separatismâ??.

Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, became another victim of this crackdown when she was placed under house arrest after she returned home from visiting Liu in prison after he had won the Nobel prize.. Amnesty International profiles five other prominent Chinese activists who have been locked up for daring to criticise the government.

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Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has once against scuttled a chance for progress in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. You didn’t know? Don’t feel bad. It all happened so quickly that hardly anyone noticed it – except in Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority has its offices. There they know all too well what happened, and why.

This latest chapter in Israel’s war against peace began at the end of September, when Netanyahu’s moratorium on expansion of the West Bank settlements ended. The U.S. called for a two-month extension, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisted that he’d break off the talks if building in settlements began again. How could he accept less from Israel than what the U.S. demanded?

Netanyahu kept the world in suspense in early October while he figured out what he must have thought was a clever maneuver. He’d agree to the extension, he said, in return for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

Background: Israel has always called on its neighbors to recognize its “right to exist.” The Palestinians gave that recognition many years ago. Under Netanyahu, the Israeli government has upped the ante: demanding recognition of Israel as “a Jewish state” and “the state of the Jewish people” and dishonestly treating the new demand as equivalent to simply recognizing Israel’s “right to exist,” knowing full well that the Palestinians would find it much harder to accept this new version of the demand. In fact, Netanyahu must have hoped the Palestinians would find it impossible.

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