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By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News , May 9, 2008
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| The relentless campaign to deny Arabs their right to political freedom in Palestine has now extended to denying them their right to academic freedom in the US.
The plan here, pursued by pressure groups headed by hard-right, Israel-can’t-do-wrong nationalists like Daniel Pipes, Allan Dershowitz and David Horowitz, among others, is to go after their victims wherever they may be found in the world of academe, and turn their lives and careers into living hell. Pipes, for example, himself a former academic, runs an outfit called Campus Watch whose job it is to make sure that no professor shall utter an unkind word about Israel in a lecture hall. They gave hell to Walid Khalidi when Princeton offered him an endowed chair and equal hell to Khalil Shikaki before his appointment at Brandeis. In short, when educators who question the unconventional wisdom attempt to communicate ideas, in this case about Israel, that are inconvenient, they find themselves targeted for public vilification and job loss. This is not just reprehensible because in this case you are saying that scholars should come under special scrutiny because of their ethnic backgrounds, but reprehensible also because here you are going against the grain of what intellectual life – the free flow of knowledge and ideas – is all about.
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Bigotry and academic freedom
May 10, 2008A Somber Anniversary
May 10, 2008The Nation, May 8, 2008
By Avi Shlaim
Israelis approach the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of their state in a subdued and somber mood. Israeli society is deeply divided, and there is no consensus on how to mark the milestone. On the one hand, Israel can boast some stunning successes: a democratic polity with universal suffrage; a highly developed, some might say overdeveloped, multiparty system; an independent judiciary; a vibrant cultural scene; progressive educational and health services; a high standard of living; and a per capita GDP almost the size of Britain’s.
The ingathering of the exiles has worked. Israel’s population has reached 7,241,000, nearly ten times what it was in 1948. Forty-one percent of the world’s Jews live in the Jewish state, speaking the Hebrew language that was confined to liturgy when Zionism was born at the end of the nineteenth century. In its central aim of providing the scattered Jews with a haven, instilling in them a sense of nationhood and forging a modern nation-state, Zionism has been a brilliant success. And these achievements are all the more remarkable against the background of appalling tragedy: the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.
On the other hand, some failures can be noted. The most pronounced one has been the failure to resolve the conflict with the Arabs, which has accompanied the Zionist enterprise from the very beginning. That conflict involved neighboring Arab states, but in origin and in essence it was a clash between two movements for national liberation: the Jewish one and the Palestinian one. In 1948 the Zionist movement realized its aim of Jewish national self-determination in Palestine. Israel’s War of Independence was the Palestinians’ catastrophe, al-Nakba in Arabic.
Principles of the Imperial New World Order
May 10, 2008Electric Politics
By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
We have to recognize that in the Imperial New World Order (INWO), with the Soviet Union gone, and an aggressive and highly militarized United States projecting its great power across the globe, destabilizing and devastating in all its major areas of operation in the alleged interest of liberation and stability, a revised set of principles should be discernible. Most of these are hardly new, but even more audaciously than in the past they translate power relationships into affirmations of rights or the denial of these very same rights, with the ensuing double standards applicable pretty much across the board. The real-world significance of these INWO principles thus depends on three factors: (a) whether Washington affirms them for itself (and directly or by implication for its close allies, clients and hangers-on); (b) whether Washington denies them to its enemies; and (c) whether Washington doesn’t care one way or the other.
As we show below, these power-based affirmations or denials of rights are accepted among the powerful, from the leaders of the Western states, political candidates, and top UN officials, to the establishment media and the intellectuals whose voices can be heard. They represent the institutionalization of a system of power in which justice is inoperative and its perversion hidden in clouds of rhetoric and obfuscation.
Arab Israelis mark ‘catastrophe’ of Israel’s creation
May 10, 2008The rally was organised by Islamists in Kfar Cana, northern Israel, where pictures from the 1948 war were shown on huge screens.
Israel celebrated its independence on Thursday in accordance with the Hebrew lunar calendar.
About 760,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes when the Jewish state was created.
According to statistics announced on Wednesday, Israel has a total population of 7.28 million people, including 1.5 million Arabs.
They are mostly descended from the 160,000 Palestinians who did not flee after Israel was created in 1948.
Myanmar puts vote before aid effort
May 10, 2008Al Jazeera, May 10, 2008
Voting has begun in Myanmar in a controverial referendum pushed by the government despite international appeals for the rulering military to focus on recovery efforts after last weekend’s devastating cyclone.
The referendum got under way on Saturday in much of the north and far south of the country, although in the areas hardest hit by Cyclone Nargis the vote has been postponed for two weeks.
Some 27 million of Myanmar’s 57 million people are eligible to vote, although it was unclear how many would vote on Saturday and how many will vote on May 24 instead.
But the cyclone has overshadowed the vote, which even before the disaster many saw as being skewed in the military’s favour.
According to state-run Myanmar television, a week after the storm hit the death toll stands at 23,335, with 37,019 missing – both figures only slightly changed since Tuesday.
However Western diplomats in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, say up to 100,000 people may have been killed by Cyclone Nargis, while more than one million have been left without shelter.
Many are without food and clean water.
Thinking globally, acting locally
May 10, 2008With the Bush administration angling for war with Iran, the city of Chicago is considering going on record opposing it
Michael Lynn | The Guardian, May 9, 2008
More than 7,000 miles separate Chicago and Tehran. But on May 14, the city council of the American city will consider whether to take a stand on an event that would have far reaching consequences for residents of both: a US attack on Iran.
A resolution introduced into the council by one of its members, Alderman Joe Moore, would put the city on record as opposing a preemptive strike against Iran by the US. The resolution urges all congressional representatives whose districts include parts of the city to “clearly express the will of the people of Chicago in opposing any attack on Iran, and urging the Bush administration to pursue diplomatic engagement with that nation.”
The resolution is the result of an initiative launched by Chicago’s No War On Iran Coalition, a broad-based grouping of local anti-war, social justice and faith organisations. Ranging widely in viewpoints, the goal that unites us all is preventing the United States from launching another elective war that we believe would prove even more disastrous than the five-year-old one next door in Iraq.
Recent events have added urgency to the goal. In April, General David Petraeus, the commanding officer of American forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to that country, testified to several congressional committees. In their testimony, both struck a common theme: the role of Iran in promoting insurgent attacks in Iraq. Both men accused so-called “special groups” of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of being responsible for the deaths of American troops and rocket strikes on the Green Zone.
Palestine: Liberation Deferred
May 9, 2008Rashid Khalidi, The Nation, May 8, 2008
The “Palestine Question” has been with us for sixty years. During this time it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more distant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question solved the previously perennial “Jewish Question” is once again open to debate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of Zionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued that what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an entirely different one.
It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and indeed even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events sixty years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy. Commemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their national catastrophe, al-Nakba–the expulsion, flight and loss of their homes by a majority of their people sixty years ago–is thus considered not in terms of this seminal event’s meaning to at least 8 million Palestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only because it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating Zionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel also created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the US occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must therefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact that it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land nearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of ethnic cleansing.
60 years of dispossession
May 9, 2008Nakba 60
Uruknet, May 8, 2008
This year Israel celebrates its 60th birthday. Yet for Palestinians and for people of conscience this is not an occasion to celebrate.
The establishment of the State of Israel involved the destruction of over 530 Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of about two-thirds of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population from their homes and lands to pave the way for the establishment of a Jewish State, with a Jewish majority
Contrary to Israeli claims that they declared statehood in response to an Arab war against them, in actual fact, Zionist leaders launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the largely defenseless Palestinian population in April of 1948. A month and a half into this campaign, 380,000 Palestinians had faced expulsion, accounting for half of the total Palestinians made refugees in 1948, spawning an era in Palestinian history known as the Nakba (catastrophe).
This major offensive was Plan Dalet (Dalet – Hebrew for letter D). The Zionist leaders waged this campaign to control and ethnically cleanse territories beyond that allocated to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan (UNPP). By 1949, the Zionist leadership/Israeli government controlled 78% of Mandatory Palestine, having seized an additional 23% of the land allocated to Palestinian State under the UNPP.
According to Plan Dalet, the brigade commanders were given full “discretion” in what to do with the villages they occupied – that is to destroy them or leave them standing. On numerous occasions, Zionist forces expelled residents from their towns and villages, committed rape and other acts of violence, massacred civilians, and executed prisoners of war. These acts have been widely documented, most forcefully by Israeli historians using military and State archives. Here is one of many testimonies from Zionist soldiers:
“The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.” He added that a soldier had bragged of raping and shooting a woman, two old women had been blown up in a house, and another woman with her baby were shot.*
New Jewish settlers migrated from across the world to inhabit the very same homes from which their rightful Palestinian owners had been expelled. Today these rightful owners are still denied the right to return to their homes.
The campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its population entailed a brutal attempt to eliminate Palestinian identity, culture and heritage. Read more
60 years on, Palestinians continue to be denied their internationally sanctioned rights to return to their homes, to self-determination and to live in full equality in their homeland.
A recent UN report condemned Israel’s on-going policies in the Occupied Territories as forms of foreign occupation, colonialism and apartheid – all in violation of international law.
No other “democracy” has so flagrantly breached international laws and UN resolutions as Israel has.
60 years on, Israel’s practices of ethnic cleansing continue.
* Sources: Abu-Lughod, Lila & Sa’di Ahmad, 2007, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed, New York: Columbia University Press; Morris, Benny, 2004, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A Secret Afghanistan Mission Prepares for War with Iran
May 9, 2008The Washington Post, May 8, 2008
By Willim M. Arkin
Those predicting war with Iran or some Bush-Cheney October surprise attack on Tehran are constantly looking for signs of military preparations: a B-52 bomber that mistakenly takes off from North Dakota with nuclear-armed cruise missiles; a second or third aircraft carrier entering the Persian Gulf; a B-1 crashing in Qatar.
Since the most likely path to war with Iran is not Marines storming the beach but a strike on nuclear facilities and “regime” targets, signs such as these can often just be mirages. The true strike is not necessarily going to come with any warning, and the U.S. military has developed an entire system called “global strike” to implement such a preemptive strike.
A secret mission conducted last August over Afghanistan caught my eye because it tells us everything we need to know about the ability of the U.S. military to conduct a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack in Iran. It also tells us how useless such a strike might be.
