Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 14 March 2008
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world's most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinians.
The central argument of the two-staters is that the one-state idea is impractical and therefore worthless of consideration. Their rallying cry is that it is at least possible to imagine a consensus emerging behind two states, whereas Israelis will never accept a single state. Thus, the one-state crowd are painted as inveterate dreamers and time-wasters.
This argument is advanced by Israel's only serious peace group, Gush Shalom. Here is the view of the group's indefatigable leader, Uri Avnery: "After 120 years of conflict, after a fifth generation was born into this conflict on both sides, to move from total war to total peace in a single joint state, with a total renunciation of national independence? This is total illusion."
Avnery's high-profile opposition to a single state has inspired many in the international solidarity groups to adopt the same position. They have been joined by an influential American intellectual, the philosopher Michael Neumann, who wrote the no-holds-barred book The Case against Israel. He appears to be waging a campaign to discredit the one-state idea too.
Recently in defense of two states, he wrote: "That Israel would concede a single state is laughable. ... There is no chance at all [Israelis] will accept a single state that gives the Palestinians anything remotely like their rights."
Unlike the one-state solution, according to Neumann and Avnery, the means to realizing two states are within our grasp: the removal of the half a million Jewish settlers living in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Both believe that, were Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, it would be possible to create two real states. "A two-state solution will, indeed, leave Palestinians with a sovereign state, because that's what a two-state solution means," argues Neumann. "It doesn't mean one state and another non-state, and no Palestinian proponent of a two-state solution will settle for less than sovereignty."
There is something surprisingly naive about arguing that, just because something is called a two-state solution, it will necessarily result in two sovereign states. What are the minimum requirements for a state to qualify as sovereign, and who decides?
True, the various two-state solutions proposed by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and George Bush, and supported by most of the international community, would fail according to the two-staters' chief criterion: these divisions are not premised on the removal of all the settlers.
But an alternative two-state solution requiring Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders might still not concede, for example, a Palestinian army -- equipped and trained by Iran -- to guard the borders of the West Bank and Gaza. Would that count? And how likely do the campaigners for two real states think it that Israel and the US would grant that kind of sovereignty to a Palestine state?
Importantly, Neumann and Avnery remind us that those with power are the ones who dictate solutions. In which case we can be sure that, when the time is right, Israel and its sponsor, the United States, will impose their own version of the two-state solution and that it will be far from the genuine article advocated by the two-state camp.
But let us return to the main argument: that the creation of two states is inherently more achievable and practical than the establishment of a single state. Strangely, however, from all the available evidence, this is not how it looks to Israel's current leaders.
Prime minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has expressed in several speeches the fear that, should the Palestinian population under Israeli rule -- both in the occupied territories and inside Israel proper -- reach the point where it outnumbers the Jewish population, as demographers project will be the case in the next few years, Israel will be compared to apartheid South Africa. In his words, Israel is facing an imminent and powerful "struggle for one-man-one-vote" along the lines of the anti-apartheid movement.
According to Olmert, without evasive action, political logic is drifting inexorably toward the creation of one state in Israel and Palestine. This was his sentiment as he addressed delegates to the recent Herzliya conference: "Once we were afraid of the possibility that the reality in Israel would force a bi-national state on us. In 1948, the obstinate policy of all the Arabs, the anti-Israel fanaticism and our strength and the leadership of David Ben-Gurion saved us from such a state. For 60 years, we fought with unparalleled courage in order to avoid living in a reality of bi-nationalism, and in order to ensure that Israel exists as a Jewish and democratic state with a solid Jewish majority. We must act to this end and understand that such a [bi-national] reality is being created, and in a very short while it will be beyond our control."
Olmert's energies are therefore consumed with finding an alternative political program that can be sold to the rest of the world. That is the reason he, and Sharon before him, began talking about a Palestinian state. Strangely, however, neither took up the offer of the ideal two-state solution -- the kind Avnery and Neumann want -- made in 2002. Then Saudi Arabia and the rest Arab world promised Israel peace in return for its withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. They repeated their offer last year and Israel has steadfastly ignored them.
Instead, an alternative version of two states -- the bogus two-state solution -- has become the default position of Israeli politics. It requires only that Israel and the Palestinians appear to divide the land, while in truth the occupation continues and Jewish sovereignty over all of historic Palestine is not only maintained but rubber-stamped by the international community. In other words, the Gazafication of the West Bank.
When Olmert warns that without two states "Israel is finished," he is thinking primarily about how to stop the emergence of a single state. So, if the real two-state camp is to be believed, Olmert is a dreamer too, because he fears that a one-state solution is not only achievable but dangerously close at hand. Sharon, it seems, suffered from the same delusion, given that demography was the main impulse for his disengaging from Gaza.
Or maybe both of them understood rather better than Neumann and Avnery what is meant by a Jewish state, and what political conditions are incompatible with it.
In fact, the division of the land demanded by the real two-staters, however equitable, would be the very moment when the struggle for Israel to remain a Jewish state would enter its most critical and difficult phase. This is precisely why Israel has blocked any meaningful division of the land so far and will continue to do so.
In the unimaginable event that Israel did divide the land, a Jewish state would not be able to live with the consequences of such a division for long. Eventually, the maintenance of an ethnic Israeli state would (and will) prove unsustainable: environmentally, demographically and ultimately physically. Division of the land simply "fast-forwards" the self-destructiveness inherent in a Jewish state.
Let us examine just a few of the consequences for the Jewish state of a genuine two-state solution.
First, Israel inside its recognized, shrunken borders would face an immediate and very serious water shortage. That is because, in returning the West Bank to the Palestinians, Israel would lose control of the large mountain aquifers that currently supply most of its water, not only to Israel proper but also to the Jewish settlers living illegally in the occupied territories. Israel would no longer be able to steal the water, but would be expected to negotiate for it on the open market.
Given the politics of water in the Middle East that would not be a trivial matter. However impoverished the new sovereign Palestinian state were to be, it would lose all legitimacy in the eyes of its own population were it to sell more than a trickle of water to the Israelis.
We can understand why by examining the current water situation. At the moment Israel drains off almost all of the water provided by the rivers and aquifers inside Israel and in the occupied territories for use by its own population, allowing each Palestinian far less than the minimum amount he or she requires each day, according to the World Health Organization.
In a stark warning last month, Israel's Water Authority reported that over-drilling has polluted with sea water most of the supply from the coastal aquifer -- that is the main fresh water source inside Israel's recognized borders.
Were Palestinians to be allowed a proper water ration from their own mountain aquifer, as well as to build a modern economy, there would not be enough left over to satisfy Israel's first-world thirst. And that is before we consider the extra demand on water resources from all those Palestinians who choose to realize their right to return, not to their homes in Israel, but to the new sovereign Palestinian state.
In addition, for reasons that we will come to, the sovereign Jewish state would have every reason to continue its Judaization policies, trying to attract as many Jews from the rest of the world as possible, thereby further straining the region's water resources.
The environmental unsustainability of both states seeking to absorb large populations would inevitably result in a regional water crisis. In addition, should Israeli Jews, sensing water shortages, start to leave in significant numbers, Israel would have an even more pressing reason to locate water, by fair means or foul.
It can be expected that in a short time Israel, with the fourth most powerful army in the world, would seek to manufacture reasons for war against its weaker neighbors, particularly the Palestinians but possibly also Lebanon, in a bid to steal their water.
Water shortages would, of course, be a problem facing a single state too. But, at least in one state there would be mechanisms in place to reduce such tensions, to manage population growth and economic development, and to divide water resources equitably.
Second, with the labor-intensive occupation at an end, much of the Jewish state's huge citizen army would become surplus to defense requirements. In addition to the massive social and economic disruptions, the dismantling of the country's military complex would fundamentally change Israel's role in the region, damage its relationship with the only global superpower and sever its financial ties to Diaspora Jews.
Israel would no longer have the laboratories of the occupied territories for testing its military hardware, its battlefield strategies and its booming surveillance and crowd control industries. If Israel chose to fight the Palestinians, it would have to do so in a proper war, even if one between very unequal sides. Doubtless the Palestinians, like Hizballah, would quickly find regional sponsors to arm and train their army or militias.
The experience and reputation Israel has acquired -- at least among the US military -- in running an occupation and devising new and supposedly sophisticated ways to control the "Arab mind" would rapidly be lost, and with it Israel's usefulness to the US in managing its own long-term occupation of Iraq.
Also, Israel's vital strategic alliance with the US in dividing the Arab world, over the issue of the occupation and by signing peace treaties with some states and living in a state of permanent war with others, would start to unravel.
With the waning of Israel's special relationship with Washington and the influence of its lobby groups, as well as the loss of billions of dollars in annual subsidies, the Jewish Diaspora would begin to lose interest in Israel. Its money and power ebbing away, Israel might eventually slip into Middle Eastern anonymity, another Jordan. In such circumstances it would rapidly see a large exodus of privileged Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom hold second passports.
Third, the Jewish state would not be as Jewish as some might think: currently one in five Israelis is not Jewish but Palestinian. Although in order to realize a real two-state vision all the Jewish settlers would probably need to leave the occupied territories and return to Israel, what would be done with the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship?
These Palestinians have been citizens for six decades and live legally on land that has belonged to their families for many generations. They are also growing in number at a rate faster than the Jewish population, the reason they are popularly referred to in Israel as a "demographic time-bomb."
Were these 1.3 million citizens to be removed from Israel by force under a two-state arrangement, it would be a violation of international law by a democratic state on a scale unprecedented in the modern era, and an act of ethnic cleansing even larger than the 1948 war that established Israel. The question would be: why even bother advocating two states if it has to be achieved on such appalling terms?
Assuming instead that the new Jewish state is supposed to maintain, as Israel currently does, the pretense of being democratic, these citizens would be entitled to continue living on their land and exercising their rights. Inside a Jewish state that had officially ended its conflict with the Palestinians, demands would grow from Palestinian citizens for equal rights and an end to their second-class status.
Most importantly, they would insist on two rights that challenge the very basis of a Jewish state. They would expect the right, backed by international law, to be able to marry Palestinians from outside Israel and bring them to live with them. And they would want a Right of Return for their exiled relatives on a similar basis to the Law of Return for Jews.
Israel's Jewishness would be at stake, even more so than it is today from its Palestinian minority. It can be assumed that Israel's leaders would react with great ferocity to protect the state's Jewishness. Eventually Israel's democratic pretensions would have to be jettisoned and the full-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinian citizens implemented.
Still, do these arguments against the genuine two-state arrangement win the day for the one-state solution? Would Israel's leaders not put up an equally vicious fight to protect their ethnic privileges by preventing, as they are doing now, the emergence of a single state?
Yes, they would and they will. But that misses my point. As long as Israel is an ethnic state, it will be forced to deepen the occupation and intensify its ethnic cleansing policies to prevent the emergence of genuine Palestinian political influence -- for the reasons I cite above and for many others I don't. In truth, both a one-state and a genuine two-state arrangement are impossible given Israel's determination to remain a Jewish state.
The obstacle to a solution, then, is not about dividing the land but about Zionism itself, the ideology of ethnic supremacy that is the current orthodoxy in Israel. As long as Israel is a Zionist state, its leaders will allow neither one state nor two real states.
The solution, therefore, reduces to the question of how to defeat Zionism. It just so happens that the best way this can be achieved is by confronting the illusions of the two-state dreamers and explaining why Israel is in permanent bad faith about seeking peace.
In other words, if we stopped distracting ourselves with the Holy Grail of the two-state solution, we might channel our energies into something more useful: discrediting Israel as a Jewish state, and the ideology of Zionism that upholds it. Eventually the respectable facade of Zionism might crumble.
Without Zionism, the obstacle to creating either one or two states will finally be removed. And if that is the case, then why not also campaign for the solution that will best bring justice to both Israelis and Palestinians?
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East is published by Pluto Press. His website is http://www.jkcook.net/
Showing posts with label jonathan cook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jonathan cook. Show all posts
Saturday, 15 March 2008
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Academic freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 5 March 2008
In the strange world of Israeli academia, an Arab college lecturer is being dismissed from his job because he refused to declare his "respect for the uniform of the Israeli army." The bizarre demand was made of Nizar Hassan, director of several award-winning films, after he criticized a Jewish student who arrived in his film studies class at Sapir College in the Negev for wearing his uniform and carrying a gun.
The incident raises disturbing questions about the freedom of Israeli academics, sheds light on the veneration of the military in Israeli public life, and exposes the close, verging on incestuous, ties between the army and Israeli academia.
Meanwhile, for many of Israel's 1.2 million Palestinian citizens, who are nearly a fifth of the country's population, Hassan's treatment confirms their fears that decades of discrimination, especially in higher education, are far from over.
Hassan has faced a storm of criticism, including claims that he is anti-Semitic, since the Israeli media mistakenly reported back in November that he had thrown out of class one of his students, Eyal Cohen, over the way he was dressed. Hassan and most of the students present say Cohen was simply warned not to attend class in future wearing his uniform.
The story soon gained a life of its own, becoming the subject of incensed talk shows and newspaper columns. A group of right-wing college staff and students lobbied for Hassan, the only Arab lecturer in the film school, to be dismissed, and the Knesset's Education Committee denounced him.
Critics claim, apparently without irony, that Hassan humiliated the student, abused the concept of academic freedom and impugned the reputation of the Israeli army.
Condemnation has come from surprising quarters, including the journalist Gideon Levy, better known for his articles attacking the the army's treatment of the Palestinians under occupation.
But more predictable has been outrage from the right. Last month two leaders of extremist Jewish settlers in Hebron, Baruch Marzel and Itimar Ben Gvir, announced that they had enrolled on Hassan's course. "I would love for him to ask me about my army service," said Marzel. "I can only assure you that he will be the one walking out of the classroom."
The army added its voice too, with senior officers, including the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, putting pressure on Sapir College to publicly rebuke the filmmaker and punish him.
A letter from the head of army personnel, General Elazar Stern, accused the college of failing to act with "proper determination" and urged that Hassan face "sharp, public, official condemnation." Stern added that Hassan must be made to apologize or be sacked, otherwise the army would end its funding of places for hundreds of soldiers who attend courses at Sapir.
Most academic institutions in Israel not only depend on such funding but receive special grants and endowments for research in security-related subjects. The Israeli revisionist historian Ilan Pappe, who was forced out of Haifa University last year, estimates that half of lecturers in Israeli universities have ties to the security services.
In Sapir College's case, links to the army have been reinforced by its location in Sderot, a poor development town close to Gaza that is the target of most of the Qassam rockets fired into Israel.
Under growing pressure, the college's Academic Council suspended Hassan without offering him a hearing. It also appointed for the first time in the college's history an academic committee to investigate the incident and report on what disciplinary action should be taken.
The committee published its report late last month, conceding that he is an "outstanding teacher" but offering only a cursory examination the events at the center of the controversy. Instead the members harshly criticized Hassan's behavior and personality and recommended that he apologize to Cohen or face dismissal.
The college's president, Zeev Tzahor, intervened by contributing his own condition. He wrote to Hassan telling him that in his apology "you must refer to your obligation to be respectful to the IDF uniform and the full right of every student to enter your classroom in uniform."
Hassan refused and, according to reports last week, the college has begun proceedings to dismiss him.
"The whole reaction has been hysterical," Hassan, who lives in Nazareth, said. "It really surprised me, as did the lies that were told about what had happened."
His students say the issue has been blown out proportion and that Hassan has never hidden his opposition to militarism, wherever it exists.
Enass Masri, one of two Arab students in Hassan's film class, said: "When he saw Cohen wearing his uniform, he explained that all military uniforms -- of the Israeli army, of Fatah or of Hamas -- are symbols of violence and that he does not allow them into his classroom.
"His concerns about the blurring in Israeli society of the boundaries between the civil and military are well known."
She added that the mistaken reports about Cohen being thrown out of class may have been part of a long-standing campaign to oust Hassan from his job. He had made himself unpopular with some staff and students by speaking his mind, she said. "Some people at the college are not prepared to accept the kind of things he says from an Arab."
Sapir College calls itself "a lighthouse in the Negev," and its film school once had a reputation for encouraging dissenting social and political opinions.
In other Israeli colleges, discussion of "politics" -- a euphemism for views not officially sanctioned -- is rarely allowed.
For example, at Haifa University, which has the largest Arab student body in the country, all protests on campus are banned unless licensed by the vice-chancellor. Unofficial demonstrations, however peaceful, are broken up and usually filmed by security staff. Video evidence is used as grounds for suspending or expelling students.
Sapir's president, Tzahor, recently told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper that his motto is: "Politics -- only as far as the classroom door."
However, the college's definition of "politics" appears selective. In another recent incident at Sapir, lecturer Shlomit Tamari told a Bedouin student to remove her head-covering, telling her it was a sign of her oppression. No disciplinary action was taken against Tamari, who is unrepentant: "I told the college that I have academic freedom, and I can talk about that subject and I am continuing to do so."
Enass Masri said she was also shocked that the college committee did not question the students in Hassan's class about what took place. "We thought we would be able to put the record straight, but we were never invited to testify.
"Almost all of the students are on Hassan's side, and we wrote a letter to the college authorities in protest at his treatment."
Instead, she says, the committee interpreted the "meaning" of what happened, according to their own view of Hassan. "They looked at him not as a human being but as an Arab, and Arabs are not allowed to have an opinion on Israeli militarism."
Hassan takes a slightly different view. Describing his questioning by the committee, he said: "They wanted me to be the Palestinian in the room, and I refused to oblige. They wanted to believe that I object to the army uniform because I am Palestinian. But I reject the uniform because it is opposed to my universal and human values. I acted as I did because I am a teacher and a human being.
"What shocked me was that the committee refused to believe that could be my motivation."
Certainly the committee's report dismisses Hassan's arguments, claiming: "Nizar abused his status and his authority as a teacher to flaunt his opinions, feelings and frustrations as a member of the Arab national minority in Israel, cloaking himself in a 'humane' and 'universal' garb, whereas in fact he demonstrated a stance of brute force bearing a distinctly nationalist character."
Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli filmmaker who was dean of Sapir's film school between 1996 and 2002, until he was hounded out over his anti-Zionist views, wrote to Tzahor, the college president, arguing that he was making an "irrational and immoral demand" in expecting Hassan to respect the army's uniform.
Bresheeth, referring to the reserve duty that most Israeli Jewish men perform well into their forties, added: "You are a soldier first, and only then an academic ... I call on the historian Zeev Tzahor to refuse the orders of Major Zeev Tzahor."
As in most other areas of Israeli life, the country's Palestinian minority faces systematic discrimination in higher education. No public university is located in an Arab community or teaches in Arabic, and, though the minority is a fifth of the population, fewer than one percent of lecturers are Arab.
In addition, the number of Arab students is third of their proportion in the population -- an under-representation that is apparently intentional. In 2003, psychometric tests biased towards Western culture were scrapped in an effort to help "weaker sections" of society gain acceptance to university. However, when the Committee of University Heads learnt that the number of Arabs entering university had risen sharply as a result, the tests were immediately reinstated.
Several leading Israeli academics are outspoken racists, including David Bukay and Arnon Sofer at Haifa University and Raphael Israeli at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The latter was called as an "expert" witness by the state at a trial in 2004 in which he stated that the Arab mentality was composed of "a sense of victimization," "pathological anti-Semitism" and "a tendency to live in a world of illusions."
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East is published by Pluto Press. His website is http://www.jkcook.net/
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Palestinians in Israel
Film reviews: Nizar Hassan's Istiqlal and Invasion, Maureen Clare Murphy (29 April 2003)
In the strange world of Israeli academia, an Arab college lecturer is being dismissed from his job because he refused to declare his "respect for the uniform of the Israeli army." The bizarre demand was made of Nizar Hassan, director of several award-winning films, after he criticized a Jewish student who arrived in his film studies class at Sapir College in the Negev for wearing his uniform and carrying a gun.
The incident raises disturbing questions about the freedom of Israeli academics, sheds light on the veneration of the military in Israeli public life, and exposes the close, verging on incestuous, ties between the army and Israeli academia.
Meanwhile, for many of Israel's 1.2 million Palestinian citizens, who are nearly a fifth of the country's population, Hassan's treatment confirms their fears that decades of discrimination, especially in higher education, are far from over.
Hassan has faced a storm of criticism, including claims that he is anti-Semitic, since the Israeli media mistakenly reported back in November that he had thrown out of class one of his students, Eyal Cohen, over the way he was dressed. Hassan and most of the students present say Cohen was simply warned not to attend class in future wearing his uniform.
The story soon gained a life of its own, becoming the subject of incensed talk shows and newspaper columns. A group of right-wing college staff and students lobbied for Hassan, the only Arab lecturer in the film school, to be dismissed, and the Knesset's Education Committee denounced him.
Critics claim, apparently without irony, that Hassan humiliated the student, abused the concept of academic freedom and impugned the reputation of the Israeli army.
Condemnation has come from surprising quarters, including the journalist Gideon Levy, better known for his articles attacking the the army's treatment of the Palestinians under occupation.
But more predictable has been outrage from the right. Last month two leaders of extremist Jewish settlers in Hebron, Baruch Marzel and Itimar Ben Gvir, announced that they had enrolled on Hassan's course. "I would love for him to ask me about my army service," said Marzel. "I can only assure you that he will be the one walking out of the classroom."
The army added its voice too, with senior officers, including the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, putting pressure on Sapir College to publicly rebuke the filmmaker and punish him.
A letter from the head of army personnel, General Elazar Stern, accused the college of failing to act with "proper determination" and urged that Hassan face "sharp, public, official condemnation." Stern added that Hassan must be made to apologize or be sacked, otherwise the army would end its funding of places for hundreds of soldiers who attend courses at Sapir.
Most academic institutions in Israel not only depend on such funding but receive special grants and endowments for research in security-related subjects. The Israeli revisionist historian Ilan Pappe, who was forced out of Haifa University last year, estimates that half of lecturers in Israeli universities have ties to the security services.
In Sapir College's case, links to the army have been reinforced by its location in Sderot, a poor development town close to Gaza that is the target of most of the Qassam rockets fired into Israel.
Under growing pressure, the college's Academic Council suspended Hassan without offering him a hearing. It also appointed for the first time in the college's history an academic committee to investigate the incident and report on what disciplinary action should be taken.
The committee published its report late last month, conceding that he is an "outstanding teacher" but offering only a cursory examination the events at the center of the controversy. Instead the members harshly criticized Hassan's behavior and personality and recommended that he apologize to Cohen or face dismissal.
The college's president, Zeev Tzahor, intervened by contributing his own condition. He wrote to Hassan telling him that in his apology "you must refer to your obligation to be respectful to the IDF uniform and the full right of every student to enter your classroom in uniform."
Hassan refused and, according to reports last week, the college has begun proceedings to dismiss him.
"The whole reaction has been hysterical," Hassan, who lives in Nazareth, said. "It really surprised me, as did the lies that were told about what had happened."
His students say the issue has been blown out proportion and that Hassan has never hidden his opposition to militarism, wherever it exists.
Enass Masri, one of two Arab students in Hassan's film class, said: "When he saw Cohen wearing his uniform, he explained that all military uniforms -- of the Israeli army, of Fatah or of Hamas -- are symbols of violence and that he does not allow them into his classroom.
"His concerns about the blurring in Israeli society of the boundaries between the civil and military are well known."
She added that the mistaken reports about Cohen being thrown out of class may have been part of a long-standing campaign to oust Hassan from his job. He had made himself unpopular with some staff and students by speaking his mind, she said. "Some people at the college are not prepared to accept the kind of things he says from an Arab."
Sapir College calls itself "a lighthouse in the Negev," and its film school once had a reputation for encouraging dissenting social and political opinions.
In other Israeli colleges, discussion of "politics" -- a euphemism for views not officially sanctioned -- is rarely allowed.
For example, at Haifa University, which has the largest Arab student body in the country, all protests on campus are banned unless licensed by the vice-chancellor. Unofficial demonstrations, however peaceful, are broken up and usually filmed by security staff. Video evidence is used as grounds for suspending or expelling students.
Sapir's president, Tzahor, recently told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper that his motto is: "Politics -- only as far as the classroom door."
However, the college's definition of "politics" appears selective. In another recent incident at Sapir, lecturer Shlomit Tamari told a Bedouin student to remove her head-covering, telling her it was a sign of her oppression. No disciplinary action was taken against Tamari, who is unrepentant: "I told the college that I have academic freedom, and I can talk about that subject and I am continuing to do so."
Enass Masri said she was also shocked that the college committee did not question the students in Hassan's class about what took place. "We thought we would be able to put the record straight, but we were never invited to testify.
"Almost all of the students are on Hassan's side, and we wrote a letter to the college authorities in protest at his treatment."
Instead, she says, the committee interpreted the "meaning" of what happened, according to their own view of Hassan. "They looked at him not as a human being but as an Arab, and Arabs are not allowed to have an opinion on Israeli militarism."
Hassan takes a slightly different view. Describing his questioning by the committee, he said: "They wanted me to be the Palestinian in the room, and I refused to oblige. They wanted to believe that I object to the army uniform because I am Palestinian. But I reject the uniform because it is opposed to my universal and human values. I acted as I did because I am a teacher and a human being.
"What shocked me was that the committee refused to believe that could be my motivation."
Certainly the committee's report dismisses Hassan's arguments, claiming: "Nizar abused his status and his authority as a teacher to flaunt his opinions, feelings and frustrations as a member of the Arab national minority in Israel, cloaking himself in a 'humane' and 'universal' garb, whereas in fact he demonstrated a stance of brute force bearing a distinctly nationalist character."
Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli filmmaker who was dean of Sapir's film school between 1996 and 2002, until he was hounded out over his anti-Zionist views, wrote to Tzahor, the college president, arguing that he was making an "irrational and immoral demand" in expecting Hassan to respect the army's uniform.
Bresheeth, referring to the reserve duty that most Israeli Jewish men perform well into their forties, added: "You are a soldier first, and only then an academic ... I call on the historian Zeev Tzahor to refuse the orders of Major Zeev Tzahor."
As in most other areas of Israeli life, the country's Palestinian minority faces systematic discrimination in higher education. No public university is located in an Arab community or teaches in Arabic, and, though the minority is a fifth of the population, fewer than one percent of lecturers are Arab.
In addition, the number of Arab students is third of their proportion in the population -- an under-representation that is apparently intentional. In 2003, psychometric tests biased towards Western culture were scrapped in an effort to help "weaker sections" of society gain acceptance to university. However, when the Committee of University Heads learnt that the number of Arabs entering university had risen sharply as a result, the tests were immediately reinstated.
Several leading Israeli academics are outspoken racists, including David Bukay and Arnon Sofer at Haifa University and Raphael Israeli at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The latter was called as an "expert" witness by the state at a trial in 2004 in which he stated that the Arab mentality was composed of "a sense of victimization," "pathological anti-Semitism" and "a tendency to live in a world of illusions."
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East is published by Pluto Press. His website is http://www.jkcook.net/
Related Links
BY TOPIC:
Palestinians in Israel
Film reviews: Nizar Hassan's Istiqlal and Invasion, Maureen Clare Murphy (29 April 2003)
Saturday, 29 September 2007
Why Did Israel Attack Syria?
An Opening Shot for War on Iran?
Jonathan Cook, September 27, 2007
Israel's air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.
From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?
It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel's month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney's recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.
The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.
But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel's public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.
The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group's program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East -- the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel -- was at risk of being shunted aside.
Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq -- presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.
Israel's leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear program -- whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim -- had to be stopped at all costs.
While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.
While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel's neighbors watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran's network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.
For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.
So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel's planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.
As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran's uncomfortable embrace: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."
Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behavior of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus' appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation". The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer's war along the northern border.
It was at this point -- with tensions simmeringly hot -- that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.
Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country's military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.
One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah's act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel's response was "disproportionate". Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?
The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one -- including the Israeli leadership -- believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel's attack. Olmert's fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.
So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?
The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.
(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)
How credible are these two scenarios?
The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea's behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US? And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?
The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel's job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.
Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad's speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries' alliance.
Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each scenario suggests a Shia "axis of evil", coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel's destruction. And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran -- launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv -- to save Israel.
That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon fanatics like John Bolton is warning enough -- as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli "intelligence", the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.
It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America's invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.
Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed years earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.
There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.
Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.
So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?
The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons "creating their own reality", as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves -- such as arming -- that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel and world order.
Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.
But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria's culpability and by provoking it to respond.
Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shia arc of extremism" and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.
Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms -- which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights -- would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.
Were either of Damascus' initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality -- one in which the forces of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Jonathan Cook, September 27, 2007
Israel's air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.
From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?
It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel's month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney's recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.
The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.
But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel's public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.
The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group's program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East -- the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel -- was at risk of being shunted aside.
Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq -- presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.
Israel's leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear program -- whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim -- had to be stopped at all costs.
While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.
While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel's neighbors watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran's network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.
For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.
So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel's planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.
As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran's uncomfortable embrace: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."
Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behavior of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus' appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation". The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer's war along the northern border.
It was at this point -- with tensions simmeringly hot -- that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.
Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country's military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.
One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah's act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel's response was "disproportionate". Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?
The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one -- including the Israeli leadership -- believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel's attack. Olmert's fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.
So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?
The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.
(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)
How credible are these two scenarios?
The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea's behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US? And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?
The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel's job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.
Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad's speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries' alliance.
Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each scenario suggests a Shia "axis of evil", coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel's destruction. And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran -- launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv -- to save Israel.
That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon fanatics like John Bolton is warning enough -- as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli "intelligence", the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.
It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America's invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.
Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed years earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.
There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.
Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.
So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?
The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons "creating their own reality", as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves -- such as arming -- that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel and world order.
Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.
But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria's culpability and by provoking it to respond.
Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shia arc of extremism" and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.
Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms -- which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights -- would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.
Were either of Damascus' initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality -- one in which the forces of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Saturday, 1 September 2007
The Guardian censors Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook
Unfortunately, and with no little irony, the editors at Comment is Free excised the last part of my article, in which I discussed my own experiences, even if briefly given the length restrictions on articles. Exceptionally, therefore, I am archiving the submitted article rather than the published one.
Unfortunately, and with no little irony, the editors at Comment is Free excised the last part of my article, in which I discussed my own experiences, even if briefly given the length restrictions on articles. Exceptionally, therefore, I am archiving the submitted article rather than the published one.
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
The Propaganda Machine
Jonathan Cook - The Guardian - August 20, 2007
The goal of hasbara is to disseminate good news about Israel, largely independent of whether the news is true or not.
It is an honour of a kind, I suppose, to briefly have the most active thread on the Comment is free site. But not much of one when 95% of the posts rarely rose above the level of vitriolic name-calling. The posters probably know that by now I am immune to playground taunts of "scum" and "Nazi", but the abuse, I suspect, is meant more as a warning to others who might criticise Israel. Keep quite - or else.
Volcanic outbursts of hatred on Cif greet anyone who objects to Israel's policies: in my case, I sinned by pointing out that its leaders have turned the small community of Jews in Tehran into pawns in a struggle to persuade the world that Iran is a genocidal threat to world Jewry. My point was that Israel's concern is entirely hollow. It simply wants to mobilise support for an attack on Iran, either by itself or the US.
Some posters to this site seem to be aware of the organised nature of these critic-bashing campaigns. They note that sites like giyus.org rally the faithful to the cause. But most posters are probably not aware that giyus and its ilk are only the tip of a much larger effort called "hasbara" by Israel and its supporters. Usually the word is translated as "advocacy for Israel". I call it by its proper name: propaganda.
The main goal of hasbara is constantly to disseminate good news about Israel, largely independent of whether the news is true or not, in the hope that over time a benevolent image of Israel will be reinforced. Here's an example: in 2000 it was reported that an Israeli court ruling had ended the country's system of land apartheid, a legally enforced territorial separation that keeps Jewish and Arab citizens apart in most of country. To this day apologists cite this ruling as proof of equality in Israel, even though the decision only applied to one Arab family, has yet to be enforced, and the Israeli parliament is currently passing legislation to make sure it never is.
But the charm offensive is only the upside of their work. The downside is, as Cif posters know well, a relentless campaign to target, discredit and silence critics of Israel. It can take many forms, not only name-calling. I was intrigued to see several posters thought I had no right to criticise Israel because my wife is an Israeli citizen, though - and this is presumably her and my offence - she also happens to be a Palestinian. They would have a field day - but fail to see their own double standards - were I to suggest that only non-Jews be allowed to apologise for Israel.
A few posters made what appeared to be a substantive point: why had I failed to note that, while today 25,000 Jews live in Tehran, another 80,000 have fled? But look closer and the case crumbles. The overwhelming majority of those 80,000 Jews left in the wake of the country's Islamic revolution in 1979 - that is, nearly 30 years ago. They are irrelevant to Israel's current claims that the Iranian leadership is preparing to commit a genocide against the Jews. In any case, most of those fleeing Jews left because they were middle class and secular and saw no future in an Islamic state, despite reassurances from Ayatollah Khomeini that they would left in peace. In other words, they left - like many other Iranians - for economic reasons, not political or religious ones.
Other posters simply lied, in the great tradition of hasbara. Several suggested I had written that Rafik Hariri was killed by Israel. I hadn't, and you can check my website to be sure. I had also apparently written that the two Israeli soldiers killed in a Hizbullah operation last year were caught on Lebanese soil. Again a search failed to find the story. No matter. Truth is not what hasbara is about.
And if all this fails to discredit a critic of Israel, simply label him an anti-semite, and the argument can be closed. Game, set and match.
I am not sure if any other country or cause encourages this kind of mainly voluntary propaganda work, but I am sure that no other country or cause has the human resources that Israel can rely on to carry it out. There are thousands of people sitting at their computers ready to pounce. (I know because I have received abusive emails from them, unless it's just a handful with thousands of different email addresses.) They do not need orders or much guidance. They do it because they love Israel and see it as part of their life's work to protect Israel's image.
Doubtless, they believe what they write too. If you have been raised to live in constant fear of anti-semitism, and to see an anti-semitic impulse lurking in the recessses of every non-Jewish mind (an observation that is often publicly made in the Israeli and American media but less often here), then what other motive could someone like me have but anti-semitism for writing what I do? The logic is satisfyingly circular.
But Cif posters may be less aware of how the rest of the Israel lobby works. Giyus is, in fact, the most amateurish part of its operation. These are the "shock troops" on the front line. They overwhelm by force of numbers only. Far more effective are the lobby's "snipers". They pick off anyone the shock troops have failed to frighten off and whose voice might be heard in places where it matters: particularly in the American media and on US campuses. Tony Judt has recently felt their ire, as have Professors Walt and Mearsheimer.
A separate lobby system, particularly Aipac, is dedicated to intimidating elected American representatives. This obsession with preserving Israel's image in the US is not surprising: the country's fate as an occupying, military power in the Middle East will, after all, be decided in Washington. In the main, the professional Israel lobby cares little about what is said in the European media, although as British newspaper websites like the Guardian start to penetrate the other side of the Atlantic that is changing. There may yet come a day when we will miss the abusive giyus crowd.
The professional Israel lobby have respectable names like Camera (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Reporting in America), Honest Reporting and the Anti-Defamation League.
Camera has a section dedicated to "naming and shaming" some of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East. You'll find a page dedicated to the Guardian's former Jerusalem correspondent, Chris McGreal, after he made the ultimate faux pas of comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, a country he knows intimately. There are many who share the honour: the Independent's Donald MacIntyre, Tim McGirk of Time magazine, Molly Moore of the Washington Post, Jim Muir and Kylie Morris of the BBC, Greg Myre and Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times. And that's just a fraction of those whose surname begins with M.
=======================================
Israel ups the stakes in the propaganda war
Stewart Purvis, November 20, 2006
Amir Gissin talked last week of plans to get Israeli video onto sites like YouTube which he said were viewed by opinion "shapers". And his cousin Dr Ra'anan Gissin, formerly Ariel Sharon's media adviser, has endorsed the idea of having picture power at the country's disposal ready for future conflicts. Referring to Israel's opponents, he put it in his usual direct way: "You need to shoot a picture before you shoot them."
SourceWatch: Hasbara refers to the propaganda efforts to sell Israel, justify its actions, and defend it in world opinion. The premise of hasbara is that Israel's problems are a matter of better propaganda, and not one of an underlying unjust situation.
The goal of hasbara is to disseminate good news about Israel, largely independent of whether the news is true or not.
It is an honour of a kind, I suppose, to briefly have the most active thread on the Comment is free site. But not much of one when 95% of the posts rarely rose above the level of vitriolic name-calling. The posters probably know that by now I am immune to playground taunts of "scum" and "Nazi", but the abuse, I suspect, is meant more as a warning to others who might criticise Israel. Keep quite - or else.
Volcanic outbursts of hatred on Cif greet anyone who objects to Israel's policies: in my case, I sinned by pointing out that its leaders have turned the small community of Jews in Tehran into pawns in a struggle to persuade the world that Iran is a genocidal threat to world Jewry. My point was that Israel's concern is entirely hollow. It simply wants to mobilise support for an attack on Iran, either by itself or the US.
Some posters to this site seem to be aware of the organised nature of these critic-bashing campaigns. They note that sites like giyus.org rally the faithful to the cause. But most posters are probably not aware that giyus and its ilk are only the tip of a much larger effort called "hasbara" by Israel and its supporters. Usually the word is translated as "advocacy for Israel". I call it by its proper name: propaganda.
The main goal of hasbara is constantly to disseminate good news about Israel, largely independent of whether the news is true or not, in the hope that over time a benevolent image of Israel will be reinforced. Here's an example: in 2000 it was reported that an Israeli court ruling had ended the country's system of land apartheid, a legally enforced territorial separation that keeps Jewish and Arab citizens apart in most of country. To this day apologists cite this ruling as proof of equality in Israel, even though the decision only applied to one Arab family, has yet to be enforced, and the Israeli parliament is currently passing legislation to make sure it never is.
But the charm offensive is only the upside of their work. The downside is, as Cif posters know well, a relentless campaign to target, discredit and silence critics of Israel. It can take many forms, not only name-calling. I was intrigued to see several posters thought I had no right to criticise Israel because my wife is an Israeli citizen, though - and this is presumably her and my offence - she also happens to be a Palestinian. They would have a field day - but fail to see their own double standards - were I to suggest that only non-Jews be allowed to apologise for Israel.
A few posters made what appeared to be a substantive point: why had I failed to note that, while today 25,000 Jews live in Tehran, another 80,000 have fled? But look closer and the case crumbles. The overwhelming majority of those 80,000 Jews left in the wake of the country's Islamic revolution in 1979 - that is, nearly 30 years ago. They are irrelevant to Israel's current claims that the Iranian leadership is preparing to commit a genocide against the Jews. In any case, most of those fleeing Jews left because they were middle class and secular and saw no future in an Islamic state, despite reassurances from Ayatollah Khomeini that they would left in peace. In other words, they left - like many other Iranians - for economic reasons, not political or religious ones.
Other posters simply lied, in the great tradition of hasbara. Several suggested I had written that Rafik Hariri was killed by Israel. I hadn't, and you can check my website to be sure. I had also apparently written that the two Israeli soldiers killed in a Hizbullah operation last year were caught on Lebanese soil. Again a search failed to find the story. No matter. Truth is not what hasbara is about.
And if all this fails to discredit a critic of Israel, simply label him an anti-semite, and the argument can be closed. Game, set and match.
I am not sure if any other country or cause encourages this kind of mainly voluntary propaganda work, but I am sure that no other country or cause has the human resources that Israel can rely on to carry it out. There are thousands of people sitting at their computers ready to pounce. (I know because I have received abusive emails from them, unless it's just a handful with thousands of different email addresses.) They do not need orders or much guidance. They do it because they love Israel and see it as part of their life's work to protect Israel's image.
Doubtless, they believe what they write too. If you have been raised to live in constant fear of anti-semitism, and to see an anti-semitic impulse lurking in the recessses of every non-Jewish mind (an observation that is often publicly made in the Israeli and American media but less often here), then what other motive could someone like me have but anti-semitism for writing what I do? The logic is satisfyingly circular.
But Cif posters may be less aware of how the rest of the Israel lobby works. Giyus is, in fact, the most amateurish part of its operation. These are the "shock troops" on the front line. They overwhelm by force of numbers only. Far more effective are the lobby's "snipers". They pick off anyone the shock troops have failed to frighten off and whose voice might be heard in places where it matters: particularly in the American media and on US campuses. Tony Judt has recently felt their ire, as have Professors Walt and Mearsheimer.
A separate lobby system, particularly Aipac, is dedicated to intimidating elected American representatives. This obsession with preserving Israel's image in the US is not surprising: the country's fate as an occupying, military power in the Middle East will, after all, be decided in Washington. In the main, the professional Israel lobby cares little about what is said in the European media, although as British newspaper websites like the Guardian start to penetrate the other side of the Atlantic that is changing. There may yet come a day when we will miss the abusive giyus crowd.
The professional Israel lobby have respectable names like Camera (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Reporting in America), Honest Reporting and the Anti-Defamation League.
Camera has a section dedicated to "naming and shaming" some of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East. You'll find a page dedicated to the Guardian's former Jerusalem correspondent, Chris McGreal, after he made the ultimate faux pas of comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, a country he knows intimately. There are many who share the honour: the Independent's Donald MacIntyre, Tim McGirk of Time magazine, Molly Moore of the Washington Post, Jim Muir and Kylie Morris of the BBC, Greg Myre and Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times. And that's just a fraction of those whose surname begins with M.
=======================================
Israel ups the stakes in the propaganda war
Stewart Purvis, November 20, 2006
Amir Gissin talked last week of plans to get Israeli video onto sites like YouTube which he said were viewed by opinion "shapers". And his cousin Dr Ra'anan Gissin, formerly Ariel Sharon's media adviser, has endorsed the idea of having picture power at the country's disposal ready for future conflicts. Referring to Israel's opponents, he put it in his usual direct way: "You need to shoot a picture before you shoot them."
SourceWatch: Hasbara refers to the propaganda efforts to sell Israel, justify its actions, and defend it in world opinion. The premise of hasbara is that Israel's problems are a matter of better propaganda, and not one of an underlying unjust situation.
Nearly All the War Crimes Were Israel's
The Second Lebanon War, A Year Later
Jonathan Cook - August 16, 2007
Last weekend, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far as to admit that this was "a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group". Israel's supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon, must have been squirming in their seats.
There are several reasons why Ha'aretz may have reached this new assessment.
Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN.
Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position.
The UN's admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.
Jonathan Cook - August 16, 2007
Last weekend, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far as to admit that this was "a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group". Israel's supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon, must have been squirming in their seats.
There are several reasons why Ha'aretz may have reached this new assessment.
Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN.
Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position.
The UN's admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.
Saturday, 11 August 2007
Israel's Jewish problem in Tehran
Jonathan Cook - The Electronic Intifada - 6 August 2007
Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler. Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential. And if the latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks like they may again be winning the battle for hearts and minds: US Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be diverting the White House back on track to launch a military strike.
Earlier this year Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's opposition leader and the man who appears to be styling himself scaremonger-in-chief, told us: "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs." Of Ahmadinejad, he said: "He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."
A few weeks ago, as Israel's military intelligence claimed -- as it has been doing regularly since the early 1990s -- that Iran is only a year or so away from the "point of no return" on developing a nuclear warhead, Netanyahu was at it again. "Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power," he warned, adding: "This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem ... The future of the Jewish people depends on the future of Israel."
But Netanyahu has been far from alone in making extravagant claims about a looming genocide from Iran. Israel's new president, Shimon Peres, has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp." And the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a German newspaper last year: "[Ahmadinejad] speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation."
There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany" line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?
What is the basis for Israel's dire forecasts -- the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as US President George W. Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is "threatening to wipe Israel off the map."
This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translating error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that "the Zionist regime in Jerusalem" would "vanish from the page of time."
He was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel. He was comparing Israel's occupation of the Palestinians with other illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, including the Shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet empire.
Nonetheless, this erroneous translation has survived and prospered because Israel and its supporters have exploited it for their own crude propaganda purposes.
In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years. As one of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews there suffer discrimination, but they are certainly no worse off than the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel -- and far better off than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Iranian Jews have little influence on decision-making and are not allowed to hold senior posts in the army or bureaucracy. But they enjoy many freedoms. They have an elected representative in parliament, they practice their religion openly in synagogues, their charities are funded by the Jewish diaspora, and they can travel freely, including to Israel. In Tehran there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. Ahmadinejad's office recently made a donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.
As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: "If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not." Iran's leaders denounce Zionism, which they blame for fueling discrimination against the Palestinians, but they have also repeatedly avowed that they have no problem with Jews, Judaism or even the state of Israel.
Ahmadinejad, caricatured as a merchant of genocide, has in fact called for "regime change" -- and then only in the sense that he believes a referendum should be held of all inhabitants of Israel and the occupied territories, including refugees from war, on the nature of the government.
Despite the absence of any threat to Iran's Jews, the Israeli media recently reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel. The Ma'ariv newspaper pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, "a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave." According to the New York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated for economic reasons, not political ones.
To step up these efforts -- and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence of claiming an imminent second Holocaust while thousands of Jews live happily in Tehran -- Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and cheap mortgages.
The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued a statement that their national identity was not for sale. "The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."
However, this financial gesture may not only be unwelcome but self-fulfilling too, if past experience is the yardstick. Israel introduced a similar scheme a few years ago, when Argentina's economy plunged into deep recession, broadcasting an offer of $20,000 to every Jew who settled in Israel. Months later the Israeli media reported a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Argentina, only adding to the pressure on Jews there to leave. Of course, there was no mention of a possible causal connection between the attacks and Israel's generous offer to Jews to abandon their homeland as other Argentinians sank into poverty.
But if financial enticements -- and a possible popular backlash -- fail to move Iranian Jews, there is good reason to fear that Israel may resort to other, more dubious ways of encouraging them to emigrate. That is certainly a path Israel has chosen before with other communities of Arab Jews, whom it has regarded either as a pool of potential spies and agents provocateurs to be used when needed or as "human dust," in the words of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to be recruited to Israel's "demographic battle" against the Palestinians.
In "Operation Susannah" of 1954, for example, Israel recklessly recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to stage a series of explosions in Egypt in a bid to discourage Britain from withdrawing from the Suez Canal zone. When the plot came to light, it naturally cast a shadow of disloyalty over Egypt's wider Jewish community. Following Israel's invasion and occupation of Sinai two years later, the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled some 25,000 Egyptian Jews and, after others were imprisoned on suspicion of spying, the rest soon left.
Even more notoriously, Israel went to greater lengths to ensure the exit of the Arab world's largest Jewish population, in Iraq. In 1950 a series of bombs targeted on Jews in Baghdad forced a rapid exodus of some 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel, convinced that Arab extremists were behind the attacks. Only later did it emerge that the bombs had been planted by members of the Zionist underground, supported by the Israeli government.
Now, Iran's Jews may find themselves treated in much the same manner -- as simple human fodder. Stories are growing of Israel exploiting the free movement between Iran and Israel enjoyed by Iranian Jews and their Israeli relatives to carry out spying operations on Iran's nuclear program. Such reports have come from reliable sources such as the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing US government officials.
The fallout from such actions is not difficult to predict. Besieged by the US and the international community, Tehran is cracking down on dissent and minority groups, fearful that its own grip on power is shaky and that the well-publicized subversion being carried out by US and Israeli agents is likely only to be stepped up. So far most officials in Tehran have been careful to avoid suggesting that Iran's Jews have double loyalties, as has the local Jewish community itself, both of them aware of Israel's interests in provoking such a confrontation. But as the strains increase, and Israel's need to prove Tehran's genocidal intent grows ever stronger, that policy may end up being forfeited -- and with it the future of Iran's Jews.
More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems, is the value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel's battle to persuade the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is impossible. For those who want to engineer a clash of civilizations, the 3,000-year-old Jewish legacy in Iran is not something to be treasured, only another obstacle to war.
Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler. Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential. And if the latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks like they may again be winning the battle for hearts and minds: US Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be diverting the White House back on track to launch a military strike.
Earlier this year Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's opposition leader and the man who appears to be styling himself scaremonger-in-chief, told us: "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs." Of Ahmadinejad, he said: "He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state."
A few weeks ago, as Israel's military intelligence claimed -- as it has been doing regularly since the early 1990s -- that Iran is only a year or so away from the "point of no return" on developing a nuclear warhead, Netanyahu was at it again. "Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power," he warned, adding: "This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem ... The future of the Jewish people depends on the future of Israel."
But Netanyahu has been far from alone in making extravagant claims about a looming genocide from Iran. Israel's new president, Shimon Peres, has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration camp." And the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a German newspaper last year: "[Ahmadinejad] speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation."
There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany" line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?
What is the basis for Israel's dire forecasts -- the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as US President George W. Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is "threatening to wipe Israel off the map."
This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translating error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that "the Zionist regime in Jerusalem" would "vanish from the page of time."
He was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel. He was comparing Israel's occupation of the Palestinians with other illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, including the Shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet empire.
Nonetheless, this erroneous translation has survived and prospered because Israel and its supporters have exploited it for their own crude propaganda purposes.
In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years. As one of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews there suffer discrimination, but they are certainly no worse off than the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel -- and far better off than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Iranian Jews have little influence on decision-making and are not allowed to hold senior posts in the army or bureaucracy. But they enjoy many freedoms. They have an elected representative in parliament, they practice their religion openly in synagogues, their charities are funded by the Jewish diaspora, and they can travel freely, including to Israel. In Tehran there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. Ahmadinejad's office recently made a donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.
As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: "If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not." Iran's leaders denounce Zionism, which they blame for fueling discrimination against the Palestinians, but they have also repeatedly avowed that they have no problem with Jews, Judaism or even the state of Israel.
Ahmadinejad, caricatured as a merchant of genocide, has in fact called for "regime change" -- and then only in the sense that he believes a referendum should be held of all inhabitants of Israel and the occupied territories, including refugees from war, on the nature of the government.
Despite the absence of any threat to Iran's Jews, the Israeli media recently reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel. The Ma'ariv newspaper pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, "a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave." According to the New York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated for economic reasons, not political ones.
To step up these efforts -- and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence of claiming an imminent second Holocaust while thousands of Jews live happily in Tehran -- Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and cheap mortgages.
The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued a statement that their national identity was not for sale. "The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."
However, this financial gesture may not only be unwelcome but self-fulfilling too, if past experience is the yardstick. Israel introduced a similar scheme a few years ago, when Argentina's economy plunged into deep recession, broadcasting an offer of $20,000 to every Jew who settled in Israel. Months later the Israeli media reported a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Argentina, only adding to the pressure on Jews there to leave. Of course, there was no mention of a possible causal connection between the attacks and Israel's generous offer to Jews to abandon their homeland as other Argentinians sank into poverty.
But if financial enticements -- and a possible popular backlash -- fail to move Iranian Jews, there is good reason to fear that Israel may resort to other, more dubious ways of encouraging them to emigrate. That is certainly a path Israel has chosen before with other communities of Arab Jews, whom it has regarded either as a pool of potential spies and agents provocateurs to be used when needed or as "human dust," in the words of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to be recruited to Israel's "demographic battle" against the Palestinians.
In "Operation Susannah" of 1954, for example, Israel recklessly recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to stage a series of explosions in Egypt in a bid to discourage Britain from withdrawing from the Suez Canal zone. When the plot came to light, it naturally cast a shadow of disloyalty over Egypt's wider Jewish community. Following Israel's invasion and occupation of Sinai two years later, the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled some 25,000 Egyptian Jews and, after others were imprisoned on suspicion of spying, the rest soon left.
Even more notoriously, Israel went to greater lengths to ensure the exit of the Arab world's largest Jewish population, in Iraq. In 1950 a series of bombs targeted on Jews in Baghdad forced a rapid exodus of some 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel, convinced that Arab extremists were behind the attacks. Only later did it emerge that the bombs had been planted by members of the Zionist underground, supported by the Israeli government.
Now, Iran's Jews may find themselves treated in much the same manner -- as simple human fodder. Stories are growing of Israel exploiting the free movement between Iran and Israel enjoyed by Iranian Jews and their Israeli relatives to carry out spying operations on Iran's nuclear program. Such reports have come from reliable sources such as the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing US government officials.
The fallout from such actions is not difficult to predict. Besieged by the US and the international community, Tehran is cracking down on dissent and minority groups, fearful that its own grip on power is shaky and that the well-publicized subversion being carried out by US and Israeli agents is likely only to be stepped up. So far most officials in Tehran have been careful to avoid suggesting that Iran's Jews have double loyalties, as has the local Jewish community itself, both of them aware of Israel's interests in provoking such a confrontation. But as the strains increase, and Israel's need to prove Tehran's genocidal intent grows ever stronger, that policy may end up being forfeited -- and with it the future of Iran's Jews.
More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems, is the value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel's battle to persuade the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is impossible. For those who want to engineer a clash of civilizations, the 3,000-year-old Jewish legacy in Iran is not something to be treasured, only another obstacle to war.
Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Sunday, 29 July 2007
Anthology of bigotry
Jonathan Cook : Al-Ahram Weekly : 26 July - 1 August 2007
The Israeli state is trying desperately to foreclose all exceptions to its unequivocally racist land laws, writes Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
Israel's parliament last week approved by an overwhelming majority the first reading of a bill to ensure that much of the country's inhabited land remains accessible to Jewish citizens only -- a move described by one leading local newspaper as turning Israel into a "racist Jewish state".
The private member's bill, called the Jewish National Fund Law, has received cross-party support. The first reading was approved by 64 legislators, with 16 -- most of them Arab MKs -- opposed. Supporters ranged from former premier Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, to Ami Ayalon, a recent challenger to head the Labour Party.
The legislation is designed to nullify the threat posed by a Supreme Court judgment, reached in 2000, that potentially opens the door to thousands of Arab families leaving the tightly controlled areas assigned to them and choosing where they live. Currently Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population, are barred from buying homes in most of the country.
The move is the latest in a series of battles since Israel's establishment in 1948 to ensure exclusive Jewish control of land through an international Zionist organisation known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). By the time of Israel's founding, the JNF had bought about six per cent of historic Palestine for Jewish settlement. Rather than demanding that these territories be handed over by the JNF, the new state authorities assigned the organisation a special, quasi-governmental status. The JNF was also given a significant share of the lands and property confiscated from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled during the 1948 War.
Today, the state has nationalised 80 per cent of land inside Israel, and the JNF holds another 13 per cent. Neither sells land to private owners on the grounds that it is being held in trust for worldwide Jewry. Instead, they offer long-term leases on the land in their possession.
The JNF has far more power than the division of land suggests, however: its 13 per cent share is reported to include some 70 per cent of the country's inhabited land; it effectively controls a government body known as the Israel Lands Authority that manages the 93 per cent of land owned by the state and the JNF; and it dominates committees set up to vet applicants to hundreds of rural communities.
Because the JNF charter forbids it from selling or leasing land to non-Jews, this arrangement has allowed the JNF to discriminate against Arab citizens on behalf of the government. The JNF's control of the Israel Lands Authority and the vetting committees has ensured that Arab citizens are excluded from most of the 93 per cent of nationalised land.
Instead they have been restricted to the three per cent of Israel on which Arab communities already exist or which is privately owned by Arab citizens, though even much of this land falls under the jurisdiction of Jewish regional councils that refuse to allow Arab families to build on it. Dozens of other Arab communities are classified as illegal because the state refuses to recognise them, even though they predate Israel's establishment.
The JNF's stranglehold on the management of Israeli land was finally challenged in 2000 when the Supreme Court compelled the vetting committee of a rural community, Katzir, to consider the application of an Arab family, the Kaadans, for a plot of land advertised for sale. Katzir's committee, which until the ruling had been refusing even to deal with the Kaadans' application, subsequently rejected the family on the grounds that they were not "socially suitable". Seven years later the court has yet to offer the Kaadans proper redress.
However, the Kaadans ruling opened the way for other Arab families to demand the right to bid for homes in communities designed only for Jews. The JNF has twice tried to market homes in a new neighbourhood of Karmiel, a town in the Galilee, but has been forced to cancel the tender on each occasion when families from a nearby Arab community, Sakhnin, applied. A petition to the Supreme Court submitted in 2004 on behalf of the Arab families has yet to be heard.
In the meantime, the JNF is reported to be considering withdrawing from the long-standing arrangement that places the Israel Lands Authority in charge of managing all public land, including JNF land. As the court ruling applies only to land managed by the Israel Lands Authority, the JNF would be still entitled to discriminate if it marketed its own housing schemes without the help of the Israel Lands Authority.
The government has been desperately seeking a way both to maintain its relationship with the JNF and not to provoke a second court ruling against it. Earlier this year it announced that land was to be offered to Jews and Arabs without discrimination. In compensation, the JNF would be given state land of equal value every time it was forced to lease land to an Arab family.
The scheme has been criticised by human rights groups which fear it will perpetuate and ultimately exacerbate discrimination by increasing the amount of land under JNF ownership: the JNF will still own the land it is leasing to Arab families but it will also be sold additional land from the state.
The new bill seeks to prevent even the government's proposed minor concession by nullifying the Supreme Court ruling. The legislation states: "The leasing of JNF lands for the purpose of settling Jews will not be seen as unacceptable discrimination." Before the legislators voted, the Knesset's legal adviser, Nurit Elstein, cleared the bill of accusations that it was racist.
Arab Knesset member Wassel Taha, of the National Democratic Assembly, said: "Only an insane Knesset would pass a racist law that affirms the great land theft of 1948 and turns it into Jews-only property."
The Israeli state is trying desperately to foreclose all exceptions to its unequivocally racist land laws, writes Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
Israel's parliament last week approved by an overwhelming majority the first reading of a bill to ensure that much of the country's inhabited land remains accessible to Jewish citizens only -- a move described by one leading local newspaper as turning Israel into a "racist Jewish state".
The private member's bill, called the Jewish National Fund Law, has received cross-party support. The first reading was approved by 64 legislators, with 16 -- most of them Arab MKs -- opposed. Supporters ranged from former premier Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, to Ami Ayalon, a recent challenger to head the Labour Party.
The legislation is designed to nullify the threat posed by a Supreme Court judgment, reached in 2000, that potentially opens the door to thousands of Arab families leaving the tightly controlled areas assigned to them and choosing where they live. Currently Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population, are barred from buying homes in most of the country.
The move is the latest in a series of battles since Israel's establishment in 1948 to ensure exclusive Jewish control of land through an international Zionist organisation known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). By the time of Israel's founding, the JNF had bought about six per cent of historic Palestine for Jewish settlement. Rather than demanding that these territories be handed over by the JNF, the new state authorities assigned the organisation a special, quasi-governmental status. The JNF was also given a significant share of the lands and property confiscated from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled during the 1948 War.
Today, the state has nationalised 80 per cent of land inside Israel, and the JNF holds another 13 per cent. Neither sells land to private owners on the grounds that it is being held in trust for worldwide Jewry. Instead, they offer long-term leases on the land in their possession.
The JNF has far more power than the division of land suggests, however: its 13 per cent share is reported to include some 70 per cent of the country's inhabited land; it effectively controls a government body known as the Israel Lands Authority that manages the 93 per cent of land owned by the state and the JNF; and it dominates committees set up to vet applicants to hundreds of rural communities.
Because the JNF charter forbids it from selling or leasing land to non-Jews, this arrangement has allowed the JNF to discriminate against Arab citizens on behalf of the government. The JNF's control of the Israel Lands Authority and the vetting committees has ensured that Arab citizens are excluded from most of the 93 per cent of nationalised land.
Instead they have been restricted to the three per cent of Israel on which Arab communities already exist or which is privately owned by Arab citizens, though even much of this land falls under the jurisdiction of Jewish regional councils that refuse to allow Arab families to build on it. Dozens of other Arab communities are classified as illegal because the state refuses to recognise them, even though they predate Israel's establishment.
The JNF's stranglehold on the management of Israeli land was finally challenged in 2000 when the Supreme Court compelled the vetting committee of a rural community, Katzir, to consider the application of an Arab family, the Kaadans, for a plot of land advertised for sale. Katzir's committee, which until the ruling had been refusing even to deal with the Kaadans' application, subsequently rejected the family on the grounds that they were not "socially suitable". Seven years later the court has yet to offer the Kaadans proper redress.
However, the Kaadans ruling opened the way for other Arab families to demand the right to bid for homes in communities designed only for Jews. The JNF has twice tried to market homes in a new neighbourhood of Karmiel, a town in the Galilee, but has been forced to cancel the tender on each occasion when families from a nearby Arab community, Sakhnin, applied. A petition to the Supreme Court submitted in 2004 on behalf of the Arab families has yet to be heard.
In the meantime, the JNF is reported to be considering withdrawing from the long-standing arrangement that places the Israel Lands Authority in charge of managing all public land, including JNF land. As the court ruling applies only to land managed by the Israel Lands Authority, the JNF would be still entitled to discriminate if it marketed its own housing schemes without the help of the Israel Lands Authority.
The government has been desperately seeking a way both to maintain its relationship with the JNF and not to provoke a second court ruling against it. Earlier this year it announced that land was to be offered to Jews and Arabs without discrimination. In compensation, the JNF would be given state land of equal value every time it was forced to lease land to an Arab family.
The scheme has been criticised by human rights groups which fear it will perpetuate and ultimately exacerbate discrimination by increasing the amount of land under JNF ownership: the JNF will still own the land it is leasing to Arab families but it will also be sold additional land from the state.
The new bill seeks to prevent even the government's proposed minor concession by nullifying the Supreme Court ruling. The legislation states: "The leasing of JNF lands for the purpose of settling Jews will not be seen as unacceptable discrimination." Before the legislators voted, the Knesset's legal adviser, Nurit Elstein, cleared the bill of accusations that it was racist.
Arab Knesset member Wassel Taha, of the National Democratic Assembly, said: "Only an insane Knesset would pass a racist law that affirms the great land theft of 1948 and turns it into Jews-only property."
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
Statement: One country, one state
Press Release, Course Participants, 9 July 2007
For decades, efforts to create a just peace for Palestinians and Israeli Jews have failed. The current crisis has further set back hopes for a political solution to the conflict.
In this context, a group of scholars, journalists and activists met in Madrid, at the invitation of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, for five days of intensive discussion on alternatives to this ongoing impasse, framed by their belief that a democratic state in all of historic Palestine provides the only moral and practical basis for a just, sustainable peace.
Presentations were informed by the understanding that the attempt to partition historic Palestine, regarded by the major powers as a solution to the conflict, has failed to bring about justice and peace or to offer a genuine process leading towards them. It was argued that the two-state approach encourages separation where equality and coexistence are imperative.
Participants presented the two-state approach as failing to take into account physical and political realities on the ground and presuming false parity in power and moral claims between the two peoples.
Discussions ranged through many other issues including the forms of domination Israel exercises over the Palestinians and the racist practices this entails, such as ethnic cleansing, forms of apartheid, a legal system in Israel built on ethnic discrimination, and the denial of the Palestinian right of return, as well as how to define the rights of Israeli Jews. The discussions considered ways of reframing the question in terms of a struggle for equality and justice, equal citizenship for all the people in the land, and decolonization. Participants debated interpretations of international law, the nature of the conflict, Zionism, the role of religion, and re-imagining national identities.
Many issues for further discussion, action and research emerged, including forms of internal and international solidarity with Palestinians (such as boycott, divestment and sanctions), the lessons from other similarly structured conflicts including South Africa and Northern Ireland, rethinking the relationship between state and citizen, and how to organize a post-conflict society so that it provides a secure and dignified life to Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
The participants shared a committment to engaging deeply with these issues, in the context of their commitment to a democratic solution that will offer an enduring and just peace in a single state, and invite the widest possible participation in this quest.
The participants in the conference were:
Ali Abunimah
Omar Barghouti
Oren Ben-Dor
George Bisharat
Haim Bresheeth
Pedro Chavez Giraldo
Jonathan Cook
Leila Farsakh
Steven Friedman
Islah Jad
Joseph Massad
Ilan Pappe
Carlos Prieto Del Campo
Nadim Rouhana
Michael Tarazi
Virginia Tilley
This press release was issued on 6 July 2007 by the speakers in the course "Palestine-Israel: Un Pais, Un Estado," which took place from 2-6 July 2007 as part of the Summer Program of Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Agenda in English
For decades, efforts to create a just peace for Palestinians and Israeli Jews have failed. The current crisis has further set back hopes for a political solution to the conflict.
In this context, a group of scholars, journalists and activists met in Madrid, at the invitation of Universidad Complutense de Madrid, for five days of intensive discussion on alternatives to this ongoing impasse, framed by their belief that a democratic state in all of historic Palestine provides the only moral and practical basis for a just, sustainable peace.
Presentations were informed by the understanding that the attempt to partition historic Palestine, regarded by the major powers as a solution to the conflict, has failed to bring about justice and peace or to offer a genuine process leading towards them. It was argued that the two-state approach encourages separation where equality and coexistence are imperative.
Participants presented the two-state approach as failing to take into account physical and political realities on the ground and presuming false parity in power and moral claims between the two peoples.
Discussions ranged through many other issues including the forms of domination Israel exercises over the Palestinians and the racist practices this entails, such as ethnic cleansing, forms of apartheid, a legal system in Israel built on ethnic discrimination, and the denial of the Palestinian right of return, as well as how to define the rights of Israeli Jews. The discussions considered ways of reframing the question in terms of a struggle for equality and justice, equal citizenship for all the people in the land, and decolonization. Participants debated interpretations of international law, the nature of the conflict, Zionism, the role of religion, and re-imagining national identities.
Many issues for further discussion, action and research emerged, including forms of internal and international solidarity with Palestinians (such as boycott, divestment and sanctions), the lessons from other similarly structured conflicts including South Africa and Northern Ireland, rethinking the relationship between state and citizen, and how to organize a post-conflict society so that it provides a secure and dignified life to Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
The participants shared a committment to engaging deeply with these issues, in the context of their commitment to a democratic solution that will offer an enduring and just peace in a single state, and invite the widest possible participation in this quest.
The participants in the conference were:
Ali Abunimah
Omar Barghouti
Oren Ben-Dor
George Bisharat
Haim Bresheeth
Pedro Chavez Giraldo
Jonathan Cook
Leila Farsakh
Steven Friedman
Islah Jad
Joseph Massad
Ilan Pappe
Carlos Prieto Del Campo
Nadim Rouhana
Michael Tarazi
Virginia Tilley
This press release was issued on 6 July 2007 by the speakers in the course "Palestine-Israel: Un Pais, Un Estado," which took place from 2-6 July 2007 as part of the Summer Program of Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Agenda in English
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Divide and Rule, Israeli-Style
Can the Arab world be turned into Gaza's jailers?
Jonathan Cook - June 27, 2007
The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas' recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. "Starving, drying up, and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary… Reality has refuted the chorus of experts and commentators who preached [on] behalf of the boycott policy. This daft notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying pressure on a helpless population suffered a complete failure."
But has Levy got it wrong? The faces of Israeli and American politicians, including Ehud Olmert and George Bush, appear soot-free. On the contrary. Over the past fortnight they have been looking and sounding even more smug than usual.
The problem with Levy's analysis is that it assumes that Israel and the U.S. wanted sanctions to bring about the fall of Hamas, either by giving Fatah the upper hand so that it could deal a knockout blow to the Palestinian government, or by inciting ordinary Palestinians to rise up and demand that their earlier electoral decision be reversed and Fatah reinstalled. In short, Levy, like most observers, assumes that the policy was designed to enforce regime change.
But what if that was not the point of the sanctions? And if so, what goals were Israel and the U.S. pursuing?
The parallels between Iraq and Gaza may be instructive. After all, Iraq is the West's only other recent experiment in imposing sanctions to starve a nation. And we all know where it led: to an even deeper entrenchment of Saddam Hussein's rule.
======================================
Let Gaza live
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz - Sunday, 24 June 2007
Here is a success story: Israel and the West imposed a boycott on the Palestinian Authority with the aim of weakening Hamas, and a year and a half later this brilliant policy has yielded its fruits: Hamas has become stronger. If there is a lesson from the fiasco in Gaza, here it is: Starving, drying up and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary.
Twilight Zone / 'Like chickens in a cage'
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz - Friday, 22 June 2007
Jonathan Cook - June 27, 2007
The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas' recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. "Starving, drying up, and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary… Reality has refuted the chorus of experts and commentators who preached [on] behalf of the boycott policy. This daft notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying pressure on a helpless population suffered a complete failure."
But has Levy got it wrong? The faces of Israeli and American politicians, including Ehud Olmert and George Bush, appear soot-free. On the contrary. Over the past fortnight they have been looking and sounding even more smug than usual.
The problem with Levy's analysis is that it assumes that Israel and the U.S. wanted sanctions to bring about the fall of Hamas, either by giving Fatah the upper hand so that it could deal a knockout blow to the Palestinian government, or by inciting ordinary Palestinians to rise up and demand that their earlier electoral decision be reversed and Fatah reinstalled. In short, Levy, like most observers, assumes that the policy was designed to enforce regime change.
But what if that was not the point of the sanctions? And if so, what goals were Israel and the U.S. pursuing?
The parallels between Iraq and Gaza may be instructive. After all, Iraq is the West's only other recent experiment in imposing sanctions to starve a nation. And we all know where it led: to an even deeper entrenchment of Saddam Hussein's rule.
======================================
Let Gaza live
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz - Sunday, 24 June 2007
Here is a success story: Israel and the West imposed a boycott on the Palestinian Authority with the aim of weakening Hamas, and a year and a half later this brilliant policy has yielded its fruits: Hamas has become stronger. If there is a lesson from the fiasco in Gaza, here it is: Starving, drying up and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary.
Twilight Zone / 'Like chickens in a cage'
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz - Friday, 22 June 2007
Wednesday, 13 June 2007
Defending Israel from Democracy
The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara
Jonathan Cook - June 5, 2007
The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support "transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.
But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first battle has been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at Haifa University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the power to determine the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew In another few years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."
The warning signs about how Israel might defend itself from this "threat" have been clear for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report published in 2002 by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of Israel's 10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two years, nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several occasions, and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched 25 investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.
All this abuse was reserved for the representatives of a community the Israeli general Moshe Dayan once referred to as "the quietest minority in the world".
But the state's violence towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian Knesset members -- until now largely the reflex actions of officials offended by the presence of legislators refusing to bow before the principles of Zionism and privileges for Jews -- is entering a new, more dangerous phase.
The problem for Israel is that for the past two decades Palestinian legislators have been entering the Knesset not as members of Zionist parties, as was the case for many decades, but as representatives of independent Palestinian parties. (A state claiming to be Jewish and democratic has to make some concessions to its own propaganda, after all.)
The result has been the emergence of an unexpected political platform: the demand for Israel's constitutional reform. Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens" -- or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy.
The figurehead for this political struggle has been the legislator Azmi Bishara. A former philosophy professor, Bishara has been running rings around Jewish politicians in the Knesset for more than a decade, as well as exposing to outsiders the sham of Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state.
Even more worryingly he has also been making an increasingly convincing case to his constituency of 1.2 million Palestinian citizens that, rather than challenging the hundreds of forms of discrimination they face one law at a time, they should confront the system that props up the discrimination: the Jewish state itself. He has started to persuade a growing number that they will never enjoy equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.
Bishara's campaign for a state of all its citizens has faced an uphill struggle. Palestinian citizens spent the first two decades after Israel's creation living under martial law, a time during which their identity, history and memories were all but crushed. Even today the minority has no control over its educational curriculum, which is set by officials charged with promoting Zionism, and its schools are effectively run by the secret police, the Shin Bet, through a network of collaborators among the teachers and pupils.
Given this climate, it may not be surprising that in a recent poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian citizens said they would support the drafting of a constitution defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (Israel currently has no constitution). Interestingly, however, what concerned commentators was the survey's small print: only a third of the respondents felt strongly about their position compared to more than half of those questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also, 72 per cent of Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality" should be prominently featured in such a constitution.
These shifts of opinion are at least partly a result of Bishara's political work. He has been trying to persuade Israel's Palestinian minority -- most of whom, whatever the spin tells us, have had little practical experience of participating in a democracy other than casting a vote -- that it is impossible for a Jewish state to enshrine equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing to a Bill of Rights, the Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, intentionally does not mention equality anywhere in its text.
It is in this light that the news about Bishara that broke in late April should be read. While he was abroad with his family, the Shin Bet announced that he would face charges of treason on his return. Under emergency regulations -- renewed by the Knesset yet again last week, and which have now been in operation for nearly 60 years -- he could be executed if found guilty. Bishara so far has chosen not to return.
Coverage of the Bishara case has concentrated on the two main charges against him, which are only vaguely known as the security services have been trying to prevent disclosure of their evidence with a gagging order. The first accusation -- for the consumption of Israel's Jewish population -- is that Bishara actively helped Hizbullah in its targeting of Israeli communities in the north during the war against Lebanon last summer.
The Shin Bet claim this after months of listening in on his phone conversations -- made possible by a change in the law in 2005 that allows the security services to bug legislators' phones. The other Palestinian MKs suspect they are being subjected to the same eavesdropping after the Attorney-General Mechahem Mazuz failed to respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on whether the Shin Bet was using this practice more widely.
Few informed observers, however, take this allegation seriously. An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz compared Bishara's case to that of the Israeli Jewish dissident Tali Fahima, who was jailed on trumped-up charges that she translated a military plan, a piece of paper dropped by the army in the Jenin refugee camp, on behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia Zbeidi, even though it was widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.
The editorial noted that it seemed likely the charge of treason against Bishara "will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly also of his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets that he could sell to the enemy, and like in the Fahima case, the fact that he identified with the enemy during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek and find an excuse for bringing him to trial."
Such doubts were reinforced by reports in the Israeli media that the charge of treason was based on claims that Bishara had helped Hizbullah conduct "psychological warfare through the media".
The other allegation made by the secret police has a different target audience. The Shin Bet claim that Bishara laundered money from terrorist organisations. The implication, though the specifics are unclear, is that Bishara both helped fund terror and that he squirrelled some of the money away, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is supposed to discredit him with his own constituency of Palestinian citizens.
It should be noted that none of this money has been found in extensive searches of Bishara's home and office, and the evidence is based on testimony from a far from reliable source: a family of money-changers in East Jerusalem.
This second charge closely resembles the allegations faced by the only other Palestinian of national prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian minority. He was arrested in 2003, originally on charges that he laundered money for the armed wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and bombs.
As with Bishara, the Shin Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone call for many months and had supposedly accumulated mountains of evidence against him. Salah spent more than two years in jail, the judges repeatedly accepting the Shin Bet's advice that his requests for bail be refused, as this secret evidence was studied in minute detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing stages, as it became clear that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the prosecution announced a plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but understandably after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial impropriety in return for his release.
To this day, Salah does not know what he did wrong. His organisation had funded social programmes for orphans, students and widows in the occupied territories and had submitted its accounts to the security services for approval. In a recent interview, Salah observed that in the new reality he and his party had discovered that it was "as if helping orphans, sick persons, widows and students had now become illegal activities in support of terrorism".
Why was Salah targeted? In the same interview, he noted that shortly before his arrest the prime minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had called for the outlawing of the Islamic Movement, whose popularity was greatly concerning the security establishment. Sharon was worried by what he regarded as Salah's interference in Israel's crushing of Palestinian nationalism.
Sharon's concern was two-fold: the Islamic Movement was raising funds for welfare organisations in the occupied territories at the very moment Israel was trying to isolate and starve the Palestinian population there; and Salah's main campaign, "al-Aqsa is in danger", was successfully rallying Palestinians inside Israel to visit the mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jersualem, the most important symbols of a future Palestinian state.
Salah believed that responsibility fell to Palestinians inside Israel to protect these holy places as Israel's closure policies and its checkpoints were preventing Muslims in the occupied territories from reaching them. Salah also suspected that Israel was using the exclusion of Palestinians under occupation from East Jerusalem to assert its own claims to sovereignty over the site, known to Jews as Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his inflammatory visit backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada; and it was control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud Barak, that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one of Barak's advisers later noted.
Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised. The trial removed him from the scene at a key moment when he might have been able to make a difference.
That now is the fate of Bishara.
Indications that the Shin Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign for Israel's reform to a state of all its citizens can be dated back to at least the start of the second intifada in 2000. That was when, as Israel prepared for a coming general election, the departing head of the Shin Bet observed: "Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state and he has crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from standing for election] has been submitted to the Attorney General." Who expressed that view? None other than Ami Ayalon, currently contesting the leadership of the Labor party and hoping to become the official head of Israel's peace camp.
In the meantime, Bishara has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the charges later fizzled out); he has been called in for police interrogations on a regular basis; he has been warned by a state commission of inquiry; and the laws concerning Knesset immunity and travel to foreign states have been changed specifically to prevent Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.
True to Ayalon's advice, Bishara and his political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), were disqualified by the Central Elections Committee during the 2003 elections. The committee cited the "expert" opinion of the Shin Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the NDA in the Knesset has increased the threat inherent in the party. Evidence of this can also be found in the ideological progress from the margins of Arab society (such as a limited circle of intellectuals who dealt with these ideas theoretically) to center stage. Today these ideas [concerning a state of all its citizens] have a discernible effect on the content of political discourse and on the public 'agenda' of the Arab sector."
But on this occasion the Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's disqualification was overturned on appeal by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court's justices.
The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara resurfaced with a vengeance in March this year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on a closed meeting between the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and senior Shin Bet officials "concerning the issue of the Arab minority in Israel, the extent of its steadily decreasing identification with the State and the rise of subversive elements".
Ma'ariv quoted the assessment of the Shin Bet: "Particularly disturbing is the growing phenomenon of 'visionary documents' among the various elites of Israeli Arabs. At this time, there are four different visionary documents sharing the perception of Israel as a state of all citizens and not as a Jewish state. The isolationist and subversive aims presented by the elites might determine a direction that will win over the masses."
In other words, the secret police were worried that the influence of Bishara's political platform was spreading. The proof was to be found in the four recent documents cited by the Shin Bet and published by very diffrerent groups: the Democratic Constitution by the Adalah legal centre; the Ten Points by the Mossawa political lobbying group; the Future Vision by the traditionally conservative political body comprising mostly mayors known as the High Follow-Up Committee; and the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of academics known as Mada.
What all these documents share in common is two assumptions: first, that existing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based on two states and that in such an arrangement the Palestinian minority will continue living inside Israel as citizens; and second, that reforms of Israel are needed if the state is to realise equality for all citizens, as promised in its Declaration of Independence.
Nothing too subversive there, one would have thought. But that was not the view of the Shin Bet.
Following the report in Ma'ariv, the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper wrote to the Shin Bet asking for more information. Did the Shin Bet's policy not constitute an undemocratic attempt to silence the Palestinian minority and its leaders, he asked. A reply from the Shin Bet was not long in coming. The secret police had a responsibility to guard Israel "against subversive threats", it was noted. "By virtue of this responsibility, the Shin Bet is required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of 'defensive democracy'.
Questioned by Israeli legal groups about this policy when it became public, the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter clarifying what he meant. Israel had to be protected from anyone "seeking to change the state's basic principles while abolishing its democratic character or its Jewish character". He was basing his opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges the Shin Bet with safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage, subversion".
In other words, in the view of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic state is democratic only if you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to use Israel's supposed democracy to challenge the privileges reserved for Jews inside a Jewish state, that same state is entitled to defend itself against you.
The extension in the future of this principle from Bishara to the other Palestinian MKs and then on to the wider Palestinian community inside Israel should not be doubted. In the wake of the Bishara case, Israel Hasson, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet and now a right-wing Knesset member, described Israel's struggle against its Palestinian citizens as "a second War of Independence" -- the war in 1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80 per cent of its Palestinians.
The Shin Bet is not, admittedly, a democratic institution, even if it is operating in a supposedly democratic environment. So how do the state's more accountable officials view the Shin Bet's position? Diskin's reply had a covering letter from Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz, the country's most senior legal officer. Mazuz wrote: "The letter of the Shin Bet director was written in coordination with the attorney general and with his agreement, and the stance detailed in it is acceptable to the attorney general."
So now we know. As Israel's Palestinian politicians have long been claiming, a Jewish and democratic state is intended as a democracy for Jews only. No one else is allowed a say -- or even an opinion.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is http://www.jkcook.net/
Jonathan Cook - June 5, 2007
The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support "transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete.
But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first battle has been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. One of Israel's gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon Sofer, a professor at Haifa University, has explained the problem posed by the presence of a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In their hands lies the power to determine the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew In another few years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."
The warning signs about how Israel might defend itself from this "threat" have been clear for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report published in 2002 by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth, the treatment of Israel's 10 Palestinian Knesset members was documented: over the previous two years, nine had been assaulted by the security services, some on several occasions, and seven hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched 25 investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.
All this abuse was reserved for the representatives of a community the Israeli general Moshe Dayan once referred to as "the quietest minority in the world".
But the state's violence towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian Knesset members -- until now largely the reflex actions of officials offended by the presence of legislators refusing to bow before the principles of Zionism and privileges for Jews -- is entering a new, more dangerous phase.
The problem for Israel is that for the past two decades Palestinian legislators have been entering the Knesset not as members of Zionist parties, as was the case for many decades, but as representatives of independent Palestinian parties. (A state claiming to be Jewish and democratic has to make some concessions to its own propaganda, after all.)
The result has been the emergence of an unexpected political platform: the demand for Israel's constitutional reform. Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens" -- or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy.
The figurehead for this political struggle has been the legislator Azmi Bishara. A former philosophy professor, Bishara has been running rings around Jewish politicians in the Knesset for more than a decade, as well as exposing to outsiders the sham of Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish and democratic" state.
Even more worryingly he has also been making an increasingly convincing case to his constituency of 1.2 million Palestinian citizens that, rather than challenging the hundreds of forms of discrimination they face one law at a time, they should confront the system that props up the discrimination: the Jewish state itself. He has started to persuade a growing number that they will never enjoy equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.
Bishara's campaign for a state of all its citizens has faced an uphill struggle. Palestinian citizens spent the first two decades after Israel's creation living under martial law, a time during which their identity, history and memories were all but crushed. Even today the minority has no control over its educational curriculum, which is set by officials charged with promoting Zionism, and its schools are effectively run by the secret police, the Shin Bet, through a network of collaborators among the teachers and pupils.
Given this climate, it may not be surprising that in a recent poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian citizens said they would support the drafting of a constitution defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (Israel currently has no constitution). Interestingly, however, what concerned commentators was the survey's small print: only a third of the respondents felt strongly about their position compared to more than half of those questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also, 72 per cent of Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality" should be prominently featured in such a constitution.
These shifts of opinion are at least partly a result of Bishara's political work. He has been trying to persuade Israel's Palestinian minority -- most of whom, whatever the spin tells us, have had little practical experience of participating in a democracy other than casting a vote -- that it is impossible for a Jewish state to enshrine equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing to a Bill of Rights, the Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, intentionally does not mention equality anywhere in its text.
It is in this light that the news about Bishara that broke in late April should be read. While he was abroad with his family, the Shin Bet announced that he would face charges of treason on his return. Under emergency regulations -- renewed by the Knesset yet again last week, and which have now been in operation for nearly 60 years -- he could be executed if found guilty. Bishara so far has chosen not to return.
Coverage of the Bishara case has concentrated on the two main charges against him, which are only vaguely known as the security services have been trying to prevent disclosure of their evidence with a gagging order. The first accusation -- for the consumption of Israel's Jewish population -- is that Bishara actively helped Hizbullah in its targeting of Israeli communities in the north during the war against Lebanon last summer.
The Shin Bet claim this after months of listening in on his phone conversations -- made possible by a change in the law in 2005 that allows the security services to bug legislators' phones. The other Palestinian MKs suspect they are being subjected to the same eavesdropping after the Attorney-General Mechahem Mazuz failed to respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on whether the Shin Bet was using this practice more widely.
Few informed observers, however, take this allegation seriously. An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz compared Bishara's case to that of the Israeli Jewish dissident Tali Fahima, who was jailed on trumped-up charges that she translated a military plan, a piece of paper dropped by the army in the Jenin refugee camp, on behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia Zbeidi, even though it was widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.
The editorial noted that it seemed likely the charge of treason against Bishara "will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his telephone conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian nationals, and possibly also of his expressions of support for their military activities. It seems very doubtful that MK Bishara even has access to defense-related secrets that he could sell to the enemy, and like in the Fahima case, the fact that he identified with the enemy during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek and find an excuse for bringing him to trial."
Such doubts were reinforced by reports in the Israeli media that the charge of treason was based on claims that Bishara had helped Hizbullah conduct "psychological warfare through the media".
The other allegation made by the secret police has a different target audience. The Shin Bet claim that Bishara laundered money from terrorist organisations. The implication, though the specifics are unclear, is that Bishara both helped fund terror and that he squirrelled some of the money away, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is supposed to discredit him with his own constituency of Palestinian citizens.
It should be noted that none of this money has been found in extensive searches of Bishara's home and office, and the evidence is based on testimony from a far from reliable source: a family of money-changers in East Jerusalem.
This second charge closely resembles the allegations faced by the only other Palestinian of national prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian minority. He was arrested in 2003, originally on charges that he laundered money for the armed wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and bombs.
As with Bishara, the Shin Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone call for many months and had supposedly accumulated mountains of evidence against him. Salah spent more than two years in jail, the judges repeatedly accepting the Shin Bet's advice that his requests for bail be refused, as this secret evidence was studied in minute detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing stages, as it became clear that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the prosecution announced a plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but understandably after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial impropriety in return for his release.
To this day, Salah does not know what he did wrong. His organisation had funded social programmes for orphans, students and widows in the occupied territories and had submitted its accounts to the security services for approval. In a recent interview, Salah observed that in the new reality he and his party had discovered that it was "as if helping orphans, sick persons, widows and students had now become illegal activities in support of terrorism".
Why was Salah targeted? In the same interview, he noted that shortly before his arrest the prime minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had called for the outlawing of the Islamic Movement, whose popularity was greatly concerning the security establishment. Sharon was worried by what he regarded as Salah's interference in Israel's crushing of Palestinian nationalism.
Sharon's concern was two-fold: the Islamic Movement was raising funds for welfare organisations in the occupied territories at the very moment Israel was trying to isolate and starve the Palestinian population there; and Salah's main campaign, "al-Aqsa is in danger", was successfully rallying Palestinians inside Israel to visit the mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jersualem, the most important symbols of a future Palestinian state.
Salah believed that responsibility fell to Palestinians inside Israel to protect these holy places as Israel's closure policies and its checkpoints were preventing Muslims in the occupied territories from reaching them. Salah also suspected that Israel was using the exclusion of Palestinians under occupation from East Jerusalem to assert its own claims to sovereignty over the site, known to Jews as Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his inflammatory visit backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada; and it was control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud Barak, that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one of Barak's advisers later noted.
Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be neutralised. The trial removed him from the scene at a key moment when he might have been able to make a difference.
That now is the fate of Bishara.
Indications that the Shin Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign for Israel's reform to a state of all its citizens can be dated back to at least the start of the second intifada in 2000. That was when, as Israel prepared for a coming general election, the departing head of the Shin Bet observed: "Bishara does not recognise the right of the Jewish people to a state and he has crossed the line. The decision to disqualify him [from standing for election] has been submitted to the Attorney General." Who expressed that view? None other than Ami Ayalon, currently contesting the leadership of the Labor party and hoping to become the official head of Israel's peace camp.
In the meantime, Bishara has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the charges later fizzled out); he has been called in for police interrogations on a regular basis; he has been warned by a state commission of inquiry; and the laws concerning Knesset immunity and travel to foreign states have been changed specifically to prevent Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.
True to Ayalon's advice, Bishara and his political party, the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), were disqualified by the Central Elections Committee during the 2003 elections. The committee cited the "expert" opinion of the Shin Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the NDA in the Knesset has increased the threat inherent in the party. Evidence of this can also be found in the ideological progress from the margins of Arab society (such as a limited circle of intellectuals who dealt with these ideas theoretically) to center stage. Today these ideas [concerning a state of all its citizens] have a discernible effect on the content of political discourse and on the public 'agenda' of the Arab sector."
But on this occasion the Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's disqualification was overturned on appeal by a narrow majority of the Supreme Court's justices.
The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara resurfaced with a vengeance in March this year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on a closed meeting between the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and senior Shin Bet officials "concerning the issue of the Arab minority in Israel, the extent of its steadily decreasing identification with the State and the rise of subversive elements".
Ma'ariv quoted the assessment of the Shin Bet: "Particularly disturbing is the growing phenomenon of 'visionary documents' among the various elites of Israeli Arabs. At this time, there are four different visionary documents sharing the perception of Israel as a state of all citizens and not as a Jewish state. The isolationist and subversive aims presented by the elites might determine a direction that will win over the masses."
In other words, the secret police were worried that the influence of Bishara's political platform was spreading. The proof was to be found in the four recent documents cited by the Shin Bet and published by very diffrerent groups: the Democratic Constitution by the Adalah legal centre; the Ten Points by the Mossawa political lobbying group; the Future Vision by the traditionally conservative political body comprising mostly mayors known as the High Follow-Up Committee; and the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of academics known as Mada.
What all these documents share in common is two assumptions: first, that existing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based on two states and that in such an arrangement the Palestinian minority will continue living inside Israel as citizens; and second, that reforms of Israel are needed if the state is to realise equality for all citizens, as promised in its Declaration of Independence.
Nothing too subversive there, one would have thought. But that was not the view of the Shin Bet.
Following the report in Ma'ariv, the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper wrote to the Shin Bet asking for more information. Did the Shin Bet's policy not constitute an undemocratic attempt to silence the Palestinian minority and its leaders, he asked. A reply from the Shin Bet was not long in coming. The secret police had a responsibility to guard Israel "against subversive threats", it was noted. "By virtue of this responsibility, the Shin Bet is required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of 'defensive democracy'.
Questioned by Israeli legal groups about this policy when it became public, the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter clarifying what he meant. Israel had to be protected from anyone "seeking to change the state's basic principles while abolishing its democratic character or its Jewish character". He was basing his opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges the Shin Bet with safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage, subversion".
In other words, in the view of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic state is democratic only if you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to use Israel's supposed democracy to challenge the privileges reserved for Jews inside a Jewish state, that same state is entitled to defend itself against you.
The extension in the future of this principle from Bishara to the other Palestinian MKs and then on to the wider Palestinian community inside Israel should not be doubted. In the wake of the Bishara case, Israel Hasson, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet and now a right-wing Knesset member, described Israel's struggle against its Palestinian citizens as "a second War of Independence" -- the war in 1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80 per cent of its Palestinians.
The Shin Bet is not, admittedly, a democratic institution, even if it is operating in a supposedly democratic environment. So how do the state's more accountable officials view the Shin Bet's position? Diskin's reply had a covering letter from Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz, the country's most senior legal officer. Mazuz wrote: "The letter of the Shin Bet director was written in coordination with the attorney general and with his agreement, and the stance detailed in it is acceptable to the attorney general."
So now we know. As Israel's Palestinian politicians have long been claiming, a Jewish and democratic state is intended as a democracy for Jews only. No one else is allowed a say -- or even an opinion.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is http://www.jkcook.net/
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