Zionism and imperialism – two heads of the same grotesque beast, which advances the cause of robber barons who defend their own interests under the holy shibboleth of capitalism.
“At 700 kilometres long, with 85 per cent of its route inside the West Bank, the Barrier cuts off communities from basic services, denies people access to their homes, and leaves thousands of people dependent on humanitarian handouts.”
Recounting a meeting she had with Palestinians who had been evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for Israeli settlements, Ms. Amos said they faced daily violence and threats from settlers, noting the attacks on Palestinians are rarely prosecuted.
Thousands of Palestinians had lost their right to live in East Jerusalem and those in the West Bank struggled to access specialized education and reach medical facilities that are only available in Jerusalem.
Fact-checking Netanyahu’s Speech DePaul vote on Sabra hummus a victory for human rights: SJP’s strategy is not predicated on the elimination of an Israeli state. Rather, it deals purely with human rights. The logic is simple; boycotting Sabra hummus and other similarly problematic products sends a strong signal to owners of the companies that make them, which is that any profiteering from human rights violations will not be tolerated.
Further to the existent and potential neoliberalism (formalisation of bantustan economy) in any incipient Palestinian state is the role that state of bantustans would play in the predatory US regional strategic plan as it counters the ‘arab spring’. Since Nutanyahoo doesn’t have the political capital or intention to offer a viable sovereign Palestinian state, the possibility for such is strictly hypothetical.
As more countries recognise a Palestinian state prior to another proposed declaration of same in September, Israeli politicians have moved to counter it with plans for annexation. However, if the OPT or parts thereof are annexed, Israel will have institutionalised apartheid systemically, highlighting the existing Palestinian bantustans and the two tiered racist zionist entity where non-jews are discriminated against by more than 20 laws. At that point, Israel will become unsustainable to the point of complete self-delegitimisation. The struggle will then be firmly focussed on equal rights for all, and the ethical nature of and necessity for BDS, boycotts, divestments and sanctions will be affirmed even more strongly.
Hamas has long signalled its desire to move away from armed struggle toward purely political means – this is the essence of its proposed hudna, or long-term truce, with Israel. It is of course possible to defend the legitimate and universal right to armed resistance against occupation, while choosing not to exercise it. “Where there is occupation and settlement, there is a right to resistance. Israel is the aggressor,” Meshaal told The New York Times on May 5, “But resistance is a means, not an end.”
Yet to choose different means, a movement has to have a viable political strategy and a clear definition of its ends. Hamas has failed to articulate, or to rally the Palestinian people around either. Instead its strategy appears to be simply to sign on to the inherently unjust, and infeasible “two-state solution” – and hope for admission to “the peace process”.
Some of the Middle East elephant’s mandarins are signalling a major land grab if Palestinians request recognition of a Palestinian state in the UN in September.
Danon favors responding to a Palestinian declaration of statehood by annexing all of Area C, which includes all the West Bank’s Jewish settlements and empty land. He said Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu should follow the example of his predecessors Levi Eshkol, who annexed eastern Jerusalem, and Menachem Begin, who annexed the Golan Heights.
‘Israel should head off the U.N. vote at the pass, he says, by having Bibi proclaim to Congress that Israel accepts Palestinian statehood. But that would leave half a million Israelis in Palestinian hands without Palestine being able to protect them. This would require Israel to maintain all the present security measures until Israel and Palestine have fully agreed on peace. Sure, this is a ploy, but not a bad one for Israel because it might avoid an international blessing for a Palestinian state.’
Netanyahu has already begun staking out Israel’s redlines. Speaking to reporters on March 9, Netanyahu said,
“Our security border is here on the Jordan and our defense line begins here. If that line is breached they will be able to infiltrate terrorists, rockets and missiles all the way to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva and throughout the country. There is no alternative to the IDF’s line of defense. Therefore, in any future situation, and I say in any future arrangement as well, the IDF must stay here, i.e. along the Jordan River. This is the State of Israel’s insurance policy. If this was true before the major unrest now shaking the Middle East and the entire region, it is doubly true today. The IDF must remain along the Jordan River.
Yet Nutanyahoo doesn’t have the political capital in the Knesset to take on the fanatical illegal settlers. Israel covets the land and resources of the West Bank, particularly the water, and did I mention the land? While the US supports Israeli intransigence there is no chance that a Palestinian state would be formed in anything other than name. Nutanyahoo’s, and indeed any other Israeli leader’s strategy will be for the status quo – unctuous bleatings of negotiated outcomes and fake peace processes, while daily, illegal Israeli settlers supported by the IOF nibble away at the West Bank, continuing Israel’s criminal colonisation and slow, disgusting genocide.
“Our intention is to leave the situation as it is: autonomous management of civil affairs, and if they want to call it a state, let them call it that. If they want to call it an empire, by all means. We intend to keep what exists now and let them call it whatever they want. . . . Our approach is steadfastness, development, construction, strengthening and so on. This is our approach and this is what we do as a government.”
This is a defining moment for the people of the region and, by extension, a critical moment for Central Command to remain engaged with our partners and to clear away obstacles to peace and prosperity. On that note, while Israel and the Palestinian territories are not in my assigned theater, lack of progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace affects U.S. and CENTCOM security interests in the region.
I believe the only reliable path to lasting peace in this region is a viable two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. This issue is one of many that is exploited by our adversaries in the region, and it is used as a recruiting tool for extremist groups. The lack of progress also creates friction with regional partners and creates political challenges for advancing our interests by marginalizing moderate voices in the region. By contrast, substantive progress on the peace process would improve CENTCOM’s opportunity to work with our regional partners and to support multilateral security efforts.
As Obama prepares for the next election, it’s unlikely he will apply adequate pressure to Nutanyahoo for a viable Palestinian state and risk his domestic political capital before a hostile Israel lobby, despite the forebodings of his defence advisors. The rainbow’s end is an illusion.
More broadly, the goal for Palestinians should not be “unity” among factions, but unity of goals for the Palestinian people. What is the purpose and platform of the planned “transitional government” other than merely to exist? A real Palestinian strategy that unites all segments of the Palestinian people has been articulated by the BDS movement:
(a) an end to occupation and colonization of the 1967 territories; (b) full equality and an end to all forms of discrimination against Palestinians in the 1948 areas (“Israel”); and (c) full respect and implementation of the rights of Palestinian refugees.
Notably neither Fatah Abbas nor Hamas have endorsed this campaign, and neither has articulated a realistic strategy aimed at restoring the rights of all Palestinians.
“The United States supports Palestinian reconciliation on terms which promote the cause of peace. Hamas, however, is a terrorist organization which targets civilians,” White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.
“To play a constructive role in achieving peace, any Palestinian government must accept the Quartet principles and renounce violence, abide by past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist,” he said.
: Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel believe Netanyahu will be able to use the newly signed unity deal as proof that Abbas doesn’t really want peace.
…
Renewed relations between Hamas and Fatah, however limited, could shed a different light on Abbas’ intentions, and Netanyahu, who is due to speak before both houses of Congress next month, will be able to present the agreement as proof that Abbas doesn’t really want peace.
Over half of the Egpytian public want to scrap the existing peace deal with Israel, according to a new survey undertaken by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The poll measured attitudes in Egypt three months after the start of the uprising in Cairo. The U.S. State Department said in response to the survey that “the Egyptian army has pledged to uphold international agreements forged by Egypt, including the 1979 peace agreement with Israel.”
…
The survey said that 54 percent of Egyptians supported the annulment of the peace agreement with Jerusalem, and that just 36 percent wanted to maintain the peace agreement with Israel.
The annulment figure rose to six out of ten Egyptians when people in lower income brackets were asked. Further, 59 percent of respondents in lower educational brackets also supported negating the agreement. Among wealthy and well-educated Egyptians, the figures for those in favor of annulling peace relations with Israel are 45 percent and 40 percent.
…
Regarding the United States, only 22 percent of Egyptians think that the US played a positive role in the uprising, in contrast to 39 percent who think that the Americans exerted a negative influence; 35 percent think that the US had no influence.
President Barack Obama, it turns out, has an image problem in the Middle East and not just in Israel: Almost two-thirds of Egyptians (64 percent ) report that they do not trust Obama’s global policy. Further, 52 percent of respondents did not like President Obama’s responses to changes in the Middle East. Less than half (45 percent ) of Egyptians are happy with the U.S. President’s performance in the region.
Four out of ten Egyptians want to maintain close relations with the U.S., yet a similar number want their country to move away from the Americans. Only 15 percent of Egyptians want to strengthen relations between their country and the U.S. in years ahead.
You could blame Facebook. What typically happens when an artist — of any genre or stature — announces a show in Israel, the act’s Facebook page or website is bombarded with posts calling on said artist to cancel the show out of protest and/or boycott the country entirely.
The detention of Tamimi is not a formality: under Israeli military decree 101 he is being charged with attempting “verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order.” As in Syria, this is an “emergency decree” disguised as protecting public security. It carries a sentence of 10 years.
Finkelstein speaks to his forthcoming book “A Farewell to Israel : The Coming Breakup of American Zionism”
Nathan Glazer, 1957: “Israel has had remarkedly slight effects on the inner life of American jewry.”
Mr. Wiesel before 1967 war was asked by Haaretz what can we do to win over jews to their jewishness because there was a fear back then of rampant assimiliation: “The jewishness of jewish youth can still be reached but not through Israel. Perhaps through the problems of jews in Russia, perhaps through questions about the Holocaust, but not through Israel.”
Finkelstein: “Israel became a strategic asset of the US. If you were pro-Israel, you were actually super-loyal to the United States, because there was Israel on the frontline protecting American interests from Arab hordes… Israel was winning, while practising ‘purity of arms’. … Zionism as an idea arises from the idea that jews cannot assimilate. Zionism’s main product is the state of Israel. Paradoxically by swearing allegiance to Israel, Americans can thus assimilate fully into American life, defending Judaeo Christian culture against Arab hordes. The more pro-Israel one is, the more pro-American one becomes.”
“Israel is seen as a besieged beacon of enlightenment values in the Middle East, so for American jews Israel becomes a source of pride… Israel is the Alamo all over again.”
The history of European Orientalism is one that is fully complicit with anti-Semitism from which it derives many of its representations of ancient and modern Arabs and of ancient Hebrews and modern Jews. As Edward Said demonstrated a quarter of a century ago in his classic Orientalism, “what has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and… the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient.” Said added: “The transference of popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.” In the context of the 1973 War, Said commented that Arabs came to be represented in the West as having “clearly ‘Semitic’ features: sharply hooked noses, the evil moustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non- Semitic population) that ‘Semites’ were at the bottom of all ‘our’ troubles.”
…
While holocaust denial in the West is indeed one of the strongest manifestations of anti-Semitism, most Arabs who deny the holocaust deny it for political not racist reasons. This point is even conceded by the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Their denial is based on the false Zionist claim that the holocaust justifies Zionist colonialism. The Zionist claim is as follows: Since Jews were the victims of the holocaust, then they have the right to colonise Palestine and establish a Jewish colonial-settler state there. Those Arabs who deny the holocaust accept the Zionist logic as correct. Since these deniers reject the right of Zionists to colonise Palestine, the only argument left to them is to deny that the holocaust ever took place, which, to their thinking, robs Zionism of its allegedly “moral” argument. But the fact that Jews were massacred does not give Zionists the right to steal someone else’s homeland and to massacre the Palestinian people. The oppression of a people does not endow it with rights to oppress others. If those Arab deniers refuse to accept the criminal Zionist logic that justifies the murder and oppression of the Palestinians by appealing to the holocaust, then these deniers would no longer need to make such spurious arguments. All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists.
…
Today we live in a world where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred, derived from anti-Semitism, is everywhere in evidence. It is not Jews who are being murdered by the thousands by Arab anti- Semitism, but rather Arabs and Muslims who are being murdered by the tens of thousands by Euro- American Christian anti-Semitism and by Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism. If anti-Semites posited Jews as the purveyors of corruption, as financier bankers who control the world, as violent communist subversives, and as poisoners of Christian wells, the Arab and the Muslim today are seen as in control of the oil market and therefore of the global financial market, the purveyors of hatred and corruption of civilised Christian and Jewish societies, as violent terrorists, and as possible mass murderers, not with some Semitic Jewish poison but with Semitic Arab nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (which are nowhere to be found). Thus Michael Moore feels vindicated in telling us in his recent film, Fahrenheit 9/11, about the portion of the American economy controlled by Saudi money while neglecting to mention the much, much larger American share of the Saudi economy. Anti- Semitism is alive and well today worldwide and its major victims are Arabs and Muslims and no longer Jews. The fight should indeed be against all anti-Semitism no matter who the object of its oppression is, Arab or Jew.
“I’m not sure it’s the role of academics to change society. People should speak out in support of democracy and criticize undemocratic elements, but not necessarily through academia. Civil society movements should lead… academics are not only academics, they are also something else, they are also members of civil society. And as members of civil society, academics need to struggle for social justice, locally and nationally.”
The Palestinian Authority will defer its attempts to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state at the United Nations if “real and serious” negotiations with Israel begin, an official was quoted saying Monday.
Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Abed Rabbo told London-based Al-Hayat newspaper on Monday that the basis of any negotiated agreement must be according to “the 1967 borders, very limited exchange of land and no exchanges of populations.”
The Zionists in contrast are automatons. Wherever I speak they do always the same. They come to the audience without any arguments or just shout “lies!” … They are brainwashed to nothing.
It is a lesson I learned in Auschwitz. When a dominant group tries to dehumanize a certain distinguishable group, it is necessary that the members of the dominant group have been brainwashed beforehand. A normal human being cannot see another human being suffering, let alone inflict suffering. His or her inborn empathy needs to be reduced to be able to inflict suffering on a human being. My hope is that, eventually, a society composed of a majority that lost empathy by brainwashing right from the kindergarten until the army, like the Zionists, kills itself from within by too much aggression.
Those who think BDS is the wrong way to go to achieve justice and rights for Palestinian people aren’t listening to Palestinian civil society, but to the colonial voice in their head.Jin, April 2011.
Maintaining a revolutionary position in the present Libyan scenario is like walking in a minefield. One cannot applaud imperialists with their undeniable record of ruthless manipulation in pursuit of control of the world’s energy resources nor the violent tyranny of Gaddafi and bevy of Western puppet dictators which infest nations which often hold treasures coveted by mercantilists. In the Financial Times, Roula Khalaf reminds us of the recent history of the Libyan revolution and warns of the impact of Gaddafi’s manipulations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA):
But as the international coalition steps up its attacks on Libyan forces, Muammer Gaddafi is single-handedly, and tragically, transforming the image of the Arab spring, taking the region back to what we have long been used to, a combination of bloody conflict and foreign intervention.
…
It is important to remember that Libyans began their protests peacefully, marching across the country to demand Col Gaddafi’s departure. They were forced to take up arms to confront a crackdown using every military tool in Col Gaddafi’s arsenal. As army officers broke away and sided with the rebels, and ammunition depots were raided, the stand-off veered towards civil war.
It was also the rebels themselves who were the first to call upon the world community for assistance, specifically asking for a no-fly zone to protect the cities and towns that were under their control. And it is only grudgingly that a coalition has been formed, with the US a late-comer to the game, and everyone insisting that any military operation required Arab backing.
Navy Vice Adm. William E. Gortney underlined that strikes are not specifically targeting the Libyan leader or his residence in Tripoli. He said that any of Gadhafi’s ground forces advancing on the rebels were open targets.
But NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski today knocked down the talk that what is going on militarily is a “huge coalition effort.” Here’s what he said in a remarkable segment this morning:
“Despite the White House attempts to make this look like it’s a huge coalition effort — obviously it required coalition political support — but for now the U.S. military is not only in the lead but conducting almost all military operations, with only minor participation from the French, as you mentioned, even British fighters over night. There’s a U.S. commander. And even this morning I talked to senior military officials, when I asked them how soon will the U.S. turn over the command to the coalition — and the indication is the U.S. military is in no hurry to do that.”
A refugee crisis – another cruel human toll consequent of war – is mounting:
As of 19 March, IOM and UNHCR estimated that at least 320,423 people have fled Libya, and approximately 8,578 remain stranded at the Libyan borders with Tunisia and Egypt.
And in Palestine, Israel’s foul oppression and collective punishment continues with a green light from the West, with opposition leader Livni calling for a repetition of the vile Cast Lead operation against the people of Gaza. Israel has cut a main power line in Gaza. The apartheid state has also admitted holding Gazan electrical engineer Abu Sisi.
Abu Sisi, 42, and a father of six, disappeared from a train while travelling between Kiev and the eastern city of Kharkiv on the night of February 18-19.
The engineer’s wife Veronika said she had been told by train attendants that her husband had been taken away by two men posing as officers of the Ukrainian secret service,
He is being held at Shikma prison in Ashkelon, according to a Ukrainian delegate at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees cited by Israeli media.
Hamas condemned the abduction and demanded the engineer’s release.
“This kidnapping violates international law and Ukraine’s sovereignty. It is further proof of the contempt of the (Israeli) occupation for the international community,” spokesman Sami Abu Zohi told AFP.
UPDATES
RT @avinunu: Iraq was devasted by weeks of intensive bombing in 1991 and Saddam held on for 12 more years, despite crippling sanctions. #
The new MI unit will monitor Western groups involved in boycotting Israel, divesting from it or imposing sanctions on it. The unit will also collect information about groups that attempt to bring war crime or other charges against high-ranking Israeli officials, and examine possible links between such organizations and terror groups.
