We’ve seen an uptick in attacks on minorities recently, especially following the election. At a time when Muslims have really been taking it on the chin the Senate tried to push through the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016,” an innocuous-sounding bill. But this legislation would have turned universities into censors by threatening “federal funding at colleges and universities where political speech against Israel occurs,” an expert on anti-Semitism and extremism wrote.

The bill would have required the Department of Education to alter the meaning of anti-Semitism to include “demonizing Israel” or “judging Israel by a double standard.” This new definition was adopted by the State Department under Hillary Clinton but was originally conceived in 2004 by Natan Sharansky, the founder of Israel’s Ba’Aliyah (immigration) party. Free speech advocates including the ACLU object to the political manipulation of a concept that has been around since 1879 – well before Israel was established.

While the bill’s supporters claim it was simply intended to shield Jewish students from hate, it was really just another attempt to censor debate over Israeli settlements and shut down the Boycott and Divestment (BDS) movement on college campuses, particularly student calls for university trustees to divest of Irael-related portfolios. With such legislation even progressive Jewish groups like JStreet-U, which is critical of Israeli policy without advocating BDS, and Jewish Voice for Peace, which does support BDS, could be subject to loss of their First Amendment rights.

According to Sharansky’s “3D Test” anti-Semitism is no longer simply the demonization of Jews. In fact, he doesn’t even bother to include this well-understood aspect in his definition. For Sharansky anti-Semitism is (1) demonization of the state of Israel; (2) holding double standards regarding the state of Israel; and (3) deligitimization = denying the right of the state of Israel to exist.

According to Sharansky “demonization” of Israel refers to unfair or exaggerated comparisons of Palestinian and Jewish suffering, or comparing Israel’s crimes with the Nazis. For Sharansky (and now the U.S. State Department) “deligitimization” refers to critics who refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Recognition of nations is a political function and one state can choose to recognize another any way it chooses.

Israel’s borders are contested by Palestinians, and land that Israel seized in Lebanon and Syria is also disputed. Neverthess, all U.N. members fully recognize Israel, and even the three with land disputes give Israel limited recognition. Israel, however, insists on being recognized specifically as a Jewish state. No nation seriously intends to erase Israel from a map – especially one with nukes. What Israel wants is the international seal of approval for Zionism.

Unfortunately for Israel, the world’s experience with Germany soured everyone on 19th Century ethno-nationalism. Zionism – any kind of ethno-nationalism – is incompabile with a pluralistic democracy. Israel’s occupation of 4.5 million Palestinians is brutal. Palestinians need their own state but Israel has effectively placed them in reservations or bantustans. This can’t g on. BDS is one way to exert a little economic pressure.

But this is a political discussion – one we should be free to have, on a street corner or a campus. Few Americans want the United States to become a Christian theocracy (I hope I’m right about this), and there are many Saudis, Pakistanis, and Iranians opposed to religious law in their own countries. Americans aren’t stingy with criticisms of Saudi justice and Americans have plenty to say about Cuba, China, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. It’s hard to see how Israel is being held to a different standard.

But whether Natan Sharansky or the government of Israel object to criticism. It’s a right to criticize a foreign country – or even one’s own – regardless of criteria. One doesn’t even need facts – like Republicans on climate change.

The injustice of Israel’s occupation is what the BDS movement hammers away at – martial law, settlements, selective application of laws, thirty-foot separation walls, private roads for settlers, checkpoints, settler violence, water theft, destruction of olive trees, night raids without warrants, prison sentences without trial, press censorship, gag laws for Israeli dissidents, “Judaizing” of both the West Bank and Arab communites in Israel proper. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documents a lot of it.

But a double standard does exist. Just not the one Mr. Sharansky wants to talk about.

Israel is not a western democracy in any recognizable sense. Democracies don’t maintain martial law for half a century over an ethnic and religious minority corraled into reservations. Democracies don’t legislate religious and racial laws that advantage members of a single group. We’d have a stroke if full legal rights in Germany were extended only to blond-haired, blue-eyed people in the year 2016.

Israel’s 1951 Law of Return permitted Jews (defined as having a Jewish mother) from any land to “return” to Israel, while millions of Palestinians have been permanently locked out of homes their parents lived in. As distasteful as it is to admit, eliminating Palestians by recognizing only Jewish blood is effectively a racial law. But the Law of Return was amended in 1971 to make it possible for non-Jewish relatives of immigrants to join their families in Israel, so the amendment took on an additional racial cast since mainly Ashkenazim (European Jews) were added to Israel’s population. Imagine if Britain offered automatic citizenship (along with settlement benefits) only to Anglicans and Episcopalians from any country (plus their blue-eyed descendants regardless of religion). We would wonder what kind of democracy it was.

And this is the real double standard – that Israel gets a pass for thumbing its nose at democratic norms.

Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner thinks he knows why Israel bothers western critics so much: “Western liberals – not to mention Israeli liberals – whose greatest moral outrage is reserved for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians have nothing to apologize for. It’s a natural reaction, an inevitable one. As with apartheid South Africa, Vietnam, European colonialism and other examples from the West’s history, the occupation enflames leftists in a way that other, greater tyrannies in the world don’t, simply because this tyranny – the last of its kind still standing – is being perpetrated by their own side.”

Derfner has a point, but even with greater tyrranies I’m entitled to a little extra outrage over Israel. After all, I’m paying taxes to my “own side” to help Israel prolong the suffering of stateless Palestinians. I’m not providing aid to Assad to kill residents of Aleppo. And the hypocrisy of the double standard from my “own side” disturbs me the most because the link between foreign policy and domestic policy has implications which affect me personally. If politicians overlook war crimes in Israel, they’ll also overlook the abuse of civilians by police domestically.

Meanwhile, Israel has quite the enabler in the United States. American politicians pretend that Israel does not have nuclear weapons while other countries are punished if they spin up a centrifuge. When Israel kills American citizens our own government does nothing. Israel receives massive aid packages every year – ones like no other nation on earth receives. Double standards.

Without doubt Israel is America’s favorite nation and is the beneficiary of a double standard – not because it has stood with the US in Afghanistan or Iraq like its NATO allies, but because many American politicians are evangelicals, for whom this little country is not just another nation – but the birthplace of Christ. For them Israel is not even Israel as a modern state. For evangelicals it’s a Biblical Disneyland. Israel’s substantial lobby operates as if represented domestic interests, while lobbyists for other nations have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. More double standards.

Yet is it a double standard to point out that maybe – just maybe – there should be a little daylight between our foreign policy and Israel’s – that our interests are not identical? This tired formulation (“no daylight”) is used repeatedly by politicians for no other country. And it’s just not true.

As he was leaving the presidency, George Washington offered a few pieces of advice – “honesty is the best policy” was one. But Washington also had something to say about permitting double standards for a favorite nation:

“… a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter… It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions … and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity…”

No one in modern times could say it any better.

One State Solution

Most of the organizations which comprise the formal Israel Lobby, including AIPAC, WINEP, and ZOA, promote policies which are virtually identical to the Likud’s One State platform, which states that there will never be a Palestinian homeland west of Jordan. Look on a map to see what that means. AIPAC has enjoyed bipartisan support for years, even as both the GOP and DNC neglected the creation of a Palestinian state and lavished many billions of dollars on Israel. Besides formal lobbyists, there are also several American Zionist organizations that fund settlements and, in so doing, undermine the Two State solution.

• American Israel Education Foundation
• American Israel Public Affairs Committee
• Friends of the Israel Defense Forces
• Jewish Federations of North America
• Jewish National Fund
• JINSA | Securing America, Strengthening Israel
• Republican Jewish Coalition
• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
• Zionist Organization of America

No-State Solution

There’s no arguing with the fact that America has a lot of anti-Semites. This week the neo-Nazi friends of Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon are planning an armed march to terrorize Jewish families and businesses of Whitefish, Montana. For most of us, however, like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who was referring to pornography, we know anti-Semitism when we see it.

But Israel managed a linguistic coup by extending the definition of anti-Semitism to include any criticism of Israel. Organizations that once fought and illuminated hatred of Jews now find themselves spending a lot of time enmeshed in Israeli foreign and domestic policy. They claim to support the Two State solution but argue that only because of anti-Semitism and recalcitrance do Palestinians have “no state” and deserve none for the time being – until Israel’s “security” needs are satisfied.

• AJC: Global Jewish Advocacy
• American Jewish Congress
• Anti-Defamation League
• Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
• Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Two-State Solution

The majority of American Jews want a Two State solution and it’s not hard to see why. The One State solution means either (1) expelling all Arabs (something Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has advocated and which half of Israelis support); (2) depriving Palestinians of a state, civil laws and rights, squeezing them into reservations or bantustans, and subjecting them to endless checkpoints; or (3) inviting Palestinians into the Israeli state. Israel has backed itself into a corner with decades of “annexation” and there’s hardly anything left for Palestinians. Occupation is all it knows. Israel could also embrace (4) the American “Indian reservation” model and unilaterally declare encircled “cantons” a “Palestinian” homeland. I fear this option would satisfy most Americans because – it seems to have worked nicely for us.

American Jews and progressive Israelis see both the moral danger and the self-destructive effect of leaving nothing for Palestinians. Consequently many American Jewish organizations support the Two State Solution:

• Adalah
• Ameinu – Liberal Values, Progressive Israel | Progressive Zionism
• American Council for Judaism
• Americans for Peace Now
• Breaking the Silence
• B’Tselem | The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• IfNotNow
• Israel Policy Forum
• J Street: The Political Home for Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace Americans
• Jewish Voice for Peace
• Jews For Racial & Economic Justice
• Jews Say No: Not In OurName!
• Jews United For Justice | ThinkJewishly. Act Locally.
• National Jewish Democratic Council
• Partners for Progressive Israel
• T’ruah
• Workmen’s Circle

On March 3rd, 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress for the third time, tying a record previously held only by Winston Churchill. That same evening the American Secretary of State was in Switzerland negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran – precisely the deal John Boehner had invited Netanyahu to sabotage in the People’s House.

With this invitation the Republican Congress was conducting its own foreign policy, one at odds with the State Department’s, and thumbing its nose at the president. Netanyahu’s appearance was an attempt to undermine American foreign policy. The Republican invitation was a potential violation of the Logan Act and it placed the interests of a foreign nation before our own.

As Netanyahu stood at the podium where presidents deliver their State of the Union addresses, Republicans were ecstatic. Netanyahu was the president Obama would never be – right-wing, uncompromising, eager for war – and White. The Israeli Prime Minister also represented the values of a nation Republicans have long admired and emulated – a land of fighters, where religion blends with governance and a favored ethnic or religious group runs the country.

Update 11/9/2016:

Republicans got the president they always wanted.

In Rafi Kanter’s recent letter he questions the truthfulness of my statements about the ADL. The suggestion of dishonesty require a response.

The ADL’s recent protestations that they never denied the Armenian genocide are much like Bill Clinton’s disavowals of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Yet strenuous denial does not equal the truth.

A July 2007 piece from Jewcy, an online Jewish magazine, explained how the ADL took on the job of being Israel’s mouthpiece: “Abdullah Gul needed a favor. […] The Turkish foreign minister was fighting a push in the U.S. House of Representatives to recognize the Turkish murder of over one million Armenians during World War I. […] Gul summoned representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and several other Jewish-American organizations to his room at the Willard Hotel in Washington. There he asked them, in essence, to perpetuate Turkey’s denial of genocide. Abraham Foxman’s ADL acquiesced…”

Plenty of Jews objected to the cowardice, if not hypocrisy. One of them was Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, a staunch Israel supporter who has given talks to the Jewish Federation at Rabbi Kanter’s very pulpit. On August 23, 2007 Jacoby wrote in the New York Times: “Particularly deplorable has been the longtime reluctance of some leading Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to call the first genocide of the 20th century by its proper name. When Andrew Tarsy, the New England director of the ADL, came out last week in support of a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide, he was promptly fired by the national organization.”

On April 16, 2008 the Armenian Genocide Museum also blasted the ADL and on August 14, 2007 the Watertown, Massachusetts Town Council voted unanimously to rescind its affiliation with the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” campaign.

Only after widespread outrage at its cowardice reached a crescendo did the ADL change its tune.

In a June 2010 piece in Salon magazine Armenian writer Mark Arax expressed disappointment with the ADL best: “As victims of the Holocaust, Jews might be expected to stand beside the Armenians and their tragedy. […] This sudden embrace of the Armenian Genocide actually marks a shameless turnaround for the major American Jewish organizations. For decades, they have helped Turkey cover up its murderous past.”

My original point was that the ADL too often wades in on political issues as a proxy for Israel – even when it is contrary to American or Jewish values. The Liberty billboard incident was just the latest example.

No matter what the ADL says it now believes, what I wrote was absolutely correct.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 27, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20160427/opinion/160429527

This morning’s Standard-Times contained an article about the removal of a billboard by Outdoor Media referencing the 1967 USS Liberty incident, in which an American ship was attacked by Israel and 34 U.S. sailors were killed. The Johnson administration immediately suppressed the story and it is still relatively unknown. The Standard-Times article quotes the New England Defamation League, which attacks the group that placed the ad (“If Americans Only Knew”) for alleged “antisemitism.” No other view was presented in the article.

Interested readers can find a curated version of the story at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident or at the group’s website http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ussliberty.html.

Without a doubt “If Americans Only Knew” is confrontational – as is PETA, who also unsuccessfully waded into local billboard marketing with disastrous results. But if you actually visit their website instead of merely taking the ADL’s word for it, it’s clear that their issues are with American foreign policy around Israel and Palestine. They leave generalizations about Jews to people like Donald Trump.

It is hardly surprising that the Defamation League would come down on the side of censorship. The ADL in recent years has expanded its definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel and it has become primarily a mouthpiece for the Israeli foreign ministry. In 2008, when it served Israel’s interests to be less hostile to Turkey, the ADL denied the Armenian genocide. Now, at a time that Jews are better-integrated into American society than ever before, the ADL has turned away from defending Jewish Americans to defending Israel’s militarism and occupation.

But the Israel-Palestine issue is not going away. More than ever, it is a valid foreign policy debate, just as American militarism is. Last year the [U.S.] Congressional Research Service reported that “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance…”

I can think of many better uses for that money – and it is certainly worth debating.

We can pretend all we want that Israel is a beleaguered little David fighting off Arab Goliaths day and night – or we can acknowledge that, like us, Israel has turned its back on its founders’ ideals and has become an ugly xenophobic nation – with an equally ugly dependency on militarism and an occupation habit. But it’s hard for Americans to criticize Zionism when we so enthusiastically embrace our own American Exceptionalism.

Still, if we are looking for an explanation for the unrelenting efforts to censor the debate on Israel and Palestine, we need only look in the mirror. This – as Walter Russell Mead wrote in “Foreign Affairs” many years ago – is the real reason we cannot bear criticism of Israel: they’re just too much like us.

Besides, who really wants to look in that mirror?

This was published in the Standard Times on April 13, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20160413/opinion/160419873

Jewish Federation of Greater New Bedford

Dear –,

This is a bit awkward. I am writing you in your capacity as President of the Federation, not as the old friend that you are to both of us.

Please ask the Federation to stop sending me appeals for donations. Deborah certainly holds her own views, but I am speaking for myself here.

My views on Zionism and Israel within our community are well-known, and these campaign appeals are unappreciated. I have previously asked the Federation to remove my name from its mailings, and it has ignored my requests. What other steps must I take to make this stop?

Zionism is not a religion. It is a remnant of 19^th century nationalism, of a destructive and divisive type we have seen all over the world – in Germany, Serbia, Africa, and the Middle East. Nationalism is incompatible with democracy because within nationalist states there is always a preferred people, race, or religion – and its “others” always find themselves in its crosshairs. In Israel proper and in the occupied territories, Palestinians don’t have to wear yellow stars, but they might as well be required to. They are third-class citizens in Israel, and essentially non-humans in the West Bank.

Judaism, on the other hand, is a religion, and one in which ethics mean everything. It has evolved since the days of temples and priests, but apparently the fundamentalist conception of God literally conferring land ownership of Israel has not similarly evolved. Until modern day Messianism reared its ugly head after the Six Day War, many Jews believed that talking about a reconstituted Israel was an abomination. Now only the Satmars reject Zionism, but many progressive Jews believe that Zionism must be reigned-in and that Israel’s rejection of Two States leaves no other alternative for peace except a single, democratic, secular state. This is my view. I cannot consider myself a Zionist in any form.

Those who believe in a fusion of nationalism and religion remind me of the Islamic zealots who want their own religious state. Israel should strive to be a 21^st century democracy and not a Jewish Caliphate. Most Americans believe in separation of church and state. Why, then, should we be expected to make an exception for Israel?

Since the program of the Federation is Zionist, I cannot support any of it. Please take my name off your list permanently. Thank you for your understanding. I hope this explains why I do not wish to have any donations given in my name.

David Ehrens

B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et-atzmo, k’ilu hu yatzav mimitzrayim.

In every generation, everyone is obligated to see themselves as though they personally left Egypt.

The beauty of Passover is that we consciously place ourselves in the shoes of people struggling to be free. We remember a story that happened long ago and far away. But our real job is to remember – personally – the slave’s struggles – any slave – and to identify personally with the underdog, the little guy, the bigot’s victim, the person whose destiny is not in his own hands. For most of us, Passover will always be a warm ritual of Jewish history, one in which we enjoy the company of family and friends – and all those cups of wine. For others it mirrors very real struggles that continue even today.

I read a wonderful article by Michael Twitty, a chef, and an Afro-American Jew. He was writing about what went into his seder plate. Exactly 150 years ago, one of his ancestors, Elijah Mitchell, was released from slavery, virtually at the moment the Civil War ended. At Passover Twitty serves a bitter herb – collard greens – on his seder plate. Instead of a shank bone there is a chicken leg – of the sort his family took with them when they began their way North during the Great Migration. For Twitty freedom is personal. The Civil Rights movement brought freedom another step closer for Afro-Americans. But who would say the struggle is over? For Blacks, like Jews, there have been numerous flights to freedom, each time discovering there is always some new way to strip them of rights and dignity. But the value of remembering history, the value of Passover, is that it illuminates the present.

Passover is a call to action. It is a constant struggle to be free. It always has been, and this is still the case today. We are at a point in our history where our democratic freedoms are threatened by any number of things. Our American ideals, and our Jewish ideals, have gone wildly off the rails, both here and in Israel.

If we really value freedom, we cannot deny it to others. A nation built on inequality and injustice, xenophobia, militarism, surveillance, paranoia, bigotry, and privilege for a small group of people is not free. Those of us who feel free, like German Jews before 1935, are at least partially deluding ourselves. The strongest person or group in a twisted society can become the most vulnerable – in the blink of an eye, in the signing of a piece of legislation, or in the interests of national security.

Unless we are the ones shaping our own government – and not Big Money or their friends in a growing police state – we can never be free. And until everyone is free, even the most vulnerable, none of us truly will be. You will not be free.

When Republicans invited Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress, the public might have wrongly concluded that lawmakers are worried about an existential threat to Israel. But Israel, with 100 nukes and growing, is the only state in the Middle East with such weapons, and it is backed by the United States, the only country on earth to have incinerated human beings with them. If anyone should be worried about nuclear weapons in the Middle East, it should be Iran.

In fact, when you look at a map of U.S. military bases in the Middle East, there aren’t many nations bordering on or near Iran that don’t have at least one U.S. military base in them: Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel, the Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And the Fifth Fleet is all over the Persian Gulf. Iran is totally surrounded by the United States. And it is the United States Iran is preoccupied with, not Israel.

Netanyahu’s theatrical performance, and the recent letter by 47 GOP senators to Iran, are both part of a campaign to garner support for throwing more U.S. weight around in the Middle East – by people who have already destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, and created the vacuum that ISIS has stepped into. Now Iran is in their crosshairs. What country do they want to wreck next? Iran, apparently.

For the last 20 years Netanyahu has been whining that Iran is on the verge of destroying Israel. Each time he calls “wolf” he becomes that much less credible. Even Mossad, Israel’s security agency, calls his claims hogwash: Mossad reported recently that Iran is “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.” But by claiming an imminent existential threat, attention is deflected from the Likud’s reckless, racist policies and its illegal settlements. And, of course, Netanyahu’s address to Congress just so happened to occur during Israeli Prime Time right before an election.

But what’s in it for the Republicans and hawkish Democrats? Political cover. You might have thought the American public would have had enough war-mongering in the last two decades. But apparently not. One more questionable act of aggression wouldn’t be very popular. But by hiding behind “existential threats” to Israel and painting a defenseless David and an Iranian Goliath, the GOP and its neoconservative allies on both side of the aisle hope to galvanize support for future, reckless military actions.

Remember the Maine? Remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Remember Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction? Apparently no one remembers any of these bogus pretexts for war or the criminals who sold them. We keep on buying it. Again and again and again and again.

This was published in the Standard Times on March 18, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150318/opinion/150319473

The one-sided “war” in Gaza was not about murdered yeshiva students or a Palestinian burned alive. It wasn’t about Qassam rockets or Israeli drones. It wasn’t about smuggling tunnels, which besides armaments also move food and building materials into Gaza. The most recent attack on Gaza was not even Israel punishing Hamas for rejecting divide-and-conquer tactics by signing a unity agreement with the PLO.

Since 1948 Israel has refused any sort of peace with Palestinians. Zionism is a zero-sum game. There can only be one winner. For Israel two states or one non-Zionist state are both losses. Occupation is unfortunate but necessary, so goes the reasoning.

Americans are extremely uncomfortable watching what is essentially a repeat of our own genocidal campaigns against Native Americans. But, then, isn’t conquering Zion THE story in the Bible? Even House Democrats talk “separation of church and state” out of the side of their mouth not supporting Zionism. And while these same liberal Congressmen fear the return of Jim Crow in the South, they apparently have nothing against martial law only for Palestinians and far worse than Jim Crow. What they are supporting is a toxic form of colonialism buttressed by US vetoes in the UN Security Council (also a vestige of colonialism) no matter which party is in power.

Israel has long maintained it has no “partner for peace” with any faction among the Palestinians. But this has been by design. In the late 1980’s Israel, which had refused to talk with the PLO, seriously erred by supporting Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama Al-Islamiya (Muslim Association) movement, the precursor of Hamas. But by the time Americans realized their similar Islamist strategy in Afghanistan had backfired, Hamas was militant and Israel sent gunships to blow the Sheikh and his family to smithereens.

With the Oslo Accords, the PLO and Fatah renounced terrorism and hopes were high for a Two State solution offering Palestinians a sovereign homeland. But Israel never rewarded the defanged, dependent West Bank with a state of its own, instead continuing to take more Palestinian land for right-wing settlers. By now it’s obvious that Israel never had any intention of giving up lands it and American supporters like to call by the biblical names Judea and Samaria. In fact, the charter of the long-ruling party, the Likud, specifically denies a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. So, from Israel’s perspective, negotiations are only for stalling and stonewalling silly Americans. Spying on the American Secretary of State just gives them an edge.

If Gazans are more militant than those in the West Bank, there is a reason. A majority of those living in Gaza now are descendants of refugees who were purposely expelled from their homes in Israel in 1948. While Israel has a “Right of Return” for Jews, this does not extend to Christians or Muslims who owned property in what is now Israel. They are now living in what is essentially a concentration camp looking over barbed wire at people who put them there. Only a fool would fail to acknowledge their anger or their rights.

There is little sense in constructing timelines of which acts of terror preceded others. While we may call Hamas terrorists, a recognized state killing 1800 people, mainly civilians, also should be called terrorist. There is no sense or justification in the cliché: “this has been going on for 3000 years.” No. It hasn’t. It’s been going on since 1948. It’s a land dispute and not a clash of civilizations or religions.

It is not surprising, then, that virtually every nation on earth – with the exception of present and former colonial powers – understands why Palestinians resist having sovereignty taken from them. It’s the Occupation. The United States and Israel can label anyone who resists “terrorist” all they want, even forgetting acts of resistance and terror that created these two nations. But the problem in Israel-Palestine, like most of the messes created by the Sykes-Picot “deal” that carved up the Middle East, will remain a mess for any knucklehead who refuses to understand why those they oppress fight back.

It’s the Occupation, Stupid.

Jewish Messenger, Fall 2012 The Jewish Federation of Greater New Bedford

Jeff Jacoby speaking at the bima at Tifereth Israel

Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby Keynotes Annual Meeting

Jeff Jacoby, an award-winning columnist for The Boston Globe and a nationally syndicated journalist, was a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation on September 23, 2012. Although the choice of a speaker may have appeared somewhat controversial, Mr. Jacoby has a following among Federation member as well as in the general community. It became apparent by a good number of guests who came to hear the noted commentator. In the absence of Federation president Dr. Stuart Forman, Dr. Jack Belkin, Federation Vice-president, led the meeting.

The business part of the meeting opened with the Board elections. This year, along with reelecting a number of seasoned board members, two new members were added to the Board roster, Meg Steinberg and Abrah (Salk) Zion. Rabbi Barry Hartman installed the new and reelected Board members with his inimitable mix of humor, advice, and good wishes. He noted that While Meg Steinberg and her husband Barry are newcomers to the area, having moved to Marion two years ago, Abrah Zion comes from a long-time New Bedford family. Following her family’s history of communal involvement, Abrah has been actively involved with the PJ Library program of the Jewish Federation. Federation executive director Olga Yorish opened her remarks by acknowledging the passing of two very special women, Shulamith Friedland and Rubye Finger who will be missed greatly by the Federation and the whole Jewish community. She then gave an overview of Federation’s past year’s activities, stressing the central theme of working in collaboration with other Jewish organizations in the community, as well as with other religious and civic organizations in New Bedford. “We had a challenging campaign last year and worked very hard to maintain our programs and allocations on the same level,” said Yorish, adding that she was looking forward to working with Ellen Hull again on the 2013 campaign. Ellen Hull kicked off the 2013 annual campaign whose theme “ordinary things” was coined by the Jewish Federations of North America. “We promise to do more and to work differently to keep up with the changing communal environment,” said Hull (see page 3).

Rev. Pam Cole and Rev. David Lima with Jeff Jacoby

Mr. Jacoby built his presentation as a response and elaboration on the question raised by Ambassador Michael Oren in a Wall Street Journal article “What happened to Israel’s reputation?” “Why has Israel’s image deteriorated?” asks Oren in his article. “Why have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? Especially now, after nearly two decades of the peace process in which Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths to end its conflict with the Palestinians.” To these questions, Mr. Jacoby offered his controversial answer, which he first suggested on the Globe’s opinion page on May 23, 2012. According to Mr. Jacoby, “The real answer is that Israel’s global standing has been debased not despite the “peace process,” but because of it.” Following the presentation, Mr. Jacoby answered a number of questions from the animated audience. The meeting was rounded up by a scrumptious dessert reception.

On Sunday, September 23rd, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby gave a talk at the Greater New Bedford Jewish Federation. As a member of the community, I was there to see if he would blast Jews for voting Democratic and pitch the Republican Party (he writes that God is a Republican); or if he was going to take potshots at multiculturalism and secularism and talk about the primacy of “Judeo-Christian” values – or if he was going to hop on the recent Muslim-bashing bandwagon – all points of view he regularly flogs in his Globe columns (website http://www.jeffjacoby.com). But this particular evening he chose another subject: selling the One State Solution.

Before I go on, I should point out that I agree with Jacoby on a One State Solution – though only because Israel has now taken so much Palestinian land that the Two State Solution is dead. Coming from an American, it should come as no surprise to say that a single, secular, democratic state is not only best, but is now the only practical solution to packing 12 million people into a space the size of New Jersey. Jacoby would consider this view antisemitic. Yet he sees nothing wrong with forcing Jewish law and ethnic privilege upon a substantial (and some say, only temporary) minority. Besides, there are many ways that Jewishness and democracy can coexist without requiring a quasi-religious settler state. Jewishness seems to be alive and well in the United States. We’ve also had 64 years to see what Zionism has become.

Jacoby started his talk, “Whatever Happened to Israel’s Good Name?” by asking if anyone remembered when the media actually loved Israel. Hammering away at the theme of how the media and forces of delegitimization have now conspired to “demonize” Israel, Jacoby asked the friendly audience if they remembered when LIFE Magazine had described Israel as a little nation “struggling to survive.” Well, not any more, he lamented.

He pulled out a copy of a special issue of LIFE Magazine from 1973, the “Spirit of Israel,”commemorating the nation’s 25th birthday with 92 pages of photos and articles, and held up his prop. Jacoby asked the Federation audience: Can you imagine the media publishing something like this today? Can you imagine them being concerned with Israel’s survival today? Jacoby was clearly preaching to the choir, and most of the audience was rapt and nodding in agreement. What Jacoby downplayed was that the Israel of 1973 was under a Mapai government, the Prime Minister was a bit of a novelty as both a woman and an American, most of the kibbutzim had not yet been converted to corporations, Palestinian territory had not yet been completely expropriated, and messianic nationalism had not yet taken root in Israel. This was a very different Israel in 1973.

Next Jacoby mentioned Michael Oren’s Wall Street Journal article, “Whatever Happened to Israel’s Reputation? – How in 40 years the Jewish state went from inspiring underdog to supposed oppressor.” Oren’s piece invokes the same LIFE Magazine issue and extols democracy and vitality in Israel, but stops short of admitting to readers of the international business magazine that Israel has finally come clean and formally abandoned the Two State Solution – although this was the message that Jacoby and the Jewish Federation were selling that Sunday night.

Jacoby repeated points he had made in his May 23rd Boston Globe column, “Peace process harmed Israel’s reputation,” in which he wrote: “The concessions Israel has made in pursuit of peace are unprecedented in diplomatic history. (I found myself wondering what actual concessions he was talking about). In his piece, Oren claims the concessions consisted of: Recognizing the PLO as a diplomatic partner, creating an armed Palestinian Authority, twice offering the Palestinians a sovereign state, agreeing to share control of Jerusalem, removing every Jewish community in Gaza.” But this conflates the PA with the PLO, paints Palestinian policemen as an army, casts offers of an emasculated state as true self-determination, defines continued land theft in East Jerusalem as “sharing,” and offers a revisionist version of the Gaza pullout. Jacoby didn’t even bother putting a spin on Israel’s human rights abuses or its Occupation. For him and most of the audience, Israel has no warts – and it was still 1973.

He described Ariel Sharon’s unilateral pullout from Gaza as the work of “appeasers.” The “appeasers” in this case – Ariel Sharon and Shaul Mofaz, who implemented Tokhnit HaHafrada (the Apartheid-sounding “separation plan”) – were members at various times of both the Likud and its spin-off, Kadima. Why would crafty old Ariel Sharon suddenly go soft? Well, he didn’t, said Sharon’s closest advisor, Dov Weissblas, explaining: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. […] When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Disengagement supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

Indeed, the Two State solution is dead and still pickling in the same formaldehyde – although the U.S. State Department continues to maintain that Palestinians must sit down in direct talks with Israel, even as Israel denies it needs to. The “Roadmap” is all but forgotten and Israel’s hasbarists have a ready-made answer for why there is no “political process with the Palestinians” – We never had a partner for peace.

In much of his talk, Jacoby seemed to be implying that, during all the years that Israel claimed to be negotiating a Two State Solution alongside American intermediaries, this was actually the work of an evil “Mr. Hyde” appeaser – because the more sensible “Dr. Jeckyl” knew all along what his “red lines” were – and that if it were not for Likud-Kadima’s temporary insanity no one would have promised to actually honor such appeasement crazy talk. But now the world unreasonably expects Israel to live up to the yet-to-be-explained “magnanimous concessions” it made while temporarily insane, and the damned Palestinians continue to insist on a state. No, we must have it all. Reconciling Zionism and Palestinian statehood is a zero-sum game in which there can only be one winner. This was the gist of his talk.

No one should be surprised at any of these sudden revelations because the Likud’s platform for years has spelled out its “red lines”:

• The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel.
• Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem.
• The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.
• The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

That night Jacoby (and the Jewish Federation) were also selling the line that American Jews no longer want Two States. He cited figures he claimed came from the American Jewish Committee, which purported to show that 55% of American Jews are opposed to a Two State Solution. He called this a “healthy development” and added that a Palestinian state would be a big “mistake.” I was unable to verify his statistics on the AJC website or elsewhere. In fact I discovered not only the opposite, but figures strongly to the contrary. A 2011 Gallup poll reported that 78% of American Jews and 81% of American Muslims support a Two State solution.

Lies and damned lies notwithstanding, he was on a roll, at least with a large portion of the audience. Jacoby complained that, somewhere along the line, people had actually started seeing things from the Palestinian perspective. He claimed that the act of simply sitting down and negotiating with Palestinians “has undermined Israel’s claim to the land.” He dismissed Palestinian national aspirations as being based on antisemitism, citing an admission by Edward Said. From my reading, what Said actually wrote is that antisemitism has been an obstacle to Arab nationalism, not its basis.

Jacoby then argued that Israel is now in a 19-year retreat from the Likud’s “red lines” and that Israel should unapologetically reject Palestinian statehood and sharing of Jerusalem once and for all. He tried to paint these views as “shared U.S. values.” Perhaps they are shared with people like Mike Huckabee, but One State and a completely Judaized Jerusalem are not accepted United States foreign policy and (outside the Jewish Federation) not acceptable to most American Jews. Yet many in the audience nodded in agreement. Jacoby added that Israel’s backing away from these “red lines” has created “irresolution,” “weakness,” and “panic” which only encourages Israel’s enemies and diminishes Israel’s respect.

Jacoby again echoed the obligatory throwaway line (“Israel has never had a partner for peace”), and asked provocatively, What is peace, anyway? Peace means one partner in conflict must give up his aims. He continued, Besides, peace is over-rated. Israel can exist without peace. He cited statistics showing that Israelis are quite happy with their quality of life – presumably including the economic and moral consequences of being an occupier. The hardliners firmly expect Two Staters to give up this aim.

His time was up and he took questions. I held up a copy of the 2011 B’Tselem Human Rights report and countered, As long as we’re displaying magazines tonight, this one displays another dimension of Israel that it doesn’t like to address: human rights abuses, illegal detentions, assassinations, home demolitions, confiscation of land, and press censorship.

The audience booed, and Jacoby asked me if there was a question in there somewhere. I wrapped up, Yes, my question is this – why shouldn’t Americans, especially American Jews, be concerned about these issues? He brushed off B’Tselem as an antisemitic group generating “libel” and “propaganda” against Israel, and totally ignored the question of whether Americans and American Jews had a right to be concerned with Israel’s actions. Instead he talked about a flowering democracy, flowering press freedoms, and a flowering economy in Israel.

The combination of wilful ignorance and denial in the room that night spells a real danger for this community and others like it. The extreme form of Zionism represented by people like Jeff Jacoby and peddled by the Jewish Federation repeatedly (this was Jacoby’s second talk to the group) – one which is so at odds with both U.S. foreign policy and Jewish ethics – will forever wreck the chance of Israel actually living up to the bright and shiny 1973 LIFE Magazine image that many still cling to in their minds and hearts today.

This was published in MondoWeiss on October 3, 2012
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/10/boston-globe-columnist-sells-one-jewish-state-and-wonders-why-israels-image-is-tanking/

Republicans are fond of accusing the President of “throwing Israel under the bus.” This argument has drawn a few percent of the most hard-line Zionists toward the Republican Party, but according to a Gallup poll, 68% of American Jews still love Obama — and 80% of us vote.

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote in Commentary magazine: “Time and again, Obama has made clear both his lack of sympathy for the Jewish state and his keen desire to ingratiate himself with Arab and Muslim autocrats. The disparities in the administration’s tone and attitude have been striking. For the prime minister of Israel, there have been humiliating snubs and telephoned harangues. […] Yet many American Jews chose to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, telling themselves that he could be numbered […] among Israel’s strongest supporters. Only the wilfully blind could believe that now. And many American Jews are wilfully blind. […] Obama is unlikely to duplicate the 78 percent of Jewish votes he drew in 2008. But will American Jews turn away from him en masse? Don’t bet on it. F– the Jews, Obama’s advisers can tell him. They’ll vote for us anyway.”

Despite Jacoby’s delusional belief that American Jews are “wilfully blind,” what Jewish “leaders” have nevertheless been seeing is Obama delivering for Israel.

David Harris, of the American Jewish Committee, has endorsed Obama. In an editorial in June lauding the President, Harris notes that Romney’s “pro-Israel” strategy is to position himself as the opposite of Obama. But Harris asks: “What in Obama’s record on Israel does Romney Oppose?”

Edgar M. Bronfman, former president of the World Jewish Congress, endorsed Obama in an August 6th piece in Haaretz. Says Bronfman: “The reality is that when confronted with rhetorical attacks and efforts to sow doubts about his support for Israel, President Obama could have simply adopted the swagger and bravado of his predecessor. It would have been easy for President Obama to go on a speaking tour pandering to the Jewish community and those in America who love Israel. But that is not his style. President Obama is a thoughtful, decisive and pragmatic leader. He values substantive solutions over political gamesmanship. Forgoing the bluster and bravado of others, President Obama continues his practical and deliberate support for the State of Israel.”

Even though the President is accused of being “weak” on Iran, the Jerusalem Post carried an article a few days ago entitled “Obama has Israel’s Back on Iran,” quoting Israel hawks Dennis Ross and Alan Dershowitz, who speculated that the United States could be brought into a war against Iran. Former ambassador Martin Indyk went so far as to predict that the US will join an attack on Iran next Spring — just in time for the _Purimspil, _the Purim play in which the evil Hamaan and his 10,000 sons are hanged.

Republicans sigh that Obama hasn’t made a state visit to Israel, and they were especially miffed last week when Obama did not meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, instead appearing on David Letterman to campaign. Where are the man’s priorities? But in an August article in Foreign Policy entitled “Obama has been Great for Israel,” Colin Kahl observes that 7 of the last 11 presidents — including Truman, who recognized Israel, and Ronald Reagan, the Republican saint — never visited Israel, and Republicans Bush and Nixon only did so in their last years of office.

In fact, Obama visited Israel as a US Senator in 2008, even before becoming President, stopping at outposts like Sderot, two miles from Gaza, expressing his support and solidarity in the strongest of terms for Israelis, when he could have simply posed for photo ops at the Kotel or Yad Vashem. More to his credit, Obama refrained from displaying embarrassingly poor knowledge of history, law, and geography — like most of the Republicans who have slapped on a yarmulke and drawled “Shalom.”

Aside from big endorsements, Obama has not been just good for Israel. He’s been great — even while he’s been a disaster for the Two State Solution or failing to stop illegal settlements. Some of his first term accomplishments for Israel that have won him such friends in the Israel Lobby:

• Asked Ambassador Charles Freeman to withdraw his bid for the National Intelligence Council after the Israel Lobby objected to him
• Kept AIPAC/WINEP lobbyist Dennis Ross on from the Bush administration as a Middle East advisor — which meant that Obama…
• Did nothing to apply leverage to Israel to stop illegal settlements
• Did little to apply leverage to Israel to pursue a Two State solution
• Didn’t give Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell much to work with, and didn’t bother replacing him after he resigned
• Intercepted arms shipments to Hamas
• Provided an additional $1 billion in funds for Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow missile defense systems (separate from the $3 billion a year in military aid and $9 billion a year in economic aid)
• Made bunker busters available to Israel
• Imposed a series of crippling sanctions against Iran
• Vetoed any and all criticisms of Israel at the UN
• Attacked the Goldstone report on the siege of Gaza
• Defended Israel on the attack on the Mavi Marmara, even though an American citizen was killed
• Opposed a joint PA-Hamas effort to negotiate with Israel – so that the two entities which represent Palestinians can’t even come to the table with Israel
• Opposed the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to obtain observer status at the UN
• Continued and initiated some very expensive wars in the Middle East which ultimately benefited Israel, in some ways even more than the United States.
• Collaborated with Israel on Stuxnet and other computer virus attacks on Iran
• Decriminalized the Iranian terrorist group MEK which has been working with Israel to kill Iranian scientists and carry out sabotage in Iran
• Granted the most meetings with a foreign head of state (this according to Netanyahu himself)
• Increased military aid to Israel every year since taking office, assuring approximately 20% of its military budget
• Forged a close relationship with the Israeli defense and intelligence establishment (Ehud Barak said in a July CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer “I’ve seen many different administrations on both sides of the political aisle and I honestly feel that this administration has done more in regards to Israel’s security than anything I can remember in the past.”)
• Improved Israel’s QME – qualitative military edge – by providing Israel with advanced technology unavailable to any other country, such as the Fifth-generation stealth Joint Strike Fighter

About the only thing Obama has not yet committed to Israel to-date is a green light to bomb Iran. Yet.

Many are surprised at how liberally American Jews vote, even on Israel, and how liberally we answer opinion polls. Two States? Justice for the Palestinians? Wow, that’s very liberal of you. But American Jews are not seriously challenged by two real states or real justice for Palestinians or real cessation of Israeli settlement building or real concessions in returning stolen land. Obama simply gives his Jewish constituency the lip service he gives to all Democrats, and we all get to feel good about how liberal we are.

So, with a stellar “for Israel” performance record like the one above, what’s really so surprising after all? There’s still no Hope for Two States, and still no Change to bring justice to an occupied people.

When it comes to Israel, we seem to be continuously inundated with Israeli hardliner views. The August 21st piece (“Cooling off Israel: Five ways to avert a strike on Iran”) by former chief of Israeli intelligence Amos Yadlin, curiously labelled “National View” since it hardly reflects an American view on the subject, was no exception. The “five” views in his article basically boil down to one: Israel can’t go it alone, so the U.S. should see that it is in “our” interests to bomb Iran for Israel, or at least threaten it with war. But while Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak may bluster about unilaterally bombing Iran, they first need to drag the U.S. into such a war. Why? Because they can’t even sell their war domestically.

The Israeli public is justifiably wary of such go-it-alone threats. A recent poll by Israel’s Dahaf Institute showed 61 percent of Israelis believe Iran should not be attacked without U.S. consent. Yadlin’s article, and those like it, bear the fingerprints of a massive P.R. offensive – by AIPAC stalwarts; the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren in a recent WSJ article; frequent Standard Times contributors Richard Haas and Charles Krauthammer calling for war; a recent article in the NYT by Uzi Dayan, former IDF chief of staff; a recent barrage of Israeli government “leaks,” including a “shock and awe” style war plan; speculations in Israel’s English-language newspaper, and elsewhere.

And both House Democrats and Republicans, as well as every Republican candidate up to and including Mitt Romney, have eagerly parroted the Likudnik line: Iran has the bomb; Iran presents an existential threat to Israel; Israel’s interests are American interests.

None of this is true. This is about nuclear hegemony: Israel’s.

Despite the alarm an Iranian enrichment program provokes, Iran does not yet possess either a nuclear weapon or a missile capable of delivering it. In fact, “recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” (NYT article by James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, Feb 24, 2012).

America’s intelligence agencies say: baloney.

Hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties would result from an Iranian response to an Israeli (and/or American) first strike. If Americans still have a taste for reckless wars after our many adventures in the Middle East, we could delude ourselves that the mighty American military could make quick work of Iranian missile defenses (Iran has a military budget of only $6 billion a year), but no one can predict Iran’s non-military responses. Would the Straights of Hormuz stay open? How would the rest of the world respond? Even a brief (unlikely) war would cost at least $40 or $50 billion, to be paid for by either Israeli – or more likely American – taxpayers who already shell out $4 billion a year to the highly militarized state.

But here’s an even better idea for averting another unnecessary war.

Israeli nuclear scientist Uzi Even suggests that Israel shutter its nuclear plant in Dimona and dismantle its own (approximately 200) nuclear weapons in exchange for Iran dismantling its program. After all, if we are concerned with nuclear weapons presenting an existential threat to the 7 million people in Israel, we should also be at least somewhat concerned that Israel’s nukes present an existential threat to the other 350 million people in the Middle East.

If the U.S. goal is not simply to ensure Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the region, an approach other than beating the drums of war is necessary. On the other hand, if this kerfuffle indeed is about preserving the Zionist state’s nuclear advantage and thumbing our nose at the rest of the world, well, then we’d better be prepared to pay the price for this madness.

According to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report, Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. To date, the United States has provided Israel $115 billion in military assistance. Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel receiving benefits not available to any other countries; for example, Israel can use some U.S. military assistance both for research and development in the United States and for military purchases from Israeli manufacturers. In addition, all U.S. assistance earmarked for Israel is delivered in the first 30 days of the fiscal year, while most other recipients normally receive aid in installments. In addition to receiving U.S. State Department-administered foreign assistance, Israel also receives funds from annual defense appropriations bills for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense programs.

The Obama Administration’s FY2013 request includes $3.1 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel and $15 million for refugee resettlement. Within the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s FY2013 budget request includes $99.8 million in joint U.S.-Israeli co-development for missile defense.

On March 5, 2012, House lawmakers introduced H.R. 4133, the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. If passed, this bill would, among other things, allocate additional weaponry and munitions for the forward-deployed United States stockpile in Israel; provide Israel additional surplus defense articles and defense services, as appropriate, in the wake of the withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq; expand Israel’s authority to make purchases under the Foreign Military Financing program on a commercial basis; encourage an expanded role for Israel within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including an enhanced presence at NATO headquarters and exercises; support extension of the long-standing loan guarantee program for Israel, recognizing Israel’s unbroken record of repaying its loans on time and in full; and require the President to submit a report on the status of Israel’s qualitative military edge in light of current trends and instability in the region.

The Washington Post reported last year that Israel receives $9-10 billion a year in economic loans (ESF funds) guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The U.S. War Reserves Stocks for Allies program from the 1980’s allows the US to store weaponry in Israel, and to “lend” it to Israel. Some of this weaponry was used in Gaza in 2008. Basically, this is a military welfare program.

A 1984 Christian Science Monitor article reported that in that year Congress passed a law sponsored by Alan Cranston and –_ note the name_ — Joe Biden which essentially forgave Israel a $9 billion debt by giving it the funds to cancel the outstanding debt.

And periodically ESF and military debts to Israel are simply forgiven or written off. This is money we cannot afford, but Israel receives more bipartisan largesse than the American working poor. The Congressional Research Service estimates we have given $130 billion to Israel over the years.

Israel maintains military control over a vast disputed area in the West Bank. If we translate it into American terms, it is like the US occupying Mexico and Central America. This costs serious money.

But last October ( 2011), Israel actually cut its own defense spending by $850 million – 5%. How can it afford to do this ? Because we, the American taxpayers, are picking up the tab.

[]

Nowadays it’s difficult to criticize Israel without being called an antisemite. Somehow a revisionist definition of antisemitism has replaced racist generalizations of Jews. Now antisemitism is defined as any critique of Zionism, criticism of Israel’s occupation, land theft, rampant racism, civil rights abuses, press censorship, or noting similarities with the old South African Apartheid system. Despite the hasbarists’ best attempts to quash criticism, the fact remains: Israel is a rogue state with plenty to dislike.

• Illegal settlements, land theft
• Settler violence
• Use of martial law to appropriate land, which is then turned over to settlements
• Arrests without warrants
• Detentions without trial for tens of thousands of people, many children
• The killing of 6400 Palestinians since 2000
• The killing of of over 1000 civilians during the siege of Gaza
• Using children as human shields
• Bombing schools, hospitals, ambulances, water and sewage facilities in Gaza
• Using white phosphorus bombs on humans
• Kidnappings, like the recent case in the Ukraine
• Assassination teams, like the one in Dubai
• The killing of 8 Turks and one American citizen on the Mavi Marmara
• Resale of joint US-Israeli military technology to China
• Spying on the United States
• Killing and wounding of international protesters and journalists
• Impunity Israel enjoys at the UN — like Syria enjoys thanks to Russia’s veto
• Meddling in US politics and foreign policy by pro-Likud AIPAC, WINEP, JINSA, ZOA, and others, whose politics are not mainstream American or even moderate Israeli views
• Israel’s outreach toward right-wing Fundamentalist Christian groups and wingnuts like Glen Beck, with their Jerusalem revival meetings and End Times nonsense
• Avigdor Lieberman, an incredible racist, whose campaign Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism called “an outrageous, abominable, hate-filled campaign, brimming with incitement that, if left unchecked, could lead Israel to the gates of hell.”
• Former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Josef, who looks and sounds like an ayatollah himself and has said a number of offensive things about gentiles, besides advocating the murder of all Palestinians
• The institutionalized racism and discrimination against Arab Israelis, Ethiopians, and the difficult legacy of growing up as Mizrachim — Arab Jews
• Vigilante groups (in places like Petah Tikva and Kiryat Gat) which beat Arab men who date Israeli women, or stage “interventions” with the families of the women
• Laws which call into question the “Jewishness” of American Jews, of Masorti Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanist Jews — or privilege Orthodox Judaism

It finally found its way into my synagogue’s newsletter.

Making its rounds on the internet is a sermon entitled “Ehr kumt” (Yiddish for “he’s coming”) given during last year’s Jewish High Holidays by Rabbi Shlomo J. Lewis of Atlanta’s Etz Chaim (Conservative) synagogue. The piece, also called by its admirers the “Sermon of the Century,” has been reproduced on all the usual Islamophobia hate sites, the Republican Jewish Committee’s web site, and its notoriety has increased due to commendations for Lewis by the Georgia legislature and the US House of Representatives. I won’t reproduce the almost 4000-word piece because it’s simply too long, but if you haven’t read it you will find it here.

Quite simply, it’s nothing but a piece of hate speech by a religious leader. Not only that, it’s a piece of dreck delivered at a pulpit by a rabbi on the first day of Rosh Hashanah – a day for introspection and self-examination, not high political theater.

I read and found the sermon very offensive, as I do any time a preacher, rabbi or imam takes to the pulpit to bludgeon his congregation with bigotry. It reminded me of an exchange with a Muslim neighbor who emailed me that “I want to tell you that the situation in the U.S. now is similar to that in Germany in 1935, where bigotry, hatred, lies, and wide-spread discrimination against a hunted minority were very common.” His deepest fears, true or only partially true, made me wonder what sort of ranting about Jews was common in German churches in 1935.

I thought about this while I re-read Rabbi Lewis’ sermon and it struck me as ironic that a Jew – a rabbi no less – would willingly play the part of religious Hetzer.

In the Germany of 1935, while there were certainly members of the clergy like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller, or Karl Barth, who spoke out clearly and with almost as much passion as Jewish prophets themselves against the Nazi regime, for the most part the Pfarrer (pastors) of mainly the Evangelische (Lutheran) church (but also the Catholic church) practically tripped over themselves in embracing the new German culture war on Jews. Even the church itself was enlisted in the persecution. Susannah Heschel has documented this sad chapter of German religious history.

Rabbi Lewis reminds me of a pastor in some Pomeranian backwater who chose to deliver – not a homily on redemption and hope – but the most virulent, anti-Semitic diatribe he could think of on an Easter morning in 1935, using some of Lewis’ own themes and words to paint a portrait of Jewish evil. The pastor might have invoked passages from Martin Luther’s 1543 pamphlet, “Von den Jüden und ihren Lügen” (About the Jews and their Lies), as Lewis seems to take his from the world of Islamophobia.

On this holiest of days Lewis led with a martial theme:

“We are at war. We are at war with an enemy as savage, as voracious, as heartless as the Nazi.”

Ridiculing what he regards as present-day “moral relativism” and political correctness, Lewis’ prescription is to return to the imagined moral absolutes of an idealized World War II:

“Evil – ultimate, irreconcilable, evil threatened us and Roosevelt and Churchill had moral clarity and an exquisite understanding of what was at stake. It was not just the Sudetenland, not just Tubruk, not just Vienna, not just Casablanca. It was the entire planet.”

The evil that faces us, then, according to Lewis, is Amalek – the personification of evil and existential threat. Lewis then continues the story for which his sermon is named. It is the story of none other than the neo-fascist Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky showing up at a synagogue in Kovno, Lithuania, and warning the city’s Jews of impending doom. Lewis embellishes the story to paint Jabotinsky as a prophet:

“When Jabotinsky came, he delivered the drash [sermon] on Shabbos morning and I can still hear his words burning in my ears. He climbed up to the shtender, [lectern] stared at us from the bima [pulpit], glared at us with eyes full of fire and cried out. ‘EHR KUMT. YIDN FARLAWST AYER SHTETL – He’s coming. Jews abandon your city.’ We thought we were safe in Lithuania from the Nazis, from Hitler. We had lived there, thrived for a thousand years but Jabotinsky was right – his warning prophetic. We got out but most did not. […] We are not in Lithuania. It is not the 1930s. There is no Luftwaffe overhead. No U-boats off the coast of long Island. No Panzer divisions on our borders. But make no mistake; we are under attack – our values, our tolerance, our freedom, our virtue, our land.“

These last words are exactly the same ones our German pastor would have used in 1935: Unsere Freiheit, unsere Ehre, unsere Heimat. Lewis doesn’t even have any idea of how distastefully he has expropriated the same language used against Jews by Nazi collaborators.

At this point, the congregation is transfixed. Lewis is working the pulpit, reciting Prophet Jabotinsky’s words. But this time the villains are not Nazis or the mutable forms of Amalek – but Muslims. High Holidays be damned, Lewis is not in a forgiving mood. Muslims – all Muslims – are guilty by association. If they aren’t perpetrators, they’re mute enablers of evil:

“Today the enemy is radical Islam but it must be said sadly and reluctantly that there are unwitting, co-conspirators who strengthen the hands of the evil doers. Let me state that the overwhelming number of Muslims are good Muslims, fine human beings who want nothing more than a Jeep Cherokee in their driveway, a flat screen TV on their wall and a good education for their children, but these good Muslims have an obligation to destiny, to decency that thus far for the most part they have avoided. The Kulturkampf is not only external but internal as well. The good Muslims must sponsor rallies in Times Square, in Trafalgar Square, in the UN Plaza, on the Champs Elysee, in Mecca condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent. Thus far, they have not. The good Muslims must place ads in the NY Times. They must buy time on network TV, on cable stations, in the Jerusalem Post, in Le Monde, in Al Watan, on Al Jazeera condemning terrorism, denouncing unequivocally the slaughter of the innocent – thus far, they have not. Their silence allows the vicious to tarnish Islam and define it.”

Of course, the same could be said about his own congregation’s – most any Jewish congregation’s – silence on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but Lewis’ point is clear: there really are no good Muslims because even the “good” ones have thumbed their noses at their obligation to destiny and decency. And worse: they haven’t chosen sides properly in the Kulturkampf. For the remainder of his talk, Lewis doesn’t bother making a distinction between terrorists, Islamic radicals, Islamists, political Islamists, or just plain Muslims. His audience knows what he means.

But what Lewis is peddling is stronger than just Kulturkampf. It’s War of the Worlds or maybe an old-fashioned Evangelical Apocalypse:

“Let us understand that the radical Islamist assaults all over the globe are but skirmishes, fire fights, and vicious decoys. Christ and the anti-Christ. Gog U’Magog. The Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness; the bloody collision between civilization and depravity is on the border between Lebanon and Israel. It is on the Gaza Coast and in the Judean Hills of the West Bank. It is on the sandy beaches of Tel Aviv and on the cobblestoned mall of Ben Yehuda Street. It is in the underground schools of Sderot and on the bullet-proofed inner-city buses. It is in every school yard, hospital, nursery, classroom, park, theater – in every place of innocence and purity.”

As in many shuls, Lewis is playing to a crowd that sees Israel as a beleaguered Western force of good fighting forces of darkness and evil (translation: Muslims). The rest of Lewis’ rant is reserved for whining about Europeans, NGOs, the United Nations, the “liberal” media, and Christian Liberation Theology. For Lewis it’s not just about terrorism. It’s about the Muslim hordes knocking on the gates of Vienna while the liberal appeasers make tea for them.

Next, Lewis paints Islam as a disease to be eradicated:

“Let’s try an analogy. If someone contracted a life-threatening infection and we not only scolded them for using antibiotics but insisted that the bacteria had a right to infect their body and that perhaps, if we gave the invading infection an arm and a few toes, the bacteria would be satisfied and stop spreading. […] Anyone buy that medical advice? Well, folks, that’s our approach to the radical Islamist bacteria. It is amoral, has no conscience and will spread unless it is eradicated. – There is no negotiating. Appeasement is death.”

I found this disturbing and repugnant because, once again, my neighbor had a point. In 1935 German propaganda posters portrayed Jews as a bacteria. Yad Vashem has also documented a series of “educational” materials published at the time in Germany which included descriptions of Jews as:

“… foreigners threatening to displace the Germans from Germany. As hyenas strike disabled animals, Jews are portrayed as preying upon disadvantaged Germans/Christians. Other animals included in these comparisons are the chameleon (the great deceiver), the locust (the scourge of God) […] and the tapeworm (the parasite of humanity). Finally, Jews are compared to deadly bacteria, which threatens the existence of the human race. Just as deadly bacteria must be exterminated, so must the Jew.“

Now concentration camps and crematoria hopefully weren’t in the back of the good rabbi’s mind when he talked of “eradicating” the Islamist bacteria. But what in God’s name was he thinking? I suspect, for Lewis and his right wing political message, God didn’t even enter the equation. This was not a drash. It was a political rant, an abuse of his position.

Lewis then moves on to a meditation on the story of an Afghan woman who was a victim of an “honor” disfigurement by a relative– something which unfortunately occurs numerous developing, not just Muslim, countries. For Lewis, though, it’s all about Islam:

“If nothing else stirs us. If nothing else convinces us, let Bibi Aisha’s mutilated face be the face of Islamic radicalism. Let her face shake up even the most complacent and naive among us.”

Lewis then finishes with a rhetorical flourish, once again using the neo-fascist Jabotinsky’s words:

“A rabbi was once asked by his students….’Rebbi. Why are your sermons so stern?’ Replied the rabbi, ‘If a house is on fire and we chose not to wake up our children, for fear of disturbing their sleep, would that be love? Kinderlach, di hoyz brent.’ Children our house is on fire and I must arouse you from your slumber. […] My friends – the world is on fire and we must awake from our slumber. ‘HER KUMT.'”

This was the end of a pathetic performance that should never have taken place at a synagogue, much less the pulpit, and never on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. This was the kind of outrageous performance one expects from Glen Beck or David Duke.

On the same day, my rabbi, in contrast – also at a Conservative synagogue – talked about new beginnings. He cited stories, without embarrassing individuals, of people who had made enormous, positive changes in their lives over the course of the year. It was as inspiring and sweet as Lewis’ was repellant and hateful.

What now for rabbi Lewis, flush with his 15 minutes of fame? He’s back at it again. His latest message to his congregation is again a long political piece you’ll just have to read to understand why the framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted separation of church and state. I sincerely hope Rabbi Lewis’ congregants don’t need him for spiritual matters pertaining to Judaism or for pastoral counseling. Because this is a guy truly obsessed with seeing evil in Muslims and too busy writing his political screeds.

This was published in Loonwatch on November 30, 2010
http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/11/shlomo-lewis-atlanta-5771-might-as-well-be-1935/

Gilad Shalit was released today. I posted the following essay more than a year ago. There are still roughly 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails whose families love them every bit as much as Shalit’s.

Tomorrow, June 25th, 2010, will be the fourth year that Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit has remained in captivity. But it has also been over forty years since Palestinians in greater numbers have been imprisoned – many without ever receiving a trial.

For three generations, more than 20% of all Palestinians – and some estimate half of all Palestinian men – have see the inside of an Israeli prison sometime in their life.

In 2010, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported over 7,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, 264 under administrative detention – indefinite imprisonment without trial.

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel cites statistics noting that as of March 2010, 6631 Palestinians were imprisoned in Israel, 8 detained under the Illegal Combatants Law (7 of whom are from Gaza) and 237 were administratively detained. 35 were women; 337 were child prisoners, including 39 under the age of 16; and 773 were from Gaza.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem detailed civil and human rights abuses in a report titled “Without Trial” and has called for an end to Israel’s illegal detentions: “Under international law, a state may detain a resident of occupied territory without trial to prevent danger only in extremely exceptional cases. Israel, however, holds hundreds of Palestinians for months and years under administrative orders, without prosecuting them. By doing so, it denies them rights to which ordinary detainees in criminal proceedings are entitled: they do not know why they are detained, when they will go free and what evidence exists against them, and are not given an opportunity to refute this evidence.”

Two weeks ago, blogger Richard Silverstein reported that “Yediot Achronot published a story about a Mr. X imprisoned in an Israeli jail.  The man was in solitary confinement. His jailers did not know who he was, did not share a word with him, no one came to visit him. No one seemed to know he was there. They didn’t even know what crime he had committed or how he came to be in the prison. His prison cell was completely isolated from other prisoners and he couldn’t communicate in any way with them.” Then the article was pulled from the paper and the story was censored. The story was picked up by the Daily Telegraph in the UK. The prisoner apparently shares the same treatment as Gilad Shalid.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry lists seven Israeli soldiers either kidnapped or missing in action: Staff Sergeants Zecharya Baumel, Zvi Feldman, and Yehuda Katz – all missing since 1982 in a battle at Sultan Yakoub, in Lebanon; Major Ron Arad, who was captured on 16 October 1986, after his aircraft was shot down near Sidon, Lebanon; Guy Hever, who went missing on the southern Golan Heights in August 1997; Majdy Halabi, last seen hitchhiking in Dalyat El Karmel in May 2005; and finally Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was abducted on June 25, 2006 near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom. Only for Shalit has there been any recent “proof of life” and Hamas acknowledges holding him.

For the last four years 23-year-old Shalit has been held in an undisclosed location and, like Israeli Prisoner X, even Red Cross visits have been denied. Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi has gone on record that securing the release of Shalit is of the utmost importance to Israel. But Ashkenazi has clashed with the Netanyahu government over the degree of importance. For four years Israel and Hamas have rejected each other’s demands and offers. In 2009 a German-brokered deal collapsed after Hamas rejected additional Israeli requirements that released political prisoners go into exile.

Any father – Israeli, Palestinian, or American – feels the pain that Shalit’s father swallows when he talks about his son. I know I do. I understand Noam and Aviva Shalit’s desperation and frustration with both Hamas and their own government. And it deeply disturbs me that Shalit, who was still a teenager when he was captured, and his family are paying a steep personal price. But so are Palestinian families. The father in me appeals to both sides to settle the prisoner negotiations and let all political prisoners – Palestinians and the one Israeli – free. But neither the Hamas nor Likud and Beteinu extremists have ears for appeals to humanity.

But there is a more pragmatic reason to resolve this issue now.

Israel has announced a relaxation of bans on certain humanitarian imports to Gaza in the wake of the flotilla attack. Flotilla organizers and the Turkish charity whose members were killed on the Mavi Marmara may have been accused of being Al Qaeda and Hamas operatives, but the incident has underscored the fact that Hamas remains in charge in Gaza and it represents governance in the besieged strip. While Israel and Hamas can both fume about Zionist or terrorist “entities,” it becomes clearer by the day: they have to start talking to each other. As diverse as the responses to the flotilla attack have been (suits against Israel in the EU versus an outpouring of Congressional resolutions s

upporting Israel in the US), there are two sides – and they must start talking.

Israel recently denied German development minister Dirk Niebel entry into Gaza. To Israel such visits only serve to legitimize Hamas. While this is somewhat ironic in light of Israel’s campaign against “Israel delegitimizers,” the snub of the German diplomat may also have been meant as a message to the international community to butt out of the Shalit negotiations and that talks with Hamas are off-limits.

Indeed, the issue of Hamas legitimacy has been the major stumbling block. Israel has an official policy of not talking to “terrorists.” Neither Israel, the PA, Egypt, nor the US want to acknowledge Hamas. For all its lofty verbiage, the Obama administration has also kept neocon ideology alive by refusing to talk to enemies. But Europe and the Arab and Muslim worlds are more pragmatic. Despite funding from Iran, the Arab League, Turkey, and the EU are willing to at least talk to Hamas. Hamas’ growing legitimacy has been observed by Americans. The New York Review of Books ran an interesting article on Hamas last year by Nicolas Pelham and Max Rodenbeck. Charlie Rose interviewed Khaled Meshaal in Damascus about a month ago. Pretending that Hamas does not represents 1.5 million people is as senseless as pretending that two Republican senators do not represent Idaho, a state with the same population as Gaza.

Acknowledging both elected governments (Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza) would force an accommodation with each other. But as long as “Palestinian unity” is a precondition for talks, there will be no peace, no end of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, and no resolution of a prisoner exchange.

But resolving a prisoner exchange – perhaps the simplest first step in restarting peace negotiations – would be in everyone’s interest.

It is in Israel’s interests to build on its gesture of relaxing Gaza imports by demonstrating flexibility it has not shown for some time. Now that Israel has been able to turn this gesture into a minor public relations victory and has indeed relaxed some import items, Shalit becomes slightly less valuable to Hamas as a tool to win import concessions from Israel. For Hamas, Shalit now has value only for a prisoner exchange. This would be a good time for Hamas to make some minimal concessions of its own in regard to Israel’s demands. Similarly, on the anniversary of Shalit’s capture, the Netanyahu government is under increasing pressure to bring him home. It would be a good time for Israel to make some concessions as well.

To both sides: Bring Gilad Shalit home. Bring all the political prisoners home.

Two months ago the United States recognized South Sudan. Last March the US started bombing Libya for regime change. Four months later it recognized that new rebel regime. For decades the United States recognized Taipei, not China, as the legitimate Chinese government. Only in 1972 did the US finally recognize a nation of nearly a billion people.

Despite the ease with which nations can be recognized or ignored, the United States insists that a Palestinian state cannot exist without further negotiations with a Likud government whose party platform says: “Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River. [..] The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state.”

For decades the United States has mouthed support for a Two State solution. But for 42 years US-mediated talks have produced nothing but delays during which Israel continued its military occupation and built more settlements. In 2009 President Obama went to Cairo and again made promises to resolve the issue. But once again the US has failed to deliver.

On Friday, frustrated by four decades of stonewalling and US bias, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will go to the UN and, in more a poker play than anything, will ask the Security Council to grant Palestine the same type of statehood that it granted Israel 63 years ago. Though this will almost certainly be defeated, Abbas will finally force the US to show its hand. The US has promised Israel it will use its veto to kill a Palestinian state despite the fact that over three quarters of the General Assembly support it.

The reasons for a US veto run counter to its own interests in supporting democracy and peace in the Middle East. Instead, they are motivated by a powerful pro-Israel lobby and by growing “Old Testament” fundamentalism among a Congress which sees Israel as a divine nation.

Last month a fifth of all American Congressmen and half of all Freshman Congressmen accepted free junkets to Israel funded by a wing of AIPAC instead of facing their own constituents on economic issues during the recess. At the same time, the Israel Project, a right-wing, Muslim-bashing group, brought 18 American ambassadors to Israel as well.

All this effort was to kill a Palestinian state. The pressures that both Democrats and Republicans feeding at the trough of the Israel Lobby or acting out of religious sentiment exert on foreign policy is intense. Intense and extremely dangerous.

Dangerous because the United States is ignoring the lessons of the Arab Spring – that its pliant regimes in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and elsewhere are despised; and, by extension, the US is too for supporting them.

Dangerous because former allies like Egypt and Turkey have finally had it with biased US foreign policy and now see the United States as toxic and irrelevant. Even the Saudis have threatened to reevaluate their relationship with the United States. And Turkey is starting to challenge the US as a regional power broker.

Dangerous because the United States is becoming isolated internationally by confusing Israeli interests for our own. Two weeks ago, in a speech at the Jewish People Policy Institute, Ambassador Daniel Shapiro said it quite bluntly: “The test of every policy the Administration develops in the Middle East is whether it is consistent with the goal of ensuring Israel’s future as a secure, Jewish, democratic state. That is a commitment that runs as a common thread through our entire government.”

Dangerous because an isolated US and Israel make war more likely.

This subservience to a foreign nation’s interests troubles even strong Israel supporters.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman worried in a recent editorial that Israel’s policies have “left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.” Friedman thinks the US is painting itself into a corner with its veto: “the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.”

Once the Israel Lobby digests its meal of the remains of the Palestinian state, what’s next on the menu? Already the pro-Israel hawks are calling for war on Iran. Most of the Republican hopefuls are nodding in agreement with Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon when he says: “All options are on the table.”

Whose table is that?

This morning’s editorial section contained a piece by Lawrence J. Haas advocating war on Iran. It was typical of ramped-up calls from neoconservatives inside and outside the Obama administration, many of whom have a misplaced preoccupation with Israel and who claim Iran has promised to incinerate half of the world’s Jews in a second nuclear holocaust. No matter that it is Israel which possesses the nukes and that no proof of Iranian nuclear weapons actually exists.

While this war-mongering is really all about who shall maintain a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East and Central Asia — and in so doing preserve oil-dependent colonialism for a few more decades — the war mongers and their friends in the defense industry and pro-Israel lobby have stepped up the calls for U.S. military action, and they’ve added a few new justifications for it. Now in addition to threatening to nuke Israel with (non-existent) nuclear weapons, Iran is being blamed for attacks on Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and allying itself with Al Qaeda. And now that the U.S. has successfully assassinated bin Laden, we really need another bogeyman.

But since our country seems bound and determined to get into — frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of wars we’ve got going on now — let’s just call it another war, it might be good to understand precisely what the Iranians think of us. Simplistic formulations like “clash of civilizations” and “they hate us for what we have” don’t provide any insight. Apparently nobody wants to re-hash or even look at history: the U.S. coup which removed a secular, democratic Iranian government in the Fifties, American support for the Shah and his brutal secret police, or recent American and Israeli assassinations and sabotage. But in fact, the U.S. has been meddling in Iran since the beginning of the 20th century and the Iranians have a long list of gripes. Iran also has legitimate concerns for its security, as Ron Paul pointed out yesterday in a GOP candidate debate. It is virtually surrounded by the United States:

Given all this, it is unlikely Iran presents much of a military threat to anyone, including Israel. And even Ehud Barak agrees.

So, if the real issue is not the bogus existential threat to Israel, and the real issue actually is the preservation of Israel’s nuclear monopoly, how do the Iranians feel about it?

One of the best documents to gauge Iran’s views is the transcript of a speech given in 2001 by Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iranian presidents come and go, but the mullahocracy remains to guide not only domestic life in Iran but also foreign policy.

In this 2001 speech, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani discussed colonialism, capitalism, the world since 1948, and Israel’s nuclear advantage, which he sees as a colonial effort and not a Jewish conspiracy. A passage below on “US-British support for Israel” is often cited as a veiled threat to destroy Israel. But the speech discusses neutralizing Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons, not destroying the nation. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

The Speech

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate… In response to your demands I will dedicate the first sermon to the Palestinian issue and the events in the world of Islam. I will use the second sermon to deal with other matters.

First, I have to thank all the good people who have made an effort to participate in the Quds rallies. In many streets I saw their ranks moving towards the university. This reflects the vigilance, the awareness, the faith and the dependable character of our good people. I hope similar support for the Palestinians is being expressed throughout the world.

Palestinian issue

The Palestinian issue, and the formation of the state of Israel, is among the worst periods of our contemporary history. I don’t know of any similar tragedy. In the fifty years that this pseudo state has been formed, and in the several decades before it, when fighting was going on, hundreds of thousands of holy people shed their blood, millions of people lost their homes, millions of people were injured, tragedies resulting from these events constitute the greatest encyclopedia of crime committed by the World Arrogance. History will not forget these things. In my sermon I would like to discuss some 30 points about the history of these events. I think it may be possible to speak about them in a single discourse and I would like to refer to the important points of this history.

First, this is the most misfortunate, tragic and bitter colonial event. Secondly colonialism, lead by Britain and then America, and supported by the United Nations and other sections of the World Arrogance are responsible for these crimes. If in the future an international court is formed – and this is my third point: a court will be formed sooner or later – and if those responsible for these crimes are put on trial many bitter truths will become known in the court. We should follow up this idea and we should ask just and knowledgeable judges to look into these crimes.

The fourth point is that the engine for this disaster is international Zionism. Zionism is a political party which was created some 100 years ago. It is named after the devotees of Zion, a hilltop in Bayt al-Maqdis. This party is not purely Jewish and not all Jews are Zionist. There are many Jews who don’t believe in Zionism. There are many Jewish scholars in America who have been active against the these events. They are also present in other parts of the world. Not all the members of the party are Jewish. There are distinguished Western politicians who were Zionist, such as Churchill, Eisenhower, Kennedy, etc. Of course, I am not an expert in this field and I don’t want to put any names in this list but those who are interested can find out the names of the well known Zionists. This party is still very active around the world and it is the engine for important events connected to Israel, and the Arab and Islamic world. This was my fourth point.

The fifth point is that the loss suffered by the formation of the pseudo state of Israel went beyond Palestine. The Jewish people themselves suffered. This is so because the Jewish people were settled in many countries. In our country, Iran, they were getting on with their life. They were engaged in business. They were rich. They enjoyed influence and a good life. This Zionist movement provoked many Jews, on the basis of their devotion to a religious state of their own, to take a wrong posture. They were put under pressure. There was an exodus and many of them became homeless. Now they have to live in those territories. I will discuss the living conditions in this country if I have the time. But they now have to wait for a possible reverse exodus because finally one day, this tumour in the body of the Islamic world will be removed and then millions of Jews who have moved there will be homeless again. When will this happen? We have to discuss this point on another occasion.

Formation of Israel

This formation of Israel was also to the loss of the region. The region suffered a great loss. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on armament and war. This is beside the acts of injustice committed against the people of Palestine. So who has benefited from the situation? This is my sixth point: The root of the problem is colonial. As traditional form of colonialism came to an end the colonialists sought new instruments of influence. One of these was to impose lackey governments in the previous colonies. The other was to create many military bases across the world, in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and other sensitive regions of the world. Costly military colonial posts on land and sea. But the most important objective was to create governments which were totally dependent on colonialism and the best case was that of the Jews – the Zionist government in the Palestinian land. This base was to serve several objectives.

Firstly, it was aimed at getting rid of Zionism in the West, which had become a real nuisance to governments and great powers. It was causing trouble. They threw them out and brought them to Palestine. Secondly, they made Zionism and the Israeli government dependent on themselves to make sure that they would be a tool in their hands. However, the opposite is true as well. They have lobbies which take advantage of colonialism to ensure their own survival. However, colonialism is the main factor. Later on, it was transformed into imperialism because colonialism did not officially exist any more. That was how it manifested itself.

Thirdly, they did that to cause insecurity and threaten other governments and force them to become dependent on imperialism. Then they could sell them arms and do other military things as well. This deeply affected the lives of the people and government of the region and Muslims because they needed particular Western and imperialist products.

There was constant warfare and regional countries became insecure and there was an attempt to prevent their economic and technological growth. We can see this happening and one does not need to explain it in detail. You can see all these things. Therefore, that is the important point. Please do not forget that point until the end of our discussion. Then we can see how much we can count on that when we are analysing the situation or when we are making predictions about the future. The Israeli government was established to act as a guardian, protector and gendarme that defends the interests of imperialism. I have already mentioned several points with regard to that issue.

The Israeli government itself, be it when it was in its embryonic stage or in its present shape, has been hanging from the umbilical cord of colonialism. It has been feeding off it. If the imperialists stop supporting it, it will be in trouble. Thus there is no independent government in Israel in the true sense of the word. It is totally dependent. Now, the Americans are officially contributing 4bn dollars a year to it. There is also the unofficial contributions made by Jewish communities and others. It is a lot.

US-British support for Israel

It is also supported politically in the United Nations and many other places. They also contain Islamic and Arab governments. Israel needs all of those things and the Americans and Britain are meeting its needs. Therefore, we should consider it to be an outgrowth of colonialism and a multi-purpose colonial base. That is where we should start discussing the next point. So the survival of Israel depends on the interests of imperialists and colonialists. So they go together.

The colonialists will keep this base as long as they need it. Now, whether they can do so or not is a separate issue and this is my next point. Any time they find a replacement for that particular instrument, they will take it up and this will come to an end. This will open a new chapter. Because colonialism and imperialism will not easily leave the people of the world alone. Therefore, you can see that they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favours Israel. Well, from a numerical point of view, it cannot have as many troops as Muslims and Arabs do. So they have improved the quality of what they have. Classical weaponry has its own limitations. They have limited use. They have a limited range as well. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.

If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality. Of course, you can see that the Americans have kept their eyes peeled and they are carefully looking for even the slightest hint that technological advances are being made by an independent Islamic country. If an independent Islamic country is thinking about acquiring other kinds of weaponry, then they will do their utmost to prevent it from acquiring them. Well, that is something that almost the entire world is discussing right now.

Now, even if that does not happen, they can still inflict greater costs on the imperialists. That is possible as well. Developments over the last few months really frightened the Americans. That is a cost in itself. Under special circumstances, such costs may be inflicted on the imperialists by people who are fighting for their rights or by Muslims. Then they will compare them to see how they could advance their interests better or what they can do. However, we cannot engage in such debates for too long. We cannot encourage that sort of thing either. I am only talking about the natural course of developments. The natural course of developments is such that such things may happen.

Those who are desperate, but who are also faithful and idealistic, see that this is in their best interests. Then no-one will be able to control them. That is when they become disappointed with such ordinary deceptive methods. Therefore, in the future, the interests of colonialism and imperialism dictate whether Israel will survive or not. Moreover, it is the resistance put up by Muslims and Iraq and the Palestinians themselves that matters. They should besiege imperialists and make them think about whether it serves their interests or not. They should also think about whether maintaining the current balance of power, which favours Israel, is affordable or not. Both of those things may change in the future.

Iran’s policy

Well, what kind of policy should the Islamic Republic pursue? That is a different issue, which is our eighth or ninth point. As I said, the supreme leader of the revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i has repeatedly said what our policy is. He explicitly said that during the Friday-prayer sermons which he delivered recently. He has enunciated our policy. Whatever we say is an analysis of those policies. The government, the Majlis and all the Iranian institutions and our friends abroad all pursue the same policy.

Well, during all those stages, the Palestinian jihad was proceeding as well. To be honest, the Palestinians never remained completely silent. They had their ups and downs. However, they never became silent. For a while, armed struggle intensified. However, they had to intervene. Their intervention took place through the pressure that was exerted on those who were involved in the armed struggle. It raised the issue of Camp David through puppet governments. It took up 20 years of the Palestinians’ time.

It is not the case that the jihad has completely subsided. However, there have also created false hopes along with the people’s rather quiet jihad. In the end, it resulted in the formation of the so-called national authority. They made false promises which included only 6,000 km of the 28,000 km of the Palestinian territory. In this way, they could form a small and insignificant government here. However, it seems that that era is coming to an end.

At this stage the Palestinians waited. They fell silent and waited. They formed political parties. Some of them took up arms but they were not strong. The final stage of compromise was held at Camp David II, in New York or Washington in America. At that stage Arafat who had been optimistic about the efforts of the American brokers lost hope. When he came to Iran he said President Clinton’s comments at the meeting was a bomb which destroyed the negotiations, the statements of the American president – expressed after several days of intense negotiations – was merely a different version of the Israeli demands, and the meeting broke up. Arafat had written it all down. He read them for me from his notebook.

In the meantime the intifadah began and found a new climax. The Palestinians came to the conclusion that negotiations, be they in Madrid, Camp David, Oslo or any other place, will succeed, only if it is accompanied by their own efforts, selflessness and revolutionary actions. This was the background to the second Intifadah. It began when the Lebanese, with their spirited actions, forced the Israelis, for the first time, to flee in disgrace. This was a good and inspiring lesson. The Palestinian struggle lives on and the Intifadah, the current climax of the Palestinian struggle, is the result of the misleading and dishonest actions of the Western powers. We are witnessing this in the world today. The situation has deep roots. This is the tenth point that I wanted to make.

Now is the Palestinian revolution, the current Intifadah, going to weaken in the future? Some people may think that the Palestinians are going to get tired, that a small community is not going to be able to stand against all this power, that the feebleness and incapability of the Islamic world and its governments will undermine their resolve. But this judgement is wrong.

Palestinian intifadah

For one thing the Palestinian jihad has been the source of inspiration to many other Islamic movements throughout the world. It was a source of inspiration to us in Iran. It has been a source of inspiration to Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Chechnya, African countries, Sudan. They feel obliged to support this jihad. Furthermore, their own advancement has similar positive effects on the Palestinian movement. These countries are not going to forget their source of inspiration. They will keeping an eye on the situation. The Palestinian movement will survive. There may be ups and downs. There many be small ups and downs in view of the global situation. But this is not going to die because it is rooted in the homelessness of five million people, in the innocence of eight million people, in the innocent blood of hundreds of thousands of martyrs whose call is still being heard, in the fallen weapons that call to be taken up, in the feelings of innocence and justice, and more than anything, in the path of martyrdom and happiness and the path of the Almighty. Therefore, you cannot say that the Palestinian movement will die. There may be ups or downs but it will survive. And it will undoubtedly end with the liberation of Palestine.

The huge wave of Islamic jihad of Palestine subsided with the start of the compromise negotiations. Then, when the talks reached a deadlock, the Palestinian intifadah intensified once again, and today, we face a new situation. The important issue today is very important and deserves a mention.

This is my 11th point. It seems that global arrogance has planned four different moves to stop and quell the present intifadah, or at least rid itself of its grave consequences. The first one concerns propaganda. You can see the great propaganda campaign which is in progress in the world today with the aim of introducing them the Palestinians as terrorists, and Israel as the side that is defending itself. You need someone as foolhardy as Molla Nasreddin legendary witty folk figure to believe this. Otherwise, who can believe that Israel, with all its helicopters, F-16 aircraft, tanks and rockets – which it uses to assassinate people – is the side that it is engaged in self-defence, but a selfless and devoted human being, who sees no other option but to attach a bomb to himself and blow himself to pieces in some place, is the terrorist element? If one day, the world reaches such a conclusion and offers such a judgment, then we must consider humanity as dead and buried, and we must start to believe that humans are the same as, or even worse than, animals. Of course, already there are people who act in such a way, but at the same time, claim to champion the cause of human rights.

In my opinion, such a belief is not going to find any place among the righteous-seeking and struggling people. Yet, this kind of propaganda exists in the world today.

The second method they have chosen is violence. You can see how it Israel is perpetrating violence. When one person is killed inside the Israeli territory, a squadron of helicopters begin to fire indiscriminately at the people. You can see for yourselves how far violence has gone. Is this kind of violence a proportionate and appropriate response? Of course, it must be acknowledged that both these methods – that is to say propaganda and violence – have had some effect, but in general, they just aggravate an already bad situation. The people who have no choice but to resort to martyrdom-seeking operations are not going to frightened of this violence. After all, they have nothing to lose. How is a person going to lose anything when he believes that by blowing himself up, one minute he is on this material world and the next moment he is going to be transferred to the divine paradise on the wings of divine angels, and once there, he will sit next to the Prophet and the disciples of God, in a reception given in the honour of divine martyrs?

This is really like a duck trying to threaten the river, or the sea. There is no way that a fish can live without the water of the sea.

As I said earlier, the conditions in Palestine are creating this type of people. These acts of violence by Israel may silence some uncertain or opportunist elements, but as a rule, they will strengthen the resolve of others. It is because of this that I want to tell global arrogance to be on guard. It is here that the cost of exerting pressure on the people of Palestine and lending support to Israel can be very high for global arrogance. If one day, these tired, faithful and martyrdom-loving people decide to deliver blows to the vital interests of arrogance no matter where they are, then they can do this. They the Americans may be able to stop half of these operations, or even two-thirds of them, but some will still be carried out, and when they do, the costs will be huge. The events in New York can be a lesson for the Americans, particularly today, when, due to their aggressive moves and their mistakes, they have paved the way and made it possible for some groups to be armed with non-conventional weapons.

Therefore, as a person who has good knowledge of history, particularly the history of popular movements, I would like to admonish the Westerners not allow to matters to go this far. They should not feel happy about events such as attacks by helicopters, or other acts of violence by Israel. This is very dangerous, and we really do not want to see the world security to be disrupted, and we do not want to see the present insecurity – which has cos

t the world more than 1,000bn dollars and has paralysed the world in many areas, including in Israel itself. The West should not allow the world to suffer from such conditions. They should not allow a situation of confrontation and antagonism between the devoted, martyrdom-seeking forces, and the centres of arrogant power, in the form of the Third World War. This is the worst possible scenario, if arrogance continues with its present ways.

The other path that they have chosen is the path of deceit and false promises. America announces that it supports an independent Palestinian state, with Bayt al-Maqdis as its capital. However, we see that things are different in practice. Europe says the same thing, and Mitchell puts forward a plan. Naturally, such plans have short-term effects for a month or two. Nonetheless, after a while, it seems the people who made these promises start to regret their statements, while, at the same time, those who had believed these promises also start to regret their decision. These plans are not going to produce much. Their last plan involves the use of the so-called Palestinian self-rule authority. This is very bitter indeed. They provide the self-rule authority with a list of names, and ask them to arrest and hand over to Israel for example 200 people on the list. God forbid if the leaders of the self-rule authority fall for this, although they already have done to some extent. They the Israelis are not going to be happy with just an arrest. They are after more.

The worst things that can happen is division and fighting among themselves. All those who have been engaged in jihad for the past 50 years will destroy all their background with one wrong action. We do not want this bitter incident to occur in the history of the Palestinian struggle. However, it is possible for such a thing to happen. I think a few days ago, the Israelis announced that they had complete confidence in Arafat and his intention to establish security. You have witnessed that Israel and America emphasize that there should be complete calm for one week before serious negotiations can begin. They think that this one week is enough and after that it will be difficult to revitalize it the intifadah. During this week other decisions will be made. The self-rule government should not give in to this and think that it will achieve its objectives in this way. In America, he Arafat saw and heard the final words of Mr. Clinton and he noted them in his old note book. He knows what can happen. As a result, God willing, the leaders of the self-rule government will not be deceived by this big trickery.

Another solution that they are hopeful about, is to tire the mojahedin and to propagate, what they used to always say to us in Iran, that there is no use in these actions, and they are like trying to achieve the impossible; they said why should these valuable human beings be destroyed like this. These are not in line with Islamic and Koranic logic. These who are in the arena are Muslims.

The Koran says that it is not such that your enemy should not be harmed… In a serious and true jihad, if you suffer, your enemy will also suffer. It addition, it says: you have some hopes that are far beyond their reach. With this suffering, you will reach absolute prosperity and with their suffering, they will plunge into hell; these are not equal. You rely on justice and God, and they are on the edge of an abyss of fire preceding sentence in Arabic and these two are not the same.

You, who believe yourselves to be intelligent people and diplomats, shouldn’t say that why are these Palestinian children are being lost like this. These blows are very fatal. You are destroying the enemy from within. A nation which does not have atomic and chemical weapons and F-16s, has discovered something stronger than F-16s which it has pursued. You have left them no option. You have shut off everywhere to them. You have placed them there through your extermination methods. As a result, it seems that these methods which the imperialists are using, will lead to no where. These were some eight or nine points which I have made and not kept count of. You yourself should count them.

Self defence or terrorism

See what arrogance Israel is demonstrating in this regard. The conference of the Islamic countries’ foreign ministers in Qatar was on the basis of an invitation by Arafat and everyone was Arafat’s guest. Israel arrogantly said that Arafat has no right to leave Palestine and even went further and said he shouldn’t leave Ramallah. Today, they are saying he has no right to leave his home. Well, this is a self-rule government. He is a weak designated against elected mayor without any authority. What government and establishment is this? What have you pinned your hopes on? Why have you wasted the Palestinian nations’ time for 20 years. Today some advise the youth and the women who have recently joined the masses of martyrdom-seeking individuals, to protect and preserve themselves for some other time. I want to mention two other important issues in another part of my speech.

Now that the situation has become a bit desperate, the Europeans, who during the past few months pursued a different approach to that of America and Israel and had made the Islamic world a little hopeful, have changed their stance.

They are openly saying that Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine are terrorist organizations. They are so shameless that they ask Islamic countries to treat these groups as if they were terrorists, to close down their accounts, to close their offices, to put their members on trial. To be so obedient is a source of shame for European governments which see themselves as being equal to America. How can they explain this injustice to their own nations and freedom-loving people? Is this fair judgment? There are five million Palestinian refugees, their families live on UN handouts in camps and shanty towns. Their groves, homes, farms and workshops inside Palestinian territories are being taken over by rich Zionists. They are only defending themselves and you call them terrorists. It is shameful. You have to be truly shameless. What sort of people pronounce these things and vote for these things in their countries? Let the world see the truth. Let the freedom-loving people of the world see the truth. Let them see that those who call themselves the leaders of the free world and who claim to be defending human rights are, in fact, opposed to human rights. They are weak and inferior. There is no rationale for their actions. Their helicopters openly terrorize people on the streets. They, and not the Palestinian Authority, control the airspace. The helicopters come down and target taxi passengers after identifying them. This is what terrorists do. Are they defending helpless people? If this is their rationale then the actions of ordinary terrorists are truly more honourable than this form of freedom seeking encouraged by the West ? One day the world will judge.

Warns USA

The second issue concerns America itself. In Afghanistan, the Americans – according to their own thinking, according to their own analysis – achieved a swift victory through the power of bombardment. Of course, it seems to be the case, but they attach very little value to the main principle and they think that the role played by the Afghan nation, the United Front and the mojahed forces. That is at least what they pretend. That is what they are displaying to the world, even if they do not truly think so. They are trying to exhibit to the world that America has found a way for fighting its opponents. The bombings, on the one hand, and the use of domestic Afghan forces, as far as they do whatever America tells them. But, such calculations about Afghanistan cannot work in other places. You know that the forces which forced the Taleban to withdraw were also involved fighting, their problem was that wherever they were about to advance, Pakistani aircraft would hit their positions in support of the Taleban. And, wherever the Taleban

had any shortcoming, the systematic army of Pakistan would intervene voluntarily. Now, the reverse is happening. Now, America is attacking the Taleban instead of the United Front which Pakistan was attacking. America also tied the hands of Pakistan so that it does not interfere from the other side. Yes, that role was indeed played by America, we accept that much. But, if America intends to compare this with other situations and use this process as a model and tested method for its future policies – which seems quite likely at the moment, because such assumptions exist in the While House and the American parliament – that would create another tragedy for mankind and world security, and it will very soon draw the attention of the Americans to the fact that they have made a strategic mistake. That is not a simple task.

The people of Afghanistan were in fact long tired of war, of clashes and of the selfishness of their domestic leaders and many other things. The way was already paved. Even if it was not America, any other powerful country, if it had become involved, could have done this and could have organized such a task. Of course, the future of this is very difficult to predict , because neither America has the capacity, acceptability or popularity among the people, nor there is any trust for it America. Others will not accept this either. We should all work together for the future of Afghanistan so that the people of Afghanistan do not fall into the trap of war, and so that their security, work and reconstruction of their country could get under way. And, if America wishes to show good will, it could also support and help. They the Americans should not think of turning that place Afghanistan into a military base, because the consequences of that can already be envisaged. It will result in dealing blows and receiving blows, it will have ups and downs; but, ultimately, nations cannot accept captivity.

You see that despite this massive deployment of forces the Jews in Palestine are faced with such circumstances. Fifty years have passed and it will be the same in 100 years. The Crusades lasted nearly 200 years and they ended like that. It’s the same now. At the end, nations will rise and resist. Amidst this, some will secure their immediate interests, and many will experience the loss.

On the whole, it seems today, the world situation and our region, is in need, on the one hand, of the alertness of nations and governments, and on the other, the realism and fairness of the arrogant powers who want to revitalize the colonial era by deploying troops, and occupying the previously abandoned military bases and securing a presence in the region. There is the hope that, God willing, this trend will secure the interest of justice and righteousness…

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iran/2001/011214-text.html

Qods Day Speech (Jerusalem Day)
Chairman of Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani
December 14, 2001, Friday
Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, in Persian 1130 gmt 14 Dec 01
Translated by BBC Worldwide Monitoring

Last Spring we were presented with the unseemly sight of a foreign leader insulting a sitting president before both houses of Congress. On May 24^th House Majority leader Eric Cantor escorted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into the congressional chambers in what could easily have been mistaken for a State of the Union Address by the President. What made the display particularly unseemly was that Netanyahu used the opportunity to excoriate President Obama for his tepid criticism of Israel’s illegal settlements while the President was in London.

An article in the New York Times guessed at the motives: “With elections coming up next year, the lawmakers appeared eager to demonstrate their support for Israel as part of an effort to secure backing from one of the country’s most powerful constituencies, American Jews.” The article failed to mention that most congressional Zionists are fundamentalist Christians, not Jews, for whom Israel is not just another country, but a veritable Biblical Disneyland.

All this is bad enough, but now they’re at it again. This week we learn that, instead of meeting with constituents during the Summer recess, a fifth of American Congressmen will be accepting free junkets to Israel funded by the American Israel Education Foundation, one of AIPAC’s many PACs. According to the Jerusalem Post, 81 Congressmen, 55 Republicans and 26 Democrats, will visit Israel. Significantly, the number includes half of all freshman Republicans. The Republican delegation will be headed by Eric Cantor and the Democrats by Steny Hoyer.

Not to be outdone, the Israel Project, a right-wing group known for its vicious Muslim-bashing, is bringing 18 American ambassadors to Israel as well.

All this precedes an anticipated call for a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September. Similar to a call for Israel’s creation 60-some years ago, also at the UN, the call for a Palestinian state is largely symbolic because it is expected that the Obama administration, like Congress, fully subservient to a pro-Israel lobby, will cast a veto. This call for Palestinian statehood — without American “facilitation” — is a final recognition of the fact that the United States has been consistently biased and is no longer relevant to the peace process.

So, while the American economy is in shambles, a motley group of American Congressmen will be getting tans at the Dead Sea, a militarily-controlled area off-limits to Palestinians. They will be touring Jerusalem, visiting Tel Aviv, and possibly popping into Ramallah to visit a Palestinian caretaker government most Palestinians hold in contempt. They’ll be meeting with Israeli generals who will tell them how Israel is stopping terrorism in its backyard so that we don’t have it in ours.

If you do a little research online, you can find out about these junkets. According to legistorm.com, a number of groups send congressmen to Israel for these — I wouldn’t call them serious fact-finding missions — vacations. The American Israel Education Foundation is the major organizer, but other groups fund similar “educational” trips: the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, the Brookings Institution, Center for Middle East Peace & Economic Cooperation, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, IDT Corp., the Jewish Community Relations Council, Makhteshim Agan, New America Foundation, Project Interchange, the Republican Jewish Coalition, numerous local Jewish Federations, Tel Aviv University, Telos Group, United Jewish Appeals, and the World Jewish Congress. In all, Legistorm has recorded 1020 of these junkets to Israel since roughly 2001.

In contrast, there have been 2 fact-finding missions to Palestine.

It’s bad enough that Congress is being diverted from doing its job of fixing the economy by these trips and that the Likud gets more attention than constituents, but the worst part is that we are letting a foreign nation and its boosters corrupt and bias our foreign policy. In exchange for the campaign donations they disburse, these lobbyists assure that our Congressmen keep giving Israel $8 million a day in military assistance and producing vetoes at the United Nations.

All this will eventually result in a backlash, not only against Israel, but unfortunately against Jewish Americans too, whether they objected to this madness or supported it. It’s time to say: enough. And time to do the right thing and abstain from vetoing a Palestinian state in September.

Multiculturalism is a filthy word in their lexicon. Feminism is just as bad. Gays merit both contempt and physical punishment. Violence toward minorities has always been their trademark, and for decades they’ve attacked liberals, secularists, and those who do not share their Middle Ages mentality.

No, I’m not talking about the Taliban. I’m not even talking about Anders Breivik and his Knights Templar revivalists (who pathetically are a hundred years behind the KKK), or the Tea Party racists who want to bring back Jim Crow, although the description is certainly apt for any of these groups.

I’m talking about their cousins, the religious Right in Israel, particularly the Kahanists, who for years have been running amok with few or no consequences and who are now the model for violent extremists like Breivik and multiculturalism-haters in the Tea Party or rabid Zionists in the U.S. like Joe Kaufman. As incomprehensible as it seems to me for Jews to be involved in violent, hate-soaked, religion-perverting nationalism, it is more shocking that these particular fellow Jews (if indeed we share any values) are the model to which the rest of the haters aspire.

Last year a guidebook called “Torat HaMalech” was published in Israel. The subtitle of this book could easily have been “Who Would Moses Slay?” because it was nothing more than a 230-page justification for murdering non-Jews. If there had not been such an uproar, a second printing could easily have been accompanied by a forward by one of the many Israeli Islamophobes who inspired Anders Breivik.

Why do Jewish brownshirts and thugs like Baruch Marzel, a “former” Kahanist who had a little love-fest last month with Glen Beck at the Knesset, operate so freely in Israel and in the Occupied Territories and in the Orthodox communities of the United States? Because, as the U.S. State Department is fond of saying of the American relationship with Israel, there is hardly any “daylight” between them and the government. Israel’s Likudnik policies are fully congruent with the extremist right. Israel is slowly being ethnically cleansed of Arabs, both in the West Bank and the Galilee, and even at the cost of importing hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Russians. As the Mizrachim might agree grudgingly, It’s never been about religion. It’s always been about race and culture, particularly the domination of Ashkenizi culture. And as always, religion is just a tree the nativists hide behind. Even “liberal” and “secular” Jews who have moved into the West Bank because of economic inducements prefer not to think too much about how they got their cheap housing. For them it’s not about religion either. When it comes right down to it, there’s never been enough “daylight” between the Left and Right in Israel. And that’s the triumph and corrupting influence of nationalism.

Living in Israel today is like living in Anders Breivik’s Norwegian Utopia of 2083, where Muslims are being removed by state institutions and racial and cultural “purity” is well on track to being restored by a brutal form of nationalism. Israel’s twisted form of Revisionist Zionism has now become not merely the paradigm for European Christian nationalism but their How-To manual. But if by chance Breivik’s dreams come true, it won’t be a win for religion. And Europeans may not turn out to like all that concertina wire and concrete.

So when I hear Jews or Christians utter the phrase, “Judeo-Christian values,” I wince because a perverted and violent form of religious-themed nationalism is what it is has really come to mean.

Just another meaningless, cynical phrase falling from hate-filled, profanity-laced lips.

As a theater lover, a Jew, and a political junkie, I read David Mamet’s first book, “The Wicked Son,” a couple of years ago. The book’s title refers to the telling of the Passover story, in which the “wicked son” asks what Passover means “to you” – demonstrating that he has distanced himself from the Jewish community. Mamet then proceeds to present the most hardline version of Zionism which, if you disagree with even a point of his extremist views, qualifies you as a Self-Hating Jew. So, besides being the author of the misogynistic piece “Oleanna” I already knew him to be a right-wing shmuck.

But now David Mamet has outed himself as a Self-Hating Jew. And I mean exactly, precisely, literally that. He hates Jews. And he was only too happy to bloviate about his apparently stupid co-religionists on a fundamentalist Christian television show. Listen to this embarrassing, shameful performance yourself:

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In the clip, Mamet is on Pat Robertson’s show, 700 Club, to flog his new book, “On the Dismantling of American Culture,” which tries to sell the same themes as disgraced German economist Thilo Sarrazin’s book “Deutschland schafft sich Ab” (“Germany Does Away With Itself”) and Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik’s manifesto – namely, that (like Breivik and Sarrazin’s Europe) “America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.” Mamet’s book contains a number of other fundamentalist prescriptions similar to Breivik’s: feminism has emasculated men, global warming is a hoax, multiculturalism is evil, and Obama is a “one-worlder.”

In his previous Zionist screed, only Jewish Two Staters or those sympathetic to rights of Palestinians drew his ire. But this time around, in today’s interview with Robertson, Mamet blasted away at Jews in general. “My people, the Jews, have a lot to answer for” over their support for Obama. Robertson asks, “Do you think the Jews are ever gonna wake up?” Mamet answers that Jews in general always wake up too late.

I suppose that was the answer and the opportunity that Robertson had been waiting for all along: Damned Jews; Why don’t they just embrace Jesus while there’s still time?

David Mamet was only too happy to help make Robertson’s point.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has been successful. So successful, in fact, that Israel has responded – as it usually does – by sealing another crack, putting another finger or gob of gum in the dike, in an effort to stanch the flood of criticism of its Apartheid laws and occupation.

This week Israel made it illegal for citizens to support non-violent boycotts of the nation.

If you thought that, somehow, Israel was still the “only democracy in the Middle East” because at least its Jewish citizens were free, well now you can forget that. Although primarily targeting Israeli Palestinians, it also restricts the rights of its Jewish citizens.

Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston has it about right: this is the quiet sound of the nation finally turning fascist. If going fascist is too strong, then it’s the sound of the last feeble exhalations of a dying democracy.

And what about American citizens who still want to boycott Israel? Rest assured that our Constitutional rights are still … being held ransom.

I’ve always loved Passover, dragging in the big tables, turning the living room of our small Cape house into a dining room, inviting visitors who had nowhere else to go or nothing else to do, or finding silly props for the ten plagues. The home-made Haggadah my wife and sister-in-law created back when the children were small, the dog bone substituting for lamb shank for the vegetarians among us, my wife’s matzoh ball soup, the different charoset recipes, all these adaptations have kept Pesach going after our generation stepped up to replace beloved parents, aunts, and uncles no longer at the table.

On occasion we’ve added oranges and olives to the Seder plate, as we honor the liberation of real people in real times. The same cacophony of “Dayenu” being sung in several keys simultaneously by my tone-deaf family can also be heard when we belt out “Tell old Pharaoh, Let My People Go.” Liberation is liberation, at least in our book. When we say, “Next year in Jerusalem” my thoughts used to fly to a peaceful Jerusalem, one in which both Jews and Palestinians had somehow managed to work things out. Despite the hopeless odds and the ugly reality, I had always hoped for a Two State solution, long after logic told me it was impossible.

But this year Passover will be quite different. By the time April rolls around, the Two State solution will be a dim memory. For the first time in the experience of everyone around the table, there will no longer be even the illusion that, if only everyone had talked things out, there could be peace. Talking and photo ops went on for the better part of my adult life. The only constant in all this theater was the building of settlements on Palestinian land. Without a state or land of their own, Palestinians are now the subjects of a Jewish Pharaoh enforcing Jewish laws. While little bloodshed is likely to follow next week’s U.S. veto of a Palestinian state in behalf of Israel, there will be no peace for generations. The quest for a Palestinian homeland must now necessarily turn to a battle for civil rights in some new version of Israel that ensures rights for all, not just for Jews.

What is so different this year is that it is no longer possible to hold that sweet old picture of interdependent Jewish and Palestinian liberation in my mind. For years I believed that Israel’s survival depended upon Palestinian liberation. I believed also that the establishment of the state of Israel itself was incomplete because Israel had chosen the role of the Egyptian taskmaster, and only by repudiating oppression could it ever hope to survive in the long term. And I also believed that, as Jews, we could never support oppression by a supposedly Jewish state. Now that hope for Palestinian self-determination is about to be destroyed, there is nothing left but to acknowledge that, by these actions, Israel is simply another flawed state and not the deserving recipient of any prayers. At least this Israel.

Oppression and occupation have been institutionalized for so long that Israel cannot conceive of its existence as anything but a Zero Sum game in which a Palestinian state cannot also exist. And most of this has been accomplished through the cheerleading, political support, and funding from American Jews. The point of no return has finally been reached. The lovely postcard images of Jerusalem as the City of Peace have been replaced by the stark photographs of Palestinian “squatters” being kicked out of their houses by settlers in formerly Arab neighborhoods. This is now the only true image that can remain of Jerusalem.

Next year I’ll have to have to find a way to celebrate a Passover which celebrates liberation, justice, and hopes for the City of Peace. But next April it will no longer be Israel’s story.

Re: “US deal for Israeli freeze on settlements helps Mideast talks” editorial in the Thursday, November 18

What was the Globe thinking when it endorsed an extravagant American giveaway to Israel engineered by Dennis Ross – in exchange for three more months of a charade known as US-brokered peace talks and a promise never again to exert such pressure on Israel?

If anyone has noticed, the 10 months of the so-called settlement freeze were never observed by Israel. So what does another 3 months of non-observance buy anyone? Just more settlements for Israel.

And if anyone has noticed, Israel’s new precondition – demanding that the Palestinians recognize not just Israel, but a Zionist Israel – is designed to scuttle such talks because of the implications for not only Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens but for millions of Palestinian refugees with unresolved land claims.

This US-financed largesse most closely resembles bribing both a home invader never to do it again and the judge to not prosecute him.

It is well past the time for tasty carrots for Israel – carrots we can scarcely afford. Now it’s time for some well-applied pressure – if not the stick. Withholding UN vetoes, taking away military aid, and demanding that Israel comply with international law have a greater chance of producing the needed attitude adjustment that decades of asking “pretty please” has failed to deliver.