AlterNet: Just How Fucked Up Is the Discourse Surrounding Israel and Palestine?

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/123580/

OK, here are three facts that I think say a lot about how screwy the discourse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really is ...

1. There is a group of regular AlterNet readers and commenters who, based on my writing about the conflict -- and my own meanderings through the comments boards -- have concluded that I'm a Zionist shill, a stooge of American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who will reflexively defend Israel right or wrong. They see in me a monster without a drop of human empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians. They've accused me of silencing any criticism of Israel by calling those who dare to "speak truth to power" anti-Semites.

They believe this to be true, deep down in their heart of hearts.

2. There is another group of regular AlterNet readers and commenters who, based on the very same body of writing, about the very same conflict, have concluded that I am a vicious anti-Semite bent on nothing short of the annihilation of the Jews. Some, perhaps guessing at my heritage because of my surname, suggest that I am a self-loathing Jew, working out some deep psychological issues by calling for Israeli blood to flow freely on the streets. They accuse me of spewing eliminationist rhetoric and see me as being immune to the horrors of terrorism perpetrated against innocents. They see me as a "useful idiot" for a global Islamo-fascist movement.

This, they believe in their heart of hearts.

3. I am, in fact, neither pro-Palestinian* nor pro-Israeli per se; I have a background in security studies and international conflict resolution, and I have a strong belief in international law and a universalist view of human rights. I believe that both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have the desire and the right to live in peace and that a majority within both groups (or a plurality when the conflict heats up) want little more and find the rejectionists on both sides odious and deserving of blame for the continuation of the bloodshed.

In other words, neither of these groups of readers' impressions -- perfectly divergent -- comes anywhere within miles of my actual views (which I've written about at length).

And that's the point of this post -- just a little anecdote suggesting how hard it is to solve a bloody, decades-long, incredibly tragic conflict dominated by ideologues who just hear what they want to hear.

* Obviously, in the context of our ridiculously binary, pathetically oversimplified discourse around Israel and Palestine, I can rightly be considered "pro-Palestinian."


Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/123580/

Israeli Homefield Scoreboard

Since the first rocket was launched into Israel in 2002 up until the December 17, 2008 invasion of Gaza, the Israel body count was maybe two dozen.

The Palestinian body count was 2,700.

That would be about 100 to one.

Since the invasion, the Israeli body count is 14.

The Palestinian body count was more than 1,400.

That would be about 100 to one.

--Russell Mokhiber, Editor, Corporate Crime Reporter

U.S.-backed Israeli massacre in Gaza, continued...

The latest numbers from Gaza put further truth to the lies told not only by the corporate defense contractor-owned media outlets but even by our Democratic representatives in the Senate and the House, like Reid and Pelosi.

885 dead and over 3400 wounded. 85% of the dead and injured are civilians, almost one third of them are children.

There is increasing evidence of the use by the Israeli military of white phosphorus, a substance that burns human flesh to the bone and is considered illegal internationally and its use a war crime. Hospitals are reporting more and more deep burns which cannot even be cleaned and dressed for lack of gauze, which tends to burn when in contact with residual phosphorus anyway.

For those who continue to parrot the party line calling this massacre retaliation for the missile attacks by Hamas into southern Israel, be advised that until 2 weeks ago, a total of 17 Israeli civilians had been killed by those rockets. The number of Palestinian civilian deaths due to Israeli rocket fire runs well into the thousands. While the violence on both sides needs to be quashed, rest assured that the Hamas government is well within their right of resistance to retaliate for the year-long Israeli blockade of food, medical supplies, energy and water into Gaza. The murderous apartheid government of Israel is indeed the aggressor.

Guerrilla warfare, called terrorism by powerful in order to further vilify their enemies, is always necessary when resisting violent occupation of wildly disproportionate military might. If this be terrorism, what then to call the collective punishment being so horribly meted out by the Israeli military for home-made rocket launches? The notion of the right to defend the citizenry runs both ways, does it not?

It is interesting to note that this obvious holocaust of ethnic cleansing is being carried out by Israel, who should know better the pain of such attempts at genocide.

Pete

Brian Eno: Stealing Gaza

It's a mistake to believe that celebrities have some sort of wisdom that we uncelebrated folk lack simply because our culture has been usurped by mass media and they happen to be its players. However, when a celebrity lands a commentary on Counterpunch and I read it, wondering why the hell I didn't write it, I feel the need to post it to my relatively harmless blog. That he's a groundbreaking musician and artist helps, too, as far as this music freak is concerned.--Pete

Stealing Gaza
By Brian Eno, Counterpunch
It's a tragedy that the Israelis - a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression - are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked "Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it's the Palestinians". By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they've forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians - with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers - and themselves - with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world - they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly...and, surprise, surprise - they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now 'under attack' you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn't possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

Brian Eno is a musician and music producer.

Are All Americans Guilty?

Paul Craig Roberts: Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

On the last day of the old year in CounterPunch, two Israelis, Jeff Halper who heads the Israeli peace movement ICAHD and Neve Gordon who is chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University, asked, “Where’s the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?”

“Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week,” report Halper and Gordon. They note that Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger, who has in the past ignorantly insulted Islamic representatives, “has been silent.”

It is the goyim moralists who are silent, not the Jews. It is the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, not the goyim media, that provides reports of Israel’s abuse of Palestinians. Gideon Levy’s “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again” was published in Haaretz (29 December), not in the goyim press. Levy’s words--“Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom”--are not words that can appear in American print or TV media. Such words, printed in Israeli newspapers, never reach the goyim.

The extent of Americans’ ignorance is breathtaking. Israel has the Palestinians jammed into tightly controlled ghettos known as Gaza and the West Bank. With Egypt’s help, Israel controls the inflows of food, medicines, water, and energy into Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are not permitted to enter Israel or Egypt. Last week a humanitarian ship bringing food and medicine was rammed by Israeli gunboats and turned away.

In the West Bank Palestinians are walled off from their fields, jobs, medical care, education, water, and from one another by endless checkpoints, roads for “Jews only,” walls, barbed wire, and machine gun towers. Palestinians are being evicted from their towns house by house, block by block.

Israel’s slow theft of Palestine is illegal under international law but protected by US “diplomacy.”

The Palestinians are no more of a threat to Israel than Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were a threat to the Nazi state. Yet, everywhere in America--Congress, the executive branch, the print and TV media, the universities, evangelical Christian institutions--there is the belief that Israel is on the verge of annihilation by Palestinian terrorists. This ignorance, so carefully cultivated by the Israel Lobby, turns genocidal aggression into self-defense.

It fools Americans, but it doesn’t fool Israelis. The Israelis have always known that “self-defense” is a cloak for a Zionist policy of territorial expansion. The policy is controversial within Israel. Many Israelis object, just as many Americans object to President Bush’s illegal wars and violations of US civil liberties. Many Israelis give voice to their moral conscience, but they are overwhelmed by vested interests.

Karl Marx declared morality to be merely a mask for vested interests. The writings of Marx and Engels are scornful of good will and moral ideals as effective forces in history. The Israeli state epitomizes Marx’s doctrine that power alone is the effective force.

Many American conservatives share the Israeli state’s belief in the efficacy of power. Conservatives who turned against Bush’s wars did so because the US was not brutal enough. They turned away from Bush’s long inconclusive wars in the way that fans desert a losing team.

Americans used to say that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” but this hasn’t been the case for US and Israeli aggression. The success the two regimes have had in instilling fear into their populations is part of the explanation for the impotence of morality. Another part of the explanation is that vested interests are a powerful constraint on morality.

Consider the case of Lee Bollinger. Columbia University is dependent on Jewish money, faculty and students. If Bollinger were to take a stand against Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians, he would be denounced as an anti-semite. Presidents of competitor universities would not come to his defense. They would pile on in hopes of recruiting Columbia’s top faculty and students and redirecting the flow of financial resources from Columbia to themselves.

An American newspaper or TV network that took a stand against Israel’s abuse of Palestinians would be confronted with an advertising boycott organized by AIPAC. American politicians who criticize Israel go down to defeat by Israel Lobby money.

Hegel gave too much emphasis to ideas, Marx too much to material interests. Both forces operate in the world. There are times in history when revolutionary ideas shatter material interests. Other times the two coexist in a balance of power. In other times material interests prevail over morality.

We are living in the latter time. Financial interests, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby are the powers that rule America. They are buttressed by neoconservatives and Christian Zionists and by the patriotic hubris that America is the main force for good operating in the world. The evils America commits are dismissed as necessary to the service of good. The destruction of Iraq, for example, is justified as “bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.”

A number of commentators, including myself, predict a decline in America’s economic power. As this occurs, Israel will have to abandon its policy of violence. With the accumulated hatred that its policies have fomented, Israel will be vulnerable.

The world will need to remember that although Israel is a Jewish state, it is a state whose policies many Jews find objectionable, just as a majority of American Jews oppose President Bush’s wars of aggression in the Middle East and his unconstitutional policies at home. We must not confuse Israel’s Zionist government with world Jewry, just as we must not confuse the American people with the war criminals in the Bush Regime.

Consider, who do you trust with your civil liberties, the US Department of Justice or the ACLU’s phalanx of Jewish attorneys?

We must avoid the mistake that was made by blaming the German people for Hitler. It was the aristocratic German military that tried to remove Hitler. In contrast, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blocked the attempt to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Pelosi is a discredit to California, but shall we blame all of America for Pelosi’s defense of war criminals? How can we do so when US Rep. Dennis Kucinich courageously read out the articles of impeachment on the House floor?

Are all Americans guilty because Kucinich did not prevail?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Just a note regarding corporate media's assertion of Israeli retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks...

...over the last seven years only 17 Israeli citizens have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire, which makes it extremely difficult for Israeli politicians, which are in the midst of an election, to argue that their response has been proportionate or defensible in any way.

Inside Gaza: A Living Hell

By Sami Abdel-Shafi, Independent UK
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/115727/inside_gaza%3A_a_living_hell/

I am safe, and yet I feel like a walking dead person. Everything around me shows it. It is hard to write something of any coherence while exposed to cold winter air and to the smell that lingers after the detonation of Israeli bombs. They must have been massive. During the bombing I opened all the windows around my apartment to avoid them imploding as a result of the vacuum shocks sweeping through Gaza City after each enormous bang. While the bombing continued, I jumped down two flights of stairs to my father's house, to make sure he was OK. Should I open up all his windows too? That would expose the old man to the risk of illness. We have no medical care or medication. However, the risk from shattering glass was greater, so I opened them all.

Mobile phones did not work, because of electricity outages and the flood of attempted calls. I flipped the electricity generator on so that we could watch the news. We wanted to understand what was going on in our own neighborhood. However, this was impossible. Israeli surveillance drones flew overhead, scrambling the reception. All I could do was step outside, where I found crowds of frantic people, lines of rising smoke and the smell of charred buildings and bodies that lay around targeted sites nearby. Somebody said the bombs had been launched in parallel raids over the entire Gaza Strip. What was the target here? Perhaps a police station about 200 meters away. Other bombs annihilated blocks less than a kilometer away, where one of the main police training centers stood. When the strikes began, a graduation ceremony for more than 100 recruits in a civil law enforcement program was under way. These were the young men trained to organize traffic, instil civil safety and maintain law and order. Many of them were killed, it is said, in addition to the Gaza Strip's police chief.

News came by word of mouth. There had been more than 150 deaths and more than 200 people were injured or missing under rubble after the first two hours of bombing. Israel had said it would continue the offensive and deepen it if necessary. Likewise, it was said that Hamas had launched more rockets at southern Israeli towns, causing one death and four injuries. Gaza had never seen anything like the numbers of dead bodies lying on its streets. Hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside.

Bombs targeting a Hamas security force building badly damaged an adjacent school, and several children were injured. We heard of many other targets around the Gaza Strip. It reminds me of the "shock and awe" campaign the Allies launched over Baghdad in 2003. But shock and awe did not bring stability or peace.

These bombs were launched by Israel, as we had known they would be. The world watched the situation simmer then boil over, but did nothing. There are some who believe that hell is divided into different classes. The ordinary people of Gaza have long been caught in the tormenting underworld. Now, if the world does not heed what has happened here, our situation will worsen. We will be trapped in the first class of hell.

© 2008 Independent UK All rights reserved.