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On AIPAC and Other Bullies

07 Oct 10

By Miko Peled

It is typical for America to suddenly wake up to an issue that has been around for, well, forever. Today it is bullying. But there can be little surprise that America has a bully problem. American policies around the world have been marked and characterized by bullying, as one would expect from an empire, even an empire that likes to see itself as spreading freedom and democracy. Bullying in America is hailed and glamorized as heroism so really, what kid wouldn’t want to be a bully?

One bully that has gotten America by the, well, where it hurts is AIPAC. Everywhere you go you hear people complaining that nothing can be done to curb Israeli violence and brutality because this fierce all powerful lobby called AIPAC. Nowhere is this heard more than our nation’s capital Washington DC.

In AIPAC’s website they make the following claim: “From a small pro-Israel public affairs boutique in the 1950s, AIPAC has grown into a 100,000-member national grassroots movement described by The New York Times as “the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel.” Wow!

I recently spent a weekend in DC and I heard two stories that exemplify the odd relationship between the world’s only superpower and this omnipotent organization, and that this has been going on for close to forty years. The first story takes place during the Carter administration when an attempt to put together a meeting between President Carter and one of the worlds leading Jewish leaders, Dr. Nahum Goldman was unsuccessful. When a mutual friend of Carter and Dr. Goldman, who told me this story, inquired with the President about this the President replied that a meeting with Dr. Goldman is not possible because Dr. Goldman really gets American Jews agitated.

Dr. Nahum Goldman was one of, if not the most important Jewish Zionist leader in America. He was a staunch Zionist his whole life and was the Co founder of the World Jewish Congress, which he led for several decades. But Goldman’s brand of Zionism was not palatable for Israeli leaders such as David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and well, the rest of Israeli politicians because Goldman tried to negotiate between Israel and the neighboring Arab states. He committed the crime of being critical of Israel for what he saw as an over-reliance on military might and for not making concessions after the 1967 Six-Day War. He further brought upon him the wrath of Jewish zealots by advocating a position that the only chance of long-term survival for Israel was to accept the rights of the Palestinians as a people. So how can the President meet with such a man?

Fast forward to today’s Washington DC. A young non-Jewish Ivy League graduate member of a DC think tank proposes to present a paper on the Palestinian perspective. She lived and reported from Palestine, she has first hand knowledge and a deeper understanding of the situation than most experts. After a long wait the paper is shelved fearing it will bring about too much debate and that it is one sided. Well, by presenting the perspective of a particular side of the conflict the paper was by definition one sided and as for creating debate, isn’t that what a think tank is supposed to do?

I have learned that on a local level agents of this ridiculous bully follow me and my activism quite closely. Self proclaimed keepers of the most zealous and uncompromising brand of Jewish nationalism have taken it upon themselves to attend, record, film and conduct classes on the things that I say about the heinous crimes and viscous attacks committed by Israel against the Palestinian people which it rules. I am not sure if I should be flattered or afraid. I mean, after all will they report me to the authorities? Will they deny me entry to Israel or the US? But of course I then recall that other than being a self-proclaimed policing force that refuses to see the ridicule and the tragedy in its positions and its actions these little bullies are really nothing.

Local elected officials are offered great trips to Israel, free of course. Happily the ones I know stood up to this bully and the favors it offers and refused the gift on grounds that it is wrong for an elected official to receive such expensive gifts. Besides, no gift of this kind is free. It comes with the expectation of future support for Israel’s draconian policies regarding the Palestinians.

It is said that AIPAC itself has the power to dethrone powerful people. That it is a king maker as well as a killer of political careers, even well established careers. But I have yet to hear an explanation as to why. Why is it that this organization and its self-righteous agents yield so much power of extortion over the world greatest power? What secrets do they posses that can yield such powers of extortion? While in DC I had the pleasure of meeting one man who is rather close to the President himself. He works with the President on issues other than the Mideast but when we met the Mideast we talked mostly about the Middle East. “Perhaps you over estimate the power of the President” is what this man said to me.

If President Obama said one sentence that truly relates to the horrors of Israeli policies, if he made one comment to criticize Israeli human rights violations or the treatment of Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons, if he publicly said what he surely knows, that Israeli insistence on building settlements for Jews only on land that belongs to Palestinians is wrong or even, God forbid that he should say that the situation in Gaza is unacceptable (not unsustainable as he said in the past). If the President says just one of theses things it would get the ball rolling sparking a serious debate and it will embolden others to ask these questions and make demands of Israel.

Far from me to suggest that politicians align themselves with what is right and what is just. However, those politicians who do care need to know the following: there are ways to stop bullies but succumbing to them and appeasing them are not included. To stop bullies one needs to stand up to the bullies and to make it clear that we will not take their BS!

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Israel Soldier _Palestine Girl

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Newsroom: U.S. Shocked Andorra Not In Africa

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Why I am not an Israeli peace activist

Weekly Worker 836 Thursday October 07 2010

Genuine socialists fight against the Zionist project, writes Moshé Machover

As the desultory “peace process” meanders from pointless appointment to meaningless meeting between heads of the Israeli settler state and the authorityless Palestinian Authority, with the US playing the part of dishonest broker, there can no longer be any lingering doubt that this is a charade staged by charlatans.

But behind and beyond this fairly obvious confidence trick there is a much more subtle deception or self-deception: it is widely assumed – even taken for granted – that “peace” is what it would take to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In other words: that what is needed is a genuine peace process instead of the present fake one.

This belief is held by almost all decent enlightened Israelis (the so-called Israeli left) – which is why they refer to themselves collectively as “the peace camp” and individually as “peace activists” – and it is shared by their friends and supporters in the west.

The ‘left’ Zionists of Peace Now as well as the ‘soft’ Zionists and semi-Zionists of Gush Shalom (‘the Peace Bloc’) display this self-deception on their name tags. The non-Zionist, Stalinist-turned-reformist Israeli Communist Party insists on giving top prominence to peace slogans.

Many of the activities in which these good people engage are highly commendable: dissent from oppressive policies and actions of the Israeli authorities, and in particular opposition to the post-1967 occupation. Some of them show real moral and physical courage in various acts of solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. Nevertheless, their self-description as “peace activists” reveals a profound misapprehension as to the nature of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and a delusion as to how it might be resolved.

The image it evokes is essentially symmetric: two sides, two nations, at war with each other, locked in a series of battles over a piece of disputed turf. To end the conflict, the two sides need to end the war, sit down together, and make peace.

In fact this is also the image promoted by Israeli hasbarah (propaganda). It likes to speak the symmetric language of “war” and “peace”. Thus, Israel and its friends describe the assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-09, codenamed ‘Operation Cast Lead’, as a “war”. In reality, it was not a war: there was virtually no fighting. It was a one-sided massacre. Similarly, Israeli diplomacy insists on referring to the territories seized by Israel in 1967 as “disputed” – a deliberately symmetric description – rather than occupied.

As for peace: none wish for it more ardently than most of Israel’s leaders. I am saying this with hardly a trace of irony. It is the truth. Only very few people – psychopaths, arms dealers and other war profiteers, as well as some cynical careerist demagogues and military officers eager for fast-track promotion – actually prefer war per se to any kind of peace. I suppose that a few Israeli political and military leaders do belong to each of these exceptional categories. But most Israeli leaders genuinely wish for peace – peace on Israel’s terms: their cherished wish is that the Palestinian people, dispossessed and subjugated, should peacefully accept their lot and give up the struggle.

Colonial conflict

The key to a proper understanding of the conflict is that it is an extremely asymmetric one: between settler-colonisers and the indigenous people. It is about dispossession and oppression. As was the case in other colonial conflicts, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has involved real wars between Israel and the neighbouring states; but these were spin-offs, consequences of the fundamental cause: the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. As this colonisation proceeds and expands, Israel will need to maintain its regional hegemony as western imperialism’s local sub-contractor, and new wars will no doubt be provoked.

In colonial conflicts, the colonisers always regard themselves as coming in peace, bearing the gifts of enlightenment and progress. It is the benighted natives who are the aggressors, resorting to violence against their benefactors. This compels the colonisers to use their superior force in order to put down the native aggressors. The latter have only themselves to blame.

I suppose this is the kind of thing my late friend, the socialist poet Erich Fried, had in mind when he wrote this poem:

Clean Sweep

The causes
now fight
their effects,

so that one can no longer
hold them
responsible for the effects;

for even
to make them responsible
is part of the effects

and effects are forbidden
and punished
by the causes themselves.

They do not wish
any longer
to know about such effects.

Anyone who sees
how diligently
they pursue the effects

and still says
that they are
closely connected with them

will now have to
blame
only himself.

While the colonisers’ aim is to impose peace – on their own terms and, if necessary, by force – the indigenous people tend to have a rather different view of the matter. Their concern is not to make peace with their dispossessors but to resist being dispossessed. To this end they often need to come bearing not peace, but the sword.

This is why you would be hard put to find peace activists among the native Americans or Australian aborigines resisting colonisation in the 19th century, or among Algerian liberation fighters or anti-apartheid militants in the 20th century.

Of course, the Israeli peace activists do not support all the harsh “peace” terms that their government wishes to impose on the Palestinian people (although some of them do not object to some of these unequal terms). But by their reductive definition of the issue as being all about peace, they knowingly or unwittingly accept a point of view biased in favour of the colonisers.

This biased viewpoint is inconsistent with internationalism. So Israeli self-proclaimed peace activists cannot be genuine socialists. Israeli socialists, whether Hebrew or Arab, fight against the Zionist project and its practices: colonisation, dispossession, discrimination; and for equal rights and universal liberation.

Peace will be an outcome of liberation, not its starting point.

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Apprehension

by Ziv Kitlaro

Another day at an Israeli checkpoint near a Palestinian village, everything looks ordinary – until a Palestinian man arrives at the checkpoint.

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EXPOSED This is how Israel controls your media EVERYONE SHOULD SEE THIS

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Support Palestine: come to Jazza Music Festival

Dear Friends of Palestine,

Musicians Sarah Gillespie, Gilad Atzmon and at least 40 other leading artists from UK and Palestine will try to achieve the impossible in London next week. 

They will play together in a massive music festival for Palestine. They are flying musicians to London for the event, mixing jazz with folk, hip hop and roots music. They believe in one thing: that artists who support Palestine must say so loudly and proudly using their music and their voices.

The Jazza Music Festival is serious but is also a  big fun party – and we want you to join in!

Jazza Music Festival
12 & 13 October 2010
@ THE SCALA (http://www.scala-london.co.uk/scala/)
275 Pentonville Road, London

For the line up, click here.

The funds raised in the two nights of the Jazza Music Festival will help the Free Palestine Movement deliver more and more humanitarian aid to Palestine.

We are also proud and delighted to announce that Shadia Mansour, the Palestinian hip hop queen, has also joined the Jazza Festival line up.

You can listen to the amazing Shadia and the mind blowing Stormtrap (ex- Ramallah Underground) singing together on a track produced recently by Gilad Atzmon together with Robert Wyatt and Ros Stephen: “Where are They Now” (Wyatt, Atzmon, Mansur, Stormtrap).

Book tickets online for Tuesday 12 October here.

Book Tickets online for Wednesday 13 October here.

You can also send in donations here.

Please circulate this message as far as you can.

Palestine needs your support.

Music against oppression.

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‘When history speaks’ for Israel in the Times it leaves out the Palestinians

by Remi Brulin on October 6, 2010

Rémi Brulin, an adjunct professor at New York University who is completing his dissertation entitled “The US Discourse on Terrorism Since 1945, and how The New York Times has Covered the Issue of Terrorism” (more here), sent us the following in response an article that ran in the New York Times Travel section last Sunday – When History Speaks in Israel:

The article in question is “When History Speaks in Israel,” and is one of the starkest examples of a complete erasure of the Palestinian from the history of the region that I have seen in a long time. I actually did a word search of the article and the word “Palestinian” doesn’t appear once! It is very much reminiscent of old claims that the Palestinian people “don’t exist,” that Israel was ” a land without a people for a people without a land”, etc…

Just read the lede:

CHAIM KAHANOVICH, an 18-year-old Polish Jew, caught his first brown glimpse of the Holy Land from the deck of a steamer in November 1924. He would never leave. Dark-haired, short and solid, Chaim brought with him a teenager’s blazing passion and an ideologue’s stubborn commitment to a cause. The long, slow journey had taken him from Warsaw by train to the Black Sea port of Constanta, then by ship through the Bosporus Straits and across the Mediterranean to Palestine. There at last, rising like the back of an ox from the blue water of Haifa Bay, was the sere ridge of Mount Carmel — the Promised Land.

From his boyhood study of Torah, Chaim would have known that Carmel was the place where the prophet Elijah faced down the pagan priests of Baal and fled the wrath of Queen Jezebel. But he had not come to Palestine to study Torah. He and his comrades were called halutzim — pioneers — and they had made aliyah (literally the ascent) to the Holy Land to plow the soil, plant grapevines and citrus groves, raise chickens, tomatoes and children, and to found a new nation.

I know the details of Chaim’s life and circumstances because he and his wife, Sonia, were relatives of mine (my maternal grandfather was their first cousin), and I recently went to Israel with my oldest daughter, Emily, for the first time to retrace their journeys and uncover what I could about our family’s story — a story of immigration shared by thousands of others. What made this trip especially inspiring was that I was able to cover so much of Israeli history: in this ancient but recently conceived nation, the founders lived just a generation ago. It’s as if the children and grandchildren of Washington, Jefferson and Adams were around to give interviews and point out historical sights.

I am usually quite critical of the New York Times in its coverage of many issues that have to do with foreign policy, but even for the Times this is particularly obscene.

I was shocked by this article especially because, with my class at NYU, I am currently using Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, the premise of which is precisely that so many Israelis ignore everything about their past, and especially about the fact that Palestinians lived for generations in those villages that became Israeli villages in 1948.

I was shocked also by this article because I had just read Johann Hari’s great interview of Gideon Levy in the Independent. The following passage especially stood out:

He was fourteen during the Six Day War, and soon after his parents took him to see the newly conquered Occupied Territories. “We were so proud going to see Rachel’s Tomb [in Bethlehem] and we just didn’t see the Palestinians. We looked right through them, like they were invisible,” he says. “It had always been like that. We were passing as children so many ruins [of Palestinian villages that had been ethnically cleansed in 1948]. We never asked: ‘Who lived in this house? Where is he now? He must be alive. He must be somewhere.’ It was part of the landscape, like a tree, like a river.

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How did the U.S. government lead its people to war?

This website, in conjunction with the 72-minute documentary film LEADING TO WAR, details how the Bush administration made its case to the American people for military action against Saddam Hussein’s regime, leading to the Iraq War which began in 2003.

WEBSITE CORE CONTENT

On each page of the main part of the website is a menu of seven topics.  These topics analyze the wide-ranging strategies and rhetorical techniques used by the administration in marketing the idea of a war with Iraq, in addition to examining the pre-war claims made by the Bush administration as presented in the film.

The core of the analysis is presented in six topics that provide a comprehensive examination of how the Bush administration led the United States to war:

A Mechanism for War – how the Bush administration constructed an elaborate mechanism to propel the nation to war

Rhetoric and Spin – the skillful manipulation of language and facts

War Through Rose-Colored Glasses – the assurances made to the public about how the war would unfold

Abuses and Misuses of Intelligence – the cherry-picking and misrepresenting of intelligence

A Mythic Reality – the creation and promotion of a ‘mythic reality’ in order to persuade the public to support a war against Iraq

Items of Note – other points of interest

The seventh topic explores the statements made in the epilogue of the film:

Bush Administration Claims vs. The Facts directly examines the important pre-war claims made by the administration: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq sought to acquire yellowcake uranium from Africa, that there was a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and others.

Relying on numerous government and press reports, this section shows how President Bush and his administration publicly presented intelligence as reliable and solid – even though behind the scenes they knew this intelligence to be disputed, or even false.

The final part of this section, The Costs of War, provides a partial summary of the tragic toll of the Iraq War: in terms of lives lost, the mentally and physically injured, the millions of refugees, and the financial cost.

THE FILM

You can watch LEADING TO WAR for free on this website, via streaming or download, or you can purchase a DVD of the film, which can be shipped anywhere in the world.  The film is subtitled in 19 languages in order to reach a wide audience, and is formatted to play on any DVD player (Region 0).

The film consists entirely of archival news footage – without commentary, without voice-over – beginning with President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2002 (the “axis of evil” speech), and continuing up to the announcement of formal U.S. military action in Iraq on March 19, 2003.  Covering these 14 months, the film presents selected interviews, speeches, and press conferences given by President Bush and his administration.

VERIFICATION OF SOURCES

To verify the facts presented on this website, most of the original information sources are either linked externally or have been copied into a file which is accessible by clicking ” [link to source] ” which appears next to all cited text.

In addition, the website includes the original and unedited source news transcripts from which the film material was chosen – so that the words spoken can be viewed in their broader context.

DOWNLOADS

The content of each web page is downloadable as a PDF. A link “[link to a PDF of this page]” can be found at the bottom of most pages of this web site. To download the PDF, right-click on the link and choose “Save Target As…” to begin downloading the file to your computer.

[link to a PDF of this page]

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