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mondoweiss/texts/1834.txt

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-We all have that one thing that brings us back to our origins. For some it is a certain song that reminds us of our roots; no matter how far away from our homeland, the lyrics make us feel we are back home. For others, it is a tangible item like an olive branch, an embroidered dress, or even a photograph. For me, it is food. Not only nutritious but a glue that holds the stories of generations within each recipe.
+In this episode, we have two interviews with our U.S. Correspondent, Michael Arria. First, Michael talks to Ryan Grim, Washington D.C. Bureau chief for The Intercept. Ryan has a new book out titled, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” In it, he reports on the fight between the squad of progressive Democrats first elected to Congress in 2018 and Israel lobby organizations AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel.
 
-Countless times I have tried to learn to cook, yet miserably failed. My poor culinary skills have never stopped me from enjoying delicious meals. And, my lackings never limited my sense of amazement when listening to tales from friends and loved ones about the origins of a dish.
+Later, we’ll hear from a student organizer at Columbia University about the school’s suspension of pro-Palestine groups on campus. In recent weeks, we’ve seen a disturbing wave of McCarthyism target Palestine activism across college campuses. A number of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters have been suspended or even banned at schools. One of the schools is Columbia University, which also suspended its Jewish Voice for Peace chapter. Michael spoke with a member of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine about these developments. She is also a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition that has been relaunched in response to the suspensions. She asked Mondoweiss to withhold her name.
 
-What I love about food is each meal has a story behind it; there is a story of a person who prepared the dish and a story of a family who gathered to eat it. When it comes to Palestinian cuisine, there is also a history of a land that once held many communities together.
+Support our work
 
-With great affection for cooking, I am sharing three recipes and the stories that came with them, as told to me by the people who formulated the below version of the dishes. The stories are written in their voice. The meals they share are popular in the Gaza Strip, where we live.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-You will hear about a delicate tumeric pastry called musafan from Mayssa, the staple rice and vegetables dish maqlouba from Ahed, and a tangy tahini meat dish called somaqiya from Majeda. I hope you try them and that they inspire you to have your own story as well.
+Articles and links mentioned in the show
 
-Musafan. (Photo courtesy of the author)
+Ryan’s new book, The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution
 
-Musafan
+Subscribe to Ryan’s newsletter, Bad News.
 
-Mayssa, 34, is a painter. She works for a mental health organization that supports children who have experienced trauma. She is a mother of four boys. She lives in West Gaza.
+Columbia University suspends Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, Michael Arria
 
-The tales my grandmother used to tell us were not about Cinderella or Snow White, they were about a land she used to live in until she was 12 years old, up until 1948. That land was called al-Majdal Asqalan. I heard a lot about friends she never got to see again and a home that was lost forever. But there were happy memories too. She shared stories about the celebrations. People from surrounding cities gathered for occasions in their most beautiful dress. Young men danced debka and played the flute (also called shababa). Girls strolled in groups and ate sweets.
+Columbia student groups form coalition to counter crackdown on Palestine activism, demand divestment from Israel, Michael Arria
 
-Her description of the people and the parties—the smells and the scenery—painted a vivid picture for my sisters and me, the recipients of these tales. Yet it was always the food that made the biggest impression. I will never forget the day she described the delicious bread they ate during celebrations. It is called musafan.  My grandmother would smile and close her eyes while describing the taste of olive oil mixed into that bread once baked in al-Majdal. They would eat it with eggs, thyme, and sometimes cheese.
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-Throughout my childhood, my sisters begged her to tell us more stories. The more she shared the more she talked about food, and the more recipes we learned. As an adult,  share her memories and meals with my children.
+Share this podcast
 
-I have never been to al-Majdal Asqalan, but every time I eat a piece of musafan I close my eyes and I can see my grandmother. In my mind, she is not the older lady I knew, but a 12-year-old girl in her colorful dress, sheepishly watching the boys in her town dance debka or eavesdropping on gossip. She is happy, alive, and in the only place she ever considered home.
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-Ingredients
+If you enjoyed this episode, head to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-12 cups of flour1/2 cup of black cumin seeds1 tablespoon of turmeric 1 1/2 tablespoon of yeast3 tablespoons of cookie spice blend (a mix of equal parts of anise seeds, fennel seeds, and ground mahleb)1/4 cup of vegetable oil1/4 cup of olive oil1 cup of pan-roasted sesame seeds 1 teaspoon of salt 2 1/2 cups of warm water
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-Directions
+Amazon
 
-Pre-heat oven to 350. Set aside cookie sheet.In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, sesame seeds, black cumin seeds, yeast, turmeric, salt, and cookie spice blend.Add vegetable oil and olive oil to dry ingredients until it reaches a consistency of sand.Add warm water, slowly folding the dough until it is soft.Set aside, cover and let the dough rest for 10 minutes.Cut the dough into 18 equal balls.Place one ball on a clean surface to form. Using a rolling pan, roll flat into a circle that is 6 inches wide and 1/8 of an inch thick.Brush with excess olive oil. Then, fold the dough inward, grabbing sections of the circumference and folding so the edge is over the circle to the center. Repeating eight times until the dough forms a flower shape.Bake on a cookie sheet for ten minutes.Brush once more before serving.Recipe yields 18 individual musafan rounds. This is a large amount as my Palestinian family is big and can consume this much in a few days.
+Apple Podcasts
 
-Maqlouba. (Photo courtesy of the author)
+Audible
 
-Maqlouba
+Deezer
 
-Ahed, 33, teacher, he lives in East Gaza, he has one daughter.
+Gaana
 
-The borders were closed until further notice and I got stuck! I wanted to go back to Gaza but I couldn’t and I did not know what to do. As a Gazan guy who has never traveled before with limited experience in life and little money, I was scared.
+Google Podcasts
 
-I never thought I would wish to go back to the open-air prison where I have lived most of my life. Why would a bird stand outside the door of its cage and ask to be let in?
+Overcast
 
-I missed my family and I missed my mother in particular. I remembered how every Friday we would gather for a big lunch. On weekdays everyone is busy with work or studies. Fridays were the only day we were together. Weekly, my mother prepared a classic Palestinian dish. She used to say: “Fast food is not allowed on Fridays. We are a Palestinian family, and we need to eat real Palestinian food.”
+Player.fm
 
-On the other side of the border, I missed my friends too. I remembered the last time they visited me before I traveled and my mother prepared qidra for us. The word qidra in Arabic means a clay vessel. The dish is named so because it is made of rice that is baked in the qidra itself. My mother would cook the rice with pieces of meat stewed in garlic, chickpeas, cinnamon, cardamom, and cumin.
+RadioPublic
 
-Longing to be with my family, I decided to do something that reminded me of them. So, I learned the dishes my mother used to make for us. The first I decided to make was maqlouba, one of my favorite dishes. I called my mother and she walked me through it step-by-step.
+Spotify
 
-The best part of preparing maqlouba is when you finish cooking it, you put a dish over the pot and then flip it upside down, which is how maqlouba, which means “upside down” in Arabic, got its name. After I did a fluid flip, I remember sitting by myself feeling proud of my achievement. It was delicious.
+Stitcher
 
-I’ve heard people say that food sometimes feels like a warm hug. That first bite of maqlouba felt like my mother’s hug. At that moment I felt that a piece of Gaza was with me and in my heart.
+TuneIn
 
-Ingredients
+YouTube
 
-1 whole chicken cut into eight pieces (breasts, wings, thighs, drumsticks)2 eggplants2 ½ cups long-grain rice3 onions2 potatoes 3 green peppers1 bulb of garlic 1 cup of chickpeas2 tomatoes2 1/2 tablespoons of olive oil salt – as needed 1 teaspoon of black pepper1 tablespoon of cardamom1 tablespoon of cinnamon1 of ground turmeric1 of rice spices6 cups of water (for cooking); 2 cups of water (for soaking)
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-Directions
+We want your feedback!
 
-Set aside a 16-quart pot.Chop the eggplant into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Season with salt and place in a bowl of water and set aside for 30 minutes. This takes the bitterness out.In a separate mixing bowl combine water and rice and soak for ten minutes.While rice and eggplant are soaking in separate bowls, chop onions and peppers into 1/4 inch slices. Dice tomatoes. Mince garlic.Drain water from rice. Then add the salt, cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, black pepper and mix well. Add olive oil to the large pot and set heat to medium-low. Fry eggplants for two minutes to each side, then set aside. Fry the peppers, garlic, and onions until onions turn translucent. Remove vegetables and set aside.Add chicken to the pot. Stir fry for 15 minutes, flipping frequently.When chicken is done, remove the pot from heat and build a one-inch layer of chicken (skin-side down), chickpeas, and eggplant. Stack onions, green peppers, garlic, and tomatoes in another one-inch layer.Add 3/4 of rice as the next layer in the pot.Add the remaining chicken, chickpeas, eggplant, potatoes, tomato, onion, pepper, and garlic.Add the rest of the rice.Add 6 cups of water. Press down on the rice and add more water if needed to bring the liquid barely to the level of the rice.Cover the pot cook on high heat until it reaches a boil. After, reduce to simmer and cook for 20 minutes.Here comes the fun part. Remove pot from heat. Pull out a large serving platter. Using oven mitts or a towel to protect your hands from heat and steam, invert the pot in one single fluid motion, so that the contents are flipped upside down onto the serving platter.Tidy up any draining liquid with a paper town and serve.
+Email us
 
-Chickpeas and green peppers are optional. Some people like to add them while others prefer not to.
-
-Somaqiya. (Photo courtesy of Majeda.)
-
-Somaqiya
-
-Majeda, 30, is a project assistant who works at an educational institute. She is a mother of one daughter. She lives in North Gaza.
-
-If there is a wedding in Gaza, you will hear older women ululating and songs pouring out of the homes of the wedding party. And you will eat somaqiya, because no family in Gaza would have a wedding without it.
-
-There are many celebrations related to marriage. There is the actual wedding ceremony, the bride’s party (called the henna party, named after a plant-based dye used to paint intricate designs on the hands and arms), and the groom’s party where men will dance debke in the streets. We prepare the somaqiya for the groom’s party.
-
-Somaqiya is a sign of happiness. When someone in our family is getting married, my mother would start preparing the ingredients the day before. On the party day, she would wake up in the early morning to start the big meal. Her sisters, nieces, and friends would join too. While they cooked, they sang and danced. When they finished preparing the dish, they poured it onto plastic plates and asked the children in the family to sort them over the floor to cool. We serve somaqiya with pickles and homemade bread, usually pita.
-
-Somaqiya must be spicy! If not, people will say it was not delicious. When the parties end, the women in the family pack up the extras.
-
-After I got married I learned how to make somaqiya and along with other Palestinian dishes. My interest in cooking grew beyond traditional cuisine, and I started learning more about western dinners and sweets. I decided to create an Instagram page to share all the dishes I have learned.
-
-The Palestinian dishes are a part of our traditions. And I believe that sharing them plays a role in keeping our history and identity alive.
-
-Ingredients
-
-1/2 lbs of lamb shoulder cut into one-inch cubes4 cups of chard 8 tablespoons of sumac 5 tablespoons of dill seeds1 bulb of garlic 2 onions 1/2 cup of flour 5 chili peppers1 cup of vegetable oil 1 1/2 cups of tahini paste6 cups of water2 tablespoons of olive oil1 cup of olive oil
-
-Directions
-
-Pour water and sumac into a 4-quart pot, cover, and boil. When the water reaches a boil, remove from heat. Let it sit out to cool for 20 minutes. Then, with a thin meshed strainer, strain any leftover granules of sumac. Set aside the pot of sumac water. It should be a purple or red color.Dice chard and chop onions. In a separate pot, on medium-low heat, add the meat and stir for 15 minutes. Then add the chopped onion and stir for 5 minutes. After that, add the chopped chard and stir for ten minutes. Add the smashed garlic, chili peppers, and dill seeds. Continue to sautee for another three minutes. Go back to the pot of sumac water and whisk in flour, stirring until dissolved.Combine the sumac water and flour mixture with the sauteed vegetables and lamb. Stir continuously until the mixture thickens. Add salt, tahini and one cup of olive oil and stir for seven minutes. When the soup-like base appears consistent, the dish is ready to serve.
-
-Ziad AliZiad Ali is a pseudonym for a writer and blogger from Gaza.
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mondoweiss/texts/1835.txt

@@ -1,33 +1,55 @@
-The Palestinian table is famous for its abundance, but it is also subject to an abundance of restrictions under Israel’s system of settler-colonialism and apartheid.
+Student protests over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are spreading across the United States and around the world. Students at Columbia University in New York setup a protest encampment last week on the New York campus. In response, the university’s President, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, called in the New York Police Department and arrested several student organizers. These students were then banned from campus and may face expulsion.
 
-Visualizing Palestine’s latest visual highlights how these restrictions add up to the denial of Palestinian food sovereignty, defined by La Via Campesina as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” Food sovereignty is an important principle embraced by the environmental justice movement that connects Indigenous peoples, peasant communities, landless people, and small to medium size food producers around the world. These groups play an essential role in food security, but are often denied control over the land they rely on for physical, ecological, and cultural survival.
+If the goal was to quickly end the protest, this completely backfired on the university administration. Thousands of students, joined by faculty and staff from across the university, re-established the protest camp almost immediately. Other universities around the United States have seen solidarity camps erected and administration buildings occupied. Now, students around the world are joining the movement.
 
-Food Sovereignty Advocates for Land Rights
+Michael Arria and I spoke to one of the student organizers from Columbia who was arrested and banned from campus. Maryam Iqbal spoke to us on Tuesday.
 
-One of the seven principles of food sovereignty defined by La Via Campesina is agrarian reform, or reform that “gives landless and farming people — especially women — ownership and control of the land they work and returns territories to Indigenous peoples.” Agrarian reform also requires ensuring that the right to land is free of discrimination. The primacy of this principle is highly visible in the context of Palestine, where Israeli settler-colonialism has stripped Palestinians of the right to much of their agricultural land, creating high rates of food insecurity.
+In the second segment, Michael reacts to Summer Lee’s primary victory in Pennsylvania and previews his new election season newsletter.
 
-Palestinians have a long and rich agricultural heritage in the Fertile Crescent. As farmers, they have tended its fields and orchards for generations; as fishers, they have harvested its sea; and as herders, they have roamed its rocky hills and arid areas. At the time of British colonial rule, Palestinians were already farming an estimated 85% of cultivable land in Palestine, using rainfed, low-input baal techniques in harmony with the local climate and economy.
+Support our work
 
-Israel’s denial of Palestinian food sovereignty is rooted in its discriminatory land policy across all areas it controls. During the Nakba in 1948, Palestinian refugees lost almost 4.6 million dunums of farmland, which the Israeli state quickly appropriated for the establishment of Jewish-only agricultural settlements. Overtaken Palestinian fields and orchards were celebrated as a marker of Zionism’s achievement and its ideology of ethnic supemacy. In the Naqab region, Israel rapidly expropriated 85% of Palestinian Bedouin land as state land.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-Israel’s appropriation of agricultural land and assault on rural communities continues in today’s Ongoing Nakba. In occupied and besieged Gaza, 35% of agricultural land is inaccessible due to Israeli military measures. Al Mezan Center for Human Rights reported that the Israeli navy attacked fishers in Palestinian territorial waters 2,265 times from 2007 to 2021. In the occupied West Bank, 63% of agricultural land is under complete Israeli control in Area C, with Palestinian rural communities in Area C being some of the most vulnerable to Israeli policies of forced displacement. In the Jordan Valley, the Israeli military uses Palestinian farmland and pastures for drills, leaving behind unexploded ammunition that has later killed and injured Palestinians. The wall cuts off 10% of the West Bank, forcing thousands of Palestinian farmers to apply for permits from Israeli authorities to tend their own land beyond the wall. In 2020, Israel denied 73% of farmer permit requests.
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-The ongoing case of Masafer Yatta is one example of how Israel relentlessly targets Palestinian rural communities in Area C for forced displacement and urbanization. Masafer Yatta comprises 20 Palestinian Bedouin farming and herding communities living under Israeli military occupation in the South Hebron Hills. After declaring the area a firing zone in the 1980s, Israeli authorities have been hounding these communities with military exercises, home demolitions, and drawn out court proceedings. The Israeli Supreme Court, which reliably sides with the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise, recently rejected an appeal to prevent the expulsion of over 1,000 Masafer Yatta residents, paving the way for the latest installment of a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing.
+Follow Maryam Iqbal on Twitter
 
-Under Ottoman land laws, one way of acquiring ownership of land in Palestine was to cultivate it for a continuous period of ten years without objection from the state. Collective land rights were also recognized for grazing and other communal uses. Israel has reinterpreted and manipulated these laws to justify stripping Palestinians of land rights if they cultivate only part of an area of their land or if they stop cultivating an area of land due to Israeli restrictions, environmental factors, or other reasons. Additionally, Israel disregards Palestinian collective land rights.
+Share this podcast
 
-While Israel’s colonial land policy is at the root of Palestinian food insecurity, Israel’s drive to control maximum land with minimum Palestinians has produced a plethora of measures to regulate and restrict non-Jewish food producers. These include denial of the right to water, denial of freedom of movement, attacks by Israeli settlers (committed with impunity), control over imports and exports, bans affecting herders and foragers, and the criminalization of the Union for Agricultural Work Committees. The items on the table in Visualizing Palestine’s food sovereignty visual depict a selection of these restrictions.
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
 
-Greenwashing Food Insecurity
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-As a result of the denial of their food sovereignty, 69% of Palestinian households in Gaza and 33% across the occupied Palestinian territory were food insecure as of 2021. Reliance on food aid is particularly high in Gaza, where formerly thriving agricultural and fishing sectors have been devastated by Israel’s blockade, which will mark its fifteenth year this June. The framework of food sovereignty challenges the way the food insecurity paradigm often fails to address the structural and systemic causes of hunger and poverty, in this case the structures of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
 
-To add insult to injury, Israel has leveraged its control over water and other resources to build a thriving and globally prominent agriculture technology sector. Techniques such as drip irrigation, desalination, and wastewater reuse are celebrated as solutions to food and water insecurity in a changing climate, but the same policies that encourage Israelis to innovate contribute to greenwashing the food insecurity and de-development Palestinians experience under Israeli rule. Palestinian farmers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates have documented the ways that Israel’s water management harms Palestinian ecosystems, agroeconomies, and human rights, leaving their fields and faucets dry while subsidizing water for intensive production by Israeli settlements.
+Amazon
 
-The agriculture technology sector exemplifies a broader technological solutionism pervading conversations about climate change in spaces of power. These are often corporate-dictated, government-approved approaches that focus on optimizing inputs, maximizing outputs, and pushing small scale farmers to abandon traditional methods in favor of consolidating systems that prioritize food as a commodity over food as a source of nutrition. The food sovereignty movement rejects the dominance of multinational corporations and multilateral organizations in shaping agricultural policy, instead advocating for democratic control over food systems and recognition of the importance of Indigenous and peasant knowledge in forging a sustainable future free of hunger, poverty, worker exploitation, and environmental degradation.
+Apple Podcasts
 
-This visual builds on Visualizing Palestine’s previous visual work on environmental justice in Palestine, which explores concepts including climate vulnerability, green colonialism, environmental racism, and extractive colonialism.
+Audible
 
-Special thanks to Growing Palestine for their feedback and partnership in this visual, and to the many Palestinian farmers, environmentalists, researchers, and agricultural collectives whose work is leading the way in raising these issues.
+Deezer
 
-Jessica AndersonJessica Anderson is Deputy Director of Visualizing Impact (VI), a non-profit organization that creates data-led, visual tools for social justice. Visualizing Palestine, the first and largest project of VI, provides tools that convey a factual, rights-based narrative of the Palestinian movement for freedom, justice, and equality.
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mondoweiss/texts/1836.txt

@@ -1,55 +1,89 @@
-PALESTINE ON A PLATEMemories from my mother’s kitchenby Joudie Kallapp. 240. Interlink Books. Paperback $ 25 | Hardback $ 35
+In this episode, Mondoweiss’s Yumna Patel speaks with Palestinian lawyer and political analyst Diana Buttu about the genocide in Gaza and the role social media is playing in how it unfolds.
 
-BALADIA Celebration of Food from Land and Seaby Joudie Kallapp. 256. Interlink Books. $25
+Israeli soldiers on the ground in Gaza are undermining Israel’s carefully crafted public image as a victim through their social media posts, which show them joking, laughing, and committing what many legal observers believe are war crimes.
 
-Interlink is offering a $20 discount for readers who purchase “Palestine on a Plate” and “Baladi” together.
+This second Nakba is being live-streamed in real-time, and Yumna and Diana discuss the experience Palestinians are sharing of watching a genocide of their people play out on their mobile phones.
 
-Friends no longer gather for meals, no one is hosting ample tables for visitors, and strangers are not gabbing with whoever is seated close by at a bar for dinner. But there is food for sale even if the shelves at stores are half-stocked. It is clear this is a time of extraordinary abstention, yet it is also a season of culinary delights.
+Support our work
 
-“People are thinking about what would mama make?” chef Joudie Kalla tells me via telephone from her home in London where she is isolating with her two dogs. She is mid-meal, sating herself with grilled halloumi cheese, Lebanese cucumber, tomato, and drizzles of olive oil dashed with salt and pepper.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-When asked how has her approach to cooking has changed recent weeks she confesses, “it all depends on my mood quite honestly. If I’m feeling quite low then sometimes I make really quick meals,” or “quick fixes” as she later calls them. These are simple, unfussy staples of Palestinian cuisine liked spiced lamb manouche.
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-Joudie Kalla. Photo courtesy of  Joudie Kalla.
+Follow Diana on Instagram and Twitter/X
 
-“I think the most important things is just to plan ahead and make use of all of your ingredients.” On her most prolific days of quarantine cooking, she focuses on “big batches” for instances, prepping pounds of lehme, or “meat” in Arabic.
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
 
-“I make six or seven portions of that and I put it in the freezer and then I make a another big batch and put it in the freezer straight away.” This method frees up time, when time is most elusive.
+Share this podcast
 
-As far as ingredients go, Kalla passed on the mania of panic buying that engulfed the UK. She’s a longtime bulk shopper and already had her own reserves. Her lentils don’t come in small bags the size of a sandwich. “I buy a five-kilo pack, I’ve been like this all my life.”
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
 
-“I was looking at my kitchen thinking thank God my mom raised me up this way. It’s good to have extras just in case for emergency cooking,” she said.
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-When she does her weekly run to pick up essentials, she buys from small businesses, “I tend to support my local suppliers and they usually have everything. If you go to your cornerstone around your house you’ll find eggs, and flour and toilet paper.”
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
 
-Kalla is the author of two cookbooks “Baladi” and “Palestine on a Plate.” She is among a generation of Palestinian chefs who have translated family recipes and made them available to tables across the world. What is perhaps unique about her approach to cooking is that her curation of family recipes cast one of the wider nets in the vast world of Palestinian cuisine.
+Amazon
 
-Palestinian cooking styles are as varied as the accents in which people speak. “Each city, each town had a specific way of cooking something and each claimed to be the original,” she told me. In the north, where Kalla’s father hails from, there is more meat in the diet, while her mother is from the seaside towns of Yaffa and al-Lydd where fish are regular features of the local palate. “Mom’s side of the family cooked very, very spicy hot lemony dishes with lots of vegetables,” while “my dad’s family is from the north where they have meat, lamb, bulgur, lots of yogurt dishes.”
+Apple Podcasts
 
-Her books reflect booth of these traditions and also the fusion of the two. Kalla was born in Syria to parents who were from refugee families expelled from Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. She was raised in both Qatar and London. Food has always been a cornerstone of her identity.
+Audible
 
-Her maternal and paternal grandmothers met while walking to Syria and later lived in the same building. Her mother and father grew up together. After they married, her mother made it her mission to learn the culinary classics of her father’s family.
+Deezer
 
-“Its such a tiny sesame size piece of land you have so many different ways to make the same thing, which I love,” Kalla said.
+Gaana
 
-Kalla has shared with us her recipe for kufta bil tahineh, otherwise known as ground lamb kufta with tangy tahini sauce. It the kind of dish that easy to scale up or down. What’s more, it is the epitome of comfort food: meat and potatoes smothered in a silky warm sauce. The below excerpt comes from her first book “Palestine on a Plate.”
+Google Podcasts
 
-I’ve made this dish for dinner parties with 20 people (and it was a hit), and for dinners alone where I wanted to indulge. It wasn’t until I read Kalla’s recipe that I was able to correct my technique and get the sauce to the perfect consistency. The tip I learned — pre-cook the meat before adding the nutty and zesty tahini. If it goes in at the same time, it will turn runny.
+Overcast
 
-“Sometimes a tiny instruction can change the whole end result of a dish,” Kalla told me.
+Player.fm
 
-Excerpt from “Palestine on a Plate”
+RadioPublic
 
-1lb 5 oz (900 g) ground lamb1 onion, choppeda bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped2–3 teaspoons sea salt black pepper½ cup (120 ml) tahini3 tablespoons Greek yogurtjuice of 4 lemonsgreen peppers, chili, radishes, lemon slices, and Khubez (Pita Bread) to serve
+Spotify
 
-Serves 4–6
+TuneIn
 
-The flavor of the sharp tahini sauce with the beautiful spiced lamb in this dish is such a wonderful contrast in your mouth—it’s like an ivory velvet snow covering rough mountains of goodness. I love tahini. It goes so well with meat and fish and is also great in salad dressings. It adds another dimension to this recipe and the sharpness of the lemon juice makes the whole thing divine. This recipe is so simple that you really can’t go wrong, and the end result actually looks like you have put a lot of effort into making something that tastes so great. That’s the wonder of cooking—there are so many ingredients that marry well, that you can just keep making new things all the time with similar ingredients in different combinations. This dish will have you dreaming of the next time you will make it. Or hoping that no one else will want the last slice…
+YouTube
 
-Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C).
+Our RSS feed
 
-Mix the ground lamb with the onion and parsley, and add about 2 teaspoons of the salt, and a little pepper. Tip it into an ovenproof pan or dish and gently pat the mixture down, making indents every ¾ inch (2 cm) to create little dips in the surface. Do not press the meat down too tightly, though—you don’t want a dense texture.
+We want your feedback!
 
-Mix the tahini and yogurt together and add the lemon juice. It will begin to seize and thicken but don’t worry, it will loosen up. Add ½ cup (120 ml) water and taste for flavor, adding a little salt if needed. You want it to be zingy and a little runny. Set aside. Bake the meat for about 15 minutes, until browned, then take the pan out of the oven. Pour the tahini mixture all over the surface. Return the pan to the oven for another 10–15 minutes, or until slightly charred on top. Serve with green peppers, chili, radishes, and some Khubez (Pita Bread).
+Email us
 
-Tip: Transform the above dish into Kufta Bil Batata Wa Banadora—a very similar dish using vegetables as a topping. My mom would make these side by side so we could have both, since some of us liked one more than the other. Prepare the meat, onion, and parsley and press into an ovenproof pan or dish as above. Layer 2 peeled and thinly sliced large potatoes and 4–6 thinly sliced large tomatoes on top of the kufta, overlapping as you go, and keep going until you have covered the surface completely. Bake for about 30 minutes, checking it every now and then to make sure the potatoes are cooking. Serve as above.
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mondoweiss/texts/1837.txt

@@ -1,47 +1,89 @@
-No one charity epitomizes the synergy between rampant financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of Israeli war criminality and the laissez faire attitude that plagues the Canadian tax regulator, better than the Mizrachi Organization of Canada. Legally registered as a charitable organization as of 1979, Mizrachi Canada’s bold-faced website advertises itself as the Canadian home of the Religious Zionist Movement, ready and energized to move tax-deductible donations to supposedly worthy causes in Israel. With Canadian Jewish private and public foundations sitting on multiple billions of dollars, Mizrachi Canada serves as the most overt conduit for Canadians looking to support Israeli war crimes – and earn a charitable tax credit in the process.
+The Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza reports that hundreds of dead bodies have been found in the grounds of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, south of the Gaza Strip.
 
-Welcome to Canada, where Palestinian erasure is a charitable pastime and the Canada Revenue Agency, the charitable sector regulator, is either complicit or inept.
+The Civil Defense announced in a press conference that since May 1st, 392 bodies had been found in mass graves, many of whom had been identified as missing for weeks, while 58% of the bodies haven’t been identified.
 
-For starters, as I’ve written about in detail here, Mizrachi Canada operates as a tax receipt-issuing conduit for the Israeli website, jgive.com. Jgive.com, the forward-facing platform for the Israeli-based organization, ASUR Fund, plays virtual host to thousands of Israeli-registered charities. Thumbing its nose at customary international legal frameworks, like the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statutes (which Canada has internalized into its own Criminal Code) hundreds of these Israeli charities are physically located in illegally occupied Palestinian territory.
+Muhammad al-Mughayyir, director of the Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, said that some 20 bodies were buried while medical and medication tubes were still connected to their bodies, suggesting that they might have been buried alive. Al-Mughayyir added that the bodies showed signs of torture.
 
-Beyond their role in adding permanency to Israel’s illegal occupation, consider the operational parameters of some of the other Israeli charities hosted by jgive.com: Regavim works to delegitimize Palestinian territorial claims, specifically in so-called Area C of the West Bank. Elad Ir David runs an illegal settlement/tourist attraction that uses an ever-expanding, pseudo-archaeological, dig site as justification for expelling Palestinians from the town of Silwan. Women in Green claims to be an apolitical organization, yet is bent upon the destruction and subsequent Israeli settlement of Gaza. Im Tirtzu, an actual fascist organization, actively turns away aid trucks bound for Gaza.
+Adam Horowitz, our Executive Editor, spoke to Muhammad Shehada, director of communications for Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an organization with staff on the ground in Gaza documenting human rights violations. Muhammad describes the scene their staff is observing.
 
-In terms of overt support to the Israeli military, jgive.com also lists numerous ‘Hesder Yeshivas’ as Israeli charities. These quasi-educational facilities operate in a complementary capacity to military service in Israel, where soldiers undertake Talmudic studies alongside active duty. Dozens of other Israeli charities on jgive.com, like the Duvdevan Foundation, for example, provide material and financial support to active members of the Israeli military, drawing them into direct financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of an ever-expanding list of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Mizrachi Canada’s financial support of these internationally illegal Israeli recipients is listed in Table 1.
+Support our work
 
-NameDollar Amount (CDN)Description ALON SHEVUT RELIGIOUS AND COMMUNITY$16,470.00Illegal Settlement – Alon ShvutBAIS ISRAEL$18,585.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemBEIT KNESSET HAZORIM B’RINA$21,910.00Illegal Settlement Outpost – EfratBEIT MIDRASH ‘ZICHRON MOSHE’$18,610.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemCHASDEI EFRAT$338.00Illegal Settlement – EfratDOLEV HOMES FOR YOUTH AT RISK$64,360.00Illegal Settlement – DolevEFRAT DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION$323,923.00Illegal Settlement – EfratHAKIBUTZ HADATI$93,083.00Religious movement comprises several illegal kibbutzes in West Bank, (Migdal Oz, Kfar Etzion, Rosh Tzurim)JOB KATIF/LA’OFEK$3,132.00Illegal Settlement – Alon ShvutKEREN AHIEZER ACHISAMCH$63,616.00Illegal Settlement – Karnei Shomron KIRYAT HAYESHIVA BET EL$98,055.00Illegal Settlement – Beit ElMECHINAT YEDIDYA$44,304.00Illegal Settlement – Gush Etzion districtMICHLOL MAALE LEVONA$46,988.00Illegal Settlement – Ma’ale LevonaMIDRESHET HAROVA$77,645.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemMIDRESHET HAVORA$10,621.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemNETZER ARIEL$20,786.00Illegal Settlement – ArielSHIRAT HATAMAR$1,079.00Illegal Settlement – EfratSYNAGOGUE IN MEMORY OF NOAM RAZ$736.00Illegal Settlement – KeidaTALMUD TORAH HADAR YOSEF$9,500.00Illegal Settlement – Serves Binyamin RegionTESHIVA HAR BRACHA$159,259.00Illegal Settlement – Har BrachaGUSH ETZION FOUNDATION$1,742.00Provides financial support for settlementsTHE WOMEN’S BEIT MISRASH OF EFRAT$9,546.00Illegal Settlement – EfratULPANA L’BANOT KIRYAT ARBA$1,440.00Illegal Settlement – Kiryat ArbaYESHIVA BNEI ROCHEL-KEVER ROCHEL$6,189.00Illegal Settlement – BethlehemYESHIVAT HAKOTEL$31,743.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemYESHIVAT HAR ETZION$148,441.00Illegal Settlement – Har EtzionYESHIVAT NETIV ARYEH$32,933.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemYESHIVAT ORAYTA$11,040.00Illegally annexed East JerusalemYESHIVAT SHAVEI HEVRON$125,789.00Illegal Settlement – HebronYISHUV ELI$8,781.00Illegal Settlement – EliYESHIVAT SHAVEI HEVRON$2,173.00Illegal Settlement – HebronBNEI DAVID/YESHIVAT HESDER ELI$44,010.00Hesder Yeshiva – Military adjacent educational training in lieu of active military serviceYESH. HES, OR VISHUA HAIFA$1,119.00Hesder Yeshiva YESH. HESDER KIRYAT SHEMONEH$475.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER ACCO$39,042.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER DIMONA$6,000.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER HAREL$39,251.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER MAALOT YAAKOV$25,885.00Hesder YeshivaYESHIVAT HESDER NEVE DEKALIM (V)$53,769.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER NOF HAGALIL$5,425.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER OR ETZION$11,814.00Hesder YeshivaYESHIVAT HESDER RAMAT GAN$4,950.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER SDEROT$29,318.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER SHILOH$475.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER TFAHOT$31,315.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT HESDER YAFO$20,356.00Hesder Yeshiva YESHIVAT MA’ALE GILBOA$1,900.00Hesder Yeshiva hybrid BRIT OLAM$2,344.00Israeli Political PartyFOUNDATION OF THE VETERAN PARATROOPERS$22,521.00Military affiliatedGARIN TORANI LOD$19,620.00Works towards Jewish-only settling in Jewish minority neighbourhoodsOREV$11,608.00Israeli paratrooper divisionREGAVIM$8,460.00Conducts surveillance and legal warfare against Palestinians, specifically in ‘Area C’ of West BankWOMEN IN GREEN$11,403.00Works towards colonization of ‘Greater Israel’DUVDEVAN FOUNDATION$200,000.00Supports members of Duvdevan Unit – Israeli military unit.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-Table 1 – Illegal Israeli Intermediaries named by Mizrachi Canada (Source: Mizrachi Canada 2023 Schedule 2 – Overseas Activity)
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-Internationalizing the scheme, jgive.com has aligned itself with a variety of charitable partners, which provide Zionist donors in America, Great Britain, and Canada the opportunity to use the jgive website to donate to the Israeli charity of their choice, in their home currencies, and receive charitable tax receipts in their home countries. None of this would be possible without ‘home country’ partners, because the Israeli charities themselves don’t have charitable status outside of Israel. In America, jgive.com’s charity partner is the Jerusalem-registered, Friends of Asor Fund USA. In Great Britain, the charity partner is registered as UK Toremet. For Canadian Zionists, the charitable tax receipting service is provided by Mizrachi Canada.
+‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 202: Gaza’s Civil Defense finds hundreds of new bodies in mass graves at Nasser Hospital – Qassam Muaddi
 
-This isn’t actually legal in Canada. In Canada, if you’re a charity and you want to move money into the hands of an international intermediary, like an Israeli charity, you need to demonstrate direction and control over the money you’re providing and be able to prove that the international recipient is undertaking charitable programming that wouldn’t have taken place without your money. You can’t just blanket fundraise for pre-existing operations over which you have no control, like what Mizrachi Canada does for jgive.com. That’s called being an illegal conduit.
+The Shift: Does the White House care about mass graves? – Michael Arria
 
-Canadian charities are also required to obey Canadian public policy statements. Global Affairs Canada has made it clear that the Canadian government does not consider the post-1967 Israeli presence in the occupied Palestinian territory to be “permanent” and, importantly, considers the Fourth Geneva Convention to be legally applicable and “establishes Israel’s obligations as an occupying power”.
+‘It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth:’ testimonies from the mass grave at Nasser Hospital – Tareq Hajjaj
 
-As we all know, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention notes that the transferring civilian populations into occupied territory, along with forced deportation and transfer of indigenous populations, are war crimes. Canadian charities are legally responsible for the actions of their international intermediaries. And so, regardless of whatever passes for charity law in the apartheid state, Mizrachi Canada is legally responsible to Canadian law for the activities of its Israeli recipients.
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
 
-Beyond the confines of the Income Tax Act and Canadian public policy, the actions of Mizrachi Canada’s Israeli intermediaries also contravene various aspects of the Canadian Criminal Code. Under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the transfer of civilian populations into a territory under occupation, along with the “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”, are war crimes. The Rome Statute has been adopted in full into Canadian law through the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (CAHWCA), as have the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, under the Geneva Conventions Act. War crimes and crimes against humanity, within both Acts, are indictable offenses under the Canadian Criminal Code.
+Share this podcast
 
-The problem isn’t just limited to the activities of Mizrachi Canada. As I’ve written about in some detail here, Mizrachi Canada is not the only Canadian charity that moves money into the hands of Israeli intermediaries committing war crimes (for whom they are legally responsible). On a solely financial level, the jgive.com empire is certainly the key, international, operator within the world of ‘point and click’ Israeli charity. But the Canadian charitable organization Canada Charity Partners, for example, operates as a conduit for the Israeli-based website israelgives.org. Ne’eman Foundation Canada, prior to its revocation (which I’ve written about here), also hosted dozens of Israeli charities, many of them located within the illegal settlements and/or who provided material and financial support to Palestinian dispossession.
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter. Click here to post a tweet!
 
-The overall problem is that these Canadian charitable organizations seem to be able to operate within a space of extra-legality. If/when the Canada Revenue Agency does finally act, as with the case of Ne’eman Canada, the actual repercussions are totally minimal – the charity simply dissolves and its place within the illegal, transactional, system is replaced.
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-Tragically, by financial accounts, genocide has been very good for those involved in the Israeli charity business. 2023 saw jgive.com’s parent company, the ‘ASUR Fund’ take in over 283 million NIS in donations (about $78 million USD). This is over double the 131 million NIS it brought in in 2022. For its part, in 2023 Mizrachi Canada brought in over $21 million CDN, about triple the over $7 million CDN it declared in revenue in 2022.
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
 
-Asleep at the Wheel or In on the Deal?
+Amazon
 
-Beyond the fact that the Canadian charitable sector is now actively an extra-legal hotbed of financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of Israeli war crimes, two serious issues present themselves.
+Apple Podcasts
 
-Firstly, as an outside researcher, year in year out, by rights I should be able to chart out all of a Canadian charity’s international activity. Canadian charities are required to divulge their international activity, by intermediary name and received dollar amount, in the ‘Schedule 2 – Overseas Activity’ section of their yearly tax returns. Yet even this baseline of data, via which one might then begin the research process, is frequently absent. Consider that Mizrachi Canada, between 2007-2021, claimed to have moved over $46 million CDN into Israel. Only about $600,000 CDN of this was properly accounted for, by intermediary name and dollar amount, in its yearly tax returns. The rest, over a span of 15 years, quite simply, could have gone anywhere.
+Audible
 
-This lack of baseline reporting isn’t limited to Mizrachi Canada, either. The David Hofstedter Family Foundation, for example, consistently moves tens of millions of dollars CDN into Israel per year and simply lists the country code ‘Israel’ as its recipient. The endemic lack of reporting is the same with the United Israel Appeal of Canada, which is the main money-moving arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada and also moves millions of dollars CDN per year.
+Deezer
 
-Having familiarized myself with the sector, it isn’t an underestimate to say that tens of millions of dollars CDN in tax-deductible donations move from Canada to Israel, every year, without any outside ability to know or understand where this money ends up, or what it is intended to do. The Canada Revenue Agency, for its part, appears either unable or unwilling to address this. So, while Mizrachi Canada and its activities are certainly illegal and problematic, the bigger issue is the endemic lack of reporting within the sector – and a regulator either asleep at the wheel or in on the deal.
+Gaana
 
-Without fully delving into the conspiratorial, consider that the same private foundations – tied to family and corporate fortunes in Canada – whose names grace hospital wings, academic chairs, and art prizes, are the same ones underwriting Mizrachi Canada’s financial complicity in war crimes and genocide. Between 2000-2023, Canadian public and private foundations donated millions of dollars CDN to Mizrachi Canada and were responsible for about a third of the overall cash flowing through Mizrachi Canada to Israel during this period. Table 2 illustrates all Canadian foundation donors to Mizrachi Canada, between 2000-2023, that donated a minimum $200,000, cumulatively.
+Google Podcasts
 
-Legal NameAmount (CDN)Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal $3,904,684.00THE ROTHFAM FOUNDATION$3,888,448.00ISRAEL KOSCHITZKY FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$2,967,802.00SILVER FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$2,661,449.00NATHAN AND LILY SILVER FAMILY FOUNDATION$2,277,118.00THE JEWISH LEGACY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$2,172,390.00THE AMAYN CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$2,047,676.00DAAT CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$1,744,830.00THE SHELLO CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$1,727,500.00THE JACK WEINBAUM FAMILY FOUNDATION$1,245,876.00The Jonathan and Ethan Lax Foundation$1,222,429.00THE BUCKINGHAM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$1,148,893.00Jewish Foundation of Greater Toronto$1,061,076.00RAYJO CHARITABLE TRUST$1,037,526.00THE FRIEDBERG CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$987,217.00CANADIAN COUNCIL FOR ISRAEL$985,087.00THE MEYER FAMILY FOUNDATION$961,204.00THE CANADIAN COMMITTEE FOR THE TEL AVIV FOUNDATION$950,676.00HERZOG FAMILY TRUST$840,902.00THE WAYNE TANENBAUM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$833,500.00TORAH V’AVODAH CONGREGATION,$801,000.00THE FRANCES TANENBAUM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$769,212.00BINAH CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$661,580.00COLLEGE BETH JACOB POUR LES ENSEIGNANTS INC$660,352.00THE JOSEPH TANENBAUM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$656,175.00THE SAMUEL AND BESSIE ORFUS FAMILY FOUNDATION$647,000.00THE HERBERT GREEN FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION INC.$605,532.00THE P SCHWARTZ FAMILY FOUNDATION$594,630.00FAMGLAS FOUNDATION$549,070.00THE ESTHERELKE TANENBAUM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$428,212.00BESSIN FAMILY FOUNDATION$425,996.00THE JOSEPH AND FANNY TANENBAUM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$374,650.00Fondation Johanne & Normand Sternthal/Foundation Johanne & Norman Sternthal$318,120.00THE FRANKEL FAMILY FOUNDATION$318,079.00SEMINARY LOAN FUND$306,382.00CHIMP: Charitable Impact Foundation (Canada)$300,979.00THE KELMAN CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$284,447.00BETH OLOTH CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION$270,800.00THE MORRIS AND BEVERLY BAKER FOUNDATION$257,608.00UNITED JEWISH APPEAL OF GREATER TORONTO$243,850.00My Charity Fund$243,190.00THE ESTARON FOUNDATION$236,544.00THE S. SIGLER FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$224,348.00THE NUSBAUM FAMILY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION$218,449.00KEREN HATORAH CHARITY FUND$203,146.00
+Overcast
 
-Table 2 – $200,000+ CDN foundation donors to Mizrachi Canada (2000-2023).
+Player.fm
 
-This scenario arguably epitomizes the Faustian bargain at the heart of foundational philanthropy in Canada; tax-deductible donations prop up our social service regimes yet also slate resistant indigenous populations for extermination. These are the ‘too big to fail’ of the Canadian charitable sector. The tax regulator, for reasons unknown, has either abandoned its duties, is complicit, or is understaffed to the point of being incapacitated.
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mondoweiss/texts/1838.txt

@@ -1,45 +1,47 @@
-Most Palestinians see themselves as the self-evident indigenous people of the land. The relationship with the land, agriculture, and ancestral heritage has solidified this over centuries. However, huge efforts have been put in by Zionist propaganda groups to erase this fact and undermine this status. Like other colonial endeavors, the colonizer exerts his will on the land for self-profit with a disregard to local wisdom and possible consequences of their actions.
+Editor’s Note: The author of this article requested that their name not be published, fearing for their personal safety due to the intensification of fascist persecutions against critical voices in Israel.
 
-Over the past four months I have encountered a number of Palestinian “secrets” that either Palestinians keep to themselves in order to protect their heritage, or that others keep from the Palestinians in order to deny them from it.
+Since October 7, the day’s events have been shrouded in mystery. There are not only questions about the Israeli intelligence apparatus’s colossal failure to anticipate what was happening in the tightly besieged Strip or the quick collapse of their billion-dollar “Maginot Line” but also the details of what actually transpired in the military bases and settlements around the Gaza Strip. We know that, by common estimates, 1,400 Israelis were killed in the following few days, but we do not yet know the details of how.
 
-First, at the beginning of August of this year, Jerusalem faced severe forest fires which consumed the hills of pine trees and uncovered a secret; Palestinian terraces. These terraces date back to the Ottoman period and consensus is that were in fact constructed by the indigenous Palestinian population. This is an ancient technique which attempts to utilize hills for agricultural purposes by cultivating the land and rain fall.
+Some reports are beginning to appear, including documentation of the killing of Israelis by Palestinian fighters, but there are a growing number of reports that indicate the Israeli military was also responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths on October 7 and the days after.
 
-This is not the first time a colonizing nation disregard indigenous practices with the consequences being massive fires. In Australia, the indigenous people were prevented from performing “cultural burns” that would assist the land with regrowth and prevent larger fires. In both these cases, one can see the consequences of disregarding local wisdom. I wonder what our landscape would look like if Palestinians were not prevented from continuing to treat the land as they have for generations. At the very least it would not feel as forced (or as flammable) as the pine trees do.
+Hannibal Directive in action?
 
-The second secret that I encountered was during the Spring time of this year in the Galilee with my in-laws. My wife’s uncle “Z” invited me on a nature trip around his hometown of Shafa’amer.  He explained that there is a special plant that is only edible for two weeks during the year and that this would be our last opportunity to find it.
+On Friday, October 20, Haaretz published a lengthy article by its senior military analyst, Amos Harel, describing Israel’s failure to prepare for Hamas’s October 7 attacks. He introduces his readers to “the commander of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld,” whom he met a few weeks before the war, and heard from him that “things won’t get better, at some point they’ll get worse.”
 
-As we went searching for it, Z explained that there is a collective agreement of the Palestinians to keep this plant a secret from their Israeli neighbors: “It is part of my childhood and our heritage, they have taken the most of the land and most of everything else. We prefer that they stay ignorant of this plant.”
+He goes on to describe what happened on October 7:
 
-Visually, there is nothing about this plant that suggests one could eat it. It requires some preparation and its flavor is sweeter than a cucumber but similarly refreshing. In the past, Palestinians would go out to collect the plant and eat it next to the natural water sources that flow in the area. Today, the new towns around the water resource have contaminated much of the water, making it harder to find clean and fresh plants.
+“The Coordination and Liaison Office was attacked on October 7 together with all the outposts along the division’s line. A large Hamas force seized the adjacent Erez Crossing, which was closed for the Simhat Torah holiday. From there, within minutes and with no resistance, they advanced into the military base, killing and kidnapping the soldiers of the Civil Administration, though a few of them managed to return fire before being hit… Brig. Gen. Rosenfeld entrenched himself in the division’s subterranean war room together with a handful of male and female soldiers, trying desperately to rescue and organize the sector under attack. Many of the soldiers, most of them not combat personnel, were killed or wounded outside. The division was compelled to request an aerial strike against the base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.”
 
-As we were eating this plant on the side of the path, an Israeli couple saw us and watched us for a while. It was obvious they wanted to know what we were eating but hesitated to say anything. When it became clear that we were not going to volunteer any information, the lady instigated:
+This dry, complimentary description of the high commander, hiding with a few soldiers in an underground bunker and ordering an aerial bombardment of “the base” where his soldiers were fighting against Hamas militants, maybe wounded and maybe taken as prisoners, has a lot to say about the Israeli psyche in these bloody times.
 
-“You (Arabs) eat that in salads, don’t you?”
+It brings back to my mind the events of August 1, 2014, during the most violent Israeli campaign against Gaza up to the current one. On August 1, there was a ceasefire, but an Israeli unit initiated a provocation that ended with the capture of one of its soldiers by Palestinian militants. The Israeli response was devastating, clearly designed to make sure that the soldier, Hadar Goldin, would be dead with as many Palestinians as possible. According to investigations by Amnesty International and the United Nations, cited in Wikipedia, “the massive Israeli bombardment killed between 135 and 200 Palestinian civilians, including 75 children, in the three hours following the suspected capture of the one Israeli soldier.”
 
-“No, we do not.”
+These events are not accidental local eruptions of the “Samsonian” desire to die (or let your soldiers die) with one’s enemies. It is a well-documented official policy of the Israeli army, at least since 1986, known as the “Hannibal Directive,” the “Hannibal code,” or the “Hannibal doctrine.”
 
-“I am sure you eat it in salads.”
+It may not have ended with General Rosenfeld ordering the bombing of his soldiers. It will take years until we may (or may not) have a full picture of what happened on October 7 and the following days. But in addition to military deaths, there are also some details regarding the Israeli role in Israeli civilian deaths that can already be found amid the heavy flow of propaganda around the events of the day.
 
-“No, we do not eat it in salads.”
+Deaths in Kibbutz Be’eri
 
-“What is it?”
+Electronic Intifada published a long interview with Yasmin Porat, describing how she was held hostage by Palestinian militants in Kibbutz Be’eri. According to her account, the kidnappers treated her and other hostages “humanely,” believing they would be allowed to retreat safely to Gaza due to the protection of the Israeli captives. However, when the Israeli soldiers arrived, “they eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire.”
 
-“A plant from this area.”
+Her testimony is complemented by evidence from Israeli soldiers who described how the Israeli military shot tank shells into buildings where militants and their hostages were hiding.
 
-“It looks tasty.”
+On October 11, Quique Kierszenbaum reported in The Guardian about his tour of Kibbutz Be’eri, a tour organized by the Israeli Army’s propaganda unit. He writes:
 
-Our culture of hospitality obligated us to offer some to the couple and they were shocked by the taste of the plant. We dodged the rest of their questions and they eventually left without so much as a thank you. Their rude and condescending tone completely justified our secrecy over this plant.
+“Building after building has been destroyed, whether in the Hamas assault or in the fighting that followed, nearby trees splintered and walls reduced to concrete rubble from where Israeli tanks blasted the Hamas militants where they were hiding. Floors collapsed on floors. Roof beams were tangled and exposed like rib cages.”
 
-Most Palestinians will also find it upsetting that hummus and falafel have been culturally misappropriated as Israeli cuisine both here and abroad, we therefore were unwilling to contribute to this subjugation. The reality of such aggressive colonialism is not just the loss of land and resources, but the denial of your identity and heritage. The Zionist narrative is unable to accept the uniqueness of how Palestinian cuisine differs from other Arab cuisines. It is shaped by the land and therefore solidifies not only the Palestinian indigenous identity; but our right to the land as well.
+In another report in Haaretz in Hebrew (it does not appear to be available in English) on October 11, probably following the same army-guided PR tour, Nir Hasson and Eden Solomon interviewed “Erez, deputy commander of an armored reserve battalion.” He described how he and his tanks unit “fought inside the kibbutz, from house to house, with the tanks.” “We had no choice,” he concludes.
 
-In other colonial contexts, one can see how the agricultural practices of the indigenous people were banned and kept secret from the colonizer, but these peoples have kept the secret amongst them and refuse to have their heritage erased or abused. Z’s main concern is that the younger generation take little interest in our agricultural heritage and this knowledge may one day be forgotten.
+Most recently, Nir Hasson returned to Be’eri and interviewed a local resident named Tuval, who was lucky to be away from the kibbutz at the time of the attack but whose partner was killed. In Hasson’s October 20 Haaretz article, he reports:
 
-The third secret that I encountered was in my neighborhood of Abu-Tor, which is split between a Jewish (West) side and a Palestinian (East) side. The main park in the neighborhood is located on the West side and all residents will come and use it, as none exist on the East side. During one of our family outings in the park, my wife started talking to one of the Palestinian ladies in the park about one of the trees that drops edible fruit, yet no one seemed to be using it. Palestinians will come to collect the fruit, but most of it goes to waste.
+“His voice trembles when his partner, who was besieged in her home shelter at the time, comes to mind. According to him, only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF complete the takeover of  the kibbutz. The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
 
-The lady commented that: “You can make many nutritious delicacies from this fruit; like a special jelly. This is sold for a fortune in health-food shops and is expensive. If the Israelis in this neighborhood knew the value of this fruit, they would not let it drop and go to waste like this.” There was very little information that I could find online and there are no recipes that I could find in Hebrew. Sure enough, my wife and I collected a bucketful and made dessert the next day, following this lady’s recipe.
+This quote is important for several reasons; one is because it adds to the understood timeline of events. This testimony would seem to indicate that many Israeli captives were still alive on Monday, October 9, a full two days after the events of Saturday, October 7. While it might be understandable if captives had been killed in the hectic crossfire of an initial Israeli response to the attack on the 7th, this account would seem to indicate that the decision to assault the kibbutz and everyone inside was made as a clear military calculation.
 
-In Harold Brookfield’s Exploring Agrodiversity, Audrey Richards (a British social-anthropologist) was accompanying indigenous people in the African Savanah. She remarks that: “These people’s thoughts and interests are in fact… entirely concentrated on objects that the average white man simply does not see.” This seems to be the case in the Israeli-Palestinian context as well. On the one hand, you have the deep generational knowledge of the land, and on the other you have the oblivious colonizer who walks past these agricultural treasures that are hiding in plain sight.
+It is clear Palestinian militants were hiding in these buildings with their Israeli captives as Israeli soldiers were blasting their way in with massive tank shells in close quarters. It deserves to be investigated who caused most of the death and destruction that took place. This is especially important as these deaths are now being used to justify the destruction of Gaza and the killing of thousands of civilians there.
 
-Over the past few years, it has been wonderful to see Palestinian chefs have been publishing cookbooks that celebrate Palestinian cuisine. These are the type of contributions which will help maintain our cultural heritage. Having said that, the smaller “secrets”, which are oftentimes local to specific areas of the land may end up being forgotten. The battle over Palestinian hummus is important, but my bigger concern is for the recipes we might lose over time.
+Implications for Israeli captives in Gaza
 
-If I had one concluding thought, it would be that we as Palestinians need to find creative ways to preserve our collective knowledge and heritage. The colonization of Palestine is not the only thing that is distancing us from our land, but also the global move of peoples from rural areas to urban ones and the seemingly complete disinterest of many people in the younger generations. For us, the challenge is not simply to preserve this knowledge from the rapid change that Palestinian society faces, but also to reclaim our indigenous identity and practices from those that would want to erase it.
+All this is not history or simply in the past. There are implications for the next stage of the war, which might be even much bloodier. One central element of the conflict is now the fate of more than two hundred Israeli captives, soldiers, and civilians.
+
+For the Palestinians, this is a historic opportunity to release their long-held militants from what they call “the occupation bastilles.” Even as Palestinians know that the liberation of their land is still a distant dream, the liberation of their prisoners through a prisoner swap is the most precious victory for which they can strive. However, Israel, as it has proved many times in the past and as recent events may indicate, may be ready to put the lives of its soldiers and citizens at risk rather than witness the joy of freedom celebrated on both sides of the border.

mondoweiss/texts/1839.txt

@@ -1,11 +1,61 @@
-Izzeldin Bukhari is a chef based in Jerusalem’s Old City who works to promote traditional Palestinian food and the impact of Israel’s attempts to appropriate Palestine’s food culture and heritage.
+In this episode, we have two interviews with our U.S. Correspondent, Michael Arria. First, Michael talks to Ryan Grim, Washington D.C. Bureau chief for The Intercept. Ryan has a new book out titled, “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.” In it, he reports on the fight between the squad of progressive Democrats first elected to Congress in 2018 and Israel lobby organizations AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel.
 
-In ‘Colonising the Tastebuds’, a ten-minute film made by Baladi – Rooted Resistance, Izzeldin discusses the difficulties he has in obtaining locally-grown produce (baladi) and how he has to travel through checkpoints to access markets in the West Bank or go directly to farmers to buy Palestinian-grown and organic fruit and vegetables.
+Later, we’ll hear from a student organizer at Columbia University about the school’s suspension of pro-Palestine groups on campus. In recent weeks, we’ve seen a disturbing wave of McCarthyism target Palestine activism across college campuses. A number of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters have been suspended or even banned at schools. One of the schools is Columbia University, which also suspended its Jewish Voice for Peace chapter. Michael spoke with a member of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine about these developments. She is also a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition that has been relaunched in response to the suspensions. She asked Mondoweiss to withhold her name.
 
-The film follows Izzeldin in the Old City, shopping for produce in Ramallah and at a food tasting and speaking event in Bethlehem.
+Support our work
 
-His cooking, as well as the food tours he offers of the Old City through his company Sacred Cuisine, are Izzeldin’s way of supporting Palestine’s struggle for freedom. “Just talking about food can really reflect the depth of Palestinian society and the history of the Palestinian in this land,” he says.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-“They [Israel] are using their maximum power, they are using their maximum punishment. They are trying to teach us to give up on being Palestinian. And we are saying ‘I can’t’. Simply, we can’t. It’s in our blood, it’s in our ancestors, it’s the history, the heritage. It comes with every muskhan dish I eat, with every hiwerina I eat, with every waraka dawali. And this is how we continue to be Palestinian.”
+Articles and links mentioned in the show
 
-Baladi – Rooted ResistanceBaladi – Rooted Resistance is a media project by writer Sandra Guimarães and photojournalists Anne Paq, Craig Redmond, and Ahmad Al-Bazz. It tells the stories of Palestinians resisting Israeli colonization and occupation with seeds, wild foraged plants and homegrown vegetables — Palestinians who believe food politics and food sovereignty intersects with the struggle for self-determination and freedom. To learn more visit: baladirootedresistance.com.
+Ryan’s new book, The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution
+
+Subscribe to Ryan’s newsletter, Bad News.
+
+Columbia University suspends Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, Michael Arria
+
+Columbia student groups form coalition to counter crackdown on Palestine activism, demand divestment from Israel, Michael Arria
+
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
+
+Share this podcast
+
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter. Click here to post a tweet!
+
+If you enjoyed this episode, head to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
+
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
+Email us
+
+Leave us an audio message at SparkPipe

mondoweiss/texts/1840.txt

@@ -1,15 +1,89 @@
-A “Taste of Home” food festival to be held in Philadelphia on June 20th  initially included a truck for Israeli food, but the invitation was withdrawn after Palestinian solidarity activists objected to its inclusion. A furor followed from pro-Israel advocates, and organizers decided to cancel the event in its entirety.
+In this episode, Mondoweiss’s Yumna Patel speaks with Palestinian lawyer and political analyst Diana Buttu about the genocide in Gaza and the role social media is playing in how it unfolds.
 
-Philadelphia’s “Taste of Home” food festival disinvited Moshava, an Israeli-owned food truck, and all manner of condemnation, doxing, harassment, death threats, has been unleashed on the festival’s organizers who dared to take a moral stand against cultural appropriation.
+Israeli soldiers on the ground in Gaza are undermining Israel’s carefully crafted public image as a victim through their social media posts, which show them joking, laughing, and committing what many legal observers believe are war crimes.
 
-The word Moshava refers to Jewish settlements in Palestine, representing the first wave of European colonizers who eventually conquered Palestine through violent campaigns of ethnic cleansing that continue until this day, with the latest expulsions taking place as this is written, in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, where the Israeli military is literally removing Palestinian residents from their homes where they’ve lived for generations, in order to replace them with Jewish settlers, a shocking number of whom are actually American Jews.
+This second Nakba is being live-streamed in real-time, and Yumna and Diana discuss the experience Palestinians are sharing of watching a genocide of their people play out on their mobile phones.
 
-Naming a food truck after a colonial tradition is appropriate considering that its menu is predominantly Arab food, appropriated by Israel much the same as they’ve appropriated Palestinian lands, home, and heritage. There is nothing Israeli about shawarma, hummus, falafel, or arayes, all of which predate the state of Israel by a few dozen centuries. The fact that Arab Jews brought Arabic culinary traditions from their native Arab countries to Israel does not make those foods Israeli, any more than pizza or tacos can become American cuisine no matter how much they’re served and consumed here.
+Support our work
 
-At the same time that Israel demolishes Palestinian villages, razes ancient Palestinian cemeteries and destroys non-Jewish Palestinian archeology to remove traces of indigenous Palestinian life, it employs cultural appropriation as another form of erasure.  It is simply not okay for Israelis to claim the heritage of indigenous Palestinians at the same time they’re trying to displace and remove them.  But it is particularly egregious when one considers all the ways that Israel has weaponized food against Palestinians.  Here are just a few examples:
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-Israel implemented a policy of counting calories allowed into Gaza in order to severely limit Palestinian nutrition intake, designed “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”In addition to taking over Palestinian farms outright, Israel has been systematically bulldozing agricultural lands, especially in Gaza, coupled with continued aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides that render huge swaths of arable farmland as useless and toxic.Since Israel conquered the rest of Palestine in 1967, it has uprooted more than one million olive trees, with terrible nutritional, ecological, and economic consequences for Palestinians. This is coupled with systematic paramilitary settlers burning of Palestinian olive and fruit-bearing trees, particularly during harvest season.Israel diverts water from Palestinian villages to illegal Israeli settlements, prevents Palestinians from accessing their own water, and generally employs a myriad of protocols that effectively steal Palestinian water, creating an apartheid reality where Palestinians live a parched life, while Israeli settlers in the same area enjoy unlimited water, with green lawns and swimming pools.Israel enforces laws that ban traditional herb foraging of indigenous Palestinian foodways
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-Finally, it is worth noting that the owner of the Moshava food truck served in the same Israeli military that has been engaged in the ongoing ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians, which has been called a system of apartheid by leading Israeli and international human rights organizations.
+Follow Diana on Instagram and Twitter/X
 
-We applaud the organizers for canceling this blatant attempt at Palestinian erasure, cultural appropriation, and food-washing of apartheid. They have nothing to apologize for.
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
+
+Share this podcast
+
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
+
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
+
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
+
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+
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+
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mondoweiss/texts/1841.txt

@@ -1,11 +1,87 @@
-Izzeldin Bukhari is a chef based in Jerusalem’s Old City who works to promote traditional Palestinian food and the impact of Israel’s attempts to appropriate Palestine’s food culture and heritage.
+A Girl Scout Troop in Missouri recently broke away from the organization after it made legal threats against the group.
 
-In ‘Colonising the Tastebuds’, a ten-minute film made by Baladi – Rooted Resistance, Izzeldin discusses the difficulties he has in obtaining locally-grown produce (baladi) and how he has to travel through checkpoints to access markets in the West Bank or go directly to farmers to buy Palestinian-grown and organic fruit and vegetables.
+For the Girl Scouts’ “Agents of Change” capstone project, a St. Louis county troop decided to make and sell bracelets to raise money for children in Gaza.
 
-The film follows Izzeldin in the Old City, shopping for produce in Ramallah and at a food tasting and speaking event in Bethlehem.
+The Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri said the move was “political” and instructed them to shut down the fundraiser.
 
-His cooking, as well as the food tours he offers of the Old City through his company Sacred Cuisine, are Izzeldin’s way of supporting Palestine’s struggle for freedom. “Just talking about food can really reflect the depth of Palestinian society and the history of the Palestinian in this land,” he says.
+The children in this particular troop were inspired by other troops that raised money for war victims in Ukraine. Those troops faced no repercussions over their fundraisers.
 
-“They [Israel] are using their maximum power, they are using their maximum punishment. They are trying to teach us to give up on being Palestinian. And we are saying ‘I can’t’. Simply, we can’t. It’s in our blood, it’s in our ancestors, it’s the history, the heritage. It comes with every muskhan dish I eat, with every hiwerina I eat, with every waraka dawali. And this is how we continue to be Palestinian.”
+Despite breaking away from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri, the group is staying together, and their bracelet campaign has continued.
 
-Baladi – Rooted ResistanceBaladi – Rooted Resistance is a media project by writer Sandra Guimarães and photojournalists Anne Paq, Craig Redmond, and Ahmad Al-Bazz. It tells the stories of Palestinians resisting Israeli colonization and occupation with seeds, wild foraged plants and homegrown vegetables — Palestinians who believe food politics and food sovereignty intersects with the struggle for self-determination and freedom. To learn more visit: baladirootedresistance.com.
+Mondoweiss’s U.S. Correspondent Michael Arria spoke with the Girl Scout Troop Leader and mother to one of the scouts, Nawal Abuhamdeh, and two of the Girl Scouts about the situation.
+
+Support our work
+
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
+
+Share this podcast
+
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
+
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
+
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
+
+Amazon
+
+Apple Podcasts
+
+Audible
+
+Deezer
+
+Gaana
+
+Google Podcasts
+
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+
+Player.fm
+
+RadioPublic
+
+Spotify
+
+TuneIn
+
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+
+Our RSS feed
+
+We want your feedback!
+
+Email us
+
+Leave us an audio message at SparkPipe
+
+More from Mondoweiss
+
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters:
+
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+
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+
+The Shift tracks U.S. politics
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
+Telegram

mondoweiss/texts/1842.txt

@@ -1,15 +1,61 @@
-A “Taste of Home” food festival to be held in Philadelphia on June 20th  initially included a truck for Israeli food, but the invitation was withdrawn after Palestinian solidarity activists objected to its inclusion. A furor followed from pro-Israel advocates, and organizers decided to cancel the event in its entirety.
+Despite its claim that the goal of the war in Gaza is the elimination of Hamas, Israel’s actions reveal its true intention: the collapse of Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank. Nearly six months into a war that the International Court of Justice found could “plausibly” be a genocide, Israel has killed over 33,000 Palestinians, displaced nearly 2 million, and manufactured a famine that is starving children to death.
 
-Philadelphia’s “Taste of Home” food festival disinvited Moshava, an Israeli-owned food truck, and all manner of condemnation, doxing, harassment, death threats, has been unleashed on the festival’s organizers who dared to take a moral stand against cultural appropriation.
+Mondoweiss’ Managing Editor, Faris Giacaman, and Palestine staff writer Qassam Muaddi join us to discuss key developments in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, events in the West Bank, and potential pathways out of this catastrophe.
 
-The word Moshava refers to Jewish settlements in Palestine, representing the first wave of European colonizers who eventually conquered Palestine through violent campaigns of ethnic cleansing that continue until this day, with the latest expulsions taking place as this is written, in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, where the Israeli military is literally removing Palestinian residents from their homes where they’ve lived for generations, in order to replace them with Jewish settlers, a shocking number of whom are actually American Jews.
+Support our work
 
-Naming a food truck after a colonial tradition is appropriate considering that its menu is predominantly Arab food, appropriated by Israel much the same as they’ve appropriated Palestinian lands, home, and heritage. There is nothing Israeli about shawarma, hummus, falafel, or arayes, all of which predate the state of Israel by a few dozen centuries. The fact that Arab Jews brought Arabic culinary traditions from their native Arab countries to Israel does not make those foods Israeli, any more than pizza or tacos can become American cuisine no matter how much they’re served and consumed here.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-At the same time that Israel demolishes Palestinian villages, razes ancient Palestinian cemeteries and destroys non-Jewish Palestinian archeology to remove traces of indigenous Palestinian life, it employs cultural appropriation as another form of erasure.  It is simply not okay for Israelis to claim the heritage of indigenous Palestinians at the same time they’re trying to displace and remove them.  But it is particularly egregious when one considers all the ways that Israel has weaponized food against Palestinians.  Here are just a few examples:
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-Israel implemented a policy of counting calories allowed into Gaza in order to severely limit Palestinian nutrition intake, designed “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”In addition to taking over Palestinian farms outright, Israel has been systematically bulldozing agricultural lands, especially in Gaza, coupled with continued aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides that render huge swaths of arable farmland as useless and toxic.Since Israel conquered the rest of Palestine in 1967, it has uprooted more than one million olive trees, with terrible nutritional, ecological, and economic consequences for Palestinians. This is coupled with systematic paramilitary settlers burning of Palestinian olive and fruit-bearing trees, particularly during harvest season.Israel diverts water from Palestinian villages to illegal Israeli settlements, prevents Palestinians from accessing their own water, and generally employs a myriad of protocols that effectively steal Palestinian water, creating an apartheid reality where Palestinians live a parched life, while Israeli settlers in the same area enjoy unlimited water, with green lawns and swimming pools.Israel enforces laws that ban traditional herb foraging of indigenous Palestinian foodways
+Israel destroyed al-Shifa Hospital to accelerate social collapse in Gaza, Faris Giacaman
 
-Finally, it is worth noting that the owner of the Moshava food truck served in the same Israeli military that has been engaged in the ongoing ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians, which has been called a system of apartheid by leading Israeli and international human rights organizations.
+‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 181: Israel says it will ‘temporarily’ allow aid into Gaza, Qassam Muaddi
 
-We applaud the organizers for canceling this blatant attempt at Palestinian erasure, cultural appropriation, and food-washing of apartheid. They have nothing to apologize for.
+From the cities to the countryside, armed resistance is spreading in the West Bank, Shatha Hanaysha
+
+How Ibrahim al-Nabulsi became the ‘lion of Nablus’, Mariam Barghouti
+
+On the Brink: Jenin’s Rising Resistance (Documentary Film), Yumna Patel
+
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
+
+Share this podcast
+
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
+
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
+
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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mondoweiss/texts/1843.txt

@@ -1,55 +1,87 @@
-PALESTINE ON A PLATEMemories from my mother’s kitchenby Joudie Kallapp. 240. Interlink Books. Paperback $ 25 | Hardback $ 35
+A Girl Scout Troop in Missouri recently broke away from the organization after it made legal threats against the group.
 
-BALADIA Celebration of Food from Land and Seaby Joudie Kallapp. 256. Interlink Books. $25
+For the Girl Scouts’ “Agents of Change” capstone project, a St. Louis county troop decided to make and sell bracelets to raise money for children in Gaza.
 
-Interlink is offering a $20 discount for readers who purchase “Palestine on a Plate” and “Baladi” together.
+The Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri said the move was “political” and instructed them to shut down the fundraiser.
 
-Friends no longer gather for meals, no one is hosting ample tables for visitors, and strangers are not gabbing with whoever is seated close by at a bar for dinner. But there is food for sale even if the shelves at stores are half-stocked. It is clear this is a time of extraordinary abstention, yet it is also a season of culinary delights.
+The children in this particular troop were inspired by other troops that raised money for war victims in Ukraine. Those troops faced no repercussions over their fundraisers.
 
-“People are thinking about what would mama make?” chef Joudie Kalla tells me via telephone from her home in London where she is isolating with her two dogs. She is mid-meal, sating herself with grilled halloumi cheese, Lebanese cucumber, tomato, and drizzles of olive oil dashed with salt and pepper.
+Despite breaking away from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri, the group is staying together, and their bracelet campaign has continued.
 
-When asked how has her approach to cooking has changed recent weeks she confesses, “it all depends on my mood quite honestly. If I’m feeling quite low then sometimes I make really quick meals,” or “quick fixes” as she later calls them. These are simple, unfussy staples of Palestinian cuisine liked spiced lamb manouche.
+Mondoweiss’s U.S. Correspondent Michael Arria spoke with the Girl Scout Troop Leader and mother to one of the scouts, Nawal Abuhamdeh, and two of the Girl Scouts about the situation.
 
-Joudie Kalla. Photo courtesy of  Joudie Kalla.
+Support our work
 
-“I think the most important things is just to plan ahead and make use of all of your ingredients.” On her most prolific days of quarantine cooking, she focuses on “big batches” for instances, prepping pounds of lehme, or “meat” in Arabic.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-“I make six or seven portions of that and I put it in the freezer and then I make a another big batch and put it in the freezer straight away.” This method frees up time, when time is most elusive.
+Share this podcast
 
-As far as ingredients go, Kalla passed on the mania of panic buying that engulfed the UK. She’s a longtime bulk shopper and already had her own reserves. Her lentils don’t come in small bags the size of a sandwich. “I buy a five-kilo pack, I’ve been like this all my life.”
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
 
-“I was looking at my kitchen thinking thank God my mom raised me up this way. It’s good to have extras just in case for emergency cooking,” she said.
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-When she does her weekly run to pick up essentials, she buys from small businesses, “I tend to support my local suppliers and they usually have everything. If you go to your cornerstone around your house you’ll find eggs, and flour and toilet paper.”
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
 
-Kalla is the author of two cookbooks “Baladi” and “Palestine on a Plate.” She is among a generation of Palestinian chefs who have translated family recipes and made them available to tables across the world. What is perhaps unique about her approach to cooking is that her curation of family recipes cast one of the wider nets in the vast world of Palestinian cuisine.
+Amazon
 
-Palestinian cooking styles are as varied as the accents in which people speak. “Each city, each town had a specific way of cooking something and each claimed to be the original,” she told me. In the north, where Kalla’s father hails from, there is more meat in the diet, while her mother is from the seaside towns of Yaffa and al-Lydd where fish are regular features of the local palate. “Mom’s side of the family cooked very, very spicy hot lemony dishes with lots of vegetables,” while “my dad’s family is from the north where they have meat, lamb, bulgur, lots of yogurt dishes.”
+Apple Podcasts
 
-Her books reflect booth of these traditions and also the fusion of the two. Kalla was born in Syria to parents who were from refugee families expelled from Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. She was raised in both Qatar and London. Food has always been a cornerstone of her identity.
+Audible
 
-Her maternal and paternal grandmothers met while walking to Syria and later lived in the same building. Her mother and father grew up together. After they married, her mother made it her mission to learn the culinary classics of her father’s family.
+Deezer
 
-“Its such a tiny sesame size piece of land you have so many different ways to make the same thing, which I love,” Kalla said.
+Gaana
 
-Kalla has shared with us her recipe for kufta bil tahineh, otherwise known as ground lamb kufta with tangy tahini sauce. It the kind of dish that easy to scale up or down. What’s more, it is the epitome of comfort food: meat and potatoes smothered in a silky warm sauce. The below excerpt comes from her first book “Palestine on a Plate.”
+Google Podcasts
 
-I’ve made this dish for dinner parties with 20 people (and it was a hit), and for dinners alone where I wanted to indulge. It wasn’t until I read Kalla’s recipe that I was able to correct my technique and get the sauce to the perfect consistency. The tip I learned — pre-cook the meat before adding the nutty and zesty tahini. If it goes in at the same time, it will turn runny.
+Overcast
 
-“Sometimes a tiny instruction can change the whole end result of a dish,” Kalla told me.
+Player.fm
 
-Excerpt from “Palestine on a Plate”
+RadioPublic
 
-1lb 5 oz (900 g) ground lamb1 onion, choppeda bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped2–3 teaspoons sea salt black pepper½ cup (120 ml) tahini3 tablespoons Greek yogurtjuice of 4 lemonsgreen peppers, chili, radishes, lemon slices, and Khubez (Pita Bread) to serve
+Spotify
 
-Serves 4–6
+TuneIn
 
-The flavor of the sharp tahini sauce with the beautiful spiced lamb in this dish is such a wonderful contrast in your mouth—it’s like an ivory velvet snow covering rough mountains of goodness. I love tahini. It goes so well with meat and fish and is also great in salad dressings. It adds another dimension to this recipe and the sharpness of the lemon juice makes the whole thing divine. This recipe is so simple that you really can’t go wrong, and the end result actually looks like you have put a lot of effort into making something that tastes so great. That’s the wonder of cooking—there are so many ingredients that marry well, that you can just keep making new things all the time with similar ingredients in different combinations. This dish will have you dreaming of the next time you will make it. Or hoping that no one else will want the last slice…
+YouTube
 
-Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C).
+Our RSS feed
 
-Mix the ground lamb with the onion and parsley, and add about 2 teaspoons of the salt, and a little pepper. Tip it into an ovenproof pan or dish and gently pat the mixture down, making indents every ¾ inch (2 cm) to create little dips in the surface. Do not press the meat down too tightly, though—you don’t want a dense texture.
+We want your feedback!
 
-Mix the tahini and yogurt together and add the lemon juice. It will begin to seize and thicken but don’t worry, it will loosen up. Add ½ cup (120 ml) water and taste for flavor, adding a little salt if needed. You want it to be zingy and a little runny. Set aside. Bake the meat for about 15 minutes, until browned, then take the pan out of the oven. Pour the tahini mixture all over the surface. Return the pan to the oven for another 10–15 minutes, or until slightly charred on top. Serve with green peppers, chili, radishes, and some Khubez (Pita Bread).
+Email us
 
-Tip: Transform the above dish into Kufta Bil Batata Wa Banadora—a very similar dish using vegetables as a topping. My mom would make these side by side so we could have both, since some of us liked one more than the other. Prepare the meat, onion, and parsley and press into an ovenproof pan or dish as above. Layer 2 peeled and thinly sliced large potatoes and 4–6 thinly sliced large tomatoes on top of the kufta, overlapping as you go, and keep going until you have covered the surface completely. Bake for about 30 minutes, checking it every now and then to make sure the potatoes are cooking. Serve as above.
+Leave us an audio message at SparkPipe
+
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+
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters:
+
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+
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mondoweiss/texts/1844.txt

@@ -1,73 +1,89 @@
-The recent status revocations of the Jewish National Fund of Canada Inc (JNFC) and Ne’eman Foundation Canada suggest that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has blinked first in the face of the International Court of Justice’s July 19, 2024, advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The two former charities had been involved for years – the JNFC, notably, since 1967 – in transferring Canadian taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations into the hands of Israeli intermediaries involved in undermining the territorial sovereignty of Palestine, specifically in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
+The Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza reports that hundreds of dead bodies have been found in the grounds of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, south of the Gaza Strip.
 
-Extricating the Canadian charitable sector from its ongoing complicity with Israeli war crimes is, however, not a ‘one and done’ affair. Worth on average close to $280 million CDN per year in charitable donations (2018-2022), Israel is consistently the top, yearly, international recipient of Canadian benevolence. Canadian charity guru, Mark Blumberg, suggests that Canadian Jewish community-related charities are sitting on about $9.2 billion CDN in assets (2022), with upper echelon Jewish public and private foundations holding another $5 billion CDN. In perspective, stymying the internationally illegal operations of the JNFC and Ne’eman Canada, while meaningful, is but a drop in the proverbial bucket.
+The Civil Defense announced in a press conference that since May 1st, 392 bodies had been found in mass graves, many of whom had been identified as missing for weeks, while 58% of the bodies haven’t been identified.
 
-With an eye towards understanding both the recent, historical, movement of Canadian donations into Israel, along with identifying the origin sources of Canadian capital moving into the apartheid state, the following piece utilizes the Canadian Access to Information Act (ATI) to gather tax data surrounding trends in money movement from Canada to Israel. To be sure, there are gaps in the data, but what emerges is a picture of gangster capitalism, where charities run out of private residences, with no public profile, no website, and no outreach to speak of, handle tens of millions of dollars CDN per year tied to the Canadian Zionist billionaire class. While the billionaire class will undoubtedly prove resilient and sheltered in the face of exposure to their potential financial complicity in aiding and abetting war crimes, understanding the sources of their wealth yet still provides human beings with conscience with the possibility of retributive action.
+Muhammad al-Mughayyir, director of the Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, said that some 20 bodies were buried while medical and medication tubes were still connected to their bodies, suggesting that they might have been buried alive. Al-Mughayyir added that the bodies showed signs of torture.
 
-Method
+Adam Horowitz, our Executive Editor, spoke to Muhammad Shehada, director of communications for Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an organization with staff on the ground in Gaza documenting human rights violations. Muhammad describes the scene their staff is observing.
 
-Charitable status revocations due to failed audits, which is what transpired with Ne’eman Canada and the JNFC, leave a paper trail – which includes the CRA’s investigative findings – that is accessible via ATI request. I first made an ATI request for a list of all charitable status revocations due to failed audits for Canadian charities that disclosed having moved money to Israel, between 2018-2023. This list, I hypothesized, would provide me with the names of Canadian charities that had caught the eye of the CRA, who had then subsequently been unable to explain away some type of serious transgressional activity.
+Support our work
 
-With this list in hand, I excluded any charity that had moved under $500,000 CDN to Israel per year, on the grounds that they were financially irrelevant to the overall flow of charitable donations from Canada to Israel. I was left with five former Canadian charities, legally registered as Colel Chabad Lubavitch Foundation of Israel, Kupas Hachesed Meoroth, Chasdei Levy Yitzcok, Gates of Mercy and the Beth Oloth Charitable Organization. For each of these, I requested the CRA’s audit findings, along with the names of their overseas recipients in Israel, their board of directorate information, and the financial gifts these charities claimed to have received from other charities. Beyond understanding the means via which illicit donations had historically moved from Canada to Israel, this data would allow me to understand – to the degree that donor privacy restrictions would allow – where this money had actually originated from.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-What follows, firstly, are brief synopses of the activities of the five revoked charities, followed by an analysis of the origin sources of these donations.
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-Colel Chabad Lubavitch Foundation of Israel
+‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 202: Gaza’s Civil Defense finds hundreds of new bodies in mass graves at Nasser Hospital – Qassam Muaddi
 
-A CRA audit for the fiscal period of 2008-2009 uncovered that Colel Chabad had been selling official donation receipts to donors, for 10% to 20% of their receipted value. When it comes to filing one’s personal taxes, these receipts, it is important to note, have a value of upwards of 50% or more of the donated principle, meaning that Canadian charities actually create wealth. One of Colel Chabad’s clients, Dr. Lorne Wayne Sokol, gained notoriety for laundering money he had obtained by allegedly defrauding the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, through Colel Chabad. Sokol had incorporated a company in Belize, the Moshe Shmuel Deitsch Company, named for Colel Chabad’s self-claimed Israeli intermediary, Moshe Deutsch.
+The Shift: Does the White House care about mass graves? – Michael Arria
 
-Through the Belizean company, Sokol (and potentially others) was subsequently repaid by Colel Chabad for between 80% to 90% of the principal they had donated to the charity. Colel Chabad appears to have netted 10% to 20% off the principle, while Sokol and other unnamed participants netted the value of a tax credit while recouping 80% to 90% of their Belize-laundered principle, meaning a net profit for donors ballparked at 130-140%.
+‘It felt like pulling my heart out of the earth:’ testimonies from the mass grave at Nasser Hospital – Tareq Hajjaj
 
-Colel Chabad’s president, Abraham Neuwirth, would plead ignorance to the scheme. Colel Chabad’s secretary Zalman Zirkind, along with his brothers, however, were involved in a wider, international, narco-trafficking/money laundering scheme. In 2021, Zalman would be sentenced to 84 months’ imprisonment by a United States District Court for conspiracy to commit money laundering. Zirkind’s association with Colel Chabad, it should be noted, far outlived the charity’s exposure as a potential money laundering operation; he was listed as Colel Chabad’s secretary between 2000 until at least 2015, at which point the charity simply ceased updating its Board of Directors filings with the CRA.
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
 
-Kupas Hachesed Meoroth
+Share this podcast
 
-In 2018, the CRA informed Kupas Hachesed Meoroth (KHM) that it was unable to verify the validity of donations, totaling over $32 million CDN, receipted between 2014-15.
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter. Click here to post a tweet!
 
-In a further investigation into KHM’s “wire transfer information”, the CRA determined that only $100,862 of the tens of millions of dollars CDN claimed by KHM could be verified as having been sent to Israel between 2014-2016. The regulator noted that: “the majority of the funds spent on foreign activities were actually given to individuals residing in Canada and cashed at Canadian bank accounts”. These funds, which totalled over $48 million between 2013-2016, had apparently been delivered to an unknown number of Canadian and American recipients in the form of hundreds of unique cheques, typically written out to an individual by first initial and last name only. In numerous instances, cheques made out to multiple addressees were cashed via a shared bank account.
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-KHM director Edward Binet (2007-2020) would defend the cheque cashing operation and claimed that the recipients deposited their cheques and then hand delivered millions of dollars in hard cash to (unnamed) recipients in Israel, who arrived in Israel by airplane. KHM, however, had no supporting documentation to suggest that the cash handovers had ever taken place. The entire situation forced the CRA to conclude that: “it does not appear that any charitable activity occurred, whether within or outside of Canada” and that “it appears the Organization is simply gifting funds to individuals and conferring an unacceptable private benefit”.
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
 
-KHM’s charitable status appears to have been put on some kind of hiatus between 2017-2019; the organization did not file tax returns for this period. In 2020, KHM was operational for what appears to be three more years, into 2022, although tax filings for these years are incomplete. Binet, for his part, appears to have suffered no legal repercussions for having presided over KHM. As of writing, Binet remains the president of multiple, active, Montreal-based, charities, including ‘Congrégation Beltz’, which donated close to $2 million to KHM and another transgressional charity, Chasdei Levy Yitzcok.
+Amazon
 
-Chasdei Levy Yitzcok
+Apple Podcasts
 
-A 2018 CRA audit, undertaken for the fiscal years 2015-2016, determined that the Montreal-based Chasdei Levy Yitzcok (CLY) had demonstrated a widespread failure in issuing proper donation receipts and had failed to carry on its own charitable activity. Speaking directly to the charity’s direction and control over its sole Israeli intermediary, one Rabbi Israel Levy, the CRA would note that CLY could provide no documentation to “confirm any interaction” between the charity and its Israeli agent(s), or that the agent(s) actually “performed any work” for the charity.
+Audible
 
-The CRA determined that CLY had issued cheques, totalling over $2.7 million CDN, to several “foreign residents”, during the fiscal year of 2016. In certain instances, the CRA found that representatives of CLY were just cashing cheques they had written to themselves. Expanding their investigation to include the Canada Border Service Agency, the CRA determined that none of the foreign residents named as recipients by CLY had legally entered Canada within a five-year time span prior to the audit; the inference being that they had never received their cheques, let alone cashed them. These findings caused the CRA to conclude that in 2016, “over $2,700,000 of the Organization’s charitable resources were converted to cash without any documentary evidence to show that the funds were used in a charitable manner”.
+Deezer
 
-Gates of Mercy and The Beth Oloth Charitable Organization
+Gaana
 
-Originally registered as a charitable organization in 1991, Gates of Mercy operated as what I’ve termed a ‘burner charity’ and conducted minimal business up to 2007. In 2008, however, Gates of Mercy experienced a significant increase in activity, receiving total donations of over $5.4 million CDN. Over the next several years Gates of Mercy’s activity grew exponentially; between 2009-2011, it brought almost $47 million CDN in donations.
+Google Podcasts
 
-In 2012, Gates of Mercy experienced its first audit – for activities conducted between 2008–2010. The CRA’s audit found that Gates of Mercy had “failed to retain direction and control over the use of its funds,” and had no means to demonstrate or ensure these funds were being utilized for its own charitable activities. Gates of Mercy had also failed to keep “adequate books and records”, had “issued receipts not in accordance with the [Income Tax] Act” and had failed to “file an information return in prescribed format”.
+Overcast
 
-Rather than trigger a criminal investigation, Gates of Mercy simply entered a compliance agreement with the CRA in 2012, signed by Shmuel Reidel, a director at Gates of Mercy. Reidel’s 2012 signing is an important data marker; while Gates of Mercy continued to move millions of dollars CDN in charitable donations per year offshore, the charity’s financial activity and total number of donors experienced a marked decrease, post-2011. Most donors – and their charitable donations – moved en masse to another Reidel-directed charitable organization, ‘The Beth Oloth Charitable Organization’.
+Player.fm
 
-Incorporated in 1980, CRA records show Beth Oloth largely inactive until 2012, just as Gates of Mercy entered into a compliance agreement with the CRA. Beth Oloth then experienced a massive uptick in reported revenue; the charitable organization took in over $9.4 million in revenue for the year. Revenue would skyrocket in the ensuing years: Between 2013-2014, Beth Oloth reported over $62 million CDN in received donations.
+RadioPublic
 
-The CRA responded in 2016 with an audit of Beth Oloth’s 2011–2014 activities. As with Gates of Mercy, Beth Oloth was found to be non-compliant with the Income Tax Act on a variety of levels. The CRA also evinced concern that Beth Oloth was depositing cheques made out to Reidel and Gates of Mercy. Representatives from Beth Oloth would claim that Reidel no longer held a formal association with the charity and maintained an “advisory role” only. But the cross-writing of cheques between the two charities suggested to the CRA the existence of an undisclosed relationship or arrangement between the two organizations.
+Spotify
 
-As for its charitable activities, between 2012-2014 Beth Oloth claimed that it had moved over $63 million CDN to a stable of thousands of international intermediaries, the vast majority of which were in Israel. While the CRA identified multiple instances where Beth Oloth’s self-claimed Israeli intermediaries were actively involved in supplying financial support to the illegal settlements and the IDF, the general conclusion was that the sheer scope of Beth Oloth’s operations were impossible to direct or control. The CRA revoked both Gates of Mercy’s and Beth Oloth’s charitable status in 2019.
+TuneIn
 
-Who is supporting these organizations?
+YouTube
 
-With the general picture being of hundreds of millions of dollars CDN in uncontrolled charitable donations flowing from Canada into Israel, the next step was to understand the source of this money. The identity of individual private donors in Canada is protected by law. But the movement of donations to any Canadian charity from other Canadian charities is recorded and is publicly accessible. When such inter-charity donations emanate from private foundations, they can be traced back to their sources of private wealth.
+Our RSS feed
 
-With data received from ATI requests, I created a list of all charitable donations from other Canadian charities, received by the five revoked charities (and subsequently included donations received by Ne’eman Canada and the JNFC), between 2000-2023. This list revealed hundreds of unique Canadian charities moving their pooled assets into the now-seven revoked charities, who subsequently moved (or at least claimed to move) their money into Israel. From here, I searched for overlaps between boards of directors and created aggregated entities where such linkages existed. For the sake of financial relevancy, I then created a list of all aggregated entities that had cumulatively moved at least $1 million CDN in donations to the seven revoked charities within the 2000-2023 timeframe. The result is a list of 56 aggregated entities, responsible for over $393 million CDN in charitable donations flowing out of Canada into Israel.
+We want your feedback!
 
-In the case of Ne’eman Canada and the JNFC, we know that much of this money has gone to finance the operations of Israeli recipients actively engaged in Palestinian ethnic cleansing, or towards organizations that operate in support of the war criminality actively being perpetrated by the IDF. In the case of the other five revoked charities profiled above, the linkages between the hundreds of millions of dollars CDN in charitable donations and their Israeli recipients are far less clear. In several cases, the Israeli intermediaries appear as cutouts, John Doe-type entities whose identity is difficult to verify. Confirming what type of activity these cutouts perform, or what they do with the hundreds of millions of dollars CDN in charitable donations, is impossible to ascertain. If anything, the existence of such systemic, transgressional, activity within the Canada to Israel charitable pipeline points to a significant degree of corruption within the entire subsector, and a federal regulator either unable or uninterested in staunching the flow of illicit, Canadian taxpayer-subsidized, cash moving into Israel.
+Email us
 
-Certain aspects of the ‘Big Gifters’ list escape easy explanation. For example, several members of the list, such as the Mizrachi Organization of Canada, are legally registered as charitable organizations. As I’ve written about in detail, here, Mizrachi Canada, on its own, moves millions of dollars per year to ultra-Zionist organizations in Israel, many of them located in the illegal settlements. Why it and other charitable organizations, which are legally conceived of as the ‘frontline’ operators within the Canadian charitable sector, also appear on a list meant to expose upper echelon donors is unknown. Charitable organizations are not supposed to sit on pools of assets and so shouldn’t, technically, have millions of dollars on hand to move to other Canadian charitable organizations. When donations move from one charitable organization to another, and then into Israel, it is impossible to discern the origin source of the money itself. It is, in essence, money twice ‘washed’.
+Leave us an audio message at SparkPipe
 
-Jewish Foundations are also featured on the list. Registered as public foundations, these charities cumulatively sit on multiple billions of dollars CDN in assets, which because of their legal structure, are anonymized. While many of these Foundations, located across Canada, engage in local community support and services, their understanding of ‘tikkun olam’, clearly involves bankrolling the ethnic cleansing of ‘Greater Israel’; the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba and the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal, for example, cumulatively donated over $30 million CDN to the JNFC.
+More from Mondoweiss
 
-Most members of the list, however, are legally registered as private foundations. Sitting on billions of dollars CDN in cumulative assets, these are the benefactors of private schools, synagogues, wings of hospitals, schools of business, university lecture halls, rehab centers, sports tournaments, and all the rest. Bluntly, these are the ‘too-big-to-fails’ of the Canadian charitable sector.
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters:
 
-This ocean of private wealth can be sourced back to its points of origin. For example, to cookie-cutter condominium developments, such as Lebovic Enterprises, multi-pronged urban development corporations, such as Fieldgate Properties, Ranee Management, Medallion Corporation, and Rosdev, high-risk hedge fund investment, such as with the Friedberg Mercantile Group, which I’ve written about in more detail here, and media empires, such as with the Asper Foundation. Other massive sources of corporate wealth, such as Almad Investment and Reichmann Hauer Capital Partners, blur any semblance of line between finance and real estate and count mortgage assets and international holdings among the prime pieces of their globe-spanning investment portfolios.
+Daily Headlines
 
-What is to be done with the information contained within the list is a question without easy answer. Certainly, consumers exercising their financial right to invest or withdraw funds as they see fit is a possibility. There is, however, a gradient of difficulty in attempting to exercise one’s financial muscle against some of the largest property holders in Canada’s largest cities, for example, which, while not impossible, is perhaps daunting.
+Weekly Briefing
 
-Legislative reform of the Income Tax Act is another possibility. The revocations of Canadian charitable organizations involved in illegally moving donations to Israel, such as those profiled in this article, is certainly a measure of hope. But these do nothing to punish – financially or otherwise – those making use of such financial flow-throughs. Nor do such ‘one off’ revocations seem to have much of a lasting effect on the overall movement of illicit cash to Israel; such flow-throughs simply reconstitute themselves under another name and carry on with their activities. Meaningful reform would entail developing investigative and punishment regimes specifically geared towards those making (consistent) use of revoked charities. Given the place of influence that such donors occupy within society at large, such reform, however, arguably exists exclusively within the realm of the hypothetical.
+The Shift tracks U.S. politics
 
-As it is, the Canadian charitable sector, which employs upwards of 10% of the total population and lives and dies upon its reputation as salve to neoliberal abandonment of the welfare state, has a profound association – with legal implications – with ongoing Israeli war crimes, billions in assets notwithstanding.
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mondoweiss/texts/1845.txt

@@ -1,73 +1,39 @@
-The recent status revocations of the Jewish National Fund of Canada Inc (JNFC) and Ne’eman Foundation Canada suggest that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has blinked first in the face of the International Court of Justice’s July 19, 2024, advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The two former charities had been involved for years – the JNFC, notably, since 1967 – in transferring Canadian taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations into the hands of Israeli intermediaries involved in undermining the territorial sovereignty of Palestine, specifically in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
+Podcasts
 
-Extricating the Canadian charitable sector from its ongoing complicity with Israeli war crimes is, however, not a ‘one and done’ affair. Worth on average close to $280 million CDN per year in charitable donations (2018-2022), Israel is consistently the top, yearly, international recipient of Canadian benevolence. Canadian charity guru, Mark Blumberg, suggests that Canadian Jewish community-related charities are sitting on about $9.2 billion CDN in assets (2022), with upper echelon Jewish public and private foundations holding another $5 billion CDN. In perspective, stymying the internationally illegal operations of the JNFC and Ne’eman Canada, while meaningful, is but a drop in the proverbial bucket.
+In this episode, Mondoweiss’s Culture Editor Mohammed El-Kurd speaks with journalist and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers Ahmad Alnaouq.
 
-With an eye towards understanding both the recent, historical, movement of Canadian donations into Israel, along with identifying the origin sources of Canadian capital moving into the apartheid state, the following piece utilizes the Canadian Access to Information Act (ATI) to gather tax data surrounding trends in money movement from Canada to Israel. To be sure, there are gaps in the data, but what emerges is a picture of gangster capitalism, where charities run out of private residences, with no public profile, no website, and no outreach to speak of, handle tens of millions of dollars CDN per year tied to the Canadian Zionist billionaire class. While the billionaire class will undoubtedly prove resilient and sheltered in the face of exposure to their potential financial complicity in aiding and abetting war crimes, understanding the sources of their wealth yet still provides human beings with conscience with the possibility of retributive action.
+By Mohammed El-Kurd and Dave Reed
 
-Method
+January 6, 2024
 
-Charitable status revocations due to failed audits, which is what transpired with Ne’eman Canada and the JNFC, leave a paper trail – which includes the CRA’s investigative findings – that is accessible via ATI request. I first made an ATI request for a list of all charitable status revocations due to failed audits for Canadian charities that disclosed having moved money to Israel, between 2018-2023. This list, I hypothesized, would provide me with the names of Canadian charities that had caught the eye of the CRA, who had then subsequently been unable to explain away some type of serious transgressional activity.
+0
 
-With this list in hand, I excluded any charity that had moved under $500,000 CDN to Israel per year, on the grounds that they were financially irrelevant to the overall flow of charitable donations from Canada to Israel. I was left with five former Canadian charities, legally registered as Colel Chabad Lubavitch Foundation of Israel, Kupas Hachesed Meoroth, Chasdei Levy Yitzcok, Gates of Mercy and the Beth Oloth Charitable Organization. For each of these, I requested the CRA’s audit findings, along with the names of their overseas recipients in Israel, their board of directorate information, and the financial gifts these charities claimed to have received from other charities. Beyond understanding the means via which illicit donations had historically moved from Canada to Israel, this data would allow me to understand – to the degree that donor privacy restrictions would allow – where this money had actually originated from.
+The Mondoweiss Podcast, Episode 66: Mohammed El-Kurd and Ahmad Al-Naouq on the complicity of mainstream media in Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza
 
-What follows, firstly, are brief synopses of the activities of the five revoked charities, followed by an analysis of the origin sources of these donations.
+In this episode, Mondoweiss’s Culture Editor Mohammed El-Kurd speaks with journalist and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers Ahmad Alnaouq.
 
-Colel Chabad Lubavitch Foundation of Israel
+Despite having 21 members of his family murdered by Israel in the past few months, Alnaouq has been at the forefront of advocating for Palestinian liberation. In this conversation, they talk about the complicity of mainstream media in the genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians in Gaza.
 
-A CRA audit for the fiscal period of 2008-2009 uncovered that Colel Chabad had been selling official donation receipts to donors, for 10% to 20% of their receipted value. When it comes to filing one’s personal taxes, these receipts, it is important to note, have a value of upwards of 50% or more of the donated principle, meaning that Canadian charities actually create wealth. One of Colel Chabad’s clients, Dr. Lorne Wayne Sokol, gained notoriety for laundering money he had obtained by allegedly defrauding the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, through Colel Chabad. Sokol had incorporated a company in Belize, the Moshe Shmuel Deitsch Company, named for Colel Chabad’s self-claimed Israeli intermediary, Moshe Deutsch.
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-Through the Belizean company, Sokol (and potentially others) was subsequently repaid by Colel Chabad for between 80% to 90% of the principal they had donated to the charity. Colel Chabad appears to have netted 10% to 20% off the principle, while Sokol and other unnamed participants netted the value of a tax credit while recouping 80% to 90% of their Belize-laundered principle, meaning a net profit for donors ballparked at 130-140%.
+We Are Not Numbers: Palestinian Journalist Ahmed Alnaouq Mourns 21 Family Members Killed by Israel, Democracy Now!
 
-Colel Chabad’s president, Abraham Neuwirth, would plead ignorance to the scheme. Colel Chabad’s secretary Zalman Zirkind, along with his brothers, however, were involved in a wider, international, narco-trafficking/money laundering scheme. In 2021, Zalman would be sentenced to 84 months’ imprisonment by a United States District Court for conspiracy to commit money laundering. Zirkind’s association with Colel Chabad, it should be noted, far outlived the charity’s exposure as a potential money laundering operation; he was listed as Colel Chabad’s secretary between 2000 until at least 2015, at which point the charity simply ceased updating its Board of Directors filings with the CRA.
+Ahmad Alnaouq’s articles for Mondoweiss
 
-Kupas Hachesed Meoroth
+Follow Ahmad Alnaouq on Twitter/X
 
-In 2018, the CRA informed Kupas Hachesed Meoroth (KHM) that it was unable to verify the validity of donations, totaling over $32 million CDN, receipted between 2014-15.
+Learn more about We Are Not Numbers
 
-In a further investigation into KHM’s “wire transfer information”, the CRA determined that only $100,862 of the tens of millions of dollars CDN claimed by KHM could be verified as having been sent to Israel between 2014-2016. The regulator noted that: “the majority of the funds spent on foreign activities were actually given to individuals residing in Canada and cashed at Canadian bank accounts”. These funds, which totalled over $48 million between 2013-2016, had apparently been delivered to an unknown number of Canadian and American recipients in the form of hundreds of unique cheques, typically written out to an individual by first initial and last name only. In numerous instances, cheques made out to multiple addressees were cashed via a shared bank account.
+Follow Mohammed El-Kurd on Twitter/X and Instagram
 
-KHM director Edward Binet (2007-2020) would defend the cheque cashing operation and claimed that the recipients deposited their cheques and then hand delivered millions of dollars in hard cash to (unnamed) recipients in Israel, who arrived in Israel by airplane. KHM, however, had no supporting documentation to suggest that the cash handovers had ever taken place. The entire situation forced the CRA to conclude that: “it does not appear that any charitable activity occurred, whether within or outside of Canada” and that “it appears the Organization is simply gifting funds to individuals and conferring an unacceptable private benefit”.
+Subscribe to our free email newsletters.
 
-KHM’s charitable status appears to have been put on some kind of hiatus between 2017-2019; the organization did not file tax returns for this period. In 2020, KHM was operational for what appears to be three more years, into 2022, although tax filings for these years are incomplete. Binet, for his part, appears to have suffered no legal repercussions for having presided over KHM. As of writing, Binet remains the president of multiple, active, Montreal-based, charities, including ‘Congrégation Beltz’, which donated close to $2 million to KHM and another transgressional charity, Chasdei Levy Yitzcok.
+Related Posts
 
-Chasdei Levy Yitzcok
+Hamas suspends releasing Israeli captives over Israeli breach of ceasefire terms
 
-A 2018 CRA audit, undertaken for the fiscal years 2015-2016, determined that the Montreal-based Chasdei Levy Yitzcok (CLY) had demonstrated a widespread failure in issuing proper donation receipts and had failed to carry on its own charitable activity. Speaking directly to the charity’s direction and control over its sole Israeli intermediary, one Rabbi Israel Levy, the CRA would note that CLY could provide no documentation to “confirm any interaction” between the charity and its Israeli agent(s), or that the agent(s) actually “performed any work” for the charity.
+February 10, 2025
 
-The CRA determined that CLY had issued cheques, totalling over $2.7 million CDN, to several “foreign residents”, during the fiscal year of 2016. In certain instances, the CRA found that representatives of CLY were just cashing cheques they had written to themselves. Expanding their investigation to include the Canada Border Service Agency, the CRA determined that none of the foreign residents named as recipients by CLY had legally entered Canada within a five-year time span prior to the audit; the inference being that they had never received their cheques, let alone cashed them. These findings caused the CRA to conclude that in 2016, “over $2,700,000 of the Organization’s charitable resources were converted to cash without any documentary evidence to show that the funds were used in a charitable manner”.
+In Gaza, as reality sets in, the joy of homecoming begins to fade
 
-Gates of Mercy and The Beth Oloth Charitable Organization
-
-Originally registered as a charitable organization in 1991, Gates of Mercy operated as what I’ve termed a ‘burner charity’ and conducted minimal business up to 2007. In 2008, however, Gates of Mercy experienced a significant increase in activity, receiving total donations of over $5.4 million CDN. Over the next several years Gates of Mercy’s activity grew exponentially; between 2009-2011, it brought almost $47 million CDN in donations.
-
-In 2012, Gates of Mercy experienced its first audit – for activities conducted between 2008–2010. The CRA’s audit found that Gates of Mercy had “failed to retain direction and control over the use of its funds,” and had no means to demonstrate or ensure these funds were being utilized for its own charitable activities. Gates of Mercy had also failed to keep “adequate books and records”, had “issued receipts not in accordance with the [Income Tax] Act” and had failed to “file an information return in prescribed format”.
-
-Rather than trigger a criminal investigation, Gates of Mercy simply entered a compliance agreement with the CRA in 2012, signed by Shmuel Reidel, a director at Gates of Mercy. Reidel’s 2012 signing is an important data marker; while Gates of Mercy continued to move millions of dollars CDN in charitable donations per year offshore, the charity’s financial activity and total number of donors experienced a marked decrease, post-2011. Most donors – and their charitable donations – moved en masse to another Reidel-directed charitable organization, ‘The Beth Oloth Charitable Organization’.
-
-Incorporated in 1980, CRA records show Beth Oloth largely inactive until 2012, just as Gates of Mercy entered into a compliance agreement with the CRA. Beth Oloth then experienced a massive uptick in reported revenue; the charitable organization took in over $9.4 million in revenue for the year. Revenue would skyrocket in the ensuing years: Between 2013-2014, Beth Oloth reported over $62 million CDN in received donations.
-
-The CRA responded in 2016 with an audit of Beth Oloth’s 2011–2014 activities. As with Gates of Mercy, Beth Oloth was found to be non-compliant with the Income Tax Act on a variety of levels. The CRA also evinced concern that Beth Oloth was depositing cheques made out to Reidel and Gates of Mercy. Representatives from Beth Oloth would claim that Reidel no longer held a formal association with the charity and maintained an “advisory role” only. But the cross-writing of cheques between the two charities suggested to the CRA the existence of an undisclosed relationship or arrangement between the two organizations.
-
-As for its charitable activities, between 2012-2014 Beth Oloth claimed that it had moved over $63 million CDN to a stable of thousands of international intermediaries, the vast majority of which were in Israel. While the CRA identified multiple instances where Beth Oloth’s self-claimed Israeli intermediaries were actively involved in supplying financial support to the illegal settlements and the IDF, the general conclusion was that the sheer scope of Beth Oloth’s operations were impossible to direct or control. The CRA revoked both Gates of Mercy’s and Beth Oloth’s charitable status in 2019.
-
-Who is supporting these organizations?
-
-With the general picture being of hundreds of millions of dollars CDN in uncontrolled charitable donations flowing from Canada into Israel, the next step was to understand the source of this money. The identity of individual private donors in Canada is protected by law. But the movement of donations to any Canadian charity from other Canadian charities is recorded and is publicly accessible. When such inter-charity donations emanate from private foundations, they can be traced back to their sources of private wealth.
-
-With data received from ATI requests, I created a list of all charitable donations from other Canadian charities, received by the five revoked charities (and subsequently included donations received by Ne’eman Canada and the JNFC), between 2000-2023. This list revealed hundreds of unique Canadian charities moving their pooled assets into the now-seven revoked charities, who subsequently moved (or at least claimed to move) their money into Israel. From here, I searched for overlaps between boards of directors and created aggregated entities where such linkages existed. For the sake of financial relevancy, I then created a list of all aggregated entities that had cumulatively moved at least $1 million CDN in donations to the seven revoked charities within the 2000-2023 timeframe. The result is a list of 56 aggregated entities, responsible for over $393 million CDN in charitable donations flowing out of Canada into Israel.
-
-In the case of Ne’eman Canada and the JNFC, we know that much of this money has gone to finance the operations of Israeli recipients actively engaged in Palestinian ethnic cleansing, or towards organizations that operate in support of the war criminality actively being perpetrated by the IDF. In the case of the other five revoked charities profiled above, the linkages between the hundreds of millions of dollars CDN in charitable donations and their Israeli recipients are far less clear. In several cases, the Israeli intermediaries appear as cutouts, John Doe-type entities whose identity is difficult to verify. Confirming what type of activity these cutouts perform, or what they do with the hundreds of millions of dollars CDN in charitable donations, is impossible to ascertain. If anything, the existence of such systemic, transgressional, activity within the Canada to Israel charitable pipeline points to a significant degree of corruption within the entire subsector, and a federal regulator either unable or uninterested in staunching the flow of illicit, Canadian taxpayer-subsidized, cash moving into Israel.
-
-Certain aspects of the ‘Big Gifters’ list escape easy explanation. For example, several members of the list, such as the Mizrachi Organization of Canada, are legally registered as charitable organizations. As I’ve written about in detail, here, Mizrachi Canada, on its own, moves millions of dollars per year to ultra-Zionist organizations in Israel, many of them located in the illegal settlements. Why it and other charitable organizations, which are legally conceived of as the ‘frontline’ operators within the Canadian charitable sector, also appear on a list meant to expose upper echelon donors is unknown. Charitable organizations are not supposed to sit on pools of assets and so shouldn’t, technically, have millions of dollars on hand to move to other Canadian charitable organizations. When donations move from one charitable organization to another, and then into Israel, it is impossible to discern the origin source of the money itself. It is, in essence, money twice ‘washed’.
-
-Jewish Foundations are also featured on the list. Registered as public foundations, these charities cumulatively sit on multiple billions of dollars CDN in assets, which because of their legal structure, are anonymized. While many of these Foundations, located across Canada, engage in local community support and services, their understanding of ‘tikkun olam’, clearly involves bankrolling the ethnic cleansing of ‘Greater Israel’; the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba and the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal, for example, cumulatively donated over $30 million CDN to the JNFC.
-
-Most members of the list, however, are legally registered as private foundations. Sitting on billions of dollars CDN in cumulative assets, these are the benefactors of private schools, synagogues, wings of hospitals, schools of business, university lecture halls, rehab centers, sports tournaments, and all the rest. Bluntly, these are the ‘too-big-to-fails’ of the Canadian charitable sector.
-
-This ocean of private wealth can be sourced back to its points of origin. For example, to cookie-cutter condominium developments, such as Lebovic Enterprises, multi-pronged urban development corporations, such as Fieldgate Properties, Ranee Management, Medallion Corporation, and Rosdev, high-risk hedge fund investment, such as with the Friedberg Mercantile Group, which I’ve written about in more detail here, and media empires, such as with the Asper Foundation. Other massive sources of corporate wealth, such as Almad Investment and Reichmann Hauer Capital Partners, blur any semblance of line between finance and real estate and count mortgage assets and international holdings among the prime pieces of their globe-spanning investment portfolios.
-
-What is to be done with the information contained within the list is a question without easy answer. Certainly, consumers exercising their financial right to invest or withdraw funds as they see fit is a possibility. There is, however, a gradient of difficulty in attempting to exercise one’s financial muscle against some of the largest property holders in Canada’s largest cities, for example, which, while not impossible, is perhaps daunting.
-
-Legislative reform of the Income Tax Act is another possibility. The revocations of Canadian charitable organizations involved in illegally moving donations to Israel, such as those profiled in this article, is certainly a measure of hope. But these do nothing to punish – financially or otherwise – those making use of such financial flow-throughs. Nor do such ‘one off’ revocations seem to have much of a lasting effect on the overall movement of illicit cash to Israel; such flow-throughs simply reconstitute themselves under another name and carry on with their activities. Meaningful reform would entail developing investigative and punishment regimes specifically geared towards those making (consistent) use of revoked charities. Given the place of influence that such donors occupy within society at large, such reform, however, arguably exists exclusively within the realm of the hypothetical.
-
-As it is, the Canadian charitable sector, which employs upwards of 10% of the total population and lives and dies upon its reputation as salve to neoliberal abandonment of the welfare state, has a profound association – with legal implications – with ongoing Israeli war crimes, billions in assets notwithstanding.
+February 7, 2025

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@@ -1,47 +1,55 @@
-Much of the attention concerning two recent revocations of charitable registrations in Canada has centered upon the apparent downfall of the Jewish National Fund Canada. Undoubtedly, with its proximity to Canadian political power and its historical role as Canada’s bagman for land seizure and greenwashing endeavors in Israel, the Jewish National Fund’s revocation has become a focal point for both celebration and, within Zionist circles, abject dejection. Indeed, with the Jewish National Fund’s promise, made across multiple social media platforms, to “take action” against a perceived bias underlying the Canada Revenue Agency’s decision to revoke, the story may not be officially over.
+Student protests over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are spreading across the United States and around the world. Students at Columbia University in New York setup a protest encampment last week on the New York campus. In response, the university’s President, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, called in the New York Police Department and arrested several student organizers. These students were then banned from campus and may face expulsion.
 
-Comparatively lost in the uproar, however, is the story of the second revoked charity, Ne’eman Foundation Canada. Deeply entwined with settler violence in the occupied Palestinian territory, headquartered in the illegal settlement of Shilo, and with a single donor representing nearly half of the $44 million dollars CDN in revenue that the charity has received since its formal registration in 2011, Ne’eman Canada represents the Judeo-fascist edge of the Canada-to-Israel charity pipeline, itself valued at, on average, upwards of $270 million CDN between 2018-2022.
+If the goal was to quickly end the protest, this completely backfired on the university administration. Thousands of students, joined by faculty and staff from across the university, re-established the protest camp almost immediately. Other universities around the United States have seen solidarity camps erected and administration buildings occupied. Now, students around the world are joining the movement.
 
-Ne’eman Foundation Canada
+Michael Arria and I spoke to one of the student organizers from Columbia who was arrested and banned from campus. Maryam Iqbal spoke to us on Tuesday.
 
-Ne’eman Canada was founded in 2011 by Zionist settler – and Canadian – Chaim Katz. Until its revocation, Ne’eman Canada acted in synchronicity with the 2015 registered, Boston-headquartered, and Chaim Katz-founded, Ne’eman Foundation USA. The two organizations operated with the sole purpose of funneling donations from the North American diaspora into the Israeli charitable sector. Ne’eman Canada, until its revocation, was the money-mover of the two charities, having brought in, on average, over $6 million CDN per year in revenue between 2016-2022. Comparatively, while revenue has increased, specifically over the last two years of filing, Ne’eman USA brought in under $2 million USA per year between 2016-2022.
+In the second segment, Michael reacts to Summer Lee’s primary victory in Pennsylvania and previews his new election season newsletter.
 
-While all remnants of Ne’eman Canada have been scrubbed from a still-active website that presently focuses exclusively upon Ne’eman USA’s ties to the Israeli charitable sector, an archived grab from 2022 describes Ne’eman Canada’s role in offering Canadian donors the opportunity to receive charitable tax credits for donating to any number of Israeli registered charities offered on the website, many of whom provide financial and material support to the Israeli military and/or are physically located within the illegal settlements. This is textbook conduit activity and is not legal in Canada.
+Support our work
 
-Acting as a conduit, where a Canadian charity offers itself up as a fundraising device for organizations over whom it has no direction, control, or operational input, is illegal under section 168(1)f the Income Tax Act. Canadian charities are certainly allowed to use international intermediaries to further their respective charitable purposes. But they must be able to demonstrate direction and control over the moneys they send abroad. And the moneys must be allocated to activities that would have otherwise not taken place. Donations cannot just be siphoned into pre-existing operations or activities.
+Help us continue our critical, independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
 
-More specifically, financing a foreign military is not considered a charitable activity in Canada. Further, providing material and financial support to the illegal settlements are a direct violation of Canadian public policy and customary international law, as entrenched within the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
 
-That said, between 2016-2022, the ‘Overseas Activity’ section of Ne’eman Canada’s tax returns show millions of dollars CDN headed to numerous IDF-supportive, Israeli, organizations. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the Michael Levin Base for ‘Lone Soldiers’, Netzah Yehuda, the ultra-orthodox battalion which, until early August 2024, was under consideration for American-imposed human rights-related sanctions for its activities in the occupied territory, after members of the unit murdered 80-year old Palestinian Omar Asaad by tying him to a tree overnight, and the Duvdevan Foundation, which provides material support to the Duvdevan Commando Unit, infamous for undercover assassinations of Palestinians.
+Follow Maryam Iqbal on Twitter
 
-During the same time frame, Ne’eman Canada also funneled millions of dollars CDN into numerous organizations located in the illegal settlements. While each such instance constitutes a contravention of the Canadian War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act and Canadian public policy, along with customary international law to which Canada is obliged to adhere, perhaps the most problematic of these illegal settlement recipients are the hundreds of thousands of dollars CDN that have flowed into two pools of money for which no corresponding organization can be found: the Ne’eman Foundation for Social Progress and something called the Ne’eman Foundation Canada – General.
+Share this podcast
 
-Likely corresponding to the Na’am Foundation for Social Advancement and the Naaman Foundation for Education, these “Haim” [sic] Katz-founded organizations exist on paper only and operate with zero accountability. Both organizations list their home addresses in the illegal settlement of Shilo, an epicenter of violent settler activity which acts as a nexus for expansionary settler outposts, from which Palestinian dispossession and land annexation have ramped up exponentially under the cover of the genocide taking place in Gaza since October 7, 2023. It should be noted that even in the comparatively lax regulatory framework of the Israeli charitable sector, neither of Katz’ Shilo-based organizations has ever filed an annual report for its activities, and neither is licensed to accept charitable donations.
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter/X. Click here to post a tweet!
 
-Follow the money
+If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser, leave us a review, and follow the show!
 
-Pointing to the overall diversity of the Canadian Zionist movement, tax return data suggest that Ne’eman Canada and its illegal activities did have a certain widespread appeal. Over $10 million CDN of a total of over $44 million CDN in revenue, between 2011-2022, originated from unique, individual, donors. But, just as Zionism has always been top-down and well-funded colonialism masquerading as a spiritual calling, most of the Ne’eman Canada’s revenue was always tied to a single source: Between 2016-2022 the Friedberg Charitable Foundation donated nearly $18 million CDN – 41% of all received revenue – to Ne’eman Canada.
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
 
-To be sure, Albert Friedberg is a legendary philanthropist in Canada, specifically within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). His managerial work appears to be tireless, and he is an active director at the Rofeh Wellness Centre, Kesher Employment Services, The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society, the Maimonides Educational Foundation, the Yedidut Torah Foundation, and the Stepping Stones Foundation. His largess within the GTA Jewish community is notable; Since the Friedberg Charitable Foundation’s registration in 2007, it has moved literal hundreds of millions of dollars CDN to qualified recipients. He also seems to have a soft spot for rare and ancient Judaic scripts, which he donates from time to time to corresponding libraries, specifically at the University of Toronto.
+Amazon
 
-But there has always been a shadow side to Friedberg’s philanthropy. Between the Friedberg Foundation and his directorially connected Buckingham Charitable Foundation, between 2013-2022, Albert Friedberg has donated over $54 million CDN to Canadian charities funneling money into Israel, whose statuses were subsequently revoked for contraventions of the Income Tax Act. Standout Friedberg donations to illicit charities include over $35 million CDN to high-profile revoked charities Gates of Mercy and the Beth Oloth Charitable Organization, which, between them, not only shared a bank account but moved hundreds of millions of dollars CDN to thousands of uncontrolled and undirected Israeli recipients. Indeed, within the last decade, Friedberg money has been far and away the single largest source of private donations underwriting the activities of transgressional Canadian charities doing overseas activity with Israel.
+Apple Podcasts
 
-The Friedberg Mercantile Group Inc, the source of Albert Friedberg’s wealth, bears some investigation too.
+Audible
 
-Initially incorporated in 1987 out of Delaware, USA, America’s port of corporate convenience, Friedberg Mercantile’s head office is now located in Toronto, Ontario. Beyond offering typical broker and dealer services, the investment firm offers two main hedge funds, the Global-Macro Hedge Fund and the Asset Allocation Fund. Long-term views of Friedberg’s investments, specifically as it pertains to the Global-Macro Fund, suggest a high-risk, roller coaster ride; a 2020 article from OPM Wire notes that Friedberg’s last “good year” was 2011, when Forbes magazine notes that Friedberg pocketed $60 million CDN, personally, and managed over $2 billion CDN in investments.
+Deezer
 
-Yet transfers of money from Friedberg’s Buckingham Charitable Foundation into the Friedberg Charitable Foundation have remained surprisingly constant and, within the Canadian charitable sphere, massive. Between 2009 and 2022, Friedberg moved over $367 million CDN from the Buckingham Foundation to the Friedberg Foundation. Tax return data suggests that the Buckingham Foundation’s current, sole, operational purpose is to every now and then receive a donation of about $100 million CDN (the last one, worth over $111 million CDN took place in 2021), maintain tens of millions of dollars CDN in long-term investments, and make multi-million-dollar transfers, every year, to the Friedberg Foundation. So, while there’s no exact calculation of the size of the Friedberg fortune, it’s enough to comfortably shuffle tens of millions of dollars CDN, from one private foundation to another.
+Gaana
 
-For all that, there’s no record of Friedberg ever publicly pronouncing his stance on Zionism, the occupation, or anything else for that matter. This movement of charitable donations, from a massive pool of wealth apparently gleaned from the world of hedge funds, through Canadian charitable organizations, and then into the hands of frontline settler organizations in the occupied territory and IDF supportive organizations in Israel, is the only verifiable track record of Friedberg’s political leanings.
+Google Podcasts
 
-Whack-a-mole
+Overcast
 
-Ne’eman Canada is far from the only Canadian charity operating as a conduit for illegal Israeli settlements and IDF-supportive Israeli organizations. The Mizrachi Organization of Canada, along with Canada Charity Partners, and the Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, among others, actively issue Canadian donors charitable tax receipts for donating to the illegal settlements and IDF-supportive organizations. So, while Ne’eman Canada’s revocation is certainly a victory for those who would bring the Canadian charitable sector in line with customary international law, the Canada-to-Israel charity pipeline has proven itself to be adaptive and responsive to instances of ‘one-off’ regulatory enforcement.
+Player.fm
 
-In response to Ne’eman Canada’s revocation, Israelgives.org, a small-scale website that act as a clearinghouse for the Israeli charitable sector, has already begun its own disinformation campaign, in which it claims that Canadian charities illegally funneling money to the settlements and the IDF are being wrongfully “targeted” simply for their association with Israel. Suggesting that Ne’eman Canada’s charitable status was revoked simply because it “failed to maintain proper books and records”, Israelgives.org is actively encouraging concerned Canadian Zionists to shift their philanthropic activities to its Canadian conduit, Canada Charity Partners.
+RadioPublic
 
-For enforcement to be effective, the Canada Revenue Agency must bring the entire Canada-to-Israel charitable sector into compliance with pre-existing Canadian public policy and customary international law, specifically considering the International Court of Justice’s advisory ruling, determining that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory is patently illegal. The ICJ noted that member states at the United Nations are “under an obligation not to provide aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” While we may be more primed to target shipments of military hardware with our activist campaigns, there is no reason to suggest that state subsidies, in the form of charitable tax credits, should be somehow immune from the World Court’s assessment of “aid or assistance”.
+Spotify
 
-Legislative reform of the Canadian Income Tax Act must also be directed at those who utilize these transgressional charitable organizations, such as Albert Friedberg, to illegally underwrite the Zionist project. Without such meaningful reform, the status revocations of the JNFC and Ne’eman Canada, while significant, are evocative of punishing a gun, but not the one who wields it. With enough conviction of purpose, the solution is all too simple:
+TuneIn
 
-Register another charity. Find another gun.
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mondoweiss/texts/1847.txt

@@ -1,51 +1,32 @@
-On Tuesday the Liberal government listed Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network as a terror entity. Made in conjunction with Washington, the move criminalizes the Vancouver-based grassroots solidarity group. It’s now illegal to finance or materially assist Samidoun.
-
-After Israel labeled Samidoun a terror organization in 2021, Zionist groups and the National Post began pushing Ottawa to follow suit. But the Liberals wavered under pushback from the BC Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Union of Postal Workers and dozens of other civil society organizations. After October 7 the Conservatives launched a full court press to list Samidoun that seems to have tipped the scales.
-
-Listing Samidoun is a direct attack against those opposing genocide. An August parliamentary petition calling on the government to list the organization began, “Samidoun Prisoners Solidarity Network (Samidoun) is viewed as one of the main groups behind anti-Israeli protest rallies that have been staged across Canada.” Immediately after its listing Zionists started denouncing individuals and organizations that have worked with Samidoun or its two principal organizers Charlotte Kates and Khaled Barakat. For its part, Samidoun criticized its listing as “meant to introduce a norm in which organizations may be designated as ‘terrorist’ for organizing demonstrations, lectures, publishing posters and engaging in entirely public and political work that challenges imperialist states’ complicity in Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
-
-Notwithstanding the menacing “terror” label, no one claims Samidoun has engaged in any violence. Criticism of the group focused on its supports for Palestinian armed resistance and that someone burned a Canadian flag at a protest they co-organized October 7. But that isn’t illegal, let alone grounds to ban an organization.
-
-In the government’s statement listing Samidoun they claim the group has “close links with and advances the interests of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is a listed terrorist entity.” In its statement the US accused Samidoun of financing the secular leftist PFLP but curiously Canada hasn’t charged anyone associated with Samidoun for what was already illegal.
-
-If Samidoun is a terrorist organization because it has ties to the PFLP — which has barely engaged in armed struggle for decades — then it won’t be long until they target other groups on the grounds they have “close links” to Samidoun. And on and on.
-
-Created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack in the U.S., Canada’s terror list grants the government powers to ban an organization without providing a standard legal burden of proof. In essence the government can list a group and poof it’s illegal to assist it. It’s also near impossible for that organization to mount a defense against their listing.
-
-Canada’s terror list reinforces the U.S.-led imperial system. It consists overwhelmingly of organizations viewed as challenging U.S. hegemony and is a concrete example of why Benjamin Netanyahu’s immediate response to the 9/11 attacks was to blurt out that “it’s very good”. Asked on the day of the attack how it would impact U.S.-Israel relations, the then former Israeli prime minister said it would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
-
-During its first 12 years the list consisted solely of groups based abroad. That’s changing. According to the president of the Canadian Association for Intelligence and Security Studies Jessica Davis, Samidoun’s listing “is a rare case of a Canadian organization being listed, with someone leading it who is resident in Canada (and will likely feel the effects of this listing). If we’re going to see a legal challenge to this regime, it could well be this case.”
-
-The first ever Canadian-based group added to the terror list was the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy. IRFAN was designated a terrorist organization in 2014 largely for supporting orphans and a hospital in Gaza through official (Hamas-controlled) channels.
-
-At its high point the leading Canadian Muslim registered charity operated in a dozen countries and sponsored four thousand orphans. In the early 2000s Canadian Alliance (now Conservatives) leader Stockwell Day began attacking IRFAN. Nearly a decade later the Canada Revenue Agency revoked the group’s charitable status, claiming “IRFAN-Canada is an integral part of an international fundraising effort to support Hamas”, which is on Canada’s terror list.
-
-A big part of the CRA’s supporting evidence was that IRFAN worked with the Gaza Ministry of Health and Ministry of Telecommunications, which came under Hamas’ direction after they won the 2006 election. The Mississauga-based organization tried to send a dialysis machine to Gaza and continued to support orphans in the impoverished territory with the money channeled through the post office controlled by the Telecommunications Ministry.
-
-The IRFAN and Samidoun cases highlight the anti-Palestinian nature of Canada’s terrorist list. Over 10 percent of the list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population. Representing much of Palestinian political life, eight of the oppressed nation’s organizations are listed.
-
-Terrorism listing used to justify Israeli violence
-
-But no Palestinian organization is responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the Israeli military. The IDF is responsible for dozens of times more deaths than any listed Palestinian (or other) organization.
-
-Canada’s terror list doesn’t simply omit the main purveyor of violence in the region. It also enables that state’s terrorism. Israel supporters have long argued that that country has the right to terrorize Palestinians because Ottawa (usually at the lobby’s behest) listed some organization with limited means a “terrorist” group. Before Hamas’ October 7 attack Canada’s pro-apartheid lobby argued Israel could terrorize 2.2 million Palestinians living in the open-air Gaza prison because Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is listed a terrorist group in Canada. Over the past year of Israel’s holocaust in Gaza Canadian officials have repeatedly highlighted that Hamas is a terror organization as part of legitimating Israel’s killing.
-
-Recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and foreign minister Mélanie Joly extended that point to Israel’s terror in Lebanon. In response to Israel dropping 80 “bunker buster” and other massive bombs on a Beirut suburb three weeks ago Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked and killed innocent civilians, causing immense suffering across the region.”
-
-But Hezbollah isn’t classified as a “terrorist” organization by the United Nations or most countries in the world. Nor was an organization that’s long been represented in Lebanon’s parliament defined as a “terrorist” organization by Ottawa for the first half of its existence. In fact, Prime Minister Jean Chretien met Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah in Beirut in October 2002.
-
-In “Selectively Terrified” Mary Foster detailed “how Hezbollah became a terrorist organization in Canada”. Foster wrote that “pressure to list Hezbollah came from the Canadian Alliance Party (a precursor to today’s Conservative Party), senior Liberal politicians Irwin Cotler and Art Eggleton, B’nai Brith (a Jewish human rights organization, staunchly pro-Israel in orientation), and the Canadian Jewish Congress.” The campaign was greatly boosted by fabricated quotes in the National Post claiming Nasrallah encouraged suicide bombing during a speech at a Beirut rally.
-
-Hezbollah and Hamas’ listing was also used to justify listing the first major state actor. In June the Trudeau government added part of Iran’s military, the 100,000 strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to Canada’s terrorist list. The government release noted, “the decision to list the IRGC through the Criminal Code listing regime sends a strong message that Canada will use all tools at its disposal to combat the terrorist activity of the IRGC, conducted both unilaterally and in knowing association with listed terrorist entities such as Hizballah and Hamas.”
-
-Made amidst Israel’s repeated provocations against Iran, Tehran condemned Canada’s move as made “in alliance with terrorists and Zionists.” Iran’s envoy to the UN sent a letter to the Secretary-General and UN Security Council labeling Ottawa’s move “a blatant violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.”
-
-When foreign minister Joly made the announcement Liberal MP Judy Sgro stood by her side. Sgro is a high-profile supporter of the violent, cult-like, Iranian opposition organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which backed Iraq in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
-
-MEK is one of only two groups ever removed from Canada’s terror list. In 2012 prominent pro-Israel activists worked with Iranian dissidents to convince the State Department to remove the MEK from the US terrorism list, which paved the way for Ottawa to follow suit. The MEK, according to US government sources, teamed up with Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists.
-
-Clearly, Canada’s terrorist list is driven by imperial politics. Also apparent, is its deeply anti-Palestinian bias.
-
-To paraphrase a famous quote from another time: First they came for the organizations that fought for Palestinian rights, but I didn’t protest because I wasn’t Palestinian. Then they came for the organizations that protested the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians …
-
-You know the rest of the story.
+This past semester I was the violin and viola teacher at the Gaza branch of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music—though I never met my students, because Israel blocked me from entering the coastal strip. So I taught by Skype from the West Bank as best I could (when Gaza City’s electricity and Internet were both working at the same time), a poor substitute that nonetheless attempted to show the war-weary students that they had not been forgotten.[1]
+They would be justified to believe that the world had indeed forsaken them. Israel strangles Gaza with a hermetic siege, lays waste to it with unprovoked attacks by land, air, and sea, and then blocks relief and rebuilding. Why, then, the violin? The people of Gaza need liberation above all, but until then they urgently need food, medicine, and reconstruction. Do they really need foreigners teaching their children violin?
+People should have the opportunity to excel in whatever they love, and this is especially important for young people under extreme hardship and trauma. After Japan was devastated by a war and two atomic bombs, Shinichi Suzuki wanted to give something of meaning and beauty, a sense of self-worth, to the generation of lost children around him; he responded by developing a violin teaching method that addressed the country’s circumstances. For the people of Gaza, any pursuit of normality—playing soccer, writing poetry, chasing quarks—also defies Israel’s attempts to dehumanize them.[2]
+Students in Gaza who win prestigious international scholarships or any other opportunity for further achievement are able to do so only at Israel’s pleasure. Those students whose dreams Israel does not shatter at the Armistice Line face the blockade again when they try to return to see their families at holidays or between school years—and if Israel does let them visit, they must accept the high risk that they will be unable to get out again.
+For Palestinian musicians, Israel’s draconian control over civilian life means that they can only collaborate with colleagues in the same Israeli-created bantustan; that reliable planning is impossible; that your child’s music teacher may suddenly be expelled; and that on the day of the concert your child has worked all year to prepare for, s/he may be stopped from reaching the hall. Imagine a national music competition in which a foreign country blocks participants: In last year’s Palestine National Music Competition, the Conservatory had to establish video links to circumvent Israeli interference and enable all Palestinian applicants to audition. Some winners were forced to present their celebratory concert “live” by video link set up on the concert hall stage.
+Tom Suárez (left, and lower right of screen), in Bethlehem, coaching a young violinist at the National Conservatory of Music in Gaza, via Skype.
+All Palestinians live with the fear of violence from the occupying military. In the West Bank, one talented teenage violinist I have coached and known for years was accused (wrongly, though the issue is irrelevant) by IDF soldiers of throwing stones; he denied it, and they smashed his violin. Another young musician similarly accused was, like so many other Palestinians, arbitrarily imprisoned and forced to sign a “confession”. In the most extreme case known to me, a Palestinian contrabass student (now a colleague) returning from a lesson was stopped by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint. They tied him to a wall and called in several new IDF recruits. “We caught this terrorist”, the soldiers told the new recruits. “What do we do with terrorists?” He awoke the next day in a hospital. His bass bow, broken in two, was all that was found with him.
+One experience of mine is representative of the more mundane day-to-day obstacles confronting musical life in Palestine. The premiere of my string quartet Peregrinations was to have taken place in April 2014 at Bethlehem’s Peace Center, next to the traditional site of Christ’s birth, in a performance by the NCM String Quartet, under the auspices of the John Paul II Foundation and with the support of Bethlehem Municipality. It had been well-advertised and was to be broadcast live by Radio Mawwal. Two weeks before the performance, Israel prevented the quartet’s first violinist from reaching the West Bank. Diplomatic efforts to stop Israeli interference failed, forcing the cancellation of the concert. Within the space of one year, Israel thwarted three concerts of mine alone.
+One day en route to teach students at a French cultural exchange institute in Hebron, two Israeli soldiers stopped me and asked what I was doing. I pointed to the viola strapped to my back, pointed to the entrance of the old city, and told them that I was teaching music. “What is your religion?” they asked next. I asked why they cared about my religion. “Because if you are Jewish you are not allowed.” They did not explain, but the impression was that the thought of a Jew teaching Palestinians to play the viola struck them as treasonous. Living in Palestine, one quickly learns to act pragmatically and say whatever avoids trouble, but I had had quite enough that day and told them that my religion was not their affair. After this went back and forth a few times, they grabbed me and started hauling me away to an IDF booth some fifty feet away. I was under arrest, they informed me. Quickly coming to my senses, I apologized and gave them the safest answer. “I am Christian.” The surname in my passport seemed to agree; and as regards my non-cooperation, the appearance of two TIPH international observers watching us from a distance likely tipped the balance in my favor. They let me go.[3]
+Israel’s tight grip on life in Palestine is spun as the regrettable consequence of its right to self-defense. This, like the very idea that putting down resistance to its oppression is “defense”, is a lie. Stifling Palestinian achievement is itself the goal of Israel’s interference, because the Zionist narrative requires the dehumanization of anyone in the way of its ambitions. Israel needs to depict Palestine, and above all Gaza, as a nest of marauders. Palestine must never be seen as a civilization nurturing artists, writers, scientists, scholars—and violinists.
+The BBC recently aired a piece entitled “Saving Gaza’s only grand piano”, a feel-good item that reported the discovery and restoration of a grand piano damaged in Israel’s 2014 “Protective Edge” attacks. In a virtually Orwellian reversal, the BBC referred to that onslaught as a “war with Israel”, and left its audience with the impression that Gaza would have a more flourishing music scene if only—well, if only ruling Hamas weren’t so conservative. One need not make any excuses for Hamas’ faults to point out that it is not Hamas that bombs Gaza to ruins and suffocates it under siege.[4]
+“Paradise” is how Gaza was described to me by someone who lived there in the mid-1940s. Cataclysmic change hit Gaza in 1948 when many of the roughly eight hundred thousand Palestinians ethnically cleansed that year by the Zionist armies were shoved into the Mediterranean enclave, vastly exceeding its resources as Israel simultaneously severed it from the rest of Palestine. Israel’s siege of Gaza began then—not after the election of Hamas fifty-eight years later. Many of the refugees trapped in Gaza were on the brink of starvation, but they were shot dead on sight if they attempted to return to their own homes or even to reach what then became known as the West Bank, where conditions were slightly less horrific. Israel, meanwhile, stole their land, their homes, belongings, orchards, assets, businesses, factories, aquifers, and natural resources.[5]
+When after these seven decades with neither relief nor justice, fringe groups in Gaza fire crude rockets over the Armistice Line in response to an Israeli assault that the West does not report, our media and our governments showcase these rockets as an unprovoked attack. Israel has used them to justify five major campaigns—Summer Rains (2006), Autumn Clouds (2006), Cast Lead (2008-2009), Pillar of Defense (2012), and Protective Edge (2014)—that killed more than four thousand people, injured thousands, and laid waste to the entire civilian infrastructure. In each case, the media confined the discourse to two options: Most pundits, and the US Congress, offered unqualified support, while dissenting commentators argued that the attacks were “disproportionate”—justified, yes, but perhaps a bit too much “defense”. What actually happened, and why, remains off-limits. [6]
+Open-back troubadour truck with drums and wind instruments celebrating newly-weds as the road turns south along the coast, Gaza City, 2009. (Photo Tom Suarez)
+“Gaza has excellent musicians,” an unidentified chronicler wrote in the fourth century A.D. The Palestinian coastal region was, indeed, famous throughout the Roman Empire for its superb musicians, and Gaza appears to have had a dedicated music school by the third or second centuries BC.[7] Today’s National Conservatory of Music follows a long tradition. The Zionist occupation of Palestine, like the occupations before it, will pass. In the meantime, Gaza’s millennia-old musical life, though crippled along with all aspects of everyday life, continues.
+When future historians chronicle the so-called Palestinian-Israeli “conflict”, they will find the basics remarkably simple: turn-of-the-twentieth-century racial-nationalism spawns a settler ethnocracy. The land’s people resist. End of story. Everything else is details. What will leave our future historians confounded, however, is to understand how we explained our own role to ourselves. Why did we empower Israel so tenaciously, even as it made a mockery of everything we preached, and harmed us strategically, morally, and economically? What were we thinking?
+Cartoon by Sainatee Suárez.
+Tom Suárez is the author of Palestine Sixty Years Later, as well as three books on the history of cartography. He is currently finishing a major work on Zionist violence during the British Mandate and early statehood years, to be published in 2016 by Skyscraper Books.
+
+See also :
+• Night of horror at Ben Gurion airport for two French music students Mondoweiss, April 30, 2015 (Note: Neither of the two musician authors of this article are among the unnamed musicians in the present article.)
+• Ramallah Orchestra’s performance of ‘Eroica’ in Jerusalem is cancelled due to Israeli interference Mondoweiss, July 2, 2012
+• Violinist tumbles while climbing separation wall, is unable to perform historic concert Mondoweiss, July 14, 2013
+• The Palestine National Orchestra: a view from the violin section Mondoweiss, March 31, 2012
+Notes
+1. Along with the author, Israel blocked the Conservatory’s General Director, Suhail Khoury, from reaching his institution. For more on the National Conservatory of Music, see this web page and this pdf. For the experiences of one medical professional blocked by Israel, see Mads Gilbert’s book, Night in Gaza, Skyscraper Publications, 2015. ( US – UK – info)
+2. For reports on how musicians in Gaza use their art to helped those emotionally scarred by the violence today, see e.g., Gaza youth learn music and challenge the occupation, Electronic Intifada, May 14, 2010; and the video Gaza After the War: Music Therapy.
+3. TIPH (Temporary International Presence in Hebron) observers have no power, but act as witnesses. They followed the author until out of sight of the soldiers, and asked for an account of what had happened. The organization was formed in the aftermath of the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre by Hebron settler Baruch Goldstein.
+4. Tim Whewell, Saving Gaza’s only grand piano, BBC Magazine, 26 March, 2015.  Daniel Barenboim financed its restoration by the French technician Claire Bertrand. The articles alleges that the piano’s origin is uncertain; but the Conservatory’s general manager, Suhail Khoury, states (personal correspondence) that he was a primary participant in the piano’s acquisition and importation, and well aware of its history, but that the BBC never asked him. The National Conservatory’s Khamis Abu Shaaban was the discoverer of the piano after it lay damaged from bombings. Ironically, a few weeks before the BBC piece appeared, a concert within Palestine by Mr. Abu Shaaban’s own Watar Band was cancelled because Israel blocked him. The image on the right is a poster in East Jerusalem announcing the Watar Band concert, crossed out after news came that they were prevented from coming. Mr. Whewell did not respond to the author’s attempt to contact him.
+5. Ted Steel, interview with the author, 2014. A good source for the early post-1948 period is Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, Clarendon Press, 1993.
+6. Regarding the Gaza rockets, see also Suarez, UXOs: Did Israel deliberately arm Hamas?, in Mondoweiss, December 13, 2010.
+7. Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine: Archaeological, Written and Comparative Sources. p260 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002. By the fifth century AD, Gaza was also widely renowned for its visual arts, mosaics, philosophy, literature, and wine making.

mondoweiss/texts/1848.txt

@@ -1,47 +1,92 @@
-Much of the attention concerning two recent revocations of charitable registrations in Canada has centered upon the apparent downfall of the Jewish National Fund Canada. Undoubtedly, with its proximity to Canadian political power and its historical role as Canada’s bagman for land seizure and greenwashing endeavors in Israel, the Jewish National Fund’s revocation has become a focal point for both celebration and, within Zionist circles, abject dejection. Indeed, with the Jewish National Fund’s promise, made across multiple social media platforms, to “take action” against a perceived bias underlying the Canada Revenue Agency’s decision to revoke, the story may not be officially over.
+THREE WORLDSMemoir of an Arab Jewby Avi Shlaim336 pp. One World, 2023 $29.95
 
-Comparatively lost in the uproar, however, is the story of the second revoked charity, Ne’eman Foundation Canada. Deeply entwined with settler violence in the occupied Palestinian territory, headquartered in the illegal settlement of Shilo, and with a single donor representing nearly half of the $44 million dollars CDN in revenue that the charity has received since its formal registration in 2011, Ne’eman Canada represents the Judeo-fascist edge of the Canada-to-Israel charity pipeline, itself valued at, on average, upwards of $270 million CDN between 2018-2022.
+Avi Shlaim’s new work, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab Jew, is truly a brave book.
 
-Ne’eman Foundation Canada
+Its message is clear: “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” This truth was not uttered by a brave boy among the chorus of hypocrites and liars — the boy turned out to be a distinguished history professor who spoke the truth he collected as painstakingly as collecting straws in the wind.
 
-Ne’eman Canada was founded in 2011 by Zionist settler – and Canadian – Chaim Katz. Until its revocation, Ne’eman Canada acted in synchronicity with the 2015 registered, Boston-headquartered, and Chaim Katz-founded, Ne’eman Foundation USA. The two organizations operated with the sole purpose of funneling donations from the North American diaspora into the Israeli charitable sector. Ne’eman Canada, until its revocation, was the money-mover of the two charities, having brought in, on average, over $6 million CDN per year in revenue between 2016-2022. Comparatively, while revenue has increased, specifically over the last two years of filing, Ne’eman USA brought in under $2 million USA per year between 2016-2022.
+Avi Shlaim declared his identity clearly as an Arab Jew — an Arab by culture, history, and geography, and a Jew by faith. His identity was destroyed by the Ashkenazi European Jews.
 
-While all remnants of Ne’eman Canada have been scrubbed from a still-active website that presently focuses exclusively upon Ne’eman USA’s ties to the Israeli charitable sector, an archived grab from 2022 describes Ne’eman Canada’s role in offering Canadian donors the opportunity to receive charitable tax credits for donating to any number of Israeli registered charities offered on the website, many of whom provide financial and material support to the Israeli military and/or are physically located within the illegal settlements. This is textbook conduit activity and is not legal in Canada.
+Here we have a new victim of Ashkenazi Zionism. It was not only the Palestinians who were depopulated by massacres and ethnic cleansing. It was also the Arab Jews who were uprooted from their ancestral home by Zionist bombs.
 
-Acting as a conduit, where a Canadian charity offers itself up as a fundraising device for organizations over whom it has no direction, control, or operational input, is illegal under section 168(1)f the Income Tax Act. Canadian charities are certainly allowed to use international intermediaries to further their respective charitable purposes. But they must be able to demonstrate direction and control over the moneys they send abroad. And the moneys must be allocated to activities that would have otherwise not taken place. Donations cannot just be siphoned into pre-existing operations or activities.
+Welcome, brother, to the common struggle.
 
-More specifically, financing a foreign military is not considered a charitable activity in Canada. Further, providing material and financial support to the illegal settlements are a direct violation of Canadian public policy and customary international law, as entrenched within the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
+Shlaim’s family enjoyed in Baghdad the life of the rich upper class. His father was a very successful businessman, with wide connections among the Iraqi ruling class. Shlaim’s mother, a central character in the book and a vivacious and determined woman, lived in a villa that was rather like a palace, attended by over a dozen servants. She kept busy in the evenings by throwing parties and playing cards with Baghdad’s wealthy elites.
 
-That said, between 2016-2022, the ‘Overseas Activity’ section of Ne’eman Canada’s tax returns show millions of dollars CDN headed to numerous IDF-supportive, Israeli, organizations. These include, but are certainly not limited to, the Michael Levin Base for ‘Lone Soldiers’, Netzah Yehuda, the ultra-orthodox battalion which, until early August 2024, was under consideration for American-imposed human rights-related sanctions for its activities in the occupied territory, after members of the unit murdered 80-year old Palestinian Omar Asaad by tying him to a tree overnight, and the Duvdevan Foundation, which provides material support to the Duvdevan Commando Unit, infamous for undercover assassinations of Palestinians.
+That life was irreversibly shattered after the Zionists planted bombs in Baghdad synagogues in 1950. Thus ended Jewish history in Iraq. This history is much more ancient and continuous — for over 2500 years — than the history of European Jews, which probably originated in Al-Khazar in Eastern Europe in the tenth century, and surfaced on record only after the demise of Muslim Spain.
 
-During the same time frame, Ne’eman Canada also funneled millions of dollars CDN into numerous organizations located in the illegal settlements. While each such instance constitutes a contravention of the Canadian War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act and Canadian public policy, along with customary international law to which Canada is obliged to adhere, perhaps the most problematic of these illegal settlement recipients are the hundreds of thousands of dollars CDN that have flowed into two pools of money for which no corresponding organization can be found: the Ne’eman Foundation for Social Progress and something called the Ne’eman Foundation Canada – General.
+The author describes in minute detail the product of his painstaking research over the years, which demonstrates that Zionists planted bombs to uproot Jews from Iraq. The family became unwilling immigrants to Israel, “the promised land.” The journey was tagged as aliyah (rising up, or ascent), but for them, it was a yeridah — or descent — into the abyss.
 
-Likely corresponding to the Na’am Foundation for Social Advancement and the Naaman Foundation for Education, these “Haim” [sic] Katz-founded organizations exist on paper only and operate with zero accountability. Both organizations list their home addresses in the illegal settlement of Shilo, an epicenter of violent settler activity which acts as a nexus for expansionary settler outposts, from which Palestinian dispossession and land annexation have ramped up exponentially under the cover of the genocide taking place in Gaza since October 7, 2023. It should be noted that even in the comparatively lax regulatory framework of the Israeli charitable sector, neither of Katz’ Shilo-based organizations has ever filed an annual report for its activities, and neither is licensed to accept charitable donations.
+The trauma Shlaim endured from being uprooted as a child persisted when he became a distinguished history professor. Now his task was to find out who was behind the bombing of the synagogues. Was it the product of Arab rejection of Israel — and hence, all Jews — or was it engineered by the Zionists?
 
-Follow the money
+His research paid off. Several books have been written on the subject by Jews, including some who were agents of the bombing, like Naeim Giladi in Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. He left Israel and died in exile in New York.
 
-Pointing to the overall diversity of the Canadian Zionist movement, tax return data suggest that Ne’eman Canada and its illegal activities did have a certain widespread appeal. Over $10 million CDN of a total of over $44 million CDN in revenue, between 2011-2022, originated from unique, individual, donors. But, just as Zionism has always been top-down and well-funded colonialism masquerading as a spiritual calling, most of the Ne’eman Canada’s revenue was always tied to a single source: Between 2016-2022 the Friedberg Charitable Foundation donated nearly $18 million CDN – 41% of all received revenue – to Ne’eman Canada.
+Shlaim’s work is different. Over the years, he looked for primary operators and found original documents. To start with, he asserts that Iraqi Jews thought of themselves primarily as Iraqi or Arab Jews, and those who adopted Zionist ideology were a minority. The estimate is that out of a total of 130,000 Iraqi Jews, no more than 2,000 belonged to the Zionist movement — that is to say, 1.53 percent. Iraqi Jews lamented the disaster that befell the majority, engineered by the few.
 
-To be sure, Albert Friedberg is a legendary philanthropist in Canada, specifically within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). His managerial work appears to be tireless, and he is an active director at the Rofeh Wellness Centre, Kesher Employment Services, The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society, the Maimonides Educational Foundation, the Yedidut Torah Foundation, and the Stepping Stones Foundation. His largess within the GTA Jewish community is notable; Since the Friedberg Charitable Foundation’s registration in 2007, it has moved literal hundreds of millions of dollars CDN to qualified recipients. He also seems to have a soft spot for rare and ancient Judaic scripts, which he donates from time to time to corresponding libraries, specifically at the University of Toronto.
+Planning the bombing of Baghdad’s synagogues
 
-But there has always been a shadow side to Friedberg’s philanthropy. Between the Friedberg Foundation and his directorially connected Buckingham Charitable Foundation, between 2013-2022, Albert Friedberg has donated over $54 million CDN to Canadian charities funneling money into Israel, whose statuses were subsequently revoked for contraventions of the Income Tax Act. Standout Friedberg donations to illicit charities include over $35 million CDN to high-profile revoked charities Gates of Mercy and the Beth Oloth Charitable Organization, which, between them, not only shared a bank account but moved hundreds of millions of dollars CDN to thousands of uncontrolled and undirected Israeli recipients. Indeed, within the last decade, Friedberg money has been far and away the single largest source of private donations underwriting the activities of transgressional Canadian charities doing overseas activity with Israel.
+In the face of the accusation of having bombed Baghdad’s synagogues, Israel has long maintained its innocence, denying that it had any hand in the atrocities, either directly or indirectly.
 
-The Friedberg Mercantile Group Inc, the source of Albert Friedberg’s wealth, bears some investigation too.
+Shlaim disagrees:
 
-Initially incorporated in 1987 out of Delaware, USA, America’s port of corporate convenience, Friedberg Mercantile’s head office is now located in Toronto, Ontario. Beyond offering typical broker and dealer services, the investment firm offers two main hedge funds, the Global-Macro Hedge Fund and the Asset Allocation Fund. Long-term views of Friedberg’s investments, specifically as it pertains to the Global-Macro Fund, suggest a high-risk, roller coaster ride; a 2020 article from OPM Wire notes that Friedberg’s last “good year” was 2011, when Forbes magazine notes that Friedberg pocketed $60 million CDN, personally, and managed over $2 billion CDN in investments.
+“A number of Iraqi Jews and Iraqi-born scholars in Israel have argued, to the contrary, that the Zionist underground was responsible. To support their claim they relied on various testimonies, circumstantial evidence and fragmentary pieces of information, but they were unable to produce a smoking gun. All my relatives in Israel were utterly convinced, evidence or no evidence, that the Zionist underground engineered our departure from Iraq.”
 
-Yet transfers of money from Friedberg’s Buckingham Charitable Foundation into the Friedberg Charitable Foundation have remained surprisingly constant and, within the Canadian charitable sphere, massive. Between 2009 and 2022, Friedberg moved over $367 million CDN from the Buckingham Foundation to the Friedberg Foundation. Tax return data suggests that the Buckingham Foundation’s current, sole, operational purpose is to every now and then receive a donation of about $100 million CDN (the last one, worth over $111 million CDN took place in 2021), maintain tens of millions of dollars CDN in long-term investments, and make multi-million-dollar transfers, every year, to the Friedberg Foundation. So, while there’s no exact calculation of the size of the Friedberg fortune, it’s enough to comfortably shuffle tens of millions of dollars CDN, from one private foundation to another.
+The evidence he had unearthed provides a partial answer to this question: three of the five bombs were the work of the Zionist underground in Baghdad.
 
-For all that, there’s no record of Friedberg ever publicly pronouncing his stance on Zionism, the occupation, or anything else for that matter. This movement of charitable donations, from a massive pool of wealth apparently gleaned from the world of hedge funds, through Canadian charitable organizations, and then into the hands of frontline settler organizations in the occupied territory and IDF supportive organizations in Israel, is the only verifiable track record of Friedberg’s political leanings.
+The person who was responsible for three of the bombs was Yusef Ibrahim Basri, a 28-year-old Baghdadi Jew, a lawyer by profession, a socialist, an ardent Jewish nationalist, and a member of Hashura, the military wing of Hatenua, or the Movement. He was caught and hanged by the Iraqi government.
 
-Whack-a-mole
+Basri’s controller was an Israeli intelligence officer, Max Binnet, who was based in Iran; Binnet supplied Basri with hand grenades and TNT. Basri was arrested on June 10, 1951, due to an error he had made. After four bombs had gone off in the streets of Baghdad, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) arrested him. After nearly a month of horrific torture, Basri  broke down and confessed that he was responsible for three of the bombs but not for the one in the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue.
 
-Ne’eman Canada is far from the only Canadian charity operating as a conduit for illegal Israeli settlements and IDF-supportive Israeli organizations. The Mizrachi Organization of Canada, along with Canada Charity Partners, and the Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, among others, actively issue Canadian donors charitable tax receipts for donating to the illegal settlements and IDF-supportive organizations. So, while Ne’eman Canada’s revocation is certainly a victory for those who would bring the Canadian charitable sector in line with customary international law, the Canada-to-Israel charity pipeline has proven itself to be adaptive and responsive to instances of ‘one-off’ regulatory enforcement.
+Basri and his accomplice, Shalom Salih Shalom, were hanged in Baghdad in January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, the Israeli plan to uproot Iraqi Jews.
 
-In response to Ne’eman Canada’s revocation, Israelgives.org, a small-scale website that act as a clearinghouse for the Israeli charitable sector, has already begun its own disinformation campaign, in which it claims that Canadian charities illegally funneling money to the settlements and the IDF are being wrongfully “targeted” simply for their association with Israel. Suggesting that Ne’eman Canada’s charitable status was revoked simply because it “failed to maintain proper books and records”, Israelgives.org is actively encouraging concerned Canadian Zionists to shift their philanthropic activities to its Canadian conduit, Canada Charity Partners.
+Shlaim quotes another Iraqi Jew, the Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav, who comments on the Iraqi reaction to the news of Basri’s hanging:  “That is God’s revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths.”
 
-For enforcement to be effective, the Canada Revenue Agency must bring the entire Canada-to-Israel charitable sector into compliance with pre-existing Canadian public policy and customary international law, specifically considering the International Court of Justice’s advisory ruling, determining that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory is patently illegal. The ICJ noted that member states at the United Nations are “under an obligation not to provide aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” While we may be more primed to target shipments of military hardware with our activist campaigns, there is no reason to suggest that state subsidies, in the form of charitable tax credits, should be somehow immune from the World Court’s assessment of “aid or assistance”.
+In Israel, Shlaim found another useful source — an Iraqi Jew who claimed to have carried out several exploits on behalf of Zionism in Iraq. He was Yaacov Karkoukli, an Iraqi Jew who was born in Baghdad in 1928. He had a prominent friend and neighbor, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, who overthrew the Iraqi monarchy on July 14, 1958. This friendship is remarkable, perhaps peculiar, as Qasim distinguished himself as an officer in the Iraqi army, which came to liberate Palestine from the Zionist invasion in 1948 and was noted for saving the West Bank — especially the now famous Jenin — from the Zionist occupation. Karkoukli was an active Israeli agent and claimed many exploits, including supplying Israel with a full list of Iraqi arms acquisitions in 1948.
 
-Legislative reform of the Canadian Income Tax Act must also be directed at those who utilize these transgressional charitable organizations, such as Albert Friedberg, to illegally underwrite the Zionist project. Without such meaningful reform, the status revocations of the JNFC and Ne’eman Canada, while significant, are evocative of punishing a gun, but not the one who wields it. With enough conviction of purpose, the solution is all too simple:
+After a long pursuit, Shlaim managed to extract from Karkoukli, in addition to a long narration of his deeds, a piece of paper in Arabic extracted from an official Iraqi report about the Zionist bombing in Baghdad.
 
-Register another charity. Find another gun.
+Shlaim persisted. In 2013, he contacted an Iraqi journalist named Shamil Abdul Qadir, who published a book entitled History of the Zionist Movement in Iraq and its Role in the Emigration of the Jews in 1950–1951. He found the report, one paper of which was delivered by Karkoukli. The report was confirmation of the Zionist bombings except for one case in which the bombing was instigated by the pro-Arab Istiqlal party.
+
+Shlaim commented:
+
+“This report constitutes undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks that helped to terminate two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon. I hesitate to call it a ‘smoking gun…”
+
+Israel did not learn from this experience. In 1954, the scandal known as the Lavon Affair was exposed. The Mossad ordered its agents, Egyptian Jews, to plant bombs in cinemas. Many died. They were caught and hanged. As a result, Egyptian Jews were deported to Israel or to Europe for holders of European passports.
+
+Is this what David Ben Gurion wanted, the “ingathering of exiles?” Yes, reluctantly.
+
+He did not mince words. He described Arab Jews as “primitive” or worse, but he had little choice. So, what made him bring them to Israel?
+
+Through a series of massacres, the Zionist forces led by the Haganah depopulated over 500 Palestinian towns and villages. About half were depopulated before Israel was created and before any Arab soldier entered Palestine to rescue Palestinians from massacres like Deir Yassin. Palestine became empty. The majority of European Jews opted to immigrate to USA, not Palestine. Ben Gurion had to find people to fill the vacuum. Germany paid reparations, not to the survivors of its Jewish citizens but to the new Israel to help settle new immigrants. Germany won twice: it relieved its conscience by paying reparations, and it got rid of its Jewish citizens.
+
+Zionists started the campaign to entice Arab Jews to immigrate to Israel. The first prize was Iraqi Jews, the most established and the richest of all Arab Jews.
+
+In Israel, a shock was waiting for them. Upon arrival in Israel, they were met with the humiliating treatment of spraying them with DDT, and housing them in ma’abarot, a transit camp of tents and shacks, not in the Kibbutzim where the Europeans resided.  Shlaim’s family escaped this treatment through powerful contacts. But the family had to earn a living.
+
+Yeridah
+
+Shlaim’s mother, ever determined and resourceful, took up a job in the only skill she could find employable, a telephonist. For a lady of the palace, hostess of parties for the rich and important, to take this position is a feat of courage. His father remained in Iraq for a while, then immigrated to Israel but remained without a job, a broken but dignified man.
+
+Although his mother accepted her new way of life (in spite of various attempts to move to Britain owing to her British citizenship), she never accepted the Askenazi brand of Zionism. When the author asked her about Zionism, she replied, “Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing.”
+
+For a young Iraqi boy in the new Israel, the state that was created and run by Ashkenazis, it was a tough life. He lost his Iraqi past and did not gain, or allowed to gain, an Ashkenazi personality. A humiliating experience he never forgot was when his father (a true Iraqi Arab) called him in Arabic among his Ashkenzi friends. He could not reply. The silence was embedded in his soul. Perhaps the book was his first admission.
+
+Throughout the book, Shlaim described his experiences with the transparency of an honest narrator and the rigor of a seasoned historian. He described the ills of Zionism and the injustice to Palestinians.
+
+Zionism not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned the Jews of the East into strangers in their own land. In 1947–49 it was not only the land of Palestine that was partitioned but also the past. The common past of Jews and Muslims in Iraq was superseded by the new reality of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
+p. 296
+
+In spite of this strong verdict, Shlaim never uttered a disparaging word about Jews in Europe, their experience in Europe, or their future in Israel/Palestine. He advocates a single democratic Palestine/Israel for all its people. However, there was no specific explanation of this future plan, no mention of the Right of Return of Palestinians to their homes in 530 depopulated towns and villages, or the recovery of their property in the land where only 6% was registered as Jewish by the British Mandate.
+
+I read the book non-stop with great enthusiasm. I related to it in many ways. Shlaim also read my memoir, Mapping my Return, and wrote a warm endorsement.
+
+I found that we both had many similar trajectories.
+
+In 1948, as a ten-year-old boy, I became a refugee after my birthplace was attacked by 24 Zionist armored vehicles. I went to Cairo to study, a friendly Arab country, in which I was the odd refugee boy in school. In 1950, he, too, was uprooted from his ancestral home in Baghdad to a foreign place called Israel, full of Ashkenazis.
+
+After a short sojourn, we both found ourselves in London in the early 1960s, where we both started a rewarding academic career. I wish we met in London, but I think we would not. He was then an Israeli, and I was a Palestinian with the wound of refugeedom still bleeding. By the time he was admitted to the university in the mid-1960s, I had already got my Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from University College London.
+
+The analogy continues. His initials are AS (Avi Shlaim). So are mine (Abu Sitta). His father died in 1970 while he was in exile. So did mine, in the same year.
+
+When my lecture on Balfour at Edinburgh University in November 2022 was threatened by cancellation due to a concerted Zionist campaign, Shlaim wrote a supporting letter to the concerned parties. I did not know it then.
+
+I hope our trajectory toward justice will continue in the same manner.

mondoweiss/texts/1849.txt

@@ -1,51 +1,32 @@
-On Tuesday the Liberal government listed Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network as a terror entity. Made in conjunction with Washington, the move criminalizes the Vancouver-based grassroots solidarity group. It’s now illegal to finance or materially assist Samidoun.
-
-After Israel labeled Samidoun a terror organization in 2021, Zionist groups and the National Post began pushing Ottawa to follow suit. But the Liberals wavered under pushback from the BC Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Union of Postal Workers and dozens of other civil society organizations. After October 7 the Conservatives launched a full court press to list Samidoun that seems to have tipped the scales.
-
-Listing Samidoun is a direct attack against those opposing genocide. An August parliamentary petition calling on the government to list the organization began, “Samidoun Prisoners Solidarity Network (Samidoun) is viewed as one of the main groups behind anti-Israeli protest rallies that have been staged across Canada.” Immediately after its listing Zionists started denouncing individuals and organizations that have worked with Samidoun or its two principal organizers Charlotte Kates and Khaled Barakat. For its part, Samidoun criticized its listing as “meant to introduce a norm in which organizations may be designated as ‘terrorist’ for organizing demonstrations, lectures, publishing posters and engaging in entirely public and political work that challenges imperialist states’ complicity in Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
-
-Notwithstanding the menacing “terror” label, no one claims Samidoun has engaged in any violence. Criticism of the group focused on its supports for Palestinian armed resistance and that someone burned a Canadian flag at a protest they co-organized October 7. But that isn’t illegal, let alone grounds to ban an organization.
-
-In the government’s statement listing Samidoun they claim the group has “close links with and advances the interests of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is a listed terrorist entity.” In its statement the US accused Samidoun of financing the secular leftist PFLP but curiously Canada hasn’t charged anyone associated with Samidoun for what was already illegal.
-
-If Samidoun is a terrorist organization because it has ties to the PFLP — which has barely engaged in armed struggle for decades — then it won’t be long until they target other groups on the grounds they have “close links” to Samidoun. And on and on.
-
-Created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack in the U.S., Canada’s terror list grants the government powers to ban an organization without providing a standard legal burden of proof. In essence the government can list a group and poof it’s illegal to assist it. It’s also near impossible for that organization to mount a defense against their listing.
-
-Canada’s terror list reinforces the U.S.-led imperial system. It consists overwhelmingly of organizations viewed as challenging U.S. hegemony and is a concrete example of why Benjamin Netanyahu’s immediate response to the 9/11 attacks was to blurt out that “it’s very good”. Asked on the day of the attack how it would impact U.S.-Israel relations, the then former Israeli prime minister said it would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
-
-During its first 12 years the list consisted solely of groups based abroad. That’s changing. According to the president of the Canadian Association for Intelligence and Security Studies Jessica Davis, Samidoun’s listing “is a rare case of a Canadian organization being listed, with someone leading it who is resident in Canada (and will likely feel the effects of this listing). If we’re going to see a legal challenge to this regime, it could well be this case.”
-
-The first ever Canadian-based group added to the terror list was the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy. IRFAN was designated a terrorist organization in 2014 largely for supporting orphans and a hospital in Gaza through official (Hamas-controlled) channels.
-
-At its high point the leading Canadian Muslim registered charity operated in a dozen countries and sponsored four thousand orphans. In the early 2000s Canadian Alliance (now Conservatives) leader Stockwell Day began attacking IRFAN. Nearly a decade later the Canada Revenue Agency revoked the group’s charitable status, claiming “IRFAN-Canada is an integral part of an international fundraising effort to support Hamas”, which is on Canada’s terror list.
-
-A big part of the CRA’s supporting evidence was that IRFAN worked with the Gaza Ministry of Health and Ministry of Telecommunications, which came under Hamas’ direction after they won the 2006 election. The Mississauga-based organization tried to send a dialysis machine to Gaza and continued to support orphans in the impoverished territory with the money channeled through the post office controlled by the Telecommunications Ministry.
-
-The IRFAN and Samidoun cases highlight the anti-Palestinian nature of Canada’s terrorist list. Over 10 percent of the list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population. Representing much of Palestinian political life, eight of the oppressed nation’s organizations are listed.
-
-Terrorism listing used to justify Israeli violence
-
-But no Palestinian organization is responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the Israeli military. The IDF is responsible for dozens of times more deaths than any listed Palestinian (or other) organization.
-
-Canada’s terror list doesn’t simply omit the main purveyor of violence in the region. It also enables that state’s terrorism. Israel supporters have long argued that that country has the right to terrorize Palestinians because Ottawa (usually at the lobby’s behest) listed some organization with limited means a “terrorist” group. Before Hamas’ October 7 attack Canada’s pro-apartheid lobby argued Israel could terrorize 2.2 million Palestinians living in the open-air Gaza prison because Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is listed a terrorist group in Canada. Over the past year of Israel’s holocaust in Gaza Canadian officials have repeatedly highlighted that Hamas is a terror organization as part of legitimating Israel’s killing.
-
-Recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and foreign minister Mélanie Joly extended that point to Israel’s terror in Lebanon. In response to Israel dropping 80 “bunker buster” and other massive bombs on a Beirut suburb three weeks ago Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked and killed innocent civilians, causing immense suffering across the region.”
-
-But Hezbollah isn’t classified as a “terrorist” organization by the United Nations or most countries in the world. Nor was an organization that’s long been represented in Lebanon’s parliament defined as a “terrorist” organization by Ottawa for the first half of its existence. In fact, Prime Minister Jean Chretien met Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah in Beirut in October 2002.
-
-In “Selectively Terrified” Mary Foster detailed “how Hezbollah became a terrorist organization in Canada”. Foster wrote that “pressure to list Hezbollah came from the Canadian Alliance Party (a precursor to today’s Conservative Party), senior Liberal politicians Irwin Cotler and Art Eggleton, B’nai Brith (a Jewish human rights organization, staunchly pro-Israel in orientation), and the Canadian Jewish Congress.” The campaign was greatly boosted by fabricated quotes in the National Post claiming Nasrallah encouraged suicide bombing during a speech at a Beirut rally.
-
-Hezbollah and Hamas’ listing was also used to justify listing the first major state actor. In June the Trudeau government added part of Iran’s military, the 100,000 strong Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to Canada’s terrorist list. The government release noted, “the decision to list the IRGC through the Criminal Code listing regime sends a strong message that Canada will use all tools at its disposal to combat the terrorist activity of the IRGC, conducted both unilaterally and in knowing association with listed terrorist entities such as Hizballah and Hamas.”
-
-Made amidst Israel’s repeated provocations against Iran, Tehran condemned Canada’s move as made “in alliance with terrorists and Zionists.” Iran’s envoy to the UN sent a letter to the Secretary-General and UN Security Council labeling Ottawa’s move “a blatant violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.”
-
-When foreign minister Joly made the announcement Liberal MP Judy Sgro stood by her side. Sgro is a high-profile supporter of the violent, cult-like, Iranian opposition organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which backed Iraq in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
-
-MEK is one of only two groups ever removed from Canada’s terror list. In 2012 prominent pro-Israel activists worked with Iranian dissidents to convince the State Department to remove the MEK from the US terrorism list, which paved the way for Ottawa to follow suit. The MEK, according to US government sources, teamed up with Israel to assassinate Iranian scientists.
-
-Clearly, Canada’s terrorist list is driven by imperial politics. Also apparent, is its deeply anti-Palestinian bias.
-
-To paraphrase a famous quote from another time: First they came for the organizations that fought for Palestinian rights, but I didn’t protest because I wasn’t Palestinian. Then they came for the organizations that protested the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians …
-
-You know the rest of the story.
+A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.
+
+The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.
+When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.
+Photograph labelled “Arab demonstrations on Oct. 13 and 27, 1933. In Jerusalem and Jaffa. Return of Grand Mufti from India. Met by hundreds of cars at Gethsemane, Nov. 17, 1933.” Library of Congress, LC-M33- 4218.
+In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
+Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]
+Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.
+The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.
+The mufti of Jerusalem, Sayid Amin al Husseini, meets with Hitler, November 1941.
+Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.
+Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.
+And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.
+Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,
+it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.
+British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:
+We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.
+So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.
+A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”
+But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.
+The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]
+Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.
+Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.
+Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.
+1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:
+Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.
+The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.
+2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)
+3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel [Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël [Investig’Action, 2019]
+Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]
+4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August, 1941
+Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.

mondoweiss/texts/1850.txt

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-Wealthy donors, a well-organized outside lobby and an empowered victimhood narrative ensures McGill’s president promotes genocide. With students expressing their overwhelming support for divestment through referendums, rallies, petitions, a hunger strike and 75-day encampment Deep Saini recently claimed those opposing Israel’s holocaust in Gaza are “a small group” causing difficulty for “the majority”.
+The ten-year-old — we’ll call her Bisan — got off the choir bus at France’s Dieppe coast and ran over the sandy beach toward the gray North Atlantic. After wading excitedly, but cautiously, into the chilly waves, she turned around and ran back to the bus to grab her sweater. Newly confident, Bisan raced back to the water and plunged in, only to discover that sweaters do not keep you warm in the ocean.
 
-In a highly provocative move for a university president presenting himself as neutral, President Saini participated in a recent town hall with the most vocal advocate of Israeli violence in the House of Commons. A Canadian Jewish News report on an event Liberal MP Anthony Housefather billed as a discussion about Jewish students and faculty’s “safe return to campus”, quoted Saini smearing McGill students. “It’s very hard to tell whether the antisemitism went up or it became more overt,” Saini told the pro-genocide event. “Did we actually see a rise in antisemitism? Or did we see people using this moment, forum these circumstances, to give themselves a license to express antisemitism?”
+Bisan grew up in the Palestinian city of Hebron, perhaps an hour’s drive from her country’s gorgeous Mediterranean beaches. But she had never seen the ocean until reaching France, which, in turn, she could not get to except by way of Jordan. Like everything else in her young life, her ability to reach her own country’s beaches was dictated by a foreign government in Tel Aviv in which her parents have no vote and over which international law has no power.
 
-The head of the prestigious university also labeled those opposed to the genocide as a small minority. “It was a stark example of how a small group of determined people can create an extremely difficult situation for the majority that remains relatively quiet and ends up becoming a victim,” Saini said.
+Imagine Parisians blocked by a neighboring country from going to the English Channel or Mediterranean coast… The world would not (and decades past did not) tolerate foreign occupation in France; in Palestine, we support it and pay for it. Bisan was luckier than most of her peers — she got to experience the ocean because she had joined a children’s choir created by a musician from France, Dr. Mathilde Vittu.
 
-President Saini threatened professors over any “abuse of podium.” “Nobody would be allowed to abuse their position to make a (political or hateful) statement”, Saini declared. He even asked Jewish Zionist students to spy on professors, reportedly “calling on Jewish students to be the ears on the ground and report any breaches of conduct.”
+The Amwaj Choir (in blue) performs at the celebrated Philharmonie de Paris, June, 2018. Click here for video.
 
-Keen to dispatch police against student protesters, Saini doesn’t believe those promoting a holocaust should feel uncomfortable. “Nobody is going to be now excluded from or made to feel uncomfortable in class because they are a Zionist and support Israel,” concluded Saini.
+One must be careful not to be misunderstood when writing about non-Palestinians “bringing” music to Palestine, lest it sound as though Palestinians need outsiders to do this for them. But equally, it would be patronizing to treat Palestinians as some static Orientalist construct who cannot decide for themselves when they welcome other influences into their own cultural inheritance — especially as seven decades of dispossession and suppression have done much to suffocate the collaborative and absorptive streams of cultural life that are natural and that we take for granted for ourselves.
 
-Days before Saini’s provocative comments to ‘Holocaust Housefather’ he physically confronted a student challenging him over employing police and private security to repress students opposing Israel’s holocaust in Gaza. In a video posted online a visibly agitated Saini grabs at a student and is physically restrained by one of his people. In its post of the video Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill notes, “instead of listening to his student’s concerns, Saini decided to do what he does best: forcefully silence the student.”
+Mathilde Vittu coaching the Amwaj Choir.
 
-The McGill administration’s response to the student encampment on campus was to repeatedly ask the Montréal police to intervene even seeking a court ruling to force the police to do so. After the court rejected their bid for an emergency injunction the McGill administration hired private security firm SIRCO to dismantle an encampment calling for the university to cut ties with Israeli universities and companies assisting the slaughter in Gaza. In a bit of a legalistic dance, hundreds of police, including the provincial Sûreté du Québec, assisted the operation to remove the encampment on its lower field, which is unused, but well situated in downtown Montréal.
+Vittu comes from the highest tradition of European ‘classical’ music. She is a professor of music analysis at the Conservatoire de Paris, as well as an expert in voice training, a conductor, and violist. With such elite credentials it might seem unexpected that in September 2013, on sabbatical from her Paris teaching commitments, Vittu accepted a teaching position at the Ramallah branch of Palestine’s Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.
 
-A few weeks after the July 10 dismantlement of the encampment, Saini published a Montreal Gazette op-ed headlined “As McGill’s president, I have a duty to all students, no matter their views”. In it, Saini rejects call for divesting since all students don’t agree on the matter. That’s true, of course. Left unstated, however, is how lopsided opinion is. In the largest referendum turnout in the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) history, 78.7% of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” The November vote followed a March 2022 vote that supported boycotting “corporations and institutions complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.” Seventy-one percent of undergraduate voters backed that motion.
+Over the course of the following year, she served the Conservatory far beyond her actual obligations, formed a strong bond with Palestine, acquired a fine viola by the Palestinian luthier Aref Sayed, and began a serious study of the Arabic language. Her expertise in voice training and choral music, her love for children, her love of Palestine, and her desire to contribute to a better future in the best way she is able, all coalesced into a single vision: She would create a children’s choir — which in turn meant creating a children’s choir school. Her vision was of a choir singing far and wide, the effects radiating out, and of children eventually teaching other children, like ripples — and so its name became obvious: Amwaj, Arabic for ‘waves’.
 
-As Israeli violence has grown since November, opinion has likely strengthened in favor of lessening McGill’s complicity in genocide and apartheid. But, if Saini believes the anti-holocaust forces are just “a small group”, there’s a simple way to settle the matter: Organize a referendum in which every McGill undergraduate, graduate, faculty and staff can vote. Saini could even require a super majority — say 55%, 60%, or two thirds — for a divestment motion to take effect. But Saini won’t organize such a vote because he knows students support divestment and he’s actually fronting for a “small group.”
+True to its name, Amwaj is conceived not as a single school, but as a network. In addition to choral singing, Amwaj offers voice training, foreign languages, music theory, conducting, introduction to piano, percussion, and theatre.
 
-There are important geopolitical and cultural factors that influence Canadian support for Israel and help explain Saini’s hostility to divesting, as the university recently did with fossil fuels and Russia. But the most pressing element is a remarkably empowered victim narrative.
+Word of the project was spread in Bethlehem by the Ghirass Cultural Center, and in Hebron by the Association d’Échanges Culturels Hébron France. Initially, there were no auditions, and no requirements other than that the children attend all lessons and rehearsals that they are able to. A monthly tuition of ten shekels (approximately $2.70) was charged, though this was essentially symbolic: no one is turned away should the fee present a hardship, and food is provided that far exceeds the cost.
 
-“Jews at McGill: ‘We feel alone’”, blared the cover of Saturday’s National Post, linking to a two-page spread that included the spurious claim students organized a “Kristallnacht-themed rally” in November. (73 Postmedia outlets reportedly ran the story). The New York based Jewish Forward published a similar commentary headlined “For Jewish students at McGill like me, our return to campus is filled with dread”.
+In August, 2015, the Amwaj Choir held its first summer camp, hosted by Association d’Échanges Culturels Hébron-France, which has run intercultural programs for children and adults for nearly 20 years. The children sang in Arabic as well as in French, English, German, Italian, Armenian, and Welsh; small workshops explored body percussion, vocal technique, jazz singing, theatre, vocal games., and introduction to music notation.
 
-But structurally speaking Jewish (Zionist) students may be the most ‘un-alone’ group at the university. Jews are far overrepresented as students and faculty at Canada’s most internationally acclaimed university and are well represented throughout McGill. . There is a well-financed Hillel and Chabad as well as McGill Jewish Law Students’ Association, Medicine and Dentistry Jewish Association, and Jewish Frosh. Zionist-aligned Jewish students are assisted by international campus organizations such as CAMERA, Hasbara Fellowship Canada, and StandWithUs Canada. They are also supported financially and otherwise by powerful outside lobby groups such as B’nai Brith, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal, Montreal’s Federation CJA and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. A slew of outside media outlets such as Algemeiner, Suburban, Times of Israel, National Post, Montreal Gazette, Forward, and others regularly publish commentaries from McGill students who complain about the university and support genocide. In addtion, the university has a Department of Jewish Studies and Jewish Teacher Training Program. McGill also has multiple exchanges with Israeli institutions, which were mostly instigated by Jewish Zionist donors.
+(Video above: The song Hal Asmar Ellon, from a performance at the Bethlehem Convention Palace in January, 2017. The Amwaj Choir (blue shirts) is accompanied by a professional ensemble of 30 musicians from Palestine and abroad, and joined by children of St Joseph School, École des frères, and Sounds of Palestine. The violinist Amandine Beyer is among the ensemble (pink ornament in hair and purple keffiyeh around the waist).
 
-Still, the victimhood narrative is overwhelming. So even if Saini didn’t support a global power structure that cares little for Palestinian life he’d be loath to face the wrath of Zionist donors, outside Israeli lobby groups, and the prevailing victim narrative.
+September brought regular courses in Hebron, and the following month in Bethlehem’s Ghirass Cultural Center, whose other programs include fine arts, dance, music, library activities, adult literacy, and teacher training.
 
-What will it take for the majority to break this stranglehold? Certainly, the North America wide day of student action like the one planned for September 12 won’t hurt. But something bigger like the Quebec-wide student strike that’s been discussed, is more likely to turn the tide.
+As news of the school spread, applicants soon outnumbered available places, and auditions are now held to fill vacancies — though the informal, non-intimidating nature of the selection process barely merits the word ‘audition’. Sixty voices is considered the Choir’s ideal size, split evenly between Hebron and Bethlehem.
 
-On Friday McGill students organized a walkout and some ripped up the grass where the encampment was demolished. Those who see little problem with destroying everything in Gaza were outraged grass had been damaged.
+The nascent Choir was invited to participate in October’s El Atlal Festival in Jericho, but heightened tension in the West Bank led to the festival’s cancellation. Two months later, in December 2015 — a mere three months after the Choir’s inauguration — the Hebron and Bethlehem branches performed a joint concert in the Chapel of Bethlehem University as part of the Christmas Nights festival organized by the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Bethlehem Strings, a baroque ensemble comprised of professionals and the more advanced Palestinian music students, accompanied the Amwaj Choir in a series of Christmas carols in several languages and songs from the Palestinian tradition. As described on the Choir’s website, “the experience of sharing the stage with professional musicians allowed the children to understand the setting of a public performance.”
 
-If you refuse to respond to all democratic and pacifistic means of political expression you have to expect escalation, notably while Palestinians continue to be slaughtered. Saini is setting the stage for an explosion and it’s on him and his enablers if things deteriorate.
+Mathilde Vittu conducting members of the Amwaj Choir, accompanied by some of Palestine’s professional musicians, in Saint-Anne’s Church, Jerusalem.
+
+If all this seemed perfectly natural to those involved, some on the outside wondered whether there might have been any negative reaction from the predominantly Muslim families to the concert’s Christian context. There was none. Hebron is predominantly Muslim, but even in Bethlehem, which is largely Christian, most of the children who apply are Muslim.
+
+The summer of 2016 brought the Choir’s first chance to share the stage with a professional choir when the Choir of London came to Hebron. More opportunity for the children to work alongside professionals followed in December, when the Oslo Philharmonic Choir came to Palestine (rehearsal video). This culminated in a concert  at Bethlehem’s Nativity Church (Saint Catherine’s), in which the children joined the Oslo choir in five songs spanning German, English, Norwegian, and Arabic. January 2017 brought another concert with the Bethlehem Strings, now at the Bethlehem Convention Palace and joined by the extraordinary Baroque violinist Amandine Beyer.
+
+Amwaj Choir in performance with the Oslo Philharmonic Choir in Saint Catherine’s Church by the traditional site of Christ’s birth.
+
+The French Children’s Choir, Les Petits chanteurs de Lyon, visited Palestine in the spring and summer of 2017 and joined forces with Amwaj (video). In July, Amwaj performed with the Ramallah Orchestra, a symphony orchestra under the Palestinian conservatory Al Kamandjati. The Israeli journalist Amira Hass attended, chatted with a few of the Amwaj children, and wrote about it. “We met,” she wrote, “in the most unexpected place: the desert. A procession of camels was marching towards the sunset.”
+
+Hass described the desperation that led a Palestinian youth to attack the West Bank settlement of Halamish, which caused the cancellation of the ensemble’s scheduled concert in Jerusalem. The attack, she wrote, was in line with the Israeli “plan” of pushing Palestinians past the breaking point: it’s “part of the logic of control. You escalate, you incite, you detain more young people, you scare more children to create more reasons for preventive activities and oppression, and to maintain the apparatus.”
+
+But any nurturing of Palestinian achievement and self-worth, such as Amwaj, is powerful defiance, powerful resistance, of a sort that Israel is powerless to exploit. It will try to stymie such defiance, but, ultimately, cannot control it.
+
+Les Petits Chanteurs de Lyon returned to Palestine in the spring of 2018, partly in preparation for the summer and the Amwaj Choir’s most impressive accomplishment to date: its first international residency and concert series. This included a six-day residency at the Philharmonie de Paris; a concert at the Institut du Monde Arabe with the DEMOS children’s orchestra; a concert at the church Notre-Dame des Vertus at Aubervilliers with the Children’s choir of the Orchestre de Paris; a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris with the DEMOS children’s orchestra; a concert in Lille, Le Grand Sud, with the child singers of Finoreille; a residency in Lyon with Les Petits Chanteurs de Lyon; and a concert at the Cathedral of Vaise with Les Petits Chanteurs de Lyon.
+
+Nothing happens easily under military occupation, and no child born into such injustice is free of its scars. And so it was inevitable that the Amwaj Choir would become not just a choir, not just a social network for its members, but a powerful safety net and antidote. Knowing life only under military repression, many children harbor repressed anger, not just from the visible dehumanization imposed by Israeli control, but from the unseen pressure it exerts on home life and on their parents. Mathilde and her small staff have not infrequently found themselves acting as adviser, as consoler, as friend, and as social worker. As but one example, a boy — we’ll call him Khalil — attended all rehearsals, but never sang a note. He always took his place in the choir, and never made a sound. But since he fulfilled the sole requirement of attending the rehearsals, his right to remain in the Choir was not questioned. Even when he wanted to join the Choir’s tour to France, he was not excluded. Yet no one could have anticipated that in France, with his first breaths free of apartheid, suddenly, he began to sing, and his outlook changed.
+
+Dr. Vittu and the Choir’s General Director, Michele Cantoni, have maintained a consistently high level of staff and visiting teachers, despite Israeli deterrents to Palestinian achievement. To begin with, all teachers from abroad must accept the endless specter of losing Israeli “permission” to be in Palestine. Lucie Tronche is one who was not deterred.
+
+Lucie Tronche instructing the Amwaj musicians.
+
+I had the pleasure of meeting Tronche soon after she first arrived in Palestine, and met up with her again a year later.  Tronche had been teaching in several conservatoires in France, when (as she described it to me) she “discovered Palestine, its cultural and musical richness, and I decided to move there in order to work within the continuity of a musical and artistic project.” She became involved full-time with the Amwaj Choir as coach, conductor, and theory teacher. A year later, “that human and artistic experience has proven to be well beyond my expectations.”
+
+Given its newness and the challenges imposed by foreign repression, what the Amwaj Choir has accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. But there is still a long way to go before it is a world-class children’s choir. While Vittu is constantly challenging the choir to improve, she is careful not to over-extend the children, and to train them with a solid technique free of shortcuts.
+
+In a decade, she predicts, the Amwaj Choir will be ready for the world.
+
+Author’s note: I met Mathilde Vittu in 2013 at Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music, where she and I were both teaching. Although we taught at different branches — she in Ramallah, I in Jerusalem — we got to know each other through music projects, string quartets, and beer.
+
+Acknowledgements: The choir is supported by Instruments of Peace – Geneva, Fondazione Giovanni Paolo II, Institut Français de Jérusalem, and many individual donors through its support page. It maintains partnerships with several arts organizations, and has enlisted the collaboration of a long roster of professional and advanced student musicians.
+
+• Amwaj Choir, website.• Interviews with choir members.• Youtube Channel• Support the Amwaj Choir• Amira Hass, Music, Children’s Choirs and Camels in the Desert, Haaretz, Aug 1, 2017
+
+Jerusalem, 1940: A glimpse of Palestinian musical life before the Nakba. [Library of Congress, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection; LC-M33-11118. Reproduced in Suárez, State of Terror, p61.]

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@@ -1,31 +1,23 @@
-Wealthy donors, a well-organized outside lobby and an empowered victimhood narrative ensures McGill’s president promotes genocide. With students expressing their overwhelming support for divestment through referendums, rallies, petitions, a hunger strike and 75-day encampment Deep Saini recently claimed those opposing Israel’s holocaust in Gaza are “a small group” causing difficulty for “the majority”.
-
-In a highly provocative move for a university president presenting himself as neutral, President Saini participated in a recent town hall with the most vocal advocate of Israeli violence in the House of Commons. A Canadian Jewish News report on an event Liberal MP Anthony Housefather billed as a discussion about Jewish students and faculty’s “safe return to campus”, quoted Saini smearing McGill students. “It’s very hard to tell whether the antisemitism went up or it became more overt,” Saini told the pro-genocide event. “Did we actually see a rise in antisemitism? Or did we see people using this moment, forum these circumstances, to give themselves a license to express antisemitism?”
-
-The head of the prestigious university also labeled those opposed to the genocide as a small minority. “It was a stark example of how a small group of determined people can create an extremely difficult situation for the majority that remains relatively quiet and ends up becoming a victim,” Saini said.
-
-President Saini threatened professors over any “abuse of podium.” “Nobody would be allowed to abuse their position to make a (political or hateful) statement”, Saini declared. He even asked Jewish Zionist students to spy on professors, reportedly “calling on Jewish students to be the ears on the ground and report any breaches of conduct.”
-
-Keen to dispatch police against student protesters, Saini doesn’t believe those promoting a holocaust should feel uncomfortable. “Nobody is going to be now excluded from or made to feel uncomfortable in class because they are a Zionist and support Israel,” concluded Saini.
-
-Days before Saini’s provocative comments to ‘Holocaust Housefather’ he physically confronted a student challenging him over employing police and private security to repress students opposing Israel’s holocaust in Gaza. In a video posted online a visibly agitated Saini grabs at a student and is physically restrained by one of his people. In its post of the video Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill notes, “instead of listening to his student’s concerns, Saini decided to do what he does best: forcefully silence the student.”
-
-The McGill administration’s response to the student encampment on campus was to repeatedly ask the Montréal police to intervene even seeking a court ruling to force the police to do so. After the court rejected their bid for an emergency injunction the McGill administration hired private security firm SIRCO to dismantle an encampment calling for the university to cut ties with Israeli universities and companies assisting the slaughter in Gaza. In a bit of a legalistic dance, hundreds of police, including the provincial Sûreté du Québec, assisted the operation to remove the encampment on its lower field, which is unused, but well situated in downtown Montréal.
-
-A few weeks after the July 10 dismantlement of the encampment, Saini published a Montreal Gazette op-ed headlined “As McGill’s president, I have a duty to all students, no matter their views”. In it, Saini rejects call for divesting since all students don’t agree on the matter. That’s true, of course. Left unstated, however, is how lopsided opinion is. In the largest referendum turnout in the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) history, 78.7% of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” The November vote followed a March 2022 vote that supported boycotting “corporations and institutions complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.” Seventy-one percent of undergraduate voters backed that motion.
-
-As Israeli violence has grown since November, opinion has likely strengthened in favor of lessening McGill’s complicity in genocide and apartheid. But, if Saini believes the anti-holocaust forces are just “a small group”, there’s a simple way to settle the matter: Organize a referendum in which every McGill undergraduate, graduate, faculty and staff can vote. Saini could even require a super majority — say 55%, 60%, or two thirds — for a divestment motion to take effect. But Saini won’t organize such a vote because he knows students support divestment and he’s actually fronting for a “small group.”
-
-There are important geopolitical and cultural factors that influence Canadian support for Israel and help explain Saini’s hostility to divesting, as the university recently did with fossil fuels and Russia. But the most pressing element is a remarkably empowered victim narrative.
-
-“Jews at McGill: ‘We feel alone’”, blared the cover of Saturday’s National Post, linking to a two-page spread that included the spurious claim students organized a “Kristallnacht-themed rally” in November. (73 Postmedia outlets reportedly ran the story). The New York based Jewish Forward published a similar commentary headlined “For Jewish students at McGill like me, our return to campus is filled with dread”.
-
-But structurally speaking Jewish (Zionist) students may be the most ‘un-alone’ group at the university. Jews are far overrepresented as students and faculty at Canada’s most internationally acclaimed university and are well represented throughout McGill. . There is a well-financed Hillel and Chabad as well as McGill Jewish Law Students’ Association, Medicine and Dentistry Jewish Association, and Jewish Frosh. Zionist-aligned Jewish students are assisted by international campus organizations such as CAMERA, Hasbara Fellowship Canada, and StandWithUs Canada. They are also supported financially and otherwise by powerful outside lobby groups such as B’nai Brith, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal, Montreal’s Federation CJA and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. A slew of outside media outlets such as Algemeiner, Suburban, Times of Israel, National Post, Montreal Gazette, Forward, and others regularly publish commentaries from McGill students who complain about the university and support genocide. In addtion, the university has a Department of Jewish Studies and Jewish Teacher Training Program. McGill also has multiple exchanges with Israeli institutions, which were mostly instigated by Jewish Zionist donors.
-
-Still, the victimhood narrative is overwhelming. So even if Saini didn’t support a global power structure that cares little for Palestinian life he’d be loath to face the wrath of Zionist donors, outside Israeli lobby groups, and the prevailing victim narrative.
-
-What will it take for the majority to break this stranglehold? Certainly, the North America wide day of student action like the one planned for September 12 won’t hurt. But something bigger like the Quebec-wide student strike that’s been discussed, is more likely to turn the tide.
-
-On Friday McGill students organized a walkout and some ripped up the grass where the encampment was demolished. Those who see little problem with destroying everything in Gaza were outraged grass had been damaged.
-
-If you refuse to respond to all democratic and pacifistic means of political expression you have to expect escalation, notably while Palestinians continue to be slaughtered. Saini is setting the stage for an explosion and it’s on him and his enablers if things deteriorate.
+Last night the Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy gave a thrilling speech describing the brutal tyranny of the occupation, the inevitability of the one-state solution, and the necessity of boycott and sanctions to cause Israel to change its conduct at the Greenburgh Town Hall in Westchester County, N.Y.. Levy was the guest of Jewish Voice for Peace and Wespac. Suhail Khalilieh of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem also spoke on the settlements; I will get to his speech in the next day or so.
+Levy’s speech was frequently disrupted by pro-Israel activists. The police refused to remove the hecklers on free-speech grounds, and the crowd was too left-wing to do much beyond singing We Shall Overcome and standing in front of the hecklers in an effort to maintain order. But the hecklers added value, I believe: Levy often used the hecklers against themselves. He addressed them at the very beginning of his speech, part 1 below– on my tape, you can briefly see Lauri Regan holding up a LEVY = HATE sign that Levy embraced — and many times after.
+
+Below is part 2 of the speech, in which Levy states that the conflict is a simple one.  “When someone steals your car… you have to get back your stolen car… The Palestinian car was stolen by Israel and it must be returned, without any conditions.”
+“They have no legal political or historical rights!” hecklers shout.
+Levy says that Jewish Israelis have been able to live happily with occupation because of three deep-rooted beliefs/blindnesses: One, we are the chosen people, we can do anything we want, and international law doesn’t apply to us. Two, we the Jews are the biggest victim in history and the only victim in history. Golda Meir said after the  Holocaust Jews have the right to do whatever we want. And third, that Palestinians are not exactly human beings. “Killing Palestinians is not really a violation of human rights.”
+Now even Israeli Jewish society is threatened by “one lynch after another, day after day.” Scenes that he had never thought even imaginable are occurring.
+He says emphatically that Israel is practicing apartheid in its occupied territories:
+If two peoples share one piece of land and one people gets all the rights in the world, and the other people don’t get any rights, this is apartheid. No other way to call it. No other way to call it!
+A lot of heckling after that, at 10:00.
+And for all you believers in the Israel lobby – Levy says that Israel appears to dictate foreign policy to the United States, against the U.S. “national interest.”
+“The two state solution is in my view dead. The settlers won.” And there is only one alternative: the one-state solution. It’s not easy. I have no illusions. “But it is the only game that is in town… Therefore the struggle the discourse must be from now on I think a very simple one. Equal rights. That’s all.”
+A lot of heckling over that. Great response by Levy at 15:14. “They will kill us! Holocaust! Holocaust.”
+
+Below is part three, which follows another disruption. Levy says that only an international intervention will save Israel’s “moral profile.”
+Life in Israel is too good, Israel is too strong, and brainwashing is much too efficient to expect a change from within the Israeli society.
+No country in the world remains powerful when it lives only on its sword….
+The world must bring pressure on Israel so that it will consider whether it “is worth it” to continue the criminal occupation.
+
+At 5:40 you can see Levy’s great answer to a heckler who asks why Israel shouldn’t be compared to Syria. He says, Because the U.S. finances Israel and Israel wants to be considered part of the liberal, western world. At 9:20, my favorite interchange: Levy reminds the audience that Jews used terrorism to fight the British occupation. He speaks of the destruction of the south wing of the King David Hotel in 1946. A heckler says that was a British headquarters! Levy promptly explains that 61 of the 91 victims were civilians.
+And here is the optimistic ending of the speech:
+
+The apartheid system, Soviet Russia and the Berlin wall all fell within months, Levy said, and anyone who had predicted those events would have been judged insane.  “Many times in history things happen in the most unexpected way in the unexpected timing.” He then analogized Israel to a huge tree that mysteriously falls and is found to be “totally rotten on the inside.”

mondoweiss/texts/1852.txt

@@ -1,35 +1,24 @@
-Last month the Biden administration announced that the Israeli government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza or else the country could lose access to some U.S. weapons.
-
-Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin established the deadline in a letter to Israel’s ministers, in which it laid out 16 conditions that Israel would have to meet. “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for U.S. policy,” it read.
-
-When asked about the move during a press briefing State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller reiterated the need for Israel to act.
-
-“The bottom line is we felt it was appropriate, if we are making clear to the Government of Israel that there are these changes that need to be implemented, that we give them an appropriate period of time to implement it – implement them,” he told reporters. “We didn’t think it was appropriate to send a letter and just say this has to happen overnight; we gave them a – made clear there’s a short window in which we want to see changes, because the humanitarian situation is so dire on the ground.”
-
-That deadline has now passed and a group of aid organizations (including Oxfam and Save the Children) have published a detailed report showing that Israel has failed to meet any of the conditions mentioned in the Blinken/Austin letter.
-
-“Israel’s actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter. Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” reads the opening section. “That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago. The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee now assess that ‘the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.’ The findings of this scorecard underscore Israel’s failure to comply with U.S. demands and international obligations. Israel should be held accountable for the end result of failing to ensure the adequate provision of food, medical, and other supplies to reach people in need.”
-
-Israel did respond to one condition of the letter, announcing that it plans to open an aid crossing into Gaza at Kissufim, but there’s no indication that any humanitarian aid has actually traveled through it.
-
-Despite this reality, the White House has made it clear that they don’t plan to withhold any weapons from Israel.
-
-“I certainly don’t have a change in U.S. policy to announce today,” said State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel at Tuesday’s briefing. “We have seen some steps being taken. There need to be some additional steps that are also taken,” he added.
-
-Patel was repeatedly pressed by reporters about the issue. “You guys were the ones that gave them the 30-day deadline,” said the AP’s Matt Lee. “It��s hard to see your answers today, such as they are, as anything other than kind of giving them a pass for not meeting the criteria that was laid out in the letter.”
-
-Patel responded by deflecting from the letter and claiming that the U.S. would continue to monitor the situation.
-
-“Certainly, Matt, I would not view it as giving them a pass,” said Patel. “Because, one, no one is up here – certainly I’m not – saying that the situation in Gaza or their humanitarian circumstances are rosy. It is a very dire circumstance. And what we need to see is we need to see these steps acted on. We need to see them implemented. And the ultimate hope is that through these steps some conditions have been created in which we can see things like additional aid, additional food trucks, additional measures being taken that ultimately will be beneficial to the Palestinian people in Gaza. That’s what we aim to see.”
-
-“Is this not inconsistent with U.S. law that you had to send this letter and lay out this timeline because they had withheld so much aid up to this point?,” asked CNN’s Jennifer Hansler.
-
-“Jenny, the point of this letter was to raise some areas of concern and to lay out some steps in which we thought that addressing some of these areas would lead to steps in the right direction when it comes to humanitarian assistance, claimed Patel. “We have seen some steps being taken.”
-
-A September report from ProPublica’s Brett Murphy revealed that multiple governmental bodies concluded that Israel has purposely blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza and that Blinken was briefed on the issue, but chose to reject the findings while testifying before congress.
-
-One source told Murphy that the State Department did not welcome information showing that aid was being blocked. “A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person said. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.'”
-
-In an interview at Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan Senator Chris Van Hollen suggests that the Blinken/Austin letter was a cynical ploy to generate votes for Vice President Kamala Harris.
-
-“[I’m concerned] this was a political attempt to try to send a message to voters a month ago that ‘oh, the president really does care about the situation – the humanitarian situation in Gaza,’” said Van Hollen.
+Two years ago, during the Q&A of a talk I gave about Palestine at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, British filmmaker Ken Loach raised a most essential question. Paraphrasing, he asked, “Where do we go from here?”
+The gist of my reply: We must first expose Israel’s front-line weapon against justice for Palestine, its cynical misuse of the smear of antisemitism. So long as we respond to this abuse on its own terms, the weapon is foolproof. It hijacks the discourse away from Israel’s crimes regardless of the efficacy of the smears. Israel’s crimes, and even the “P” word — Palestine or the Palestinians — remain off-limits. We must instead stop allowing Israel to control the terms of our response. Instead, we must turn the tables and accuse the accusers of antisemitism for exploiting Jewish identity in the service of injustice.
+But Ken Loach’s own recent brush with the weapon demonstrates the barriers to speaking that simple truth.
+The story begins one day in the 1990s, in the university city of Newcastle in northwest England, when a man at a gas station was confronted by a group of young people shouting racist abuse. As the tirade continued, one of the provocateurs recognized his victim — Shaka Hislop, the famed Newcastle United football player.
+What’s a youth to do when the target of your bigotry turns out to be one of your heroes? In this case, he asked for Shaka’s autograph.
+If that experience was an epiphany for the young taunter, it was also for Hislop. He realized that perhaps the power of football and his status as a role model could be harnessed to challenge racism in society through education. In 1996 this dream become reality with the founding of Show Racism the Red Card, the UK’s largest anti-racism educational charity. Among its efforts is an annual art competition, open to all young people in England, Wales, and Scotland, for works in a wide range of media, including artwork, creative writing, film, and music.
+When the charity announced that Ken Loach and the highly-respected children’s novelist Michael Rosen would be the judges for 2020, Israel’s advocates in the UK raised the alarm: both men had a history of supporting Palestinian human rights causes. Rosen’s name “raised eyebrows,” as the Jewish Chronicle put it, and the British group the Campaign Against Antisemitism objected to Rosen as “a former backer of the Socialist Workers Party who has also reportedly defended Jeremy Corbyn against charges of antisemitism.” The cross-hairs, however, focused on life-long anti-racist, 83-year-old BDS-supporting Ken Loach.
+Guardian coverage of Ken Loach’s support for BDS. August 25 2014.
+On February 13 the vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Amanda Bowman, sent a letter to Show Racism the Red Card demanding that they uninvite Loach. The letter, claiming that the Board “represents the Jewish community in Britain,” cited “Perdition,” a 1987 Jim Allen play directed by Loach as evidence of antisemitism and “malign intentions.” (The play, which dealt with alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in Hungary during World War II, was canceled 24 hours before its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, in deference to protests.)
+But the Red Card stood firm. On March 5, it announced that it stood by Loach.
+Indeed, Ken Loach’s life has been defined by core principles of fairness, equality, and social justice, precisely the fabric of the anti-racist campaign. His films give voice to the marginalized and powerless and are a manifestation of who he is as a person: he has refused awards when any injustice is associated with its sponsors, such as the Turin Film Festival award in 2012 and an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1977. Since the 1960s, his films have substantively affected public awareness and policy — for example, his 1966 TV play about homelessness, “Cathy Come Home,” directly led to the creation of the charity “Crisis” the following year. Professionally and personally, Loach lived the Red Card’s anti-racist values.
+Now unambiguously outraged, the Board of Deputies escalated its attack at the “shameful” decision to invite Loach, again exploiting its claimed ownership of “the Jewish community”:
+“That a so-called anti-racist charity would ignore a minority community’s concerns about racism, is both astounding and shameful. The Jewish community will no longer have any confidence in Show Racism the Red Card’s trustees, its CEO, or their ability to show antisemitism the red card.”
+More than 200 public figures wrote to the Red Card in support of Loach, arguing that it would be “damaging for the struggle against racism in all its forms if SRtRC were to succumb,” the letter said, using an acronym for the organization.
+In his defense of Loach, Michael Rosen wrote:
+“I am beginning to wonder how the word ‘antisemitism’ is being used.   As a child my parents told me of their fight against antisemitism in the East End of London in the 1930s.   I am worried and saddened that our fight against antisemitism, as I have always understood it to mean, is being undermined.”
+At this point, persuasion having failed, the goalpost changed. Since the Red Card had failed to comply with the Board of Deputies’ direct attacks on Loach, they then targeted the Red Card’s sponsorship, and even its charitable status. An aggressive campaign was launched to pressure unions, government agencies, football clubs, and politicians to stop funding, or indeed even passively supporting the Red Card.
+Pro-Israel campaigner Rachel Riley attacked Loach.
+The message was clear: as described in a Statement From His Supporters, the price for keeping Loach would be “to wreck not only the competition and Ken Loach’s reputation, but the charity’s very existence.”
+And so Ken Loach, in consultation with the Red Card, removed himself from the panel of judges. The organization’s statement of March 18 reported that
+A significant factor in Ken Loach’s decision is the abuse online and in person that he and his family have received. It is profoundly distressing, and he is very concerned to protect those closest to him.
+Yet their success in removing Loach did not entirely satisfy the Board of Deputies, which now wanted the charity to apologize to what it called “the Jewish community.” Moreover, “the backtrack,” according to a Jewish Chronicle report of March 16, “left Jewish groups who had previously called out SRtRC angry.”
+The tactic used to force the anti-racism institution’s compliance has also been used against venues hosting Palestine events and talks. When one British hotel ignored demands to cancel a talk by a human rights activist, a sudden online onslaught of 1-star scathing “reviews” by faux “guests” sent the highly-regarded hotel’s rating into precipitous free-fall. As with Ken Loach and Show Racism the Red Card, the speaker and sponsors withdrew their date.
+It is disgraceful that Israel’s apologists deprived the young contestants of the esteemed filmmaker. But against Ken Loach directly, they are powerless.

mondoweiss/texts/1853.txt

@@ -1,41 +1,37 @@
-On July 30, Israel launched military operations in Lebanon and Iran that significantly escalated regional tensions by killing Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr and Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh.
-
-While U.S. officials claimed distance from the attacks and insisted that talks for a Gaza ceasefire would continue, many expect that any hope of negotiations were significantly set back by the killings. “[Haniyeh] was someone who saw the value of a deal and was instrumental to getting certain breakthroughs in the talks,” a source close to the negotiations told CNN. Meanwhile, across social media, many drew attention to the fact that Israel has worked to undermine a ceasefire, and is looking to expand its brutal war, with the full support of the Biden administration.
-
-Official U.S. responses
-
-Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with the leaders of Qatar and Jordan after Haniyeh’s death, where he reportedly stressed the need for talks to continue.
-
-“The Secretary discussed the urgency of efforts to reach a ceasefire to the conflict in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages, allow a surge of humanitarian assistance, and create the conditions for broader stability,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “He reiterated the importance of preventing further escalation of the conflict.  Secretary Blinken also thanked Jordan for its leadership in providing life-saving humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.”
-
-White House national security spokesperson John Kirby would not confirm or deny the assassinations but acknowledged that such killings would not help “the temperature going down” in the region.
-
-“I’m not going to be Pollyannish about it — we’re obviously concerned about escalation,” Kirby told reporters. “All of this adds to the complicated nature of what we’re trying to get done.”
-
-Kirby also said that the President had been briefed on the apparent strikes.
-
-At a State Department briefing spokesman Vedant Patel said “The United States of course will take every possible measure to appropriately and accurately protect our personnel, our interests, in the region and beyond, should we need to.”
-
-Blinken and Patel both denied that the United States was involved in the strikes. However, United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterated his “unwavering commitment” to Israel if the escalation led to attacks on the country.
-
-On the right-wing platform Truth Social, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump claimed that many world conflicts would not exist if he were president. He also curiously claimed that Iran had invaded Israel.
-
-“RUSSIA NEVER INVADED UKRAINE UNDER TRUMP!,” wrote the former president. “IRAN NEVER INVADED ISRAEL UNDER TRUMP! NOBODY INVADED ANYBODY UNDER TRUMP! CHINA NEVER EVEN THOUGHT OF INVADING TAIWAN UNDER TRUMP! BIGGEST EVER EMBARRASSMENT IN AFGHANISTAN WOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED UNDER TRUMP! THERE WAS NO INFLATION UNDER TRUMP! WHAT A DIFFERENT WORLD IT WOULD BE UNDER TRUMP!!!”
-
-Social media responds
-
-“Haniyeh was not just a ‘top Hamas leader’,” wrote IfNotNow co-founder Yonah Lieberman. “He was the lead negotiator in ceasefire talks. This assassination is spitting in the face of diplomacy. Israel doesn’t want a ceasefire. They want to continue to kill Palestinians with impunity, take their land, and enforce apartheid.”
-
-“In 2012, Israel & Hamas held truce talks,” pointed out historian Zachary Foster. “Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari hours after he received a draft of the truce. In 2024, Israel & Hamas held truce talks. Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the primarily negotiator in the truce talks.”
-
-“In the last 24 hours, Israel has apparently killed Hamas & Hezbollah leaders, and thus: -Killed off a Gaza ceasefire -Risked dragging the US into regional war -Ended hopes of improved US-Iran ties,” posted the think-tank Quincy Institute. “Washington: stop enabling this recklessness. Stop sending weapons to Israel NOW.”
-
-“Assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, a key negotiator for a long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza, reflects how far Israel is willing to go to nip in the bud any attempts to restore peace and stop the bloodshed of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians,” said human rights activist Maha Hussaini.
-
-“Is this what Kamala signed off on in her meeting with Netanyahu?,” wondered professor and author Eman Abdelhadi. “Attacks on a Beirut suburb and a strike in Iran on Hamas’s main negotiator? When Harris said get the deal done, did she mean regional war?”
-
-Many called on the administration to deescalate in response to the killings.
-
-“It is obvious to everyone except President Biden that war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is deliberately trying to torpedo chances of a Gaza ceasefire deal, spark an all-out regional war with Iran, and draw the United States into that conflict, all to maintain his own power,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a statement.
-
-“Unless President Biden takes swift concrete action to stop this march to war, including freezing military aid to the out-of-control Israeli government, it appears Netanyahu will soon get his wish and that the American taxpayer will pay the price,” it continued.
+Google Earth January 7 2012; Star indicates that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital
+Although maps are never neutral documents, most maps we see and use are benign and have no particular mission to cause harm or further wars. Yet the history of cartography is replete with maps made to deceive, to prove, to exploit, to kill, to intimidate, to curry favor, to create a desired reality.
+What if a mapmaker came along who could control a single map that much of humanity looked to as a standard reference? In a clinical, scientific setting that seemed to place it above falsehoods or political manipulation?
+The capital of Israel is and always has been Tel Aviv. Why, then, do GoogleEarth (above) and GoogleMaps insist on marking Jerusalem as the capital? Israel occupies East Jerusalem in a brutal military occupation illegal under international law and condemned by UN Resolutions that not even the United States challenged. But Israel claims that an “undivided” Jerusalem is its capital, and that is what Google tells the world.
+Is Google waging war-by-map on behalf of Israel? If not, what is its standard for accuracy?[1] As regard physical geography, that’s relatively straight-forward. But standard for accuracy in political geography? What else could be a guide but the rule of law?
+The 1947 UN Partition Resolution that created the Israeli state stipulated that Jerusalem would be an open, international city administered by the UN. But like the Partition itself, this was not to be: Zionist forces quickly seized most of the city, with both David Ben-Gurion and his political nemesis Menachem Begin vowing never to relinquish it, and Jordan’s Abdullah I taking East Jerusalem and the West Bank in exchange for delaying any Arab defense.
+The uneasy balance remained until the 1967 war, after which Israel claimed it had annexed East Jerusalem (in contrast to the West Bank and Gaza, which it claimed to be occupying). That ‘annexation’ has never been recognized by international law, yet in 1980 the Knesset went a step further and passed the Jerusalem Law claiming all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
+Seven UN Resolutions between 1968-1980 address this illegal seizure. What is remarkable by today’s perspective is that in no case did the US vote against them.
+In 1968, Res 252 “reaffirms that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible, and deplores the failure of Israel to comply with [previous] General Assembly resolutions.”[2] There were no votes against. The US and Canada abstained. Israel defied the resolution.
+In 1969, Res 267 “deplores the failure of Israel to show any regard for the resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council… Censures in the strongest terms all measures taken to change the status of the City of Jerusalem… Confirms that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel which purport to alter the status of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, are invalid and cannot change that status…”.[3] This resolution was adopted unanimously. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+The same year, Res 271 reaffirmed the previous resolutions, and addressed Israel’s destruction of non-Jewish holy places. It determined “that the execrable act of desecration and profanation of the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque emphasizes the immediate necessity of Israel’s desisting from acting in violation of the aforesaid resolutions and rescinding forthwith all measures and actions taken by it designed to alter the status of Jerusalem.”[4] There were no votes against. Four countries abstained: Colombia, Finland, Paraguay, and the US. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+Two years later, in 1971, Res 298 “deplores the failure of Israel to respect the previous resolutions…” and “confirms in the clearest possible terms that all legislative and administrative actions taken by Israel to change the status of the City of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties, transfer of populations and legislation aimed at the incorporation of the occupied section, are totally invalid and cannot change that status…”[5] No votes against. Syria abstained. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+After nine more years, Res 465 of 1980 could only repeat much of the same. “All measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention…” It adds concern over the reported “serious depletion of natural resources, particularly the water resources.”[6] The Security Council had asked the mayor of Hebron to testify; but Israel, which now illegally occupied Hebron, blocked his departure, and so the resolution included a protest at this new outrage. Resolution 465 was adopted unanimously. Israel continued to defy all the resolutions.
+The same year, Res 476 deplored “the persistence of Israel, in changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and the status of the Holy City of Jerusalem,” and reconfirms “that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal validity.”[7] No dissenting votes; the US abstained.
+Yet thirty days after Res 476, the Knesset defied the UN on a whole new level by enacting its “Jerusalem Law”[8] which claimed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital. Within three weeks, the Security Council passed Res 478 in response. It states that Israel’s action is “a violation of international law” and asked any member countries with their embassy in Jerusalem to move it to Tel Aviv, lest its location be construed as an endorsement of Israel’s military annexation.[9] No dissenting votes; the US abstained. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+Each of these UN Resolutions made explicit that building ‘facts on the ground’ can not be used to leverage expropriation of land and transfers of populations in the future. Doing so with the idea of making such seizures irreversible is “totally invalid and cannot change that status.” Israel cannot erase the historic record, but forces such as Google can make the world believe falsehoods by having control over what cartographic data most people see.
+By 1987, the presumably knowledgeable Thomas Friedman failed even to question Ariel Sharon when, in an interview from Sharon’s disputed residence in East Jerusalem, he emphasized that it lay in Israel’s capital.[10] Every four years, US presidential candidates promise to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, presumably aware that US law itself would have to be circumvented. Obama had already called Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel when running for his first term; the ‘vote’ to put it in the Democratic Party platform in his second campaign was a mockery of process (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8BwqzzqcDs).
+Not surprisingly, given Israel’s expertise in technology, Google has invested much in the country, and in June of 2012 Google executive Eric Schmidt met with PM Netanayhu. During the meeting, a fawning Schmidt managed even to eulogize the IDF (video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDNwQvBwe-g).
+
+What of Google’s competitor in the smartphone field? Apple’s iPhones had used Google’s maps until its iPhone 5, which introduced Apple Maps and its now-infamous repertoire of errors. One apparent ‘error’ was its failure to mark a capital of Israel. Indignation over the missing capital quickly hit the internet and Israeli media, bloggers demanding that Apple mark Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Yet at writing (9 Jan ‘12), four months later, Israel still has no capital, and the iPhone’s world clock app shows Jerusalem as a city without an associated country. Apple appears to have taken the tack used by the CIA, whose World Factbook map[11] marks no city as Israel’s capital. Given the cartographic conundrum, this makes sense: Israel has every right to say that Tel Aviv is not its capital, so it is not shown as such, but nor does it have the right to place its capital in other people’s land, so it is not shown in Jerusalem either.
+The map war continue to be fought in physical media as well. Four years ago, British authorities forced Israel to replace tourism billboards in London Transit because they flaunted a map labelling all of Palestine as Israel.[12] Cyber map warfare is more insidious, however. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a news clipping makes the protagonist realize that Big Brother has been lying (all copies of the article were to have been destroyed, but one mistakenly survived). But if instead of physical copies, it were digital in cyberspace? Big Brother would simply have modified the file.
+If enough of a fuss were made, Google would have to respond to the issue of Jerusalem on its maps. In the spotlight, would it really defy international law?
+Author’s postscript: This article presupposes a huge gift to Israel: all the  Palestinian land between the UN Partition and the 1949 Armistice or  Green Line, more than half of what was to have been Palestine. The Green  Line was merely a cease-fire line, not a border granting Israel the  Palestinian lands within it, but Israel refused to budge and the line is  now commonly presumed to be Israel’s unofficial border. The present  article, like everything written on the ‘conflict’ since the Suez War,  is predicated on accepting this state of affairs, vastly tilted in  Israel’s favor.
+Thomas Suarez is the author of several works on the history of cartography.  http://thomassuarez.com
+Notes:
+1. The author’s attempts to contact Google or correct the error remain unanswered.
+2.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/46F2803D78A0488E852560C3006023A8
+3.http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/5932ecf53ff36a04852560c300656122?OpenDocument
+4.http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/35941b603b4459b8852560c50061dc5e?OpenDocument
+5.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/441329A958089EAA852560C4004EE74D
+6.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/5AA254A1C8F8B1CB852560E50075D7D5
+7.http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/6de6da8a650b4c3b852560df00663826?OpenDocument
+8. Passed by the Knesset July 30, 1980. It’s full name is Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel.
+9.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/DDE590C6FF232007852560DF0065FDDB
+10. Thomas Friedman, In Jerusalem, Sharon Apartment Creates a Stir. NY Times December 31, 1987.
+11. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/maps/large/is-map.gif
+12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/22/israel-underground-ads-occupied-territories-map

mondoweiss/texts/1854.txt

@@ -1,41 +1,122 @@
-Last week the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Israel had barred at least six medical NGOs from entering Gaza.
-
-“WHO is concerned about the impact of these denials on Gaza’s strained healthcare system,” said the organization in a statement, pointing out that just 17 of the area’s 36 hospitals remain functional.
-
-The groups included Glia and FAJR Scientific. At the time of publication three of the banned groups, including the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), had been cleared to re-enter the area.
-
-Dr. Tarek Loubani is the Medical Director at Glia, which provides medical supplies to impoverished areas.
-
-“The situation is so incredibly dire and the services we were able to provide were already meager,” Loubani told Mondoweiss. “We weren’t allowed to bring in medications. We weren’t allowed to bring in medical equipment. We weren’t allowed to bring in enough doctors. We weren’t allowed to bring in money. Israel’s restrictions were already killing people but at least we were able to do something. We knew that, but at least we were able to do something. That little something that we were able to do has now evaporated.”
-
-Loubani points out that the group has only been able to bring in $2,800 a month per person. That amount doesn’t go far as Israel’s assault has completely decimated the region’s economy. A single roll of toilet paper is currently $10 in Gaza and a gallon of gasoline is $300.
-
-These frustrations were echoed Dr. Mosab Nasser, the CEO of FAJR Scientific, which provides emergency surgeries in the region.
-
-“Effectively you have to exit as soon as possible,” Nasser told Mondoweiss. “The maximum doctors can stay is about three to four weeks. They have to sleep on the floor at the hospitals. These are top surgeons in the U.S., who live in the comfortably but are trying to help. Even then, Israel blocks them from going in most of the time. We don’t talk politics. We are not activists. We don’t advocate for anything except the protection of innocent people and that is not a crime. We’re there to save lives.”
-
-Nasser notes that there have been severe restrictions on medical staff since Israel invaded Rafah in May and that his organization currently has about $2 million worth of medical supplies stuck in Jordan, the West Bank, and Egypt that they’re unable to bring into Gaza.
-
-In recent days, the Israeli military has besieged hospitals and shelters for displaced Palestinians across northern Gaza while preventing medical aid from entering.
-
-On October 19, Israeli forces bombed a residential block in Beit Lahia, killing more than 80 people and wounding more than 100. On the same day, Israel bombed the Tel al-Zaatar neighborhood in Jabalia, killing 33 people. and wounding more than 85.
-
-“The Israeli Authorities continue to deny humanitarian missions to reach the north with critical supplies including medicine and food for people under siege,” tweeted UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini. “Hospitals have been hit and are left without power while injured people are left without care…remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets…people attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street. Missions to rescue people from under the rubble are also being denied.”
-
-#Gaza: the Israeli Authorities continue to deny humanitarian missions to reach the north with critical supplies including medicine and food for people under siege.Hospitals have been hit and are left without power while injured people are left without care.@UNRWA remaining…— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) October 21, 2024
-
-The move comes just one month after a ProPublica article revealed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected multiple governmental reports showing that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
-
-Despite being made aware of these findings Blinken told Congress that, “[The Biden administration] does not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” humanitarian aid.
-
-Nasser doesn’t mince words when asked what the new restrictions will mean for the people of Gaza.
-
-“It means many of those injured will no longer survive. Many come to the hospital dead, but people also come to the hospital with shredded arms and legs,” says Nasser. “Many of them require an immediate amputation. Others can be saved by doing a surgery for them. There’s a crippled health care infrastructure in Gaza because many of the local doctors have either been killed or abducted by the Israeli army, so now there aren’t doctors to treat people.”
-
-Nasser says many will develop infections if surgeries can’t be done and that many “will die a slow and painful death.”
-
-“If this ban continues for, let’s say one or two months, you should expect an uptick in the number of people that will die because of their injuries,” he says. “WHO estimates that trauma surgeries will be reduced by 30% due to the absence of these organizations. If you translate that into numbers, thousands of people will die, that could have been saved if we were on the ground.”
-
-Loubani’s assessment is also grim.
-
-‘The very few patients who we were able to help and treat and give some medical comfort to, now they’re going to die too, he says. “This decision means that patients die.”
+On December 14, Tom Suárez spoke at The House of Lords, London, at the invitation of Baroness Jenny Tonge. Drawing from his recently published book State of Terror, he addressed the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and his views on the way toward ending today’s Israel-Palestine “conflict”. The following are Suárez’s remarks. The book was reviewed here by David Gerald Fincham.
+Good evening, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know are your busy schedules to be here now. My thanks to Jenny Tonge for making this meeting possible; and I would like to thank three people without whom the book would not exist: Karl Sabbagh, my publisher; Ghada Karmi, who inspired the book; and my partner, Nancy Elan, who was my constant alter-ego during my research and without whom I surely would have given up.
+My work is based principally on declassified source documents in the National Archives in Kew. When I have had to rely on published works, I have trusted established historians who cite first-hand sources. Everything I will say here tonight is based on such source material.
+Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalised. But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe. It is in our power to stop it, because we are the ones empowering it.
+We are now approaching the centennial of the British Original Sin in this tragedy, the Balfour Declaration. The British role in Palestine was a case of ‘hit & run’: The Balfour Declaration, in which the British gave away other people’s land, was the hit; and thirty years later, Resolution 181—Partition—was the run, leaving the Palestinians abandoned in a ditch.
+Zionism was of course among the incarnations of racial-nationalism that evolved in the late nineteenth century. Bigots were Zionism’s avid fans—it was the anti-Semites who championed the Zionists. Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy, reported, based on her personal experience, that those who supported Zionism did so because it provided a way to get rid of Jews.
+The London Standard’s correspondent to the first Zionist Conference in 1897 I think described Zionism perfectly. He reported that
+…the degeneration which calls itself Anti-Semitism [bear in mind that ‘anti-Semitism’ was then a very new term] has begotten the degeneration which adorns itself with the name of Zionism.
+Indeed, most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto—and worse yet, to do so on other people’s land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people as Zionism demanded.
+They had had quite enough of that from non-Jewish bigots.
+For others, the idea of going to a place where one could act out racial superiority was seductive. As the political theorist Eduard Bernstein put it at about the time the Balfour Declaration was being finessed, Zionism is “a kind of intoxication which acts like an epidemic”.
+An Israeli soldier clears out of the way as a specially-built IDF vehicle begins to douse Bethlehem in “skunk spray”, chemical warfare intended to make life miserable for the civilian population. Photo: T Suárez
+By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
+First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
+a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models [against settlers refusing to adopt Hebrew].
+A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and then expand beyond it.
+In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.
+In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote, he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
+With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
+There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
+The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
+The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.
+Britain’s wake-up call regarding the Zionists’ indoctrination of children came on the 8th of July, 1938. That day, the Irgun blew up a bus filled with Palestinian villagers. Now, this was not the first time the Irgun had done something of this sort, but this time the British caught the bomber. She was a twelve year old schoolgirl.
+Teenagers, both boys and girls, were commonly used to plant bombs in Palestinian markets and conduct other terror attacks. Teachers were threatened or removed if they tried to intervene in the indoctrination of their students, and the students themselves were blocked from advancement if they resisted, even being taught to betray their own parents if those parents tried to instill some moderation. Jews who opposed and tried to warn of the emerging fascism were assassinated, and indeed most victims of Zionist assassinations—that is, targeted, rather than indiscriminate—were Jews.
+From the beginning of World War II through to the summer of 1947, there were virtually no Palestinian attacks, even though Zionist terror against Palestinians continued. A British explanation for the Palestinians’ failure to respond in kind was that they understood that the attacks were a trap, intended to elicit a response that the Zionists would frame as an attack against which they would have to ‘defend’ themselves. This was a Zionist tactic noted by the British as early as 1918, and it remains Israel’s default strategy today, most blatantly in Gaza, but also in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
+As late as the fall of 1947, the Jewish Agency was concerned by the Palestinians’ failure to respond to its provocation, but when the end of 1947 came and the Jewish Agency could wait no longer for the civil war it needed, it was simply a matter of ratcheting up the terror.
+Throughout the Mandate period, the takeover and ethnic cleansing of Palestine remained Zionism’s unwavering goal. As but one illustration, I will summarize a key meeting of twenty people held in London on the 9th of September, 1941.
+“To be treated as most secret” is the red ink heading of the transcript. Present were Weizmann, who had called the meeting, David Ben-Gurion, and other Zionist leaders such as Simon Marks (of Marks & Spencer); and the prominent non-Zionist industrialist, Robert Waley Cohen. Discussing the path to the proposed Jewish State, the conversation ran along the lines of George Orwell’s still-to-be-published Animal Farm, in which all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
+Anthony de Rothschild began by stressing that there would be no “discrimination … against any group of its citizens” in the Jewish state, not even “to meet immediate needs”. Weizmann and Ben-Gurion also assured the sceptics: “Arabs”—Palestinians—would have equal rights. However, they clarified that within that absolute equality, Jewish settlers would have to have special privileges. Weizmann’s ‘absolute equality’ included the transfer of most non-Jews out of Palestine while permitting “a certain percentage of Arab and other elements” to remain in his Jewish state, the insinuation being as a pool of cheap labour.
+Anthony de Rothschild’s vision of equality and non-discrimination was equally compelling: it “depended on turning an Arab majority into a minority”, and to achieve this, there would be “no equal rights” for non-Jews.
+Cohen found the scheme dangerous, submitting that the Zionists were “starting with the kind of aims with which Hitler had started”. Cohen did not stop there: he suggested that if a state with equality for everyone were indeed intended, the state should be named with a neutral geographic term. He suggested … ‘Palestine’. The others were horrified at this idea, arguing that if the state had a non-Jewish name, “they would never get a Jewish majority”, in effect acknowledging the use of messianic fundamentalism as a calculated political strategy.
+In another obvious but rarely spoken admission, Ben-Gurion clarified that the ‘Jewish state’ was not based on Judaism; it was, rather, based on being a ‘Jew’, that is, by the Zionists’ racial definition.
+Asked about borders of his settler state, Weizmann continued in the same surreal manner. He replied that he would consider the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission four years earlier, in 1937, but that “the line” (the Partition) “would be the Jordan”. This was nonsensical: the Jordan was the Commission’s eastern border for the two states, and so Weizmann’s ‘partition’ meant 100% for his state, 0% for the Palestinians. He went further still: he would “very much” like to “cross the Jordan”, that is, take Transjordan along with Palestine.
+At the end of the meeting Weizmann sought to put his proposals into effect officially in the name of all Jews worldwide. Those against his proposals were, in his word, “antisemites”.
+Meanwhile, World War II was raging. What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to the most terrible enemy Jewry has ever known? From the beginning, it was to lobby the Yishuv, the Jewish settlers, not to enlist in the Allied struggle against the Nazis, because doing so would not serve Zionism—even taking advantage of May Day 1940 to lecture the Yishuv to stay in Palestine rather than join the war effort. Another reaction was to conduct a massive theft ring of Allied weapons and munitions, “as if”, as one British military record put it, “paid by Hitler himself”.
+1952: The IDF militarily commandeers the UN office dedicated to peace-keeping along the Armistice Line in order to block the exposing of its violations. (See Suárez, State of Terror, 301-303.) Photo: John Scofield
+Much has been written on the collaboration between the Zionists and fascists during the war, the best known of course being the Haavara Transfer agreement that broke the anti-Nazi boycott. One of the least known was Lehi’s attempted collaboration with the Italian fascists. In its nearly concluded ‘Jerusalem Agreement’ of late 1940, Lehi would help the fascists win the war, and in return the fascists would uproot any Jewish communities not in Palestine and force their populations to Palestine.
+If this sounds like a scheme so extreme that only fanatical Lehi could have conjured it, it is essentially what the Israeli state ultimately succeeded at in the early 1950s—most catastrophically, when it conducted a false-flag terror campaign against Jews in Iraq to destroy that ancient community and move its population to Israel as ethnic fodder.
+Violence targeting Jews was, and I would argue remains, a core tactic of Zionism. In fact, the single most deadly terror attack of the entire Mandate period was not the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 as is commonly thought. Even some of the Irgun’s bombings of Palestinian markets killed more people than the King David attack. But the most deadly single terror attack was the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.
+The Jewish Agency bombed the Patria because it was bringing the DPs to Mauritius, where the British had facilities for them. The Agency needed the DPs to be settlers in Palestine without delay, and was willing to risk the lives of all aboard in order to get the survivors to remain—which, indeed, they did.
+In further violence against its Jewish victims, the Agency framed the dead for the bombing. It spread the lie that the DPs themselves blew up the vessel, that they committed mass suicide rather than not go directly to Palestine, posthumously conscripting the dead to serve the Zionist myth.
+This was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.
+Another major tactic of violence against Jews by the Jewish Agency and American Zionist leadership was the sabotaging of safe haven in order to force them to Palestine. As but one example, in 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs, most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of treason”— ‘treason’, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.
+Nor were those already settled safe. In 1946, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Yitzhak Herzog, conducted a massive kidnapping operation of Jewish orphans that had been adopted by European families when their parents perished years earlier. Removing ten thousand children from their homes was the number he cited to the NY Times as his goal. In the National Archives, I found a copy of his own record of the trip.
+Herzog railed against the fierce resistance he met in every country by horrified local Jewish leaders who tried to protect the children. But Herzog used his political clout to circumvent them. In France, for example, facing the steadfast refusal of the Jewish leaders to betray the children, Herzog
+met the Prime Minister of France from whom I demanded promulgation of a law which would oblige every family to declare the particulars of the children it houses,
+so that those of Jewish background could be exposed and put back in orphanages until they can be shipped to Palestine—quite a Kafkaesque twist on Passover for these children who had just been spared the Nazis.
+Herzog’s justification for the kidnappings was that for a Jew to be raised in a non-Jewish home is “much worse than physical murder”. Yet even this ghastly justification fails to explain what was actually taking place, because at the same time Herzog was ‘rescuing’ Jewish orphans from this fate “much worse than physical murder”, his Jewish Agency colleagues were sabotaging Jewish adoptive homes in England for young survivors still in the camps. The real reason for all of it, of course, was that the children were needed to serve the settler project as demographic fodder.
+To that end, the Jewish Agency had coerced President Truman to segregate Jewish DPs into Zionist indoctrination camps, despite objections that it echoed Nazi behaviour. For these people who had just survived the unthinkable, then severed from the rest of humanity into these brainwashing camps, there was no such thing as free thought.
+The camps nurtured such fanaticism that it shocked a joint US-UK committee that visited in 1946. Before these camps, few DPs wanted to go to Palestine. But now the Committee found them in a delirious state, threatening mass suicide if they did not go to Palestine. Suggestions of new homes in the United States, which had always been the favored destination, were again met with threats of mass suicide.
+DPs were also groomed to bring Zionist terrorism to Europe, bombing Allied trains and Allied facilities. The bombing of the British embassy in Rome in 1946, for example, was by DPs brainwashed in these camps, as was a near-catastrophe in the Austrian Alps in 1947 when DPs nearly blew a train off a steep trestle into a deep abyss, which would almost certainly have sent its two hundred civilians and Allied troops to their deaths.
+German Jewish immigrants to Palestine during war were outraged by the Zionists’ exploitation of the Nazi horrors they had just fled. This outrage given voice by, among others, the prominent journalist Robert Weltsch, editor of Berlin newspaper until banned by the Nazis in 1938.
+Weltsch warned that Zionist leaders
+have not yet understood that the enemy seeks the destruction of the Jews … We who have been here only a few years, we know what Nazism is.
+Zionists, rather, are “taking part in the crash of European Jewry only as spectators”, fighting the British and keeping Jews from joining the Allied struggle while getting comfortable and rich from their political project in Palestine. Recent immigrants from Germany and Central Europe, he said, have no representation among the Zionist ruling establishment. If they did,
+we would have demanded that the Yishuv should put itself at the disposal of Britain for the fight against Hitler and Nazism.
+But—and I am still quoting Weltsch—
+They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.
+These German Jewish immigrants were shunned by the Zionists, their publications and presses bombed. Even Kiosks were bombed for selling non-Hebrew papers to German Jewish immigrants.
+In 1943, a man whom British records describe as ���a Jew whose integrity is not open to question” risked his life to warn the British about the threat of Zionism. For his safety, he was referred to only by the code-name ‘Z’.
+Z described Zionism as a parallel movement to Nazism. He warned that the Zionist indoctrination of Jewish youth was producing a society of extremists who will use any method necessary to achieve Zionist goals; and he pointed out that, as fascism in Europe has demonstrated, such a society is very difficult to undo once it has taken root. The result, I���m afraid, is what we, or more accurately the Palestinians, are facing today in the so-called ‘conflict’.
+How trustworthy is this anonymous testimony? I found at the National Archives a private letter in which Z is identified — he was J.S. Bentwich, the Senior Inspector of Jewish Schools in Palestine.
+Zionists
+would have got further towards rescuing the unfortunates in Axis Europe, had they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture
+—so judged a report by US Intelligence in the Middle East, dated the 4th of June, 1943, entitled “Latest Aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab Problem”. It described “Zionism in Palestine” as
+a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism,
+and stated that anti-Semitism was essential to it. Whereas
+assimilated Jews in Europe and America are noted for being … stout opponents of racialism and discrimination,
+Zionism has bred the opposite mentality in Palestine,
+a spirit closely akin to Nazism, namely, an attempt to regiment the community, even by force, and to resort to force to get what they want.
+US intelligence assailed “the crude conception” being spread of the Palestinian people as “a nomad tent-dweller … with a little seasonal agriculture”, as being “too absurd to need refutation”. The report noted the irony that it was from them that Zionist settlers learned the cultivation of Jaffa oranges. Whereas the Palestinians were self-sufficient, the Zionist settlements exist on massive external financing, and should Jews overseas ever tire of supporting the settlers, “the venture will collapse like a pricked balloon”. The conclusion of this early US intelligence report was however naïve, or at least premature: now that the world “has seen the lengths to which the Nazi creed has carried the nations”, it reasoned that the Zionists “are due to find themselves an anachronism”.
+After the war, the Jewish Agency discussed its enemies. They were democracy; the Atlantic Charter, which of course became the basis for the United Nations; Reconstruction; and the fall in anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism having always been Zionism’s drug, without which it would be irrelevant. The Agency sought to exploit anti-Semitism and blamed declining anti-Semitism in the United States on America’s so-called “democratic attitude”.
+Nor was this merely a post-war abuse. Even as Jews were still being carted off to the death camps, the New Zionist Organization’s Arieh Altman was typical in arguing that anti-Semitism must “form the foundation of Zionist propaganda”, and the Defence Security Officer in Palestine, Henry Hunloke, wondered if the Jewish Agency might even “stir up anti-Semitism … in order to force Jews … to come to Palestine”.
+Now, today, when anything approaching this topic is raised, it is twisted by some into the pejorative misstatement that the speaker—in this case, me—is blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
+NO. Rather, it is the simple fact that Zionism requires anti-Semitism, is addicted to it, and seeks to insure that it, or at least the appearance of it, never ends. One need look no further than the satisfaction among many Zionists today at the true anti-Semitism of the incoming US administration of Donald Trump, with Israeli journalists like Yaron London openly applauding this anti-Semitism as welcome news. More about that in a few minutes.
+I also mentioned Reconstruction. As one former settlement member, a man named Newton, explained, Zionist leaders were afraid that with the improvement of conditions in Europe the pressure on Palestine would subside. Any improvement in Europe was an anathema to their plans.
+The ethnic cleansing of Jaffa, 1948, as survivors are rescued by boats. Photographer unknown.
+What was the Jewish Agency’s reaction to Britain’s role in defeating the worst enemy Jewry has ever known? It saw an opportunity for extortion. The war had devastated Britain’s economy; but when Britain turned to the US for a long term loan to recuperate from its battle against the Nazis, the Agency tried to pressure Washington to deny the loan unless Britain acceded to Zionist demands. The loan was of course ultimately approved, but still in 1948 Zionists assailed US Congressmen for being pro- Marshall Plan, and the Truman administration itself dangled the loan in front of British officials when they tried to bring attention to Zionist atrocities.
+By 1946, Zionist terrorism had become the defining daily challenge of life in Palestine, and one hundred thousand British troops proved unable to contain it. Anyone or anything that kept Palestine a functioning society was a target of the Zionists. Trains, roads, bridges, communications, oil facilities, and Coast Guard stations were constantly being bombed. Utility workers, telephone repairmen, railway workers, bomb disposal personnel were murdered. Police were long a favoured target and were gunned down by the dozens.
+Among the smaller terror organizations that popped up was one specifically dedicated to Zionists’ long-running fear of Jews befriending non-Jews, the ultimate fear of course being polluting what for the Zionists was the pure Jewish race. As a sample of its methods, the terror group doused a disobedient Jewish girl with acid, severely injuring her and blinding her in one eye.
+Zionist terror was aided by the Jewish Agency’s phenomenal intelligence network. The Agency had informers all the way to high-placed sympathetic US officials that fed them intelligence, such that the British learned not even to trust direct messages to US President Truman.
+When the UN’s Palestine committee, UNSCOP, visited Palestine in the summer of 1947, the Agency had replaced the committee members’ drivers with spies; had replaced the waiters at the main restaurant they frequented with spies; and most productively, sent five young women to serve at what was called a “theatre network” of house attendants at the building where the members, all men, were being housed. The young women were required to be smart and educated, but above all, in the Agency’s word, to be “daring”. Whatever ‘daring’ meant, they extracted a wealth of information from the key people who were deliberating Palestine’s future.
+Extract from Airborne Field Security, Report No. 54, week ending 19 November 47, regarding Jewish sex workers forced to be Zionist spies. National Archives, Kew, FCO 141/14286.
+Jewish sex workers were involuntarily recruited as spies. They were told that upon the Zionist victory they would be executed for ‘sleeping with the enemy’, but might be spared if they cooperated now. The practice was so widespread that a standard questionnaire was printed up that the women were to fill out after each British customer. [note: see document detail, above]
+To demonstrate the degree to which Jewish Agency plants infiltrated the government and everyday life, a couple of months after one coast guard station was attacked and bombed by the Hagana, it blew up again … but the British were baffled, because this time there had been no attack. They discovered that the construction crew that had rebuilt the station after the previous attack were Hagana, and had simply embedded explosives in the reconstruction, to be detonated when desired.
+But the worst problem of infiltration was in the military service, where deadly sabotage by Zionist plants who had joined the forces led, tragically, to orders to remove all Jews from service in Palestine, because there was no way to tell the Zionists from the Jews.
+By 1948, this problem spread to key medical personnel. After the Jewish Agency poisoned the water supply of Acre with typhoid in order to expedite the ethnic cleansing of this city that lies on the Palestinian side of Partition, the bacteriologist hired by the British proved to be a Hagana plant or sympathizer, an obstacle to the availability of the vaccine. [Note: see document detail, below. For the injection of typhoid into the aqueduct at Acre, see e.g., Ilan Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp 100-101, and Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals, pp 10-11]
+Hagana biological warfare and the “obstructive” attitude of the bacteriologist. Extract from telegram No. 1293, from High Commissioner Cunningham, “dispatched 1900 hrs. 8.5.48”, marked “IMMEDIATE. SECRET”. National Archives, Kew, WO 275/79.
+Selling terror required effective marketing, and for that the Agency harnessed the plight of European Jews at the same time it was exploiting them. A very brief look at the iconic Zionist immigrant story is illustrative—that is of course the USS Warfield, renamed the Exodus for the obvious Biblical iconography.
+The Exodus was sold to the world as the desperate attempt of 4,515 Holocaust survivors to reach their last hope of safety and a new life, their promised land. The British, instead, forced them back, not just to Europe, but to their ultimate nightmare: Germany.
+That was the story the US and European public got.
+In truth, the Exodus was a monstrous propaganda event, grand theatre, not for benefit but at the expense of Jewish survivors. The Jewish Agency knew that Exodus passengers would be turned back, for, among other reasons, their flooding of Palestine with settlers was a tactic to force its political goals. And remember that the entire Exodus cargo of immigrants equalled less than one percent of President Roosevelt’s resettlement plan that the Zionists sabotaged. The DPs themselves were products of the Zionist camps and had been rehearsed to repeat, as one witness described it, whatever Zionist mumbo-jumbo was demanded of them.
+As for the return to Germany, it was the Jewish Agency, not the British, that forced the DPs back to Germany. Attempts were being made to find new homes for the Exodus passengers elsewhere—Denmark was one possibility—but this was sabotaged by Ben-Gurion, because it would spoil the Exodus plot.
+There was in fact already an alternative to Germany. All the Exodus DPs had the right to disembark in Southern France rather than Germany, but the Agency used violence to prevent them from leaving. The Exodus show required the pathetic spectacle of their forced return to Germany.
+The British decided to call the Agency’s bluff. They visited Golda Meir (then Meyerson), and spoke as though it went without saying that the Agency would do anything to spare the DPs the horrific return to Germany. They said that perhaps the DPs do not realize that they are free to disembark in southern France if they wish, or do not believe the British, and suggested that the Agency send a representative to tell them. Meir refused. To paraphrase Israeli Professor Idith Zertal, the greater the suffering of these survivors of the Holocaust, the greater their political and media effectiveness for the Zionists.
+A few months after the Exodus affair, the UN recommended partition, with the assumption that a Zionist state would follow. This decision was directly influenced by the certainty of continuing Zionist terror if they did not, as was the disproportionately large land area the UN gave the Zionists.
+According to British Cabinet papers, giving the Zionists so much land up front was an attempt to delay the Zionists’ expansionist wars. They knew they couldn’t stop Israeli expansionism, but they hoped to delay it. This appeasement of course failed: within a few months of Resolution 181, the Zionist armies were already waging their first expansionist war, confiscating more than half of the Palestinian side of Partition.
+But in a consummately Orwellian irony, the fact that the British were occupying Palestine enabled Zionist leaders to juxtapose their settler project as a liberation movement against British colonizers, and thus for their 1948 terror campaign of expropriation and ethnic cleansing to be spun instead as a war of ‘independence’ or ‘emancipation’.
+This so-called war of independence was in truth, to quote the British High Commissioner at the time, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children”. Its broadcasts boasting of their successes, “both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany”. The Zionists were “jubilant” he reported, with “their campaign of calculated aggression coupled with brutality”.
+British intelligence, meanwhile, reported that “the internal machinery of the Jewish State and all the equipment of a totalitarian regime is complete, including a Custodian of Enemy Property to handle Arab lands”.
+In the Yishuv itself, “persecution of Christian Jews”, by which I assume they meant converts, “and others who offend against national discipline has shown a marked increase and in some cases has reached mediaeval standards”.
+All this, to be sure, was before any Arab resistance.
+Finally, on the 15th of May, 1948, Britain fled the scene of its crime, for which the Palestinians have been paying ever since. The post-statehood period continued full throttle with the same violent messianic goals, evolving with the new dynamics.
+Now, there is no point in my having taken up your time here, no point any tree wasting its paper on this book, unless I thought that it had some value in the collective effort toward ending the conflict. So … How do I think that this book, how do I think my approach, might be constructive?
+The historical record makes plain what should already have been obvious from the present reality—that Israel’s and Zionism’s pretenses regarding Jews and Judaism, and in particular its pretense of being a response to anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution, is a fraud. Indeed quite the opposite, it thrives by exacerbating and capitalizing on these, and has turned them into a cynical, deadly business.
+Exposing this, in my opinion, is Israel’s—and the conflict’s—Achilles Heel. And this should be a simple case of the Emperor’s New Clothes—except that every time the child points out that the Emperor is naked, he or she is labelled an anti-Semite and silenced.
+The IDF attacks the area between the ‘Azza and Aida refugee camps, Bethlehem, as an ambulance (center, background) tries to rescue victims. December, 2015. Photo: T Suárez
+The US and other governments empower the conflict for their own geopolitical reasons, but why do the publics of those allegedly democratic countries give their tacit acquiescence?
+Israel has one of the world’s largest militaries, but its most powerful weapon, the one without which all its others would be impotent, is its Narrative, its creation myth, its auto-biography.
+Under the Twilight Zone of this Narrative, Israel is not merely a political entity like any other nation-state, but is transformed into the Old Testament kingdom whose name it adopted for that strategic purpose, striking a powerful chord in the collective Western sub-conscious.
+We all know the Narrative more or less, but in order for that Narrative to be ever-present, Israel has crammed it into a 3-word mantra: ‘The Jewish State’.
+This phrase—Israel’s self-identity—is a unique construct in the modern world. It is qualitatively distinct from any other country’s relationship with any other religion or cultural group. Judaism is not Israel’s state religion in the sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt. Rather, it presents itself as THE Jewish state, the metaphysical embodiment of Jewry itself, of Judaism, Jewish history, culture, persecution, and most cynical and exploitative of all, the Holocaust.
+No country claims it is the Catholic state. Costa Rica, for example, is a Catholic state; it does not suggest that it owns Catholicism, Catholics, or historic Christian martyrdom. We do not have the British government issuing guidelines as to when criticism of the Costa Rican government becomes anti-Catholic hate speech. Norway is a Lutheran state; Tunisia is one of several nations that maintains Islam as a national faith; Cambodia is a Buddhist state. Israel, in contrast, would never acknowledge even the possibility of another Jewish state because it has body-snatched everything Jewish, and holds it hostage to empower its crimes.
+Criticise Israeli terror, you will instead hit this three-word human shield—‘The Jewish State’— that Israel hides behind.
+What other country on this earth is permitted this perverse tribal claim over a religious or cultural group? This self-proclaimed exceptionalism should strike us as bizarre—even weird—yet we continue to be party to it.
+We hear a lot about anti-Semitism these days, and there is of course anti-Semitism in the world, as there are all varieties of bigotry. But let’s just blurt out the obvious: Virtually all of the alleged anti-Semitism we hear about from the Zionists is a lie, smears calculated to silence anyone who seeks to end the horror.
+This smear campaign has been compared to the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s, but it is in truth much worse, because whereas Communism is merely a political and economic theory that one can argue for or against, anti-Semitism is inherently evil. In other words, with McCarthyism, one could ultimately respond by saying, Well, let’s say I am a communist, so what?
+Zionism’s abuse of anti-Semitism, its exploitation of Judaism and historic Jewish persecution for immoral ends, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Zionism, taken at its word, makes Judaism complicit in its crimes, and thus—taken at its word—succeeds where all the conventional bigots throughout the centuries were powerless.
+Meanwhile, as we are seeing more bluntly than ever in the United States, true anti-Semitism is embraced by Zionists because it is invariably pro-Israel.
+One hundred years ago, MP Edwin Montagu accused the British government of anti-Semitism for colluding with the Zionists. History has proven him correct. If Israel is forced to stop this anti-Semitic abuse, if it is forced to come out from hiding behind its human shield, the conflict will be seen for what it is and so could not continue. Israel-Palestine will become a democratic, secular country of equals.
+And what more poetic year than the Balfour centennial for that to happen.
+Thank you.

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-Last month, on World Refugee Day, U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA),  Senator Dick Durbin (IL), Representative Greg Casar (TX) and Representative Debbie Dingell (MI) led almost 70 Democratic members of Congress on a bicameral letter calling on the Biden administration to grant refugee status to Palestinians fleeing Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza.
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-“We urge you to consider opening pathways to Palestinian refugees, particularly those with family members in the United States, to seek relief in the United States,” reads the letter. “Historically, the U.S. has resettled very few Palestinian refugees, including only 56 refugees, or 0.09 percent of the total number of resettled refugees, in fiscal year2023 and only 16 so far in fiscal year 2024. Given the dire conditions currently on the ground in Gaza, it is time for this to change.”
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-The push has been bolstered by the efforts of organizations like the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and MPower Change.
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-Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with USCPR Manager of Policy and Advocacy Campaigns Mohammed Khader about the letter, Biden’s track record on the issue, and the Republican efforts to block Palestinians from entering the country.
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-Mondoweiss: What are the demands of the congressional letter?
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-Mohammed Khader: The core focus of the letter is to provide refugee services for Palestinian-Americans’ relatives in Gaza. This really kind of centralized around the core issue of the U.S. embassy abandoning Palestinians in Gaza, but also the U.S. government’s failure to protect Palestinian Americans and their family members in Gaza.
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-There was a whole conversation around what could possibly be done to help provide relief to Palestinian-Americans and their family members here. The core purpose of the letter would be to provide what’s called a Priority-2 (P-2) designation, which is a refugee processing status that would allow Americans with family members in Gaza to either get them out or help them provide relief.
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-Obviously, there are a lot of things that could be added here, but the major issue is the fact that we have Palestinian-Americans crowdfunding, using GoFundMe, and other such efforts to help their families, but the U.S. government actually has processes and programs that can help get them out
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-We stepped in to try to offer some type of pathway in terms of doing that. Again, there are a lot of different ways that help could be provided, but this is one of many ideas in terms of leveraging the Biden administration.
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-Can you talk about the support you’ve got from Democratic lawmakers? This isn’t something that just The Squad, or more progressive members have signed onto. You’ve had 70 Congress Members back the effort.
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-There were several organizations that did outreach and leveraged their relationships and we were proud to be a part of a coalition of groups pushing on this. We were one of the first organizations pushing for it.
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-I would say in terms of the member level, um you know, I do have to give credit to the Representative Greg Casar of Texas. His team has been very much engaging in the process and have taken it on to ensure there’s a wide engagement on this issue in the House. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois is another person who has helped lead this, as he has a lot of constituents that are directly affected.
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-We can count on members of The Squad, but we were also engaging with more moderate and centrist Democrats. So for example we have people like Reps. Nanette Barragán (CA) and Tony Cárdenas (CA) on the letter, but at the same time, we have people like Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman.
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-I think that just shows that there is a significant kind of engagement that we’ve been having. Not just us, but other organizations as well. There’s a wider engagement on this letter and it’s one of the higher letter signatures collections that we’ve seen regarding Palestine.
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-This letter is obviously directed at Biden. Can you talk about how the administration has handled this issue?
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-The issue of Palestinian refugees is very much compounded with the attack on UNRWA and the kind of scapegoating of international organizations by the Israel government.
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-In terms of the Biden administration, they’ve fallen flat. Initially, when they came into to power, they put the issue on the back burner. We actually saw a lot of maneuvering by the administration, trying to hand this off as an issue for the Saudis and others to take on, as a way to essentially to reinforce the Abraham Accords.
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-They’ve failed on the issue of evacuating Afghan refugees, they failed significantly with the evacuation of Sudanese refugees. This seems to be a running theme here. Also, when refugees have had to flee conflict, war, genocide, atrocities we’ve seen a double standard. The U.S. government has done a lot for Ukrainians, for instance, whereas their efforts for Sudanese and Afghans have fallen flat too.
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-The issue of Palestinian refugees is obviously much broader than just what’s happened since October, but there’s a specific reason why the letter was put put out on World Refugee Day. While we are trying to provide relief, there is also a need to continue to ensure that  things like Right of Return and other core principles for Palestinians are recognized.
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-But again, the bottom line is that the administration has fallen flat. Their embassies have fallen flat. The embassies have not helped Palestinians at all. If you actually look at what happened after October, the administration mobilized its resources to essentially airlift Israelis out of Israel if they were American citizens through through U.S. charter airplanes.
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-We did not see any type of mobilization, certainly not that scale or scope, but not even a small percentage of that to help Palestinians in Gaza at all. We know that the administration knew that there were about a thousand Palestinians in Gaza who were a American citizens. We still did not see anything done. So this letter is kind of a longer intervention, if you will, to push the administration to do something.
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-The policy of immigration is very difficult here in the U.S.. We actually saw a Republican member of Congress introduce a piece of legislation, supported by MAGA Republicans, that would have forcibly removed Palestinians from the United States. That was something that was done several months ago, but there are continuing attempts to alienate Palestinians, to isolate Palestinians as a unique group.
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-So this letter is trying to force the administration to use the tools that it already has on the books to extend relief to Palestinian Americans and their family members in Gaza. There are already tools that could provide relief to Palestinians. And, again, if our tax dollars are going to these tools and going to the administration, we should be demanding that these tools are used to help Palestinians and not further isolate them in the international community.
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-You mentioned that Republican bill. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about GOP efforts on this issue.  I know there was also a letter a couple months ago from GOP lawmakers demanding Biden withdraw from his Palestinian refugee resettlement plan. What are we seeing from the right and how should we interpret it in the wider context of anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia?
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-Throughout this entire situation we’ve seen Republicans, the entire Republican caucus, with the exception of one member, Thomas Massie of Kentucky I believe, in addition to some Democrats, really deeply, deeply embed anti-Palestinian racism into policymaking.
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-Last week, members of Congress actually voted to include an amendment as part of the annual State Department appropriations bill, that would prevent any funding from going to the State Department to be used to cite the death toll of Palestinians and Gazans.
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-We’ve seen a lot of different anti-Palestinian things that have been arisen throughout this entire ordeal. The bill I mentioned earlier, that would revoke the visa or refugee status in asylum of Palestinians. There are many things that we’ve seen that target and attack Palestinians. Around the time too, there was also hate crime against the Palestinian six-year-old, where he was murdered.
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-There are lawmakers who have rebuked these Republican efforts, including  Jewish Democrats like Sarah Jacobs (CA) and others. But at the same time, you know, we’re seeing we’re seeing anti-Palestinian racism become more deeply embedded in the policymaking process. Not just in the congressional posture relating to Gaza, but also Palestine in general. This is something that we’re very concerned about because it feeds into our communties.
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-In upcoming months, we will obviously see rhetoric intensifying towards the election. We know that anti-Palestinian racism did not begin on October 7th, but we’ve seen it reinforced since. In the language of Joe Biden himself, to Republican members of Congress and others.
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-This is something, again, we’re very concerned about and we have tried to push back internally within on the Hill,  because we know that there are anti-Palestinian groups circulating memos and talking points to attack our community, to target students who are leading divestment efforts, who are raising the alarm on college campuses in regards to  divesting from genocide and settler colonialism.
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-It’s not solely a Democrat issue or a Republican issue, both parties need to address it.
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-That’s a good segue to my final question. You mentioned how Democrats typically run to the right on immigration during election years. We just saw a very right-wing border bill pushed by the Biden administration. We’ve also seen some really disturbing rhetroic from the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. He’s promised to, once again, bar people from certain parts of the world from entering the U.S., after October 7th he said he wouldn’t let anyone from Gaza in. He’s even threatened to deport protesting students and set back the U.S. Palestine movement What have you made of these kinds of comments from Trump and how seriously should people be taking them?
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-That’s a really good question. I do think like we should be taking everything very seriously, especially after the Supreme Court decision on immunity.
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-We saw Trump’s rhetoric in 2015-2016 and there was almost a kind of an arrogance from Democrats’ rank and file. They thought Clinton would win the election, and we were left again to deal with fascism on our own.
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-We’ve seen the rise of things like Project 2025, in addition to these recent Supreme Court decisions and I think the transition from where we are now to November is going to be very concerning. Our communities are already under attack and they’ve been under attack for months. A new administration would definitely increase targeting of our communities.
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-We’re not just concerned about the resurgence of things like the Muslim ban, but really a recreation of what the climate was after 9/11. Steady targeting, monitoring, and surveillance of our communities. Congress already passed a reform of the FISA Act, for example, a few months ago.
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-These kinds of things can already be used to weaponize against our communities, whether that be surveillance, monitoring, or repression. We already know that these things are happening. We don’t know about the scale and scope, but we know that under Trump or whatever Republican administration, these things will be very much heightened. We also know that, regardless of if it’s Biden or Trump, our community will continue to be attacked and that we have a role here to ensure that our communities are protected and that people know, ah you know, the risk and also like what things are happening.
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-Trump has shown that there is no red line, especially in the wake of the immunity ruling,  and we’ve seen that Biden has been unwilling to fully use his authority here to step in and actually do something. He’s been a very selfish president by not doing things that he said he would.
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-We know these things always come back in our communities. We know that people are going to shift blame for the President’s refusal to do anything. Whatever the precedent is after the election,  we still have a role to play in ensuring that our communities are protected and that our priorities are continuing to be focused on here.
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-Beyond that I think it’s going to be a waiting game and a guessing game for us, but our priorities will be unchanged. Our priority is solidarity with Palestinians on the ground and ensuring that Palestinians here in the U.S. have what they need to in order to continue to be active and vocal.
+It’s probably a good sign that Israel’s apologists are increasingly resorting to a sideways defense: What’s with you and Israel? I don’t hear you complaining about China or Syria or North Korea. Implicit in this mantra is an admission that any coherent defense of Israel is in short supply—the only “defense” left is to question why this particular bully is targeted from among the various nefarious bullies on the block. It’s a desperate line that is wielded effectively only because of its insinuation of some dark motive, innuendos that the other bullies cannot exploit. I’ve been doused with it by people as diverse as security agents at Ben Gurion airport to the music critic Norman Lebrecht.
+Its absurdity is self-evident. If injustice can be shielded on the grounds that there is other injustice, everyone is silenced. We would disparage those fighting China’s savagery in Tibet on the grounds that they are not active against Sudan’s repression of its lgbt citizens. Those who struggled against Indonesian/US atrocities in East Timor would have been mocked because they were not active in the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa. At best, only criticism of the single worst injustice (according to whatever chosen criteria) could be permitted: all others simply need point downward.
+Freed of this hasbara linkage, the question of why is, of course, important. Why do so many in the United States consider Israel to be very much our concern and responsibility, above and beyond other issues? Bluntly, it is our injustice. We are the ones doing it, and thus it is we with the power and the responsibility to stop it. Far more than any other bully on the block, Israel is directly armed, empowered, shielded, and bankrolled by us, by our tax dollars, by our votes, our strong-arming, our failure to act.
+Our own self-defense is another reason: we are among our own victims. Our complicity with Israel has corrupted our domestic politics, robbed the public till, and squandered our moral integrity. It has made a mockery of our nation and the ideals we profess to symbolize.
+Just as our democracy makes us responsible for what is done in our name, so is democracy is a reason why Israel is a particularly justified target for boycott. Unlike China or Syria or North Korea, Israelis elect those who run their country, as well as dictate the lives of four million Palestinians who cannot vote in its elections. The Chinese public has no control over Beijing’s atrocities in Tibet; the Israeli public votes for those who continue six and a half decades of ethnic cleansing. One may well still argue for boycott against China and other belligerent nations, and as with the case against Israel, such arguments will stand independently on their own merits, not on whether every activist can address every issue. It’s time to expose the ‘What about’ it for what it is—a cynical attempt to keep eyes from noticing that the Emperor has no clothes.

mondoweiss/texts/1856.txt

@@ -1,79 +1,15 @@
-Last month, on World Refugee Day, U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (WA),  Senator Dick Durbin (IL), Representative Greg Casar (TX) and Representative Debbie Dingell (MI) led almost 70 Democratic members of Congress on a bicameral letter calling on the Biden administration to grant refugee status to Palestinians fleeing Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza.
-
-“We urge you to consider opening pathways to Palestinian refugees, particularly those with family members in the United States, to seek relief in the United States,” reads the letter. “Historically, the U.S. has resettled very few Palestinian refugees, including only 56 refugees, or 0.09 percent of the total number of resettled refugees, in fiscal year2023 and only 16 so far in fiscal year 2024. Given the dire conditions currently on the ground in Gaza, it is time for this to change.”
-
-The push has been bolstered by the efforts of organizations like the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and MPower Change.
-
-Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with USCPR Manager of Policy and Advocacy Campaigns Mohammed Khader about the letter, Biden’s track record on the issue, and the Republican efforts to block Palestinians from entering the country.
-
-Mondoweiss: What are the demands of the congressional letter?
-
-Mohammed Khader: The core focus of the letter is to provide refugee services for Palestinian-Americans’ relatives in Gaza. This really kind of centralized around the core issue of the U.S. embassy abandoning Palestinians in Gaza, but also the U.S. government’s failure to protect Palestinian Americans and their family members in Gaza.
-
-There was a whole conversation around what could possibly be done to help provide relief to Palestinian-Americans and their family members here. The core purpose of the letter would be to provide what’s called a Priority-2 (P-2) designation, which is a refugee processing status that would allow Americans with family members in Gaza to either get them out or help them provide relief.
-
-Obviously, there are a lot of things that could be added here, but the major issue is the fact that we have Palestinian-Americans crowdfunding, using GoFundMe, and other such efforts to help their families, but the U.S. government actually has processes and programs that can help get them out
-
-We stepped in to try to offer some type of pathway in terms of doing that. Again, there are a lot of different ways that help could be provided, but this is one of many ideas in terms of leveraging the Biden administration.
-
-Can you talk about the support you’ve got from Democratic lawmakers? This isn’t something that just The Squad, or more progressive members have signed onto. You’ve had 70 Congress Members back the effort.
-
-There were several organizations that did outreach and leveraged their relationships and we were proud to be a part of a coalition of groups pushing on this. We were one of the first organizations pushing for it.
-
-I would say in terms of the member level, um you know, I do have to give credit to the Representative Greg Casar of Texas. His team has been very much engaging in the process and have taken it on to ensure there’s a wide engagement on this issue in the House. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois is another person who has helped lead this, as he has a lot of constituents that are directly affected.
-
-We can count on members of The Squad, but we were also engaging with more moderate and centrist Democrats. So for example we have people like Reps. Nanette Barragán (CA) and Tony Cárdenas (CA) on the letter, but at the same time, we have people like Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman.
-
-I think that just shows that there is a significant kind of engagement that we’ve been having. Not just us, but other organizations as well. There’s a wider engagement on this letter and it’s one of the higher letter signatures collections that we’ve seen regarding Palestine.
-
-This letter is obviously directed at Biden. Can you talk about how the administration has handled this issue?
-
-The issue of Palestinian refugees is very much compounded with the attack on UNRWA and the kind of scapegoating of international organizations by the Israel government.
-
-In terms of the Biden administration, they’ve fallen flat. Initially, when they came into to power, they put the issue on the back burner. We actually saw a lot of maneuvering by the administration, trying to hand this off as an issue for the Saudis and others to take on, as a way to essentially to reinforce the Abraham Accords.
-
-They’ve failed on the issue of evacuating Afghan refugees, they failed significantly with the evacuation of Sudanese refugees. This seems to be a running theme here. Also, when refugees have had to flee conflict, war, genocide, atrocities we’ve seen a double standard. The U.S. government has done a lot for Ukrainians, for instance, whereas their efforts for Sudanese and Afghans have fallen flat too.
-
-The issue of Palestinian refugees is obviously much broader than just what’s happened since October, but there’s a specific reason why the letter was put put out on World Refugee Day. While we are trying to provide relief, there is also a need to continue to ensure that  things like Right of Return and other core principles for Palestinians are recognized.
-
-But again, the bottom line is that the administration has fallen flat. Their embassies have fallen flat. The embassies have not helped Palestinians at all. If you actually look at what happened after October, the administration mobilized its resources to essentially airlift Israelis out of Israel if they were American citizens through through U.S. charter airplanes.
-
-We did not see any type of mobilization, certainly not that scale or scope, but not even a small percentage of that to help Palestinians in Gaza at all. We know that the administration knew that there were about a thousand Palestinians in Gaza who were a American citizens. We still did not see anything done. So this letter is kind of a longer intervention, if you will, to push the administration to do something.
-
-The policy of immigration is very difficult here in the U.S.. We actually saw a Republican member of Congress introduce a piece of legislation, supported by MAGA Republicans, that would have forcibly removed Palestinians from the United States. That was something that was done several months ago, but there are continuing attempts to alienate Palestinians, to isolate Palestinians as a unique group.
-
-So this letter is trying to force the administration to use the tools that it already has on the books to extend relief to Palestinian Americans and their family members in Gaza. There are already tools that could provide relief to Palestinians. And, again, if our tax dollars are going to these tools and going to the administration, we should be demanding that these tools are used to help Palestinians and not further isolate them in the international community.
-
-You mentioned that Republican bill. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about GOP efforts on this issue.  I know there was also a letter a couple months ago from GOP lawmakers demanding Biden withdraw from his Palestinian refugee resettlement plan. What are we seeing from the right and how should we interpret it in the wider context of anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia?
-
-Throughout this entire situation we’ve seen Republicans, the entire Republican caucus, with the exception of one member, Thomas Massie of Kentucky I believe, in addition to some Democrats, really deeply, deeply embed anti-Palestinian racism into policymaking.
-
-Last week, members of Congress actually voted to include an amendment as part of the annual State Department appropriations bill, that would prevent any funding from going to the State Department to be used to cite the death toll of Palestinians and Gazans.
-
-We’ve seen a lot of different anti-Palestinian things that have been arisen throughout this entire ordeal. The bill I mentioned earlier, that would revoke the visa or refugee status in asylum of Palestinians. There are many things that we’ve seen that target and attack Palestinians. Around the time too, there was also hate crime against the Palestinian six-year-old, where he was murdered.
-
-There are lawmakers who have rebuked these Republican efforts, including  Jewish Democrats like Sarah Jacobs (CA) and others. But at the same time, you know, we’re seeing we’re seeing anti-Palestinian racism become more deeply embedded in the policymaking process. Not just in the congressional posture relating to Gaza, but also Palestine in general. This is something that we’re very concerned about because it feeds into our communties.
-
-In upcoming months, we will obviously see rhetoric intensifying towards the election. We know that anti-Palestinian racism did not begin on October 7th, but we’ve seen it reinforced since. In the language of Joe Biden himself, to Republican members of Congress and others.
-
-This is something, again, we’re very concerned about and we have tried to push back internally within on the Hill,  because we know that there are anti-Palestinian groups circulating memos and talking points to attack our community, to target students who are leading divestment efforts, who are raising the alarm on college campuses in regards to  divesting from genocide and settler colonialism.
-
-It’s not solely a Democrat issue or a Republican issue, both parties need to address it.
-
-That’s a good segue to my final question. You mentioned how Democrats typically run to the right on immigration during election years. We just saw a very right-wing border bill pushed by the Biden administration. We’ve also seen some really disturbing rhetroic from the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. He’s promised to, once again, bar people from certain parts of the world from entering the U.S., after October 7th he said he wouldn’t let anyone from Gaza in. He’s even threatened to deport protesting students and set back the U.S. Palestine movement What have you made of these kinds of comments from Trump and how seriously should people be taking them?
-
-That’s a really good question. I do think like we should be taking everything very seriously, especially after the Supreme Court decision on immunity.
-
-We saw Trump’s rhetoric in 2015-2016 and there was almost a kind of an arrogance from Democrats’ rank and file. They thought Clinton would win the election, and we were left again to deal with fascism on our own.
-
-We’ve seen the rise of things like Project 2025, in addition to these recent Supreme Court decisions and I think the transition from where we are now to November is going to be very concerning. Our communities are already under attack and they’ve been under attack for months. A new administration would definitely increase targeting of our communities.
-
-We’re not just concerned about the resurgence of things like the Muslim ban, but really a recreation of what the climate was after 9/11. Steady targeting, monitoring, and surveillance of our communities. Congress already passed a reform of the FISA Act, for example, a few months ago.
-
-These kinds of things can already be used to weaponize against our communities, whether that be surveillance, monitoring, or repression. We already know that these things are happening. We don’t know about the scale and scope, but we know that under Trump or whatever Republican administration, these things will be very much heightened. We also know that, regardless of if it’s Biden or Trump, our community will continue to be attacked and that we have a role here to ensure that our communities are protected and that people know, ah you know, the risk and also like what things are happening.
-
-Trump has shown that there is no red line, especially in the wake of the immunity ruling,  and we’ve seen that Biden has been unwilling to fully use his authority here to step in and actually do something. He’s been a very selfish president by not doing things that he said he would.
-
-We know these things always come back in our communities. We know that people are going to shift blame for the President’s refusal to do anything. Whatever the precedent is after the election,  we still have a role to play in ensuring that our communities are protected and that our priorities are continuing to be focused on here.
-
-Beyond that I think it’s going to be a waiting game and a guessing game for us, but our priorities will be unchanged. Our priority is solidarity with Palestinians on the ground and ensuring that Palestinians here in the U.S. have what they need to in order to continue to be active and vocal.
+Half the Ramallah Orchestra, last Saturday night, at St Anne Church
+The Ramallah Orchestra, an initiative of the music conservatory Al Kamandjati, was to perform a free concert at Saint Anne Church in East Jerusalem on Saturday night, 30 June. The concert was organized with the assistance of the French Consulate, and would have built upon previous, highly successful Al Kamandjati concerts at the church.
+On the morning of the concert, Al Kamandjati was forced to cancel it.
+
+Church door, with concert announcement
+Approximately half of the international ensemble’s musicians are Palestinians. Israel, which militarily occupies East Jerusalem under a de facto annexation not recognized by international law, blocks these musicians from entering East Jerusalem unless it grants them a special permit. Despite every effort to follow Israel’s requirements, none of the Palestinians were given the permits, and so all were prevented from reaching the concert.
+In consideration of the many audience members who could not have learned of the cancellation, the remaining musicians of the Ramallah Orchestra, along with conductor Diego Masson, nonetheless continued to Saint Anne Church.
+At concert time, to welcome the seated audience, a string quartet comprised of four young Palestinians of 1948 (Palestinians of Israeli citizenship) performed Carlos Gardel’s Por Una Cabeza.
+Three orchestra members then read aloud the following statement in Arabic, English, and French :
+Good evening.
+
+Tonight we had planned to play a fabulous program for you: the overture to Rossini’s opera ‘The Italian in Algiers’, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and the great Eroica Symphony, the third symphony of Beethoven. But we are very sorry that we are unable to play our concert.
+The four musicians that you just heard are Palestinians of 1948. The core of our ensemble, about half our musicians, are Palestinians from the West Bank. These Palestinians must secure Israeli permits to enter here, even though Israel’s de facto annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognized by international law. As of this morning, none of our colleagues’ permits had been granted. We are not an orchestra without these musicians, but we stand here tonight in solidarity with them.
+We again express our deepest regret that we are prevented from playing our concert for you tonight.
+Thank you, on behalf of all the musicians of the Ramallah Orchestra.

mondoweiss/texts/1857.txt

@@ -1,41 +1,21 @@
-On July 30, Israel launched military operations in Lebanon and Iran that significantly escalated regional tensions by killing Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr and Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh.
+In order to be taken seriously in U.S. Establishment discourse, you must swear that you believe in two states existing side-by-side. This proposition (which has been held out to the stateless Palestinians for many decades now in one form or another without any consequence but further dispossession) today involves a Palestinian capital in the village of Abu Dis, which is just east of Israel’s expanded Jerusalem border.
 
-While U.S. officials claimed distance from the attacks and insisted that talks for a Gaza ceasefire would continue, many expect that any hope of negotiations were significantly set back by the killings. “[Haniyeh] was someone who saw the value of a deal and was instrumental to getting certain breakthroughs in the talks,” a source close to the negotiations told CNN. Meanwhile, across social media, many drew attention to the fact that Israel has worked to undermine a ceasefire, and is looking to expand its brutal war, with the full support of the Biden administration.
+I’ve never been to Abu Dis, but lately, I was reading Tom Suarez’s striking book of essays and photos of Palestine, Palestine Sixty Years Later, when I came across the photo above of the Dome of the Rock as viewed from the village of Abu Dis. The whole reason for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is the connection to this holy site and the Old City, which means not only the religious connection but the commercial/tourist benefits. What kind of connection exists between Abu Dis and the Old City far beyond the separation wall?
 
-Official U.S. responses
+Suarez sent me two other photographs of Abu Dis from his book, and I asked him what he thinks of the idea of Abu Dis as a capital. – Phil Weiss
 
-Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with the leaders of Qatar and Jordan after Haniyeh’s death, where he reportedly stressed the need for talks to continue.
+When in 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, the West raced to Kuwait’s defense and punished the Iraqi people with crippling sanctions for their leader’s aggression. But in response to Israel’s equally illegal and more brutal 1967 invasion and occupation of East Jerusalem, the West amplified its policy of rewarding Israel, punishing the Palestinians, and blocking any attempt to hold Israel to UN Resolutions and international law.
 
-“The Secretary discussed the urgency of efforts to reach a ceasefire to the conflict in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages, allow a surge of humanitarian assistance, and create the conditions for broader stability,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. “He reiterated the importance of preventing further escalation of the conflict.  Secretary Blinken also thanked Jordan for its leadership in providing life-saving humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.”
+The Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Dis. (Photo: T. Suarez)
 
-White House national security spokesperson John Kirby would not confirm or deny the assassinations but acknowledged that such killings would not help “the temperature going down” in the region.
+Although East Jerusalem is no more part of Israel than is Paris or Tahiti, in 1980 Israel “annexed” East Jerusalem and claimed an “undivided” Jerusalem as the country’s capital. The UN responded by reaffirming that East Jerusalem is illegally occupied Palestinian territory and that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital. Israel simply defied international law, as it has done with every UN resolution addressing the Palestinian issue since 1948.
 
-“I’m not going to be Pollyannish about it — we’re obviously concerned about escalation,” Kirby told reporters. “All of this adds to the complicated nature of what we’re trying to get done.”
+The Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Dis. (Photo: T. Suarez)
 
-Kirby also said that the President had been briefed on the apparent strikes.
+But Palestinians have long envisioned East Jerusalem as the capital of their as yet unrealized nation, and so Israel had to dampen the appearance that their illegal seizure of East Jerusalem was an impediment to peace. The answer was to propose a nearby West Bank village as the future capital of a Palestinian state. At the same time, Israel strangled that very same village by dissecting it into two with the apartheid Wall, annexing the area on the west of the wall into its illegal “greater Jerusalem,” and suffocating what was left with ever-growing Israeli settlements. Thus Israel is not only accelerating its ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem but also crippling the very town it claims should be the capital of the Palestinian state it never allows existing. Welcome to Abu Dis.
 
-At a State Department briefing spokesman Vedant Patel said “The United States of course will take every possible measure to appropriately and accurately protect our personnel, our interests, in the region and beyond, should we need to.”
+The Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Dis. (Photo: T. Suarez)
 
-Blinken and Patel both denied that the United States was involved in the strikes. However, United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterated his “unwavering commitment” to Israel if the escalation led to attacks on the country.
+The apartheid Wall severed Abu Dis’s historic link with Jerusalem and crippled much of the little economic life that had thus far survived the Occupation. Not only was the social fiber of the village torn in two, but indeed families were broken up, family members permanently separated by the Wall. In some cases even fathers and mothers were torn apart, their ID cards placing them on opposite sides of the Wall. Shepherds and their flocks were completely cut off from their grazing land, farmers from their fields. Further exacerbating the population squeeze, Bedouins whose villages Israel had razed in the Jordan Valley were brought to Abu Dis and left there.
 
-On the right-wing platform Truth Social, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump claimed that many world conflicts would not exist if he were president. He also curiously claimed that Iran had invaded Israel.
-
-“RUSSIA NEVER INVADED UKRAINE UNDER TRUMP!,” wrote the former president. “IRAN NEVER INVADED ISRAEL UNDER TRUMP! NOBODY INVADED ANYBODY UNDER TRUMP! CHINA NEVER EVEN THOUGHT OF INVADING TAIWAN UNDER TRUMP! BIGGEST EVER EMBARRASSMENT IN AFGHANISTAN WOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED UNDER TRUMP! THERE WAS NO INFLATION UNDER TRUMP! WHAT A DIFFERENT WORLD IT WOULD BE UNDER TRUMP!!!”
-
-Social media responds
-
-“Haniyeh was not just a ‘top Hamas leader’,” wrote IfNotNow co-founder Yonah Lieberman. “He was the lead negotiator in ceasefire talks. This assassination is spitting in the face of diplomacy. Israel doesn’t want a ceasefire. They want to continue to kill Palestinians with impunity, take their land, and enforce apartheid.”
-
-“In 2012, Israel & Hamas held truce talks,” pointed out historian Zachary Foster. “Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari hours after he received a draft of the truce. In 2024, Israel & Hamas held truce talks. Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the primarily negotiator in the truce talks.”
-
-“In the last 24 hours, Israel has apparently killed Hamas & Hezbollah leaders, and thus: -Killed off a Gaza ceasefire -Risked dragging the US into regional war -Ended hopes of improved US-Iran ties,” posted the think-tank Quincy Institute. “Washington: stop enabling this recklessness. Stop sending weapons to Israel NOW.”
-
-“Assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, a key negotiator for a long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza, reflects how far Israel is willing to go to nip in the bud any attempts to restore peace and stop the bloodshed of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians,” said human rights activist Maha Hussaini.
-
-“Is this what Kamala signed off on in her meeting with Netanyahu?,” wondered professor and author Eman Abdelhadi. “Attacks on a Beirut suburb and a strike in Iran on Hamas’s main negotiator? When Harris said get the deal done, did she mean regional war?”
-
-Many called on the administration to deescalate in response to the killings.
-
-“It is obvious to everyone except President Biden that war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is deliberately trying to torpedo chances of a Gaza ceasefire deal, spark an all-out regional war with Iran, and draw the United States into that conflict, all to maintain his own power,” said the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a statement.
-
-“Unless President Biden takes swift concrete action to stop this march to war, including freezing military aid to the out-of-control Israeli government, it appears Netanyahu will soon get his wish and that the American taxpayer will pay the price,” it continued.
+Palestinian leaders — including Abbas, who commonly rubber-stamps whatever the West dictates — have refused to accept Abu Dis as a future capital.

mondoweiss/texts/1858.txt

@@ -1,37 +1,37 @@
-It is really hard to believe, but: The United States has a keen interest in getting the Iran nuclear deal back in place, and it can’t do so because one small country doesn’t want us to. Our dear friend Israel says Iran is an “existential” threat, and our leaders listen to their leaders, who urge us to take military action against Iran over its nuclear program.
-
-And meantime everyone in the American establishment hides the fact that Israel has nukes. At least 90 of them, according to experts.
-
-Any realistic discussion of Iran’s nuclear program ought to include that glaring fact: Israel has 90 nukes. That statement ought to be boilerplate in any article. But our officials and media always leave Israel’s nukes out.
-
-Here’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan going along with the lie Tuesday in Jerusalem:
-
-Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program poses a grave threat to the region and to international peace and security.
-
-Ian Lustick has just published an excellent piece at Smerconish.com about Israel’s falsehoods about Iranian nukes. He says the lie that Israel has no nukes is important because if the truth were told, all aid to Israel would be at risk. The disclosure, Lustick says,
-
-would trigger the application of U.S. laws against giving foreign aid to Israel as a country with unauthorized nuclear weapons.  In domestic political terms, it is difficult to imagine any foreign policy move more costly than that.
-
-I.e., the Israel lobby exists to secure endless aid to Israel, and that includes liberal Zionist groups like J Street that have a big footprint in the Democratic Party. And AIPAC, which is about to spend a ton of money in political contests to “shore up the Washington consensus on Israel.” So the Democratic establishment is invested in the lie.
-
-And Biden’s top aide, Jake Sullivan, is in Jerusalem, making nice to the rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, even as the P.M. destroys our blessed two-state solution and bullyrags us about Iran.
-
-Grant Smith made this same point last summer. “Multiple US government agencies” have documented Israel’s nukes, but there is a gag order on their publicly acknowledging the truth because doing so would undermine foreign aid. But the result is a farce:
-
-Israel and its surrogates have continued to feed Americans a rich banquet of justifications for attacking Iran on the pretext that it is on the verge of introducing the very weapons to the Middle East that Israel deployed long ago.
-
-Another lie — Lustick says Israel doesn’t “genuinely” fear an Iranian nuclear attack. Israel is just trying to maintain regional “hegemony.”
-
-Regardless of what many ordinary Israelis have been encouraged to feel about their country as a “one-bomb state,” neither Israeli security nor political elites have ever thought that if Iran has the bomb it will drop it on Israel.  Israel’s nuclear arsenal includes at least 90 warheads, enough plutonium for 100 more, and multiple advanced delivery systems. So, what really perturbs Gantz, Bennet, Netanyahu, and so many other Israelis who speak about Iran in such apocalyptic in frenzied terms?  Simply put, they fear the loss of Israeli hegemony.   An Iranian state capable of perhaps using a nuclear weapon would end Israel’s status as the confidently preponderant military power in the region..
-
-Another lie is the oft-repeated line that Israel will take matters into its own hands if the world does nothing. “This is a charade.” But a charade with a purpose — to manipulate the United States, Lustick says.
-
-Israel is not actually practicing for a war that none of its serious military experts think it could win. .. By pretending otherwise, Israel triggers fears in Washington that its uncontrollable ally will act in utterly destructive and dangerous ways.  The intention is to push the United States beyond whatever limits it has set on its willingness to pressure Iran toward regime change. And even if these scare tactics do not produce an American military solution to the Iranian problem, they can lead American negotiators to maximize demands on Iran, thereby minimizing chances for renewing the JCPOA [Iran deal]…
-
-Ian Lustick (Photo: University of Pennsylvania)
-
-The U.S. is a willing pawn in this game because “politics is all” — meaning “the power of the Israeli lobby in domestic American politics.” Lustick says it is time to clear away the hypocrisy here because it is so dangerous.
-
-[It is] all the more important for those of us not in positions of political or policy authority to make clear what really is and really is not at stake in the Israeli-Iranian confrontation.   We have had enough wars launched on false pretenses and for unattainable goals—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.  We don’t need another one in Iran.
-
-Yes the stakes are huge. Israel is nudging us toward war, and it really is like the emperor’s new clothes, no one can say what is plain as your face, Israel is laden with nukes.
+Google Earth January 7 2012; Star indicates that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital
+Although maps are never neutral documents, most maps we see and use are benign and have no particular mission to cause harm or further wars. Yet the history of cartography is replete with maps made to deceive, to prove, to exploit, to kill, to intimidate, to curry favor, to create a desired reality.
+What if a mapmaker came along who could control a single map that much of humanity looked to as a standard reference? In a clinical, scientific setting that seemed to place it above falsehoods or political manipulation?
+The capital of Israel is and always has been Tel Aviv. Why, then, do GoogleEarth (above) and GoogleMaps insist on marking Jerusalem as the capital? Israel occupies East Jerusalem in a brutal military occupation illegal under international law and condemned by UN Resolutions that not even the United States challenged. But Israel claims that an “undivided” Jerusalem is its capital, and that is what Google tells the world.
+Is Google waging war-by-map on behalf of Israel? If not, what is its standard for accuracy?[1] As regard physical geography, that’s relatively straight-forward. But standard for accuracy in political geography? What else could be a guide but the rule of law?
+The 1947 UN Partition Resolution that created the Israeli state stipulated that Jerusalem would be an open, international city administered by the UN. But like the Partition itself, this was not to be: Zionist forces quickly seized most of the city, with both David Ben-Gurion and his political nemesis Menachem Begin vowing never to relinquish it, and Jordan’s Abdullah I taking East Jerusalem and the West Bank in exchange for delaying any Arab defense.
+The uneasy balance remained until the 1967 war, after which Israel claimed it had annexed East Jerusalem (in contrast to the West Bank and Gaza, which it claimed to be occupying). That ‘annexation’ has never been recognized by international law, yet in 1980 the Knesset went a step further and passed the Jerusalem Law claiming all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
+Seven UN Resolutions between 1968-1980 address this illegal seizure. What is remarkable by today’s perspective is that in no case did the US vote against them.
+In 1968, Res 252 “reaffirms that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible, and deplores the failure of Israel to comply with [previous] General Assembly resolutions.”[2] There were no votes against. The US and Canada abstained. Israel defied the resolution.
+In 1969, Res 267 “deplores the failure of Israel to show any regard for the resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council… Censures in the strongest terms all measures taken to change the status of the City of Jerusalem… Confirms that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel which purport to alter the status of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, are invalid and cannot change that status…”.[3] This resolution was adopted unanimously. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+The same year, Res 271 reaffirmed the previous resolutions, and addressed Israel’s destruction of non-Jewish holy places. It determined “that the execrable act of desecration and profanation of the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque emphasizes the immediate necessity of Israel’s desisting from acting in violation of the aforesaid resolutions and rescinding forthwith all measures and actions taken by it designed to alter the status of Jerusalem.”[4] There were no votes against. Four countries abstained: Colombia, Finland, Paraguay, and the US. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+Two years later, in 1971, Res 298 “deplores the failure of Israel to respect the previous resolutions…” and “confirms in the clearest possible terms that all legislative and administrative actions taken by Israel to change the status of the City of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties, transfer of populations and legislation aimed at the incorporation of the occupied section, are totally invalid and cannot change that status…”[5] No votes against. Syria abstained. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+After nine more years, Res 465 of 1980 could only repeat much of the same. “All measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention…” It adds concern over the reported “serious depletion of natural resources, particularly the water resources.”[6] The Security Council had asked the mayor of Hebron to testify; but Israel, which now illegally occupied Hebron, blocked his departure, and so the resolution included a protest at this new outrage. Resolution 465 was adopted unanimously. Israel continued to defy all the resolutions.
+The same year, Res 476 deplored “the persistence of Israel, in changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and the status of the Holy City of Jerusalem,” and reconfirms “that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal validity.”[7] No dissenting votes; the US abstained.
+Yet thirty days after Res 476, the Knesset defied the UN on a whole new level by enacting its “Jerusalem Law”[8] which claimed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital. Within three weeks, the Security Council passed Res 478 in response. It states that Israel’s action is “a violation of international law” and asked any member countries with their embassy in Jerusalem to move it to Tel Aviv, lest its location be construed as an endorsement of Israel’s military annexation.[9] No dissenting votes; the US abstained. Israel continued to defy the resolutions.
+Each of these UN Resolutions made explicit that building ‘facts on the ground’ can not be used to leverage expropriation of land and transfers of populations in the future. Doing so with the idea of making such seizures irreversible is “totally invalid and cannot change that status.” Israel cannot erase the historic record, but forces such as Google can make the world believe falsehoods by having control over what cartographic data most people see.
+By 1987, the presumably knowledgeable Thomas Friedman failed even to question Ariel Sharon when, in an interview from Sharon’s disputed residence in East Jerusalem, he emphasized that it lay in Israel’s capital.[10] Every four years, US presidential candidates promise to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, presumably aware that US law itself would have to be circumvented. Obama had already called Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel when running for his first term; the ‘vote’ to put it in the Democratic Party platform in his second campaign was a mockery of process (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8BwqzzqcDs).
+Not surprisingly, given Israel’s expertise in technology, Google has invested much in the country, and in June of 2012 Google executive Eric Schmidt met with PM Netanayhu. During the meeting, a fawning Schmidt managed even to eulogize the IDF (video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDNwQvBwe-g).
+
+What of Google’s competitor in the smartphone field? Apple’s iPhones had used Google’s maps until its iPhone 5, which introduced Apple Maps and its now-infamous repertoire of errors. One apparent ‘error’ was its failure to mark a capital of Israel. Indignation over the missing capital quickly hit the internet and Israeli media, bloggers demanding that Apple mark Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Yet at writing (9 Jan ‘12), four months later, Israel still has no capital, and the iPhone’s world clock app shows Jerusalem as a city without an associated country. Apple appears to have taken the tack used by the CIA, whose World Factbook map[11] marks no city as Israel’s capital. Given the cartographic conundrum, this makes sense: Israel has every right to say that Tel Aviv is not its capital, so it is not shown as such, but nor does it have the right to place its capital in other people’s land, so it is not shown in Jerusalem either.
+The map war continue to be fought in physical media as well. Four years ago, British authorities forced Israel to replace tourism billboards in London Transit because they flaunted a map labelling all of Palestine as Israel.[12] Cyber map warfare is more insidious, however. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a news clipping makes the protagonist realize that Big Brother has been lying (all copies of the article were to have been destroyed, but one mistakenly survived). But if instead of physical copies, it were digital in cyberspace? Big Brother would simply have modified the file.
+If enough of a fuss were made, Google would have to respond to the issue of Jerusalem on its maps. In the spotlight, would it really defy international law?
+Author’s postscript: This article presupposes a huge gift to Israel: all the  Palestinian land between the UN Partition and the 1949 Armistice or  Green Line, more than half of what was to have been Palestine. The Green  Line was merely a cease-fire line, not a border granting Israel the  Palestinian lands within it, but Israel refused to budge and the line is  now commonly presumed to be Israel’s unofficial border. The present  article, like everything written on the ‘conflict’ since the Suez War,  is predicated on accepting this state of affairs, vastly tilted in  Israel’s favor.
+Thomas Suarez is the author of several works on the history of cartography.  http://thomassuarez.com
+Notes:
+1. The author’s attempts to contact Google or correct the error remain unanswered.
+2.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/46F2803D78A0488E852560C3006023A8
+3.http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/5932ecf53ff36a04852560c300656122?OpenDocument
+4.http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/35941b603b4459b8852560c50061dc5e?OpenDocument
+5.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/441329A958089EAA852560C4004EE74D
+6.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/5AA254A1C8F8B1CB852560E50075D7D5
+7.http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/6de6da8a650b4c3b852560df00663826?OpenDocument
+8. Passed by the Knesset July 30, 1980. It’s full name is Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel.
+9.http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/DDE590C6FF232007852560DF0065FDDB
+10. Thomas Friedman, In Jerusalem, Sharon Apartment Creates a Stir. NY Times December 31, 1987.
+11. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/maps/large/is-map.gif
+12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/22/israel-underground-ads-occupied-territories-map

mondoweiss/texts/1859.txt

@@ -1,29 +1,44 @@
-Last week The White House announced that President Joe Biden would nominate former US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as his ambassador to Israel. The move is already being criticized by Republicans over Lew’s involvement in the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran deal.
-
-Before Lew, who also served as former President Obama’s Chief of Staff from 2012-2013, was even officially nominated to replace outgoing Israel Ambassador Tom Nides, GOP congressional members began questioning his qualifications. On August 31 Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Max Miller (R-OH), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Doug Lamborn (R-CO),  Christopher Smith (R-NJ), Carol Miller (R-WV), and Kat Cammack (R-FL) sent Biden a letter expressing “serious concern” over media reports that Lew might be picked.
-
-“At a time when we should work on strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship, this nomination has the potential to strain relations with our strongest ally and the only democracy in the Middle East,” it reads. “We strongly urge you to ensure that any nominee to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel can and will improve relations between our two countries.”
-
-In addition to Lew’s involvement in the Iran nuclear deal, the lawmakers also cite Lew’s past criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration’s decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements. “Especially now, on the 75th anniversary of diplomatic ties between our two great democracies, it would be reckless and irresponsible to move forward with any nomination that could deteriorate relations between the U.S. and Israel,” concludes the letter.
-
-A number of Republicans have echoed these sentiments since the nomination was made official.
-
-A spokesperson for Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Jewish Insider that he “has enormous concerns with the Biden administration’s campaign against our Israeli allies” and will “evaluate the nomination on that basis.”
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-Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) told the website that he opposes a quick confirmation process for nominees without “some changes with regard to policy with..Israel.”
-
-In a Jewish News Syndicate op-ed GOP fundraiser Eric Levine writes that, “The Obama administration’s anti-Israel record is well known. There is no better example of this hostility than the JCPOA (the 2015 Iran nuclear deal). Lew’s support for it and his hostility towards Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are, on their own, entirely sufficient reasons to reject his nomination.”
-
-This isn’t the first time Lew has faced hostility from hardline Israel supporters. While serving as Treasury Secretary in 2015 he addressed the annual Jerusalem Post Conference New York City, where he was greeted by booing and heckling. “No administration has done more for Israel’s security than this one,” he told the crowd to no avail.
-
-“It was one of the surliest receptions ever accorded to such a high-ranking administration official by a Jewish audience in the United States,” reported Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev.
-
-As Phil Weiss noted on this site at the time, “Lew never mentioned Palestine, ‘Palestinians, occupation, settlements, or even the two-state solution in his speech yesterday and still he got booed and heckled.”
-
-Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen congratulated Lew on the nomination, calling him “a true friend of Israel.” The move has also been praised by pro-Israel Democrats, including Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer who said he was “precisely the person for the job of ambassador to Israel we need.”
-
-The liberal pro-Israel group J Street put out a statement saying they were “personally thrilled” by Biden’s choice. “During his nomination hearing and once confirmed, we look forward to hearing from Secretary Lew about the steps the United States can take to meet this consequential moment in Israel’s history, and to create a more just, equitable and peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians,” it reads.
-
-“I have had the privilege of calling Jack a friend for many years. His integrity, dedication, and wisdom have always been evident, and I have no doubt that he will bring those same qualities to his role as ambassador,” said Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) President and CEO Mark Mellman.
-
-“Israel is a vital ally and partner to the United States, and the relationship between our two countries is of paramount importance,” he continued. “The secretary’s nomination is a testament to the Biden Administration’s deep commitment to strengthening this bond.”
+Palestine National Orchestra, 2010. (Photo: Los Angeles Times)
+The Palestine National Orchestra, Palestine’s flagship symphonic ensemble, is the brainchild of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, Palestine’s preeminent institution for both Western and Arabic music. When the Conservatory’s Michele Cantoni asked me to join the PNO for their March 2012 series, I eagerly accepted. What follow are my own personal reflections.
+The Belgian-British composer Tim Pottier manages the orchestra, its repertoire, musicians, programming, and tirelessly navigates the Orwellian realities of Israeli occupation. Generous individuals, organizations, businesses, and even local restaurants make the concert series financially possible and demonstrate a deep community involvement.
+Typical of major symphony orchestras, the PNO is international in its composition. In addition to its core of Palestinian musicians and extranationals who, ever-subject to Israel’s tri-monthly permit renewal, have made Palestine their home, the PNO taps musicians from elsewhere in the Middle East, from Europe, and the Americas. Many teach at the Said Conservatory (branches in Ramallah, East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nablus), or the highly regarded Al Kamandjati in Ramallah, founded by the Palestinian violist Ramzi Aburedwan. English is the one language understood by all PNO members, and so serves as the lingua franca during rehearsals. At meals and over coffee, Arabic and European languages intermingle.
+We performed concerts in both Amman (Jordan) and Ramallah (Occupied Palestine), all under the direction of Matthew Coorey (Khoury), an Australian conductor of Lebanese descent who is based in the UK. In keeping with welcome trends toward more correct performance practice, the second violins were opposite the first violins, where the ‘celli are more commonly seen. Communication between the two violin sections is more difficult with this arrangement, but it is effective: their separate lines become clearer and the ‘celli are angled to project forward.
+Coorey landed his opening downbeat to the Coriolan Overture of Beethoven without a moment’s pause, giving the work’s arresting opening a special urgency. Beethoven allows little relief from the violence, conflict, and ultimate suicide of the Roman general who lived in the 5th century BC, and Coorey made full use of the ending’s prolonged dissonance between the bassoon and ‘celli that keeps the painful tension all the way to three closing pizzicati.
+
+The PNO’s first clarinetist, the brilliant young Syrian clarinet Kinan Azmeh, performed one of his own compositions dating from 2007. Written in the unusual meter of 21/16, the intriguing “November 22” juxtaposes the semi-improvisational solo clarinet against a steady rhythmic figure from the bass and sustained lines from the upper strings. Azmeh explains that it depicts “homesickness while away from home,” in which the rhythmic figure is “how the slow and steady rhythm of life keeps moving regardless of one’s emotions,” while the clarinet intones familiarity, childhood, homesickness. The piece begins quietly with a gradual buildup to great commotion, and then ebbs, very gradually, to quite literally nothing, heightening the audience’s already rapt attention.
+
+Alexander Suleiman performed the Schumann cello concerto with both virtuosity and intelligence, and his playing of the concerto’s slow movement was among the most beautifully crafted I have heard. Suleiman’s musical experience is broad, championing new music as well as early music performance practice. He is professor of cello at the University of Southern California, and was recently appointed artistic director of the Art Conquers Borders Academy in Bremen.
+Coorey’s energetic approach to Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony captured the excitement, humanity, and humor of the work, and his fast tempi were particularly demanding of the strings, for whom Mozart is always acrobatics on eggshells. The new urtext parts the PNO wisely used caught my curiosity, as they differed in small detail from the older editions I was familiar with.
+The final work was Stravinsky’s colorful and hilarious Pulcinella Suite, from the commedia dell’arte ballet about three couples’ jealousies and flirtations. A string quintet formed by Nabih Bulos and Basel Theodory (violin), Aidan Pendleton (viola), Alexander Suleiman (‘cello), and Priscila Vela Vico (bass) intermingles with wind solos by principal flute Ahmed Qatamesh, oboe Andrea Shaheen, bassoon Maher Farkouh, horn Yousef Assi, trumpet Rani Elias, and trombone Riccardo Benetti, deftly showcasing Stravinsky’s transparently scored adaptation of music traditionally, if tenuously, ascribed to Pergolesi.
+Two encores— the “Fire Dance” from Manual de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, and the Palestinian nationalist song Mawtini, proved insufficient, one audience satisfied only after we repeated the last movement of the Mozart symphony.
+The PNO faces the logistical and funding challenges common to all orchestras. But in addition it confronts something far more impenetrable: an ever-present military occupation and crippling apartheid laws. Sold to the West as self-defense, Israel’s hold on daily Palestinian life seeks to destroy what its tanks and F-16s can’t. Thus the PNO is an act of defiant normalcy, a refusal to be defined by the 64 years of neo-colonial oppression that is the reality of everyday existence in Palestine.
+This refusal of victimhood is powerful—indeed so powerful that it lay beyond the comprehension of the BBC and the popular Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The venerable BBC couldn’t even get past the orchestra’s name, with its implicit statement of sovereign identity. In its report about the ensemble’s debut, the BBC erroneously called it the “Palestinian” National Orchestra.[1]
+Both it and Haaretz seized upon the PNO’s 2011 programming of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Concert Romanesc to re-explain the PNO in harmony with the Israeli narrative. According to Haaretz,[2] the Palestinian musicians purposefully chose Ligeti, a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, as their way of “conceding the tragic refugee history of [Israeli] society” and to say “we are brothers” in tragedy. Yet again, the Holocaust is exploited to empower more terror, and the “left-wing” Haaretz cries tears of commiseration with the very people its nation is brutalizing, as though “the conflict” were the doing of some Other Force to which Israel, too, is victim. Implicitly, Haaretz has the PNO agreeing that the apartheid Israeli state was the answer to Europe’s displaced Jews, and that the fascism it imposes upon Palestinians is the inevitable result of this. Thus the Concert Romanesc served to have Israeli mythology vindicated by its victims.
+The truth—that the Ligeti had been an independent Palestinian artistic decision made by Tim Pottier, without any thought to Israel—lay outside the Israeli narrative. Yet in a final twist to sooth its liberal audience, Haaretz jubilantly concluded that the music “managed to get through the checkpoints and the walls as though they never existed.” Forgetting, for the present purpose, the question of why Israel has checkpoints and walls on other people’s land in the first place, let’s take a brief look at how Palestinian musicians do, and don’t, get through the three ghettos into which it has dissected Palestine—Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
+To start, one must first acknowledge that one and a half million Palestinians are automatically erased from our story, as they are severed from the world by the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Israel even blocks music from Gaza for its “security”.[3] String broke? Bad reed? Need music? You’ll have to get someone to smuggle them through the tunnels from Egypt. Rare exceptions that Israel may cite are meaningless: one cannot commit musicians, venue, travel, and audience on the remote chance that Israel will not sabotage the project.
+This writer’s personal experience will suffice to illustrate. I was among a group of people invited to a professional event in Gaza City sponsored by the World Health Organization and the European Union. Applications to Israel were made well in advance by these international agencies, all to Israel’s specifications. But shortly before the event, despite a year of planning and prior approval, and despite Israel’s claim not to be occupying Gaza, it blocked our entry without explanation. When I refused to leave the gate to the Erez crossing, IDF soldiers physically removed me.
+Musicians in the West Bank can travel across their own border to Jordan, though the crossing is unpredictable, expensive, and sometimes much worse. Within the West Bank, Palestinians are impeded by Israel’s ever-increasing settlements, and walls that splice villages and families in two. Normal endeavors that musicians elsewhere take for granted—getting to a routine rehearsal in a neighboring town—can be risky and humiliating, and is always unpredictable.
+East Jerusalem has different problems. Unlike the West Bank, in which Israel maintains a military occupation, or Gaza, which remains sealed like a massive internment camp, Israel claims to have actually annexed East Jerusalem. The annexation is illegal (not even the ever-compliant U.S. recognizes it), and thus Israel’s ethnically predicated laws have no legal jurisdiction there. But they are, by military force, the laws that control.
+“Residency” is the coveted status in East Jerusalem for non-Jews. A Palestinian whose family has lived there for centuries lives in fear of ethnicity-based expulsion on arcane technicalities manufactured for the purpose. Simply leaving East Jerusalem—concert tour, study—can be used as an abdication of residence. Other families become “illegal” when Israel expands the border of Jerusalem to include parts of the West Bank.
+The arcane apartheid laws that de facto (not legally) rule occupied East Jerusalem change with neither notice nor transparency. This past January, the Jerusalem Children’s Orchestra, another initiative of the Said Conservatory, was to perform at the National Theatre in East Jerusalem. But suddenly and without notice, Israel lowered the age at which Palestinian children need special permits to enter East Jerusalem, which until then had been fifteen. In this case, Israel’s sabotage of Palestinian achievement succeeded—the new regulations could not be met in time, and so many of the young musicians would be prevented from performing. The concert was cancelled.
+Israel was only partially successful when the Palestine Youth Orchestra prepared to perform in the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Nablus. The French authorities, holding more clout than Palestinians, helped the orchestra apply for the permits Israel mandates. Permission was granted and arrangements were made. Israel then arbitrarily changed the permissible dates, but the Said Conservatory, not to be stopped, rescheduled concerts, rehearsals, travel, and housing. But then Israel changed the permits’ dates a second time. When even that failed to sabotage the project, Israel refused either to approve or deny permission for an oud player whose participation was crucial. This new obstacle was thwarted only when the resourceful Tim Pottier masterminded a media coup that would have caused the Israeli authorities more embarrassment than the issue was worth to them. In the end, the double rescheduling put the event into Ramadan, and fifteen children were stopped from participating until the last few days.
+At this point, it is worth reminding the reader that nothing here involves Israeli permission to enter Israel; it is Israeli “permission” for Palestinians to enter Palestine.
+The Oslo Accords simultaneously allowed the Palestinian Authority a facade of sovereignty, placards on office doors boasting the Palestinian Ministry of This-&-That, while actually tightening Israel’s yoke around their land. One dressing of make-believe sovereignty was the issuance of Palestinian passports, but passports of a nation that doesn’t exist have little meaning. Nor are Palestinian refugees outside Palestine eligible; they hold travel documents that are valid for a short period of time and afford limited privileges. Travel is especially difficult for them, and merely changing planes on an unbroken flight can require special visas and expense.
+The PNO operated with the Said Conservatory’s accumulated savvy about Israel bureaucracy, and all the permits Israel requires for the orchestra’s Palestinians had been meticulously secured for our March 15th concert in the West Bank.  Israel, however, made two of the permits valid only for April 5th. For three weeks, Tim tried to get the Israeli authorities to correct the dates, but was met with the traditional stonewalling, and two days before the Ramallah concert he had to fly in an oboist from Spain and get a bassoonist from Jordan.
+One must remember that Palestinians are refugees only because Israel has for six and a half decades defied United Nations’ demands that it allow those it had ethnically cleansed to return to their homes, broken the explicit promises upon which it was admitted to the UN, violated the UN Partition agreement which facilitated the creation of the state itself, and indeed violated the 1917 Balfour Declaration which Israel cites as a precedent.
+But instead of Israel being held accountable, we set out for the West Bank leaving our two colleagues, oboist Haneen Hamadeh and bassoonist Iyad Hafez, behind. Haneen, whose roots are in Nablus (West Bank), lives in Amman. Iyad, the son of Palestinian refugee from Acre, lives Apolid (stateless) in Italy, and had flown to Amman to join us. They had played all the rehearsals for the concerts.
+
+Tom Suarez at the Erez crossing, 2008. (Photo: ActiveStills)
+The roughly 40 km from Amman, through the Jordan Valley, over the Allenby Bridge, and west to Ramallah took the six hours we expected, most of it at the Israeli-controlled border facility. The Israeli “processing” is an arduous and often demeaning affair, especially for Palestinians, and one must work around its limited weekend hours. Israel collects a punitive exit tax at the Palestine-Jordan crossing which it does not impose on the Tel Aviv airport (which Palestinians are forbidden from using).
+Bringing instruments and equipment through Israeli control of Palestine’s border is also problematic and expensive. Musical instruments are detained, refused entry, and sometimes damaged by the Israeli authorities. In our case, we were assisted by the French government: they provided a government vehicle that enjoys diplomatic immunity from search. With it, the PNO transported its timpani and basses between Jordan and the West Bank.
+After the first couple of security checks, I and two Palestinians were pulled aside for special screening, then released to the interminable wait at the holding facility with the rest of the orchestra. As time passed with our entrance to Palestine uncertain, musicians began unpacking their instruments and doodling. Soon we risked the first movement of the Haffner symphony from memory, and then turned to the Schumann ‘cello concerto with one part per section propped up on chairs. (Someone videoed part of this, and it can be found on Youtube.) Israeli officials approached and reacted with differing body language, some baffled, others annoyed or bemused, or even visible touched.
+Israeli control of the movement of Palestinian and foreign musicians, and the havoc wreaked by its military occupation, make reliable planning impossible. If this presents the PNO with daunting challenges and significantly higher expenses for a limited concert series close to home, it makes a more ambitious and international schedule for a Palestinian ensemble all but impossible.
+Viewed thus, calls one hears for the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions are nothing more than calls for simply fair play, for a host country to insist that no guest block another guest.
+And it is this that we, citizens of nations that empower the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, must face. The war against Palestinian culture is not the unfortunate side-effect of bureaucracy intended, if perhaps over-zealously, to “defend Israel”. That war is, rather, the explicit purpose of that bureaucracy. The occupation is much more than colonies and tanks, more than its blocking the return of displaced persons, more than its campaigns of expropriation and ethnic cleansing. It is even more than Israel’s core MO: that, like the Orwell novel written in the year of its founding, it must forever manufacture an ever-present external threat in order to justify its actions.
+The occupation is, most insidiously, the occupation of a people—the systematic destruction or theft of their history, culture, arts, and self-worth. And as with past regimes predicated on racial supremacy, it has maintained a theatre of integrity through a system of laws that is internally consistent.[4] There are checks and balances, precedent, courts, systems for redress, and all the other trappings of legal procedure, enabling the state to claim that theirs is a system based on justice and democracy.
+But the PNO is vivid proof that Israel’s efforts to define Palestinians will fail. My time with the PNO was musically and intellectually exhilarating, one of camaraderie and solidarity of purpose. The musicians are sophisticated, with wide interests and diverse experiences, all determined to work together to produce a Palestinian orchestra that would be at home on any concert stage the world over.
+Thanks to Tim Pottier for help clarifying details of bureaucracy and legal status.
+1. “Palestinian orchestra to hold debut concert in Ramallah,” BBC, 31 Dec 2010.
+2. Ben, Noam Zeev, “In Israel, Palestinian orchestra produces sounds of independence,” Haaretz. 14 Jan. 2011.
+3. There is no transparency to the laws of Israel’s siege, but on musical instruments see, e.g., Hass, Amira, “Israel bans books, music and clothes from entering Gaza,” Haaretz. 17 May 2009.
+4. For a good analysis of this, see Baker, Abeer and Matar, Anat (eds), Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel. Pluto Press. 2011.

mondoweiss/texts/1860.txt

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-Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical rightwing ministers’ agenda is to “empty the West Bank of Arabs.” And yet high Biden officials are meeting with Netanyahu today, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due out within a couple of weeks, all to give Biden’s blessing to the “unbreakable” bond between the two governments — and perform what the State Department admitted yesterday is “triage” on the complete failure of the two-state solution.
-
-The ethnic-cleansing agenda of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Police Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was discussed by Yossi Alpher, speaking to Americans for Peace Now this week. He said the two openly-racist politicians are awaiting the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the resumption of full Israeli administration of the occupied territories.
-
-“This, then, is where Netanyahu’s new far-right government comes fully into play: significant parts of it will argue in favor of annexing all or part of the West Bank without giving Palestinians equal rights. Israel would now officially be a bi-national non- democratic state. Under these circumstances, it is easy to imagine Bezalel Smotrich announcing, ostensibly to calm international, Arab and moderate Israeli sensibilities, that equal rights will be discussed after, say, a 20-year transition period–during which Israel will look for ways to empty the West Bank of Arabs. This is Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s agenda.”
-
-Netanyahu meets with Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in Israel, Jan. 19, 2023. Photo by Israeli government.
-
-Ben-Gvir is a “disciple” of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the militant Zionist who was banned from the Israeli parliament in 1985 for being openly racist. Kahane endorsed a policy of expelling Arabs (in this 1980 book, excerpted on Amazon): “Every day the Arabs of Israel move closer to becoming a majority. Are we [Israel] committed to national suicide? Should we allow demography, geography, and democracy to push Israel closer to the abyss?”
-
-Yehuda Shaul, an Israeli activist, yesterday gave a report on the coalition agreements between the governing parties showing that Netanyahu has agreed with the radical right to pour billions of shekels into roadbuilding in the West Bank so as to serve more illegal Jewish settlements and fragment Palestinian society. The plans includes building up Eviatar, a famous outpost deep in the West Bank stopped by an earlier government, and “suburbanizing” settlements in the Jordan Valley so that residents can easily drive to Tel Aviv.
-
-“Israel is paving the road for hundreds of thousands more illegal settlers,” Shaul says [emphasis mine]. “Will the international community do what it takes to uphold international law and push back against Israeli de facto annexation of the West Bank?”
-
-Yes what about the international community?
-
-Netanyahu is fully responsible for Ben-Gvir’s rise from a marginal figure to a leader of the third largest party because he could serve Netanyahu’s ambitions (says Dan Meridor).
-
-But Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met with Netanyahu today and covered the far-right government with legitimacy.
-
-The State Department was quizzed yesterday about why it is providing legitimacy to Netanyahu’s expansionism. Spokesperson Ned Price deplored the “cycle of violence” in the country, and cited 15 Palestinians killed since Jan. 1. But he then described the American role as “triage” so as to “de-escalate tensions” and preserve the two-state solution.
-
-Now, of course our longer-term approach continues to be support for a negotiated two-state solution, a negotiated two-state solution that will bring into existence what we ultimately hope to see: Israelis and Palestinians living side by side equally, enjoying equal measures of stability, of security, of democracy, of dignity, of prosperity as well. Now, of course, this is a moment in some ways of triage. Our end goal is one that is quite far off. We recognize that at the moment.
-
-Triage: So the hemorrhaging two-state solution must be kept alive. And who continues to die, no matter what treatment is applied? Palestinians.
-
-Price also said that he had seen Rashid Khalidi’s op-ed in the New York Times, published Jan. 17, denouncing a likely site for the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem because it includes confiscated Palestinian land. Price said the U.S. has not chosen the site and that “history” of land would be a factor in such decisions, but:
-
-Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. The last administration recognized that; this administration recognizes that.
-
-So Biden embraces Trump’s policy.
-
-In his op-ed Khalidi called on the U.S. to exert pressure against the new Netanyahu government, rather than “greenlight” the evictions of Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlers.
-
-To be clear, U.S. opposition to Israel’s settlement enterprise and expropriation of Palestinian land has never been more than rhetorical. For decades, Washington has bemoaned Israel’s behavior while remaining complicit in its colonization by providing the country with more than $3 billion in military aid every year, much of which is used to oppress Palestinians.
-
-Even a conservative Israel lobbyist is concerned about the Biden approach. Michael Koplow says now is the time to be denying Israel “political gifts.” Blinken should not go to Jerusalem.
-
-Blinken’s visit also sends a message coming so early in his new government’s tenure that the U.S. has no real concerns with its makeup or policy plans, and will undoubtedly be held up by Bezalel Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and others as proof that their radical approach will have no impact at all on U.S.-Israel relations… [Blinken’s visit] creates a perception that there is a seal of American approval—whether intentional or not—for the very policies over which the U.S. has already expressed concerns.
-
-Thanks to Matthew Taylor.
+A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.
+
+The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.
+When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.
+Photograph labelled “Arab demonstrations on Oct. 13 and 27, 1933. In Jerusalem and Jaffa. Return of Grand Mufti from India. Met by hundreds of cars at Gethsemane, Nov. 17, 1933.” Library of Congress, LC-M33- 4218.
+In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
+Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]
+Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.
+The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.
+The mufti of Jerusalem, Sayid Amin al Husseini, meets with Hitler, November 1941.
+Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.
+Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.
+And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.
+Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,
+it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.
+British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:
+We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.
+So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.
+A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”
+But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.
+The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]
+Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.
+Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.
+Note: According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.
+1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:
+Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.
+The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.
+2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic. For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine. At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)
+3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel [Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël [Investig’Action, 2019]
+Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]
+4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August, 1941
+Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.

mondoweiss/texts/1861.txt

@@ -1,41 +1,85 @@
-Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical rightwing ministers’ agenda is to “empty the West Bank of Arabs.” And yet high Biden officials are meeting with Netanyahu today, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due out within a couple of weeks, all to give Biden’s blessing to the “unbreakable” bond between the two governments — and perform what the State Department admitted yesterday is “triage” on the complete failure of the two-state solution.
+Israel’s war against Palestine is a graveyard of questions that died begging to be asked.
 
-The ethnic-cleansing agenda of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Police Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was discussed by Yossi Alpher, speaking to Americans for Peace Now this week. He said the two openly-racist politicians are awaiting the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the resumption of full Israeli administration of the occupied territories.
+A man carries an unexploded mine from the ruins of his house in northern Gaza. The mine is a US-made M15. By late 2009, twelve people, half of whom were children, were killed by UXOs after Cast Lead “ended”, and many more were wounded. (photo T Suarez)
 
-“This, then, is where Netanyahu’s new far-right government comes fully into play: significant parts of it will argue in favor of annexing all or part of the West Bank without giving Palestinians equal rights. Israel would now officially be a bi-national non- democratic state. Under these circumstances, it is easy to imagine Bezalel Smotrich announcing, ostensibly to calm international, Arab and moderate Israeli sensibilities, that equal rights will be discussed after, say, a 20-year transition period–during which Israel will look for ways to empty the West Bank of Arabs. This is Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s agenda.”
+The media report Israel’s actions accompanied by explanations that Israel itself supplies. The Palestinian family was thrown out of their home because they were not legal residents of East Jerusalem. The ambulance was bombed because it was transporting terrorists. Ten thousand Palestinians are in prison because they were militants planning attacks. The house was bulldozed because it was built without a permit. These lines satisfy a compliant media; no questions are asked.
 
-Netanyahu meets with Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in Israel, Jan. 19, 2023. Photo by Israeli government.
+For the fourteen months following its so-called Cast Lead attacks of Dec 27, 2008, to Jan 18, 2009, Israel steadfastly blocked UN bomb experts from neutralizing the huge stockpile of unexploded ordnance (UXO) it left behind in the Gaza Strip.
 
-Ben-Gvir is a “disciple” of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the militant Zionist who was banned from the Israeli parliament in 1985 for being openly racist. Kahane endorsed a policy of expelling Arabs (in this 1980 book, excerpted on Amazon): “Every day the Arabs of Israel move closer to becoming a majority. Are we [Israel] committed to national suicide? Should we allow demography, geography, and democracy to push Israel closer to the abyss?”
+Thus for fourteen months, Israel ensured that the ordnance, which constituted a vast cache of explosives, could be taken by Palestinian militant groups.
 
-Yehuda Shaul, an Israeli activist, yesterday gave a report on the coalition agreements between the governing parties showing that Netanyahu has agreed with the radical right to pour billions of shekels into roadbuilding in the West Bank so as to serve more illegal Jewish settlements and fragment Palestinian society. The plans includes building up Eviatar, a famous outpost deep in the West Bank stopped by an earlier government, and “suburbanizing” settlements in the Jordan Valley so that residents can easily drive to Tel Aviv.
+Why?
 
-“Israel is paving the road for hundreds of thousands more illegal settlers,” Shaul says [emphasis mine]. “Will the international community do what it takes to uphold international law and push back against Israeli de facto annexation of the West Bank?”
+After Israel formally ended Cast Lead, the United Nations Mine Action Service, along with the British organization Mines Advisory Group, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, began collecting the formidable arsenal of UXOs that Israel had left behind. Their task was urgent—the weapons had to be destroyed so that they could not harm civilians or be scavenged by militant groups.
 
-Yes what about the international community?
+But when the UN tried to bring the equipment it needed to dispose of the ordnance, Israel—though it has no legal jurisdiction in Gaza, and though it claims not to be occupying Gaza—stopped them.
 
-Netanyahu is fully responsible for Ben-Gvir’s rise from a marginal figure to a leader of the third largest party because he could serve Netanyahu’s ambitions (says Dan Meridor).
+The bomb experts managed to dispose of some white phosphorus shells by submerging them in water and covering them with sand.[1] However, the vast majority of the UXOs could not be destroyed until Israel stopped blocking the UN from bringing in its equipment.
 
-But Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, met with Netanyahu today and covered the far-right government with legitimacy.
+So the UXOs remained stockpiled, a danger to the nearby densely populated areas, and a temptation to militant groups. The munitions were of course guarded—but by the very same Gazan police force that Israel had specifically targeted during the first days of Cast Lead, claiming that they were not a civilian force, but Hamas’ police.
 
-The State Department was quizzed yesterday about why it is providing legitimacy to Netanyahu’s expansionism. Spokesperson Ned Price deplored the “cycle of violence” in the country, and cited 15 Palestinians killed since Jan. 1. But he then described the American role as “triage” so as to “de-escalate tensions” and preserve the two-state solution.
+The first news of Cast Lead ordnance getting into the hands of Israel’s adversaries came in early February, when Hamas publically displayed weapons it had collected, including unexploded one-ton bombs, half-ton bombs, 250-kilogram bombs, 30 mm bombs, several types of anti-tank missiles, illumination rounds, and the mines that Israel uses to blow up houses.[2]
 
-Now, of course our longer-term approach continues to be support for a negotiated two-state solution, a negotiated two-state solution that will bring into existence what we ultimately hope to see: Israelis and Palestinians living side by side equally, enjoying equal measures of stability, of security, of democracy, of dignity, of prosperity as well. Now, of course, this is a moment in some ways of triage. Our end goal is one that is quite far off. We recognize that at the moment.
+Yet Israel continued to block the UN from destroying the stockpiled UXOs.
 
-Triage: So the hemorrhaging two-state solution must be kept alive. And who continues to die, no matter what treatment is applied? Palestinians.
+After another couple of weeks of stonewalling—by now mid-February—Israel issued an extraordinary statement in response to relief workers’ protests. The statement read as follows:
 
-Price also said that he had seen Rashid Khalidi’s op-ed in the New York Times, published Jan. 17, denouncing a likely site for the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem because it includes confiscated Palestinian land. Price said the U.S. has not chosen the site and that “history” of land would be a factor in such decisions, but:
+“The conclusion that the IDF is not permitting the [UXO disposal] force’s entry lacks all factual basis since no response has been issued. The issue is being considered with a favorable eye and the IDF’s answer will be given within a few days.”[3]
 
-Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. The last administration recognized that; this administration recognizes that.
+Before “a few days” were even up, five tons of Cast Lead UXOs disappeared from the stockpile the UN was waiting to destroy, the inevitable result of Israel’s interference. Israel immediately blamed Hamas; but whether it was Hamas or another militant group, Israel spun the incident — accurately — as a blow to its security.
 
-So Biden embraces Trump’s policy.
+All that remains of a police station in Gaza, destroyed by Israel with “flechette” (dart) bombs to ensure maximum human casualty; everyone inside was killed. Survivors of the police force were then left to guard Gaza’s UXOs as Israel blocked their destruction. (photo T Suarez)
 
-In his op-ed Khalidi called on the U.S. to exert pressure against the new Netanyahu government, rather than “greenlight” the evictions of Palestinians to make way for Jewish settlers.
+The media seized on the story of Hamas “stealing” bombs but were mute about the circumstances. The New York Times reported simply that the ordnance had been “awaiting safe disposal by a team working with the United Nations.”[4] The reader was led to believe that the UN team simply hadn’t gotten around to it.
 
-To be clear, U.S. opposition to Israel’s settlement enterprise and expropriation of Palestinian land has never been more than rhetorical. For decades, Washington has bemoaned Israel’s behavior while remaining complicit in its colonization by providing the country with more than $3 billion in military aid every year, much of which is used to oppress Palestinians.
+The few media that made any mention of why the UXOs were not being destroyed, did so with remarkable credulity. Haaretz reported that the UN team’s “work is being held up because Israel has not approved the entry of its equipment nor an area for storing and neutralizing ordnance.”[5] The BBC said that “the UN staff had been waiting for the Israeli army to allow them to bring specialist equipment [and] were also waiting for permission from the Israeli military to use two safe areas to dispose of the munitions.”[6] No media expressed the slightest curiosity about these strange statements and the questions they beg.
 
-Even a conservative Israel lobbyist is concerned about the Biden approach. Michael Koplow says now is the time to be denying Israel “political gifts.” Blinken should not go to Jerusalem.
+Even after these five tons of stockpiled bombs ended up in the hands of its sworn enemies, Israel still refused to allow the UN to deactivate the remaining UXOs. In late May 2009—three months after the IDF’s “no response has been issued” statement, and under continuing pressure from the UN—Israel consented “in principle” to stop blocking the UN, but only “in principle.”[7]
 
-Blinken’s visit also sends a message coming so early in his new government’s tenure that the U.S. has no real concerns with its makeup or policy plans, and will undoubtedly be held up by Bezalel Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and others as proof that their radical approach will have no impact at all on U.S.-Israel relations… [Blinken’s visit] creates a perception that there is a seal of American approval—whether intentional or not—for the very policies over which the U.S. has already expressed concerns.
+A UN Mine Action Service expert who was involved with the situation in the Gaza Strip at the time told me, with an air of bewilderment, that Israel continually presented its obstruction of their work as “bureaucratic… needing permission from senior rank, etc.” But as for getting an explanation of the delays from the relevant Israeli agencies, the “chances of getting a reply,” the officer told me, “are about as likely as the election of Khaled Meshal as Israeli prime minister”[8] — precisely zero.
 
-Thanks to Matthew Taylor.
+A US Hellfire Systems (Boeing/Lockheed Martin) AGM 114C, air-to-surface missile used by Israel against Gaza during Cast Lead. The name “Hellfire” comes from “helicopter fire-and-forget”. (photo T Suarez)
+
+Not until ten more months passed, on March 10, 2010, did Israel finally “allow” the bomb experts to bring in their equipment into the Gaza Strip and begin the destruction of the remaining Cast Lead ordnance. This was one year and two months after Cast Lead ended.
+
+Israel’s professed reason for its siege of Gaza is to keep weapons-making materials out. Israel bombs Gaza’s borders and shells its coast, routinely fires on Gazan farmers and fishermen, and pirates international aid ships, with the mere claim that its blockade is being penetrated.
+
+What ostensibly is Israel’s worst nightmare began the moment Cast Lead ended—a vast stockpile of explosives inside the Gaza Strip, guarded by agents of Hamas. But Israel’s reaction to this was fourteen months of “bureaucracy” that blocked the weapons’ destruction.
+
+At best, Israel was unconcerned by the presence of a vast stockpile of explosives inside the Gaza Strip that might be repackaged and sent over the Green Line.
+
+A child walks through the rubble of his home after Cast Lead. (photo T Suarez)
+
+Yet “unconcerned” is a generous interpretation. Israel not only failed to act to eliminate this threat to its security but actively prevented its elimination. Israel deliberately ensured that militant groups could obtain weapons materials.
+
+It is interesting to point out that in mid-September 2010, Israel began reporting a new phenomenon: white phosphorous shells fired into southern Israel from Gaza.[9] The media reported this, of course—but not the militants’ likely source for these shells.
+
+Whether one condemns militants’ rockets as terrorism, dismisses them as politically stupid, or justifies them as self-defense, is irrelevant to the issue. Israeli historians familiar with Zionist records have documented how Israel, historically, has provoked attacks to justify retaliation (“defense”).[10] The Western media rarely report Israeli attacks against Palestine, only the Palestinian response.
+
+However obvious it may seem that maintaining an external threat remains Israel’s modus operandi, it is difficult to prove. One must show not only that Israel’s actions work counter to its security, but that the very purpose of its actions is to do so.
+
+And that is the significance of its interference with the disposal of the UXOs: Israel knew full well that the result of its actions would be the continuation of the very attacks it used to justify Cast Lead.
+
+Israel must be challenged to explain why it blocked the destruction of ordnance in Hamas-controlled Gaza for over a year. If the media investigated this and myriad other unasked questions, critically and independently, the Israel-Palestine debacle would begin to look quite different to the Western public — the people upon whose acquiescence Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine depends.
+
+Thanks to Nancy Elan for her assistance. Photo credit, Tom Suarez.
+
+1. “Gaza mine-clearing teams waiting for Israeli okay,” Haaretz, 17 February 2009.
+
+2. Landmine Monitor Report 2009, Palestine. Also Amira Hass, “Gazans set up makeshift exhibit of Israeli weapons used in Cast Lead,” in Haaretz, 4 February 2009
+
+3. ibid.
+
+4. “American Lawmakers Visit Gaza,” NY Times, 18 February, 2009.
+
+5. “Gaza mine-clearing teams waiting for Israeli okay,” Haartetz, 17 February 2009.
+
+6. “Explosives haul missing in Gaza,” BBC News, 17 February 2009.
+
+7. Elena Rice [U.N. Mine Action Service] “The Rapid Response to Operation Cast Lead,” in The Journal of ERW and Mine Action, Winter, 2009.
+
+8. Email correspondence between a United Nations Mine Action Service Officer and the author, March 2010. The Israeli agencies the UN team was dealing with were COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) and CLA (Coordination and Liaison Administration). Khaled Meshal is the major Hamas figure, best known for the bungled, stranger-than-fiction assassination attempt against him by Mossad in 1997.
+
+9. “Terrorists fired 2 phosphorus shells into Israel,” in Jerusalem Post, 15 September, 2010.
+
+10. For example, Ilan Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p51-52 [Oneworld, 2006]; and Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land [University of Michigan Press, 2009].

mondoweiss/texts/1862.txt

@@ -1,29 +1,21 @@
-Last week The White House announced that President Joe Biden would nominate former US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as his ambassador to Israel. The move is already being criticized by Republicans over Lew’s involvement in the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran deal.
+In order to be taken seriously in U.S. Establishment discourse, you must swear that you believe in two states existing side-by-side. This proposition (which has been held out to the stateless Palestinians for many decades now in one form or another without any consequence but further dispossession) today involves a Palestinian capital in the village of Abu Dis, which is just east of Israel’s expanded Jerusalem border.
 
-Before Lew, who also served as former President Obama’s Chief of Staff from 2012-2013, was even officially nominated to replace outgoing Israel Ambassador Tom Nides, GOP congressional members began questioning his qualifications. On August 31 Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Max Miller (R-OH), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Doug Lamborn (R-CO),  Christopher Smith (R-NJ), Carol Miller (R-WV), and Kat Cammack (R-FL) sent Biden a letter expressing “serious concern” over media reports that Lew might be picked.
+I’ve never been to Abu Dis, but lately, I was reading Tom Suarez’s striking book of essays and photos of Palestine, Palestine Sixty Years Later, when I came across the photo above of the Dome of the Rock as viewed from the village of Abu Dis. The whole reason for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem is the connection to this holy site and the Old City, which means not only the religious connection but the commercial/tourist benefits. What kind of connection exists between Abu Dis and the Old City far beyond the separation wall?
 
-“At a time when we should work on strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship, this nomination has the potential to strain relations with our strongest ally and the only democracy in the Middle East,” it reads. “We strongly urge you to ensure that any nominee to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel can and will improve relations between our two countries.”
+Suarez sent me two other photographs of Abu Dis from his book, and I asked him what he thinks of the idea of Abu Dis as a capital. – Phil Weiss
 
-In addition to Lew’s involvement in the Iran nuclear deal, the lawmakers also cite Lew’s past criticisms of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration’s decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements. “Especially now, on the 75th anniversary of diplomatic ties between our two great democracies, it would be reckless and irresponsible to move forward with any nomination that could deteriorate relations between the U.S. and Israel,” concludes the letter.
+When in 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, the West raced to Kuwait’s defense and punished the Iraqi people with crippling sanctions for their leader’s aggression. But in response to Israel’s equally illegal and more brutal 1967 invasion and occupation of East Jerusalem, the West amplified its policy of rewarding Israel, punishing the Palestinians, and blocking any attempt to hold Israel to UN Resolutions and international law.
 
-A number of Republicans have echoed these sentiments since the nomination was made official.
+The Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Dis. (Photo: T. Suarez)
 
-A spokesperson for Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Jewish Insider that he “has enormous concerns with the Biden administration’s campaign against our Israeli allies” and will “evaluate the nomination on that basis.”
+Although East Jerusalem is no more part of Israel than is Paris or Tahiti, in 1980 Israel “annexed” East Jerusalem and claimed an “undivided” Jerusalem as the country’s capital. The UN responded by reaffirming that East Jerusalem is illegally occupied Palestinian territory and that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital. Israel simply defied international law, as it has done with every UN resolution addressing the Palestinian issue since 1948.
 
-Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) told the website that he opposes a quick confirmation process for nominees without “some changes with regard to policy with..Israel.”
+The Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Dis. (Photo: T. Suarez)
 
-In a Jewish News Syndicate op-ed GOP fundraiser Eric Levine writes that, “The Obama administration’s anti-Israel record is well known. There is no better example of this hostility than the JCPOA (the 2015 Iran nuclear deal). Lew’s support for it and his hostility towards Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are, on their own, entirely sufficient reasons to reject his nomination.”
+But Palestinians have long envisioned East Jerusalem as the capital of their as yet unrealized nation, and so Israel had to dampen the appearance that their illegal seizure of East Jerusalem was an impediment to peace. The answer was to propose a nearby West Bank village as the future capital of a Palestinian state. At the same time, Israel strangled that very same village by dissecting it into two with the apartheid Wall, annexing the area on the west of the wall into its illegal “greater Jerusalem,” and suffocating what was left with ever-growing Israeli settlements. Thus Israel is not only accelerating its ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem but also crippling the very town it claims should be the capital of the Palestinian state it never allows existing. Welcome to Abu Dis.
 
-This isn’t the first time Lew has faced hostility from hardline Israel supporters. While serving as Treasury Secretary in 2015 he addressed the annual Jerusalem Post Conference New York City, where he was greeted by booing and heckling. “No administration has done more for Israel’s security than this one,” he told the crowd to no avail.
+The Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Dis. (Photo: T. Suarez)
 
-“It was one of the surliest receptions ever accorded to such a high-ranking administration official by a Jewish audience in the United States,” reported Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev.
+The apartheid Wall severed Abu Dis’s historic link with Jerusalem and crippled much of the little economic life that had thus far survived the Occupation. Not only was the social fiber of the village torn in two, but indeed families were broken up, family members permanently separated by the Wall. In some cases even fathers and mothers were torn apart, their ID cards placing them on opposite sides of the Wall. Shepherds and their flocks were completely cut off from their grazing land, farmers from their fields. Further exacerbating the population squeeze, Bedouins whose villages Israel had razed in the Jordan Valley were brought to Abu Dis and left there.
 
-As Phil Weiss noted on this site at the time, “Lew never mentioned Palestine, ‘Palestinians, occupation, settlements, or even the two-state solution in his speech yesterday and still he got booed and heckled.”
-
-Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen congratulated Lew on the nomination, calling him “a true friend of Israel.” The move has also been praised by pro-Israel Democrats, including Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer who said he was “precisely the person for the job of ambassador to Israel we need.”
-
-The liberal pro-Israel group J Street put out a statement saying they were “personally thrilled” by Biden’s choice. “During his nomination hearing and once confirmed, we look forward to hearing from Secretary Lew about the steps the United States can take to meet this consequential moment in Israel’s history, and to create a more just, equitable and peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians,” it reads.
-
-“I have had the privilege of calling Jack a friend for many years. His integrity, dedication, and wisdom have always been evident, and I have no doubt that he will bring those same qualities to his role as ambassador,” said Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) President and CEO Mark Mellman.
-
-“Israel is a vital ally and partner to the United States, and the relationship between our two countries is of paramount importance,” he continued. “The secretary’s nomination is a testament to the Biden Administration’s deep commitment to strengthening this bond.”
+Palestinian leaders — including Abbas, who commonly rubber-stamps whatever the West dictates — have refused to accept Abu Dis as a future capital.

mondoweiss/texts/1863.txt

@@ -1,57 +1,5 @@
-U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is scheduled to travel this weekend to Saudi Arabia and Israel. The trip is the latest attempt by U. S. President Joe Biden’s administration to patch up its tattered Middle East policy, while Israel and its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continue the gradual uptick of their assault on the civilian population of Gaza.
-
-Sullivan will be primarily striving to prop up the plan that has become a farcical cornerstone of Biden’s policy: a normalization deal between the Saudis and Israel that he has convinced himself will somehow revive the long-since desiccated corpse of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. The strategy, if one can call it that, has taken on renewed importance as the November election looms and Biden flails about desperately trying to salvage a foreign policy win.
-
-In Israel, Sullivan’s task is straightforward. Netanyahu has agreed not to escalate his assault in Rafah before Sullivan’s trip. While Netanyahu is hardly a man of his word, he has no reason to break his promise here. Sullivan will reinforce Biden’s desire to keep the slaughter in Rafah to the steady pace Israel has been going at so far. As I’ve noted, this works well for Netanyahu, and allows Biden to claim he is putting some restraint on Netanyahu’s excesses, but does little but stretch out the same amount of destruction and of Palestinian deaths and injuries over a slightly longer period of time.
-
-Sullivan also hopes to bring an update to Netanyahu about a proposal for Israeli-Saudi normalization, an agreement that is likely impossible without an end to the Gaza genocide and some show by Netanyahu that Israel is willing to revive the idea of a Palestinian state.
-
-The normalization fantasy
-
-The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, or MBS as he’s known, is not seen as a serious supporter of the Palestinian cause, but most Saudi citizens are, and many in the royal family consider it at least an important responsibility in terms of their image in the Arab and Muslim world. Whatever temptations MBS might feel to simply abandon the Palestinians and make whatever deal he sees fit is constrained by those facts and by the position Saudi Arabia has and wishes to hold as a leader of the Arab and Muslim world.
-
-Since Netanyahu’s political future depends on both maintaining the genocidal operation in Gaza and ensuring that Palestinians never recognize their basic rights, MBS is well aware that a normalization deal is unlikely for now. He has time, however, and the prize—a defense agreement with the U.S. sealed by a treaty and American help in putting together a civilian nuclear program—is so great, he is willing to pursue it.
-
-The passion with which Biden has pursued this quixotic goal has kept the process alive and caused some alarm in some Washington quarters. It’s been a particular concern because the Saudis have recently tried to devise a path where they can get the package they want without Israel and Palestine being a part of it.
-
-That idea is a clear non-starter. The Saudis already have defense agreements with the U.S. What they want is an upgrade to the status of a treaty, a deal that prevents a recurrence of Donald Trump’s failure to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense in 2019, when their oil facilities were attacked by Ansar Allah (the Houthis) from Yemen.
-
-That means a treaty, which would require Senate approval, and that is out of the question without the Israel component. Even then, many Democrats are extremely skeptical of a Saudi deal, and with good reason. Biden’s obsession with this agreement is extremely dangerous, and a defense pact with Saudi Arabia is just terrible policy, even purely from a security point of view.
-
-Saudi aggression in the Mideast should be a major concern for Biden, though it appears not to be. Saudi Arabia’s shadow is long in the region, with the kingdom supporting militias and fighters in areas which could, at some point, lead to wider conflicts. That includes not only its high-profile involvement in Yemen and Syria, but also in Libya and Sudan, with ever-simmering tensions with Iran and an unsteady relationship with Türkiye thrown into the mix. They have even come into friction with their Gulf partners in the United Arab Emirates in recent years. A stronger defense pact with the United States would increase the risk of U.S. involvement in those conflicts, which has been proven repeatedly to end badly for everyone.
-
-A domestic nuclear program for Saudi Arabia, even a civilian one, has severe implications for the future of a region already badly de-stabilized by decades of foreign intervention and internal authoritarianism and corruption. As with virtually every lesson of history, Biden and his team have utterly failed to learn from the experience of the United States having almost single-handedly built Iran’s nuclear program, only to then wail to the heavens that now the Islamic Republic might use it for military means. Even aside from that worrisome possibility, a Saudi nuclear program will only enhance Iran’s motivation to escalate its own nuclear capabilities.
-
-A U.S.-Saudi defense pact and nuclear cooperation is simply terrible policy, born out of narrow-minded, militaristic thinking. It is a simplistic “Iran is bad, and must be countered by force, whatever the risks” line of thinking. Biden’s basic hatred of diplomacy, ironically shared by his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, means that this is the only strategy available to his mind, regardless of how destabilizing it will be for the region and how badly it will undermine U.S. security and other interests.
-
-But the Senate does not seem poised to grant Biden his wish. Democrats share many of the concerns I’ve listed and Republicans, who won’t be inclined to give Biden a win, would only come on board if it were clear that a deal was what Netanyahu wanted. That seems impossible, as even in a best-case scenario for Biden, Netanyahu would have to be dragged into it, overwhelmed with carrots and probably pressured with at least some minor sticks.
-
-Biden’s obsession with normalization is only likely to grow between now and November. Donald Trump is certain to point to the fact that he brokered normalization deals between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, and Biden has tried to expand those deals and found himself incapable of accomplishing it. That’s a point that is likely to play well to undecided voters, and Trump—who, for all his insanity and narcissism, reads his audience far better than Biden does—will recognize that. Biden’s advisors probably know it, too, and that is feeding into this blind determination to pursue this awful policy.
-
-Yoav Gallant and the future of Gaza
-
-Biden would certainly like to see the Gaza operation end. He clearly did not anticipate it going on for this long, and has been thoroughly unprepared for the political problems it is causing him (the loss of Palestinian life, as he, Blinken, and most of the rest of his close advisers have repeatedly made clear, means absolutely nothing to him).
-
-But for all the mass slaughter in Gaza, it has been mostly civilians and civilian infrastructure that Israel has hit. Hamas, which has obviously suffered great losses, is still quite capable of functioning, even after all this time. Neither Netanyahu nor Biden want to deal with the reality that Israeli forces are continuing to face fierce fighting even in the northern and central parts of Gaza, where Israel claimed Hamas had been eradicated.
-
-Obviously, if Hamas is still capable of fighting, Netanyahu cannot afford to stop the onslaught. It would lay bare the reality that this entire genocide has not only destroyed Israel’s image and standing around the world, but it has utterly failed even on Israel’s own terms. Its operations have killed far more of the hostages than it has saved, and it has devastated civilians while leaving Hamas standing.
-
-As much as Netanyahu cannot afford that outcome, although at this point it is already a fait accompli neither can Biden. But Biden needs something Netanyahu does not care much about: a path forward in Gaza post-genocide.
-
-While that does not concern Netanyahu, there are those in his government who are very much concerned with this question. It is no coincidence that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant chose this time, just days before Sullivan’s arrival to declare that he will refuse to help Netanyahu reoccupy Gaza.
-
-“I will not agree to the establishment of Israeli military rule in Gaza. Israel must not establish civilian rule in Gaza,” Gallant said.
-
-This is, of course, the U.S. view as well. There has been much hand-wringing over the day after in Gaza, but there are few real options. The Palestinian Authority will have a task far beyond its capabilities if it tries to take over the running of Gaza. It will simply have no chance of keeping control over the various militant factions in the Strip, including Hamas. The PA would need enormous assistance from the U.S. and Israel just to maintain some semblance of control.
-
-The PA would not be capable of replicating what it does in the West Bank in Gaza. The militant factions are more powerful in Gaza, and much more deeply connected. Fatah doesn’t have nearly the presence or infrastructure in Gaza, even before the complete destruction of the Strip since October 7. And the PA has little legitimacy among Palestinians in general. It’s one thing to cling to power in a place where you already run the administrative bureaucracy and have networks set up. It’s quite another to have such small respect and try to establish those networks of support in a war-torn area.
-
-Another idea that’s been floated about is a sort of international assemblage that would “temporarily” govern Gaza. The problem there is that no one wants to be part of it, and with good reason. The task is fraught with problems. Any country, including and perhaps especially, Arab countries, that takes on such a role will be seen, correctly, as working with Israel and the United States to stifle Palestinian aspirations.
-
-Moreover, the U.S. and Israel will see the role of whoever is governing Gaza primarily through the lens of “security,” and will insist that the first task is to ensure that militant groups, Hamas or otherwise, be hunted down. That would be prioritized far above reconstruction of the Strip and rebuilding the Gaza economy. In other words, they would essentially be treated like the PA. There is no good reason for other countries to do that.
-
-Israel has, in the past, floated the idea of selecting Palestinians not tied to either Hamas or Fatah to run Gaza. But, again, they are likely to find this exceedingly difficult. The idea of gathering disparate individuals from all over Gaza and expecting them to form even the most technocratic, but still cohesive, unit is folly. Plus, Israel would certainly be talking about Palestinians who could be bribed or extorted into serving the occupation rather than opposing it. That is obviously not a recipe for stability, much less for healing the people and rebuilding the infrastructure of Gaza.
-
-All of this, of course, is based on a single principle: that Palestinians never be allowed freedom or self-governance, much less self-determination. Reparations in the form of funds, equipment, and any other assistance Palestinians should request, and the very self-governance that Israel and the U.S. so passionately oppose is the only practical way forward, but this will not even be thought of in Washington or Israel.
-
-Instead, Sullivan will be debating Netanyahu, who will argue for indefinite Israeli control of Gaza. It’s just more of the same delusional discussion that undergirds Biden’s strategy for normalization. There is no chance normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia will solve or even mildly mitigate the problem. Nor will changing the form of colonial governance in Gaza. Recognition of Palestinian rights is the only way forward, but that is simply not something Joe Biden is capable of considering.
+It’s probably a good sign that Israel’s apologists are increasingly resorting to a sideways defense: What’s with you and Israel? I don’t hear you complaining about China or Syria or North Korea. Implicit in this mantra is an admission that any coherent defense of Israel is in short supply—the only “defense” left is to question why this particular bully is targeted from among the various nefarious bullies on the block. It’s a desperate line that is wielded effectively only because of its insinuation of some dark motive, innuendos that the other bullies cannot exploit. I’ve been doused with it by people as diverse as security agents at Ben Gurion airport to the music critic Norman Lebrecht.
+Its absurdity is self-evident. If injustice can be shielded on the grounds that there is other injustice, everyone is silenced. We would disparage those fighting China’s savagery in Tibet on the grounds that they are not active against Sudan’s repression of its lgbt citizens. Those who struggled against Indonesian/US atrocities in East Timor would have been mocked because they were not active in the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa. At best, only criticism of the single worst injustice (according to whatever chosen criteria) could be permitted: all others simply need point downward.
+Freed of this hasbara linkage, the question of why is, of course, important. Why do so many in the United States consider Israel to be very much our concern and responsibility, above and beyond other issues? Bluntly, it is our injustice. We are the ones doing it, and thus it is we with the power and the responsibility to stop it. Far more than any other bully on the block, Israel is directly armed, empowered, shielded, and bankrolled by us, by our tax dollars, by our votes, our strong-arming, our failure to act.
+Our own self-defense is another reason: we are among our own victims. Our complicity with Israel has corrupted our domestic politics, robbed the public till, and squandered our moral integrity. It has made a mockery of our nation and the ideals we profess to symbolize.
+Just as our democracy makes us responsible for what is done in our name, so is democracy is a reason why Israel is a particularly justified target for boycott. Unlike China or Syria or North Korea, Israelis elect those who run their country, as well as dictate the lives of four million Palestinians who cannot vote in its elections. The Chinese public has no control over Beijing’s atrocities in Tibet; the Israeli public votes for those who continue six and a half decades of ethnic cleansing. One may well still argue for boycott against China and other belligerent nations, and as with the case against Israel, such arguments will stand independently on their own merits, not on whether every activist can address every issue. It’s time to expose the ‘What about’ it for what it is—a cynical attempt to keep eyes from noticing that the Emperor has no clothes.

mondoweiss/texts/1864.txt

@@ -1,59 +1,85 @@
-The big news on our issue in Washington is that Benjamin Netanyahu is gone, and Joe Biden and the Israel lobby are celebrating. Yair Lapid, the foreign minister and alt-PM in the new Naftali Bennett government, came to Washington this week and was treated like a rock star by the lobby. Here at last is an attractive Israeli leader who is media-genic and loves Democrats.
+Israel’s war against Palestine is a graveyard of questions that died begging to be asked.
 
-And who is effectively as rightwing as Netanyahu: Lapid had nothing to say about Palestinians except some lukewarm comments about them having a “better life.” He devoted his comments to the threat Iran supposedly poses to Israel, likening it to Nazi Germany, and praised Israel’s normalization with Arab monarchies. Just as Prime Minister Bennett ignored Palestinians entirely in his recent speech to the U.N.
+A man carries an unexploded mine from the ruins of his house in northern Gaza. The mine is a US-made M15. By late 2009, twelve people, half of whom were children, were killed by UXOs after Cast Lead “ended”, and many more were wounded. (photo T Suarez)
 
-The pity is that American leaders go along with this charade. Secretary of State Tony Blinken amped up his anti-Iran rhetoric for Lapid’s benefit, pleasing Israelis by saying that the “runway” back to the Iran deal is getting shorter all the time.
+The media report Israel’s actions accompanied by explanations that Israel itself supplies. The Palestinian family was thrown out of their home because they were not legal residents of East Jerusalem. The ambulance was bombed because it was transporting terrorists. Ten thousand Palestinians are in prison because they were militants planning attacks. The house was bulldozed because it was built without a permit. These lines satisfy a compliant media; no questions are asked.
 
-With every passing day and Iran’s refusal to engage in good faith, the runway gets short.
+For the fourteen months following its so-called Cast Lead attacks of Dec 27, 2008, to Jan 18, 2009, Israel steadfastly blocked UN bomb experts from neutralizing the huge stockpile of unexploded ordnance (UXO) it left behind in the Gaza Strip.
 
-Blinken and Lapid offered empty statements about the Palestinian future. Blinken mentioned “the importance” of “finding a two-state solution” and Lapid said Palestinians deserve a “decent life.” But there is nothing concrete here (even though the U.S. recommitted to reopening the consulate Jerusalem).
+Thus for fourteen months, Israel ensured that the ordnance, which constituted a vast cache of explosives, could be taken by Palestinian militant groups.
 
-In rhetoric straight out of the Netanyahu playbook, Lapid cited Blinken’s father’s Holocaust background to justify an attack on Iran:
+Why?
 
-Secretary of State Blinken and I are sons of Holocaust survivors.  We know there are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil.  If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act.  We must make clear that the civilized world won’t allow it.  If the Iranians don’t believe the world is serious about stopping them, they’ll race to the bomb.
+After Israel formally ended Cast Lead, the United Nations Mine Action Service, along with the British organization Mines Advisory Group, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, began collecting the formidable arsenal of UXOs that Israel had left behind. Their task was urgent—the weapons had to be destroyed so that they could not harm civilians or be scavenged by militant groups.
 
-(Blinken of course emphasized the same background when he appeared at Congressional hearings seeking the job of Secretary of State.)
+But when the UN tried to bring the equipment it needed to dispose of the ordnance, Israel—though it has no legal jurisdiction in Gaza, and though it claims not to be occupying Gaza—stopped them.
 
-VP Kamala Harris was also vague and empty about the Palestinian future after her meeting with Lapid Tuesday:
+The bomb experts managed to dispose of some white phosphorus shells by submerging them in water and covering them with sand.[1] However, the vast majority of the UXOs could not be destroyed until Israel stopped blocking the UN from bringing in its equipment.
 
-Vice President Harris reaffirmed the United States’ strong support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, and our unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.  The two leaders also discussed the importance of advancing peace, security, and prosperity for Palestinians and Israelis, in particular the need to improve living conditions and ensure calm in Gaza.
+So the UXOs remained stockpiled, a danger to the nearby densely populated areas, and a temptation to militant groups. The munitions were of course guarded—but by the very same Gazan police force that Israel had specifically targeted during the first days of Cast Lead, claiming that they were not a civilian force, but Hamas’ police.
 
-While Lapid embraced Harris as one of Israel’s best friends in Washington/
+The first news of Cast Lead ordnance getting into the hands of Israel’s adversaries came in early February, when Hamas publically displayed weapons it had collected, including unexploded one-ton bombs, half-ton bombs, 250-kilogram bombs, 30 mm bombs, several types of anti-tank missiles, illumination rounds, and the mines that Israel uses to blow up houses.[2]
 
-Lapid met with Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and this readout also offered nothing substantive about Palestinians.
+Yet Israel continued to block the UN from destroying the stockpiled UXOs.
 
-Mr. Sullivan emphasized the importance of practical steps to improve the lives of the Palestinians.
+After another couple of weeks of stonewalling—by now mid-February—Israel issued an extraordinary statement in response to relief workers’ protests. The statement read as follows:
 
-The meeting with Nancy Pelosi October 12 was even worse. Pelosi said not a word about Palestinians. Pelosi seemed enthused by the get-together. She published a video of the two leaders’ appearance before the press and said Israel support was in her “DNA” and in the U.S. “national interest”.  She heralded the bipartisanship of the issue.
+“The conclusion that the IDF is not permitting the [UXO disposal] force’s entry lacks all factual basis since no response has been issued. The issue is being considered with a favorable eye and the IDF’s answer will be given within a few days.”[3]
 
-“On any occasion… it is a privilege to talk about the importance of the U.S. Israel bond… It is one that is based on our mutual security, it is based on our mutual values. And it is again something that is the source of pride to all of us in the Congress who work on this. Support for Israel has always been bipartisan in the Congress of the United States and it continues to be so.”
+Before “a few days” were even up, five tons of Cast Lead UXOs disappeared from the stockpile the UN was waiting to destroy, the inevitable result of Israel’s interference. Israel immediately blamed Hamas; but whether it was Hamas or another militant group, Israel spun the incident — accurately — as a blow to its security.
 
-Well not every Democrat loves Israel: eight Dems voted against giving Israel another $1 billion two weeks ago.
+All that remains of a police station in Gaza, destroyed by Israel with “flechette” (dart) bombs to ensure maximum human casualty; everyone inside was killed. Survivors of the police force were then left to guard Gaza’s UXOs as Israel blocked their destruction. (photo T Suarez)
 
-But this is very much what Pelosi told an Israel lobby group a couple years back, the Capitol would crumble and fall before the Congress stopped supporting Israel.
+The media seized on the story of Hamas “stealing” bombs but were mute about the circumstances. The New York Times reported simply that the ordnance had been “awaiting safe disposal by a team working with the United Nations.”[4] The reader was led to believe that the UN team simply hadn’t gotten around to it.
 
-And Lapid picked up the theme: “Being pro-Israel is being bipartisan.”
+The few media that made any mention of why the UXOs were not being destroyed, did so with remarkable credulity. Haaretz reported that the UN team’s “work is being held up because Israel has not approved the entry of its equipment nor an area for storing and neutralizing ordnance.”[5] The BBC said that “the UN staff had been waiting for the Israeli army to allow them to bring specialist equipment [and] were also waiting for permission from the Israeli military to use two safe areas to dispose of the munitions.”[6] No media expressed the slightest curiosity about these strange statements and the questions they beg.
 
-That bipartisanship is obviously what Netanyahu and Trump eroded by undertaking extreme and provocative measures. Though Lapid is in no way altering Netanyahu’s policy, of doing all Israel can to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.
+Even after these five tons of stockpiled bombs ended up in the hands of its sworn enemies, Israel still refused to allow the UN to deactivate the remaining UXOs. In late May 2009—three months after the IDF’s “no response has been issued” statement, and under continuing pressure from the UN—Israel consented “in principle” to stop blocking the UN, but only “in principle.”[7]
 
-Lapid gave this lame lip service to Palestinians with Pelosi.
+A UN Mine Action Service expert who was involved with the situation in the Gaza Strip at the time told me, with an air of bewilderment, that Israel continually presented its obstruction of their work as “bureaucratic… needing permission from senior rank, etc.” But as for getting an explanation of the delays from the relevant Israeli agencies, the “chances of getting a reply,” the officer told me, “are about as likely as the election of Khaled Meshal as Israeli prime minister”[8] — precisely zero.
 
-“And the Palestinians deserve a better life.”
+A US Hellfire Systems (Boeing/Lockheed Martin) AGM 114C, air-to-surface missile used by Israel against Gaza during Cast Lead. The name “Hellfire” comes from “helicopter fire-and-forget”. (photo T Suarez)
 
-Lapid also met with the rightwing Democratic Party Israel lobby group — Democratic Majority for Israel — and said, “Israel is grateful for the support of all its friends in both parties.” Democratic Majority was over the moon to get the meeting:
+Not until ten more months passed, on March 10, 2010, did Israel finally “allow” the bomb experts to bring in their equipment into the Gaza Strip and begin the destruction of the remaining Cast Lead ordnance. This was one year and two months after Cast Lead ended.
 
-Thank you, Minister Lapid, for recognizing the importance of our work. We are also deeply grateful for all of your efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance.
+Israel’s professed reason for its siege of Gaza is to keep weapons-making materials out. Israel bombs Gaza’s borders and shells its coast, routinely fires on Gazan farmers and fishermen, and pirates international aid ships, with the mere claim that its blockade is being penetrated.
 
-Democratic Majority also issued a “thrilled” statement that made no reference to Palestinians but leaned hard on the new accords between Israel and Arab neighbors which of course was a theme of the Blinken and Pelosi and Harris meetings as well.
+What ostensibly is Israel’s worst nightmare began the moment Cast Lead ended—a vast stockpile of explosives inside the Gaza Strip, guarded by agents of Hamas. But Israel’s reaction to this was fourteen months of “bureaucracy” that blocked the weapons’ destruction.
 
-Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid meets with Tom Cotton, Washington, Oct. 13, 2021. From Lapid’s twitter feed.
+At best, Israel was unconcerned by the presence of a vast stockpile of explosives inside the Gaza Strip that might be repackaged and sent over the Green Line.
 
-In the bipartisan rightwing spirit, Lapid met with the leading hawk in the Senate, Tom Cotton (who was elevated to the Senate with $1 million in support of the Emergency Committee for Israel):
+A child walks through the rubble of his home after Cast Lead. (photo T Suarez)
 
-Great to see @SenTomCotton again today. We discussed the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and malign activities in the region. Israel is grateful for your leadership and commitment to strengthening the alliance between our two countries.
+Yet “unconcerned” is a generous interpretation. Israel not only failed to act to eliminate this threat to its security but actively prevented its elimination. Israel deliberately ensured that militant groups could obtain weapons materials.
 
-In that same bipartisan rightwing spirit, Lapid met with Ted Deutch, the Democratic congressman and hack for Israel who smeared Rashida Tlaib as an antisemite on the floor of the House because she dared to say that Human Rights Watch says Israel is an apartheid state when she voted against giving Israel another $1 billion.
+It is interesting to point out that in mid-September 2010, Israel began reporting a new phenomenon: white phosphorous shells fired into southern Israel from Gaza.[9] The media reported this, of course—but not the militants’ likely source for these shells.
 
-Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid meets with Ted Deutch, Washington, Oct. 13, 2021. From Lapid’s twitter feed.
+Whether one condemns militants’ rockets as terrorism, dismisses them as politically stupid, or justifies them as self-defense, is irrelevant to the issue. Israeli historians familiar with Zionist records have documented how Israel, historically, has provoked attacks to justify retaliation (“defense”).[10] The Western media rarely report Israeli attacks against Palestine, only the Palestinian response.
 
-So calm was restored in Washington, and the Democrats are feeling confident that the party is behind Israel going into the 2022 election cycle. Because Israel support is crucial to the party’s fundraising.
+However obvious it may seem that maintaining an external threat remains Israel’s modus operandi, it is difficult to prove. One must show not only that Israel’s actions work counter to its security, but that the very purpose of its actions is to do so.
+
+And that is the significance of its interference with the disposal of the UXOs: Israel knew full well that the result of its actions would be the continuation of the very attacks it used to justify Cast Lead.
+
+Israel must be challenged to explain why it blocked the destruction of ordnance in Hamas-controlled Gaza for over a year. If the media investigated this and myriad other unasked questions, critically and independently, the Israel-Palestine debacle would begin to look quite different to the Western public — the people upon whose acquiescence Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine depends.
+
+Thanks to Nancy Elan for her assistance. Photo credit, Tom Suarez.
+
+1. “Gaza mine-clearing teams waiting for Israeli okay,” Haaretz, 17 February 2009.
+
+2. Landmine Monitor Report 2009, Palestine. Also Amira Hass, “Gazans set up makeshift exhibit of Israeli weapons used in Cast Lead,” in Haaretz, 4 February 2009
+
+3. ibid.
+
+4. “American Lawmakers Visit Gaza,” NY Times, 18 February, 2009.
+
+5. “Gaza mine-clearing teams waiting for Israeli okay,” Haartetz, 17 February 2009.
+
+6. “Explosives haul missing in Gaza,” BBC News, 17 February 2009.
+
+7. Elena Rice [U.N. Mine Action Service] “The Rapid Response to Operation Cast Lead,” in The Journal of ERW and Mine Action, Winter, 2009.
+
+8. Email correspondence between a United Nations Mine Action Service Officer and the author, March 2010. The Israeli agencies the UN team was dealing with were COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) and CLA (Coordination and Liaison Administration). Khaled Meshal is the major Hamas figure, best known for the bungled, stranger-than-fiction assassination attempt against him by Mossad in 1997.
+
+9. “Terrorists fired 2 phosphorus shells into Israel,” in Jerusalem Post, 15 September, 2010.
+
+10. For example, Ilan Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p51-52 [Oneworld, 2006]; and Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land [University of Michigan Press, 2009].

mondoweiss/texts/1865.txt

@@ -1,33 +1,15 @@
-The Podesta emails keep dripping out of Wikileaks. As Haaretz notes flatly, “Many of the leaked Clinton campaign emails deal with Israel.” Yes: the emails demonstrate the centrality of Israel as an issue for the Clintonites, and the agony they went through over President Obama’s Iran deal. Last week we picked up the emails showing the Clinton team’s knee-jerk responsiveness to prodding by megadonor Haim Saban: Clinton must not “rebuke” Netanyahu over his opposition to Obama over the deal, but send positive signals re Israel, including opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement– statements that could then be sent out to “thousands” of donors to help them understand where Hillary is on Israel.
-
-The emails keep coming, and in the last day or so, Israeli publications have picked up a Clinton comment approving the idea of a “Potemkin” peace process.
-
-Here’s the context. In a March 2015 email, right after Netanyahu’s victory in the Israeli election, Clinton foreign policy aide Jake Sullivan passed along a Times article in which Netanyahu offered a mild apology for his racist election-eve warning to Jewish voters that Palestinians were coming out to the polls “in droves,” and in which he flip-flopped on his promise that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch. Per the Times:
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-The two-state solution “remains our goal today, because it is the only way to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state,” [Netanyahu] added.
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-Sullivan comments:
-
-Unsurprisingly, Pragmatic Bibi makes an appearance.
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-Clinton steps right in:
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-This is an opening that should be exploited. A Potemkin process is better than nothing.
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-A Potemkin process is of course just what the United States has had for twenty years or so. It is our contribution to the managed conflict undertaken by the Israelis; we never put any real pressure on the Israelis, and yet, affirming the Potemkin process gives the U.S. cover to claim that it is working hard to bring about a two-state solution. Even as apartheid solidifies across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
-
-It is not clear what the “opening” Clinton refers to was. Netanyahu was obviously insincere about any Palestinian state; for several years now he has paid grudging lip service to one while expanding Israeli control over the territories. Clinton points to a Jodi Rudoren piece in the Times where the former Jerusalem bureau chief says, Netanyahu “believes in the concept of two states but thinks the current circumstances make it impossible — [and this] is reflective of a very broad view among Israel’s Jews.” I.e., never.
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-Michael Omer-Man has this angry comment on the Potemkin process at +972:
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-It’s hard to imagine a more troubling statement about Israel/Palestine from a politician who will in all likelihood be the next president of the United States, even if it represents only part of her thinking on the region…when American politicians like Hillary Clinton say that the façade of a peace process is better than no process, they mean it is better for the United States and Israel, not for Palestinians. A Potemkin peace process expressly means maintaining the status quo of occupation and oppression while neutralizing any consequences Israel might face for its actions.
-
-Clinton’s statement about a Potemkin process would seem to echo her advice in a 2013 speech to Goldman, Sachs— also leaked in the Podesta emails — that leaders need both a public and a private position on difficult issues.
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-You just have to sort of figure out… how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.
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-Though in this case, the backroom pressure on Netanyahu is just as pathetic as the public statements. Nothing happens.
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-Lastly, a running theme in the emails is pro-Israel Jewish donors. That’s why the Clinton team wants to do nothing to alienate Netanyahu. And speaking of the Israel lobby, here’s an email earlier this year from Neera Tanden, the head of the Clintonite Center for American Progress, welcoming on the CAP board Jonathan Lavine, a co-managing partner at Bain Capital. Lavine is a big supporter of Israel. From the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston:
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-For decades, Jonathan and his wife Jeannie have… in recent years increased focused [sic] on their investment in Israel, and in the Jewish future. Jonathan says that his experience on a CJP mission to Israel in 2012 opened his eyes “to the diverse fabric of CJP’s work, and how we can pursue our desire for social change and express our Jewish identity.”
+Half the Ramallah Orchestra, last Saturday night, at St Anne Church
+The Ramallah Orchestra, an initiative of the music conservatory Al Kamandjati, was to perform a free concert at Saint Anne Church in East Jerusalem on Saturday night, 30 June. The concert was organized with the assistance of the French Consulate, and would have built upon previous, highly successful Al Kamandjati concerts at the church.
+On the morning of the concert, Al Kamandjati was forced to cancel it.
+
+Church door, with concert announcement
+Approximately half of the international ensemble’s musicians are Palestinians. Israel, which militarily occupies East Jerusalem under a de facto annexation not recognized by international law, blocks these musicians from entering East Jerusalem unless it grants them a special permit. Despite every effort to follow Israel’s requirements, none of the Palestinians were given the permits, and so all were prevented from reaching the concert.
+In consideration of the many audience members who could not have learned of the cancellation, the remaining musicians of the Ramallah Orchestra, along with conductor Diego Masson, nonetheless continued to Saint Anne Church.
+At concert time, to welcome the seated audience, a string quartet comprised of four young Palestinians of 1948 (Palestinians of Israeli citizenship) performed Carlos Gardel’s Por Una Cabeza.
+Three orchestra members then read aloud the following statement in Arabic, English, and French :
+Good evening.
+
+Tonight we had planned to play a fabulous program for you: the overture to Rossini’s opera ‘The Italian in Algiers’, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and the great Eroica Symphony, the third symphony of Beethoven. But we are very sorry that we are unable to play our concert.
+The four musicians that you just heard are Palestinians of 1948. The core of our ensemble, about half our musicians, are Palestinians from the West Bank. These Palestinians must secure Israeli permits to enter here, even though Israel’s de facto annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognized by international law. As of this morning, none of our colleagues’ permits had been granted. We are not an orchestra without these musicians, but we stand here tonight in solidarity with them.
+We again express our deepest regret that we are prevented from playing our concert for you tonight.
+Thank you, on behalf of all the musicians of the Ramallah Orchestra.

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-It is really hard to believe, but: The United States has a keen interest in getting the Iran nuclear deal back in place, and it can’t do so because one small country doesn’t want us to. Our dear friend Israel says Iran is an “existential” threat, and our leaders listen to their leaders, who urge us to take military action against Iran over its nuclear program.
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-And meantime everyone in the American establishment hides the fact that Israel has nukes. At least 90 of them, according to experts.
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-Any realistic discussion of Iran’s nuclear program ought to include that glaring fact: Israel has 90 nukes. That statement ought to be boilerplate in any article. But our officials and media always leave Israel’s nukes out.
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-Here’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan going along with the lie Tuesday in Jerusalem:
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-Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program poses a grave threat to the region and to international peace and security.
-
-Ian Lustick has just published an excellent piece at Smerconish.com about Israel’s falsehoods about Iranian nukes. He says the lie that Israel has no nukes is important because if the truth were told, all aid to Israel would be at risk. The disclosure, Lustick says,
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-would trigger the application of U.S. laws against giving foreign aid to Israel as a country with unauthorized nuclear weapons.  In domestic political terms, it is difficult to imagine any foreign policy move more costly than that.
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-I.e., the Israel lobby exists to secure endless aid to Israel, and that includes liberal Zionist groups like J Street that have a big footprint in the Democratic Party. And AIPAC, which is about to spend a ton of money in political contests to “shore up the Washington consensus on Israel.” So the Democratic establishment is invested in the lie.
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-And Biden’s top aide, Jake Sullivan, is in Jerusalem, making nice to the rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, even as the P.M. destroys our blessed two-state solution and bullyrags us about Iran.
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-Grant Smith made this same point last summer. “Multiple US government agencies” have documented Israel’s nukes, but there is a gag order on their publicly acknowledging the truth because doing so would undermine foreign aid. But the result is a farce:
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-Israel and its surrogates have continued to feed Americans a rich banquet of justifications for attacking Iran on the pretext that it is on the verge of introducing the very weapons to the Middle East that Israel deployed long ago.
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-Another lie — Lustick says Israel doesn’t “genuinely” fear an Iranian nuclear attack. Israel is just trying to maintain regional “hegemony.”
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-Regardless of what many ordinary Israelis have been encouraged to feel about their country as a “one-bomb state,” neither Israeli security nor political elites have ever thought that if Iran has the bomb it will drop it on Israel.  Israel’s nuclear arsenal includes at least 90 warheads, enough plutonium for 100 more, and multiple advanced delivery systems. So, what really perturbs Gantz, Bennet, Netanyahu, and so many other Israelis who speak about Iran in such apocalyptic in frenzied terms?  Simply put, they fear the loss of Israeli hegemony.   An Iranian state capable of perhaps using a nuclear weapon would end Israel’s status as the confidently preponderant military power in the region..
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-Another lie is the oft-repeated line that Israel will take matters into its own hands if the world does nothing. “This is a charade.” But a charade with a purpose — to manipulate the United States, Lustick says.
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-Israel is not actually practicing for a war that none of its serious military experts think it could win. .. By pretending otherwise, Israel triggers fears in Washington that its uncontrollable ally will act in utterly destructive and dangerous ways.  The intention is to push the United States beyond whatever limits it has set on its willingness to pressure Iran toward regime change. And even if these scare tactics do not produce an American military solution to the Iranian problem, they can lead American negotiators to maximize demands on Iran, thereby minimizing chances for renewing the JCPOA [Iran deal]…
-
-Ian Lustick (Photo: University of Pennsylvania)
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-The U.S. is a willing pawn in this game because “politics is all” — meaning “the power of the Israeli lobby in domestic American politics.” Lustick says it is time to clear away the hypocrisy here because it is so dangerous.
-
-[It is] all the more important for those of us not in positions of political or policy authority to make clear what really is and really is not at stake in the Israeli-Iranian confrontation.   We have had enough wars launched on false pretenses and for unattainable goals—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.  We don’t need another one in Iran.
-
-Yes the stakes are huge. Israel is nudging us toward war, and it really is like the emperor’s new clothes, no one can say what is plain as your face, Israel is laden with nukes.
+Palestine National Orchestra, 2010. (Photo: Los Angeles Times)
+The Palestine National Orchestra, Palestine’s flagship symphonic ensemble, is the brainchild of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, Palestine’s preeminent institution for both Western and Arabic music. When the Conservatory’s Michele Cantoni asked me to join the PNO for their March 2012 series, I eagerly accepted. What follow are my own personal reflections.
+The Belgian-British composer Tim Pottier manages the orchestra, its repertoire, musicians, programming, and tirelessly navigates the Orwellian realities of Israeli occupation. Generous individuals, organizations, businesses, and even local restaurants make the concert series financially possible and demonstrate a deep community involvement.
+Typical of major symphony orchestras, the PNO is international in its composition. In addition to its core of Palestinian musicians and extranationals who, ever-subject to Israel’s tri-monthly permit renewal, have made Palestine their home, the PNO taps musicians from elsewhere in the Middle East, from Europe, and the Americas. Many teach at the Said Conservatory (branches in Ramallah, East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nablus), or the highly regarded Al Kamandjati in Ramallah, founded by the Palestinian violist Ramzi Aburedwan. English is the one language understood by all PNO members, and so serves as the lingua franca during rehearsals. At meals and over coffee, Arabic and European languages intermingle.
+We performed concerts in both Amman (Jordan) and Ramallah (Occupied Palestine), all under the direction of Matthew Coorey (Khoury), an Australian conductor of Lebanese descent who is based in the UK. In keeping with welcome trends toward more correct performance practice, the second violins were opposite the first violins, where the ‘celli are more commonly seen. Communication between the two violin sections is more difficult with this arrangement, but it is effective: their separate lines become clearer and the ‘celli are angled to project forward.
+Coorey landed his opening downbeat to the Coriolan Overture of Beethoven without a moment’s pause, giving the work’s arresting opening a special urgency. Beethoven allows little relief from the violence, conflict, and ultimate suicide of the Roman general who lived in the 5th century BC, and Coorey made full use of the ending’s prolonged dissonance between the bassoon and ‘celli that keeps the painful tension all the way to three closing pizzicati.
+
+The PNO’s first clarinetist, the brilliant young Syrian clarinet Kinan Azmeh, performed one of his own compositions dating from 2007. Written in the unusual meter of 21/16, the intriguing “November 22” juxtaposes the semi-improvisational solo clarinet against a steady rhythmic figure from the bass and sustained lines from the upper strings. Azmeh explains that it depicts “homesickness while away from home,” in which the rhythmic figure is “how the slow and steady rhythm of life keeps moving regardless of one’s emotions,” while the clarinet intones familiarity, childhood, homesickness. The piece begins quietly with a gradual buildup to great commotion, and then ebbs, very gradually, to quite literally nothing, heightening the audience’s already rapt attention.
+
+Alexander Suleiman performed the Schumann cello concerto with both virtuosity and intelligence, and his playing of the concerto’s slow movement was among the most beautifully crafted I have heard. Suleiman’s musical experience is broad, championing new music as well as early music performance practice. He is professor of cello at the University of Southern California, and was recently appointed artistic director of the Art Conquers Borders Academy in Bremen.
+Coorey’s energetic approach to Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony captured the excitement, humanity, and humor of the work, and his fast tempi were particularly demanding of the strings, for whom Mozart is always acrobatics on eggshells. The new urtext parts the PNO wisely used caught my curiosity, as they differed in small detail from the older editions I was familiar with.
+The final work was Stravinsky’s colorful and hilarious Pulcinella Suite, from the commedia dell’arte ballet about three couples’ jealousies and flirtations. A string quintet formed by Nabih Bulos and Basel Theodory (violin), Aidan Pendleton (viola), Alexander Suleiman (‘cello), and Priscila Vela Vico (bass) intermingles with wind solos by principal flute Ahmed Qatamesh, oboe Andrea Shaheen, bassoon Maher Farkouh, horn Yousef Assi, trumpet Rani Elias, and trombone Riccardo Benetti, deftly showcasing Stravinsky’s transparently scored adaptation of music traditionally, if tenuously, ascribed to Pergolesi.
+Two encores— the “Fire Dance” from Manual de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, and the Palestinian nationalist song Mawtini, proved insufficient, one audience satisfied only after we repeated the last movement of the Mozart symphony.
+The PNO faces the logistical and funding challenges common to all orchestras. But in addition it confronts something far more impenetrable: an ever-present military occupation and crippling apartheid laws. Sold to the West as self-defense, Israel’s hold on daily Palestinian life seeks to destroy what its tanks and F-16s can’t. Thus the PNO is an act of defiant normalcy, a refusal to be defined by the 64 years of neo-colonial oppression that is the reality of everyday existence in Palestine.
+This refusal of victimhood is powerful—indeed so powerful that it lay beyond the comprehension of the BBC and the popular Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The venerable BBC couldn’t even get past the orchestra’s name, with its implicit statement of sovereign identity. In its report about the ensemble’s debut, the BBC erroneously called it the “Palestinian” National Orchestra.[1]
+Both it and Haaretz seized upon the PNO’s 2011 programming of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Concert Romanesc to re-explain the PNO in harmony with the Israeli narrative. According to Haaretz,[2] the Palestinian musicians purposefully chose Ligeti, a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor, as their way of “conceding the tragic refugee history of [Israeli] society” and to say “we are brothers” in tragedy. Yet again, the Holocaust is exploited to empower more terror, and the “left-wing” Haaretz cries tears of commiseration with the very people its nation is brutalizing, as though “the conflict” were the doing of some Other Force to which Israel, too, is victim. Implicitly, Haaretz has the PNO agreeing that the apartheid Israeli state was the answer to Europe’s displaced Jews, and that the fascism it imposes upon Palestinians is the inevitable result of this. Thus the Concert Romanesc served to have Israeli mythology vindicated by its victims.
+The truth—that the Ligeti had been an independent Palestinian artistic decision made by Tim Pottier, without any thought to Israel—lay outside the Israeli narrative. Yet in a final twist to sooth its liberal audience, Haaretz jubilantly concluded that the music “managed to get through the checkpoints and the walls as though they never existed.” Forgetting, for the present purpose, the question of why Israel has checkpoints and walls on other people’s land in the first place, let’s take a brief look at how Palestinian musicians do, and don’t, get through the three ghettos into which it has dissected Palestine—Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
+To start, one must first acknowledge that one and a half million Palestinians are automatically erased from our story, as they are severed from the world by the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Israel even blocks music from Gaza for its “security”.[3] String broke? Bad reed? Need music? You’ll have to get someone to smuggle them through the tunnels from Egypt. Rare exceptions that Israel may cite are meaningless: one cannot commit musicians, venue, travel, and audience on the remote chance that Israel will not sabotage the project.
+This writer’s personal experience will suffice to illustrate. I was among a group of people invited to a professional event in Gaza City sponsored by the World Health Organization and the European Union. Applications to Israel were made well in advance by these international agencies, all to Israel’s specifications. But shortly before the event, despite a year of planning and prior approval, and despite Israel’s claim not to be occupying Gaza, it blocked our entry without explanation. When I refused to leave the gate to the Erez crossing, IDF soldiers physically removed me.
+Musicians in the West Bank can travel across their own border to Jordan, though the crossing is unpredictable, expensive, and sometimes much worse. Within the West Bank, Palestinians are impeded by Israel’s ever-increasing settlements, and walls that splice villages and families in two. Normal endeavors that musicians elsewhere take for granted—getting to a routine rehearsal in a neighboring town—can be risky and humiliating, and is always unpredictable.
+East Jerusalem has different problems. Unlike the West Bank, in which Israel maintains a military occupation, or Gaza, which remains sealed like a massive internment camp, Israel claims to have actually annexed East Jerusalem. The annexation is illegal (not even the ever-compliant U.S. recognizes it), and thus Israel’s ethnically predicated laws have no legal jurisdiction there. But they are, by military force, the laws that control.
+“Residency” is the coveted status in East Jerusalem for non-Jews. A Palestinian whose family has lived there for centuries lives in fear of ethnicity-based expulsion on arcane technicalities manufactured for the purpose. Simply leaving East Jerusalem—concert tour, study—can be used as an abdication of residence. Other families become “illegal” when Israel expands the border of Jerusalem to include parts of the West Bank.
+The arcane apartheid laws that de facto (not legally) rule occupied East Jerusalem change with neither notice nor transparency. This past January, the Jerusalem Children’s Orchestra, another initiative of the Said Conservatory, was to perform at the National Theatre in East Jerusalem. But suddenly and without notice, Israel lowered the age at which Palestinian children need special permits to enter East Jerusalem, which until then had been fifteen. In this case, Israel’s sabotage of Palestinian achievement succeeded—the new regulations could not be met in time, and so many of the young musicians would be prevented from performing. The concert was cancelled.
+Israel was only partially successful when the Palestine Youth Orchestra prepared to perform in the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Nablus. The French authorities, holding more clout than Palestinians, helped the orchestra apply for the permits Israel mandates. Permission was granted and arrangements were made. Israel then arbitrarily changed the permissible dates, but the Said Conservatory, not to be stopped, rescheduled concerts, rehearsals, travel, and housing. But then Israel changed the permits’ dates a second time. When even that failed to sabotage the project, Israel refused either to approve or deny permission for an oud player whose participation was crucial. This new obstacle was thwarted only when the resourceful Tim Pottier masterminded a media coup that would have caused the Israeli authorities more embarrassment than the issue was worth to them. In the end, the double rescheduling put the event into Ramadan, and fifteen children were stopped from participating until the last few days.
+At this point, it is worth reminding the reader that nothing here involves Israeli permission to enter Israel; it is Israeli “permission” for Palestinians to enter Palestine.
+The Oslo Accords simultaneously allowed the Palestinian Authority a facade of sovereignty, placards on office doors boasting the Palestinian Ministry of This-&-That, while actually tightening Israel’s yoke around their land. One dressing of make-believe sovereignty was the issuance of Palestinian passports, but passports of a nation that doesn’t exist have little meaning. Nor are Palestinian refugees outside Palestine eligible; they hold travel documents that are valid for a short period of time and afford limited privileges. Travel is especially difficult for them, and merely changing planes on an unbroken flight can require special visas and expense.
+The PNO operated with the Said Conservatory’s accumulated savvy about Israel bureaucracy, and all the permits Israel requires for the orchestra’s Palestinians had been meticulously secured for our March 15th concert in the West Bank.  Israel, however, made two of the permits valid only for April 5th. For three weeks, Tim tried to get the Israeli authorities to correct the dates, but was met with the traditional stonewalling, and two days before the Ramallah concert he had to fly in an oboist from Spain and get a bassoonist from Jordan.
+One must remember that Palestinians are refugees only because Israel has for six and a half decades defied United Nations’ demands that it allow those it had ethnically cleansed to return to their homes, broken the explicit promises upon which it was admitted to the UN, violated the UN Partition agreement which facilitated the creation of the state itself, and indeed violated the 1917 Balfour Declaration which Israel cites as a precedent.
+But instead of Israel being held accountable, we set out for the West Bank leaving our two colleagues, oboist Haneen Hamadeh and bassoonist Iyad Hafez, behind. Haneen, whose roots are in Nablus (West Bank), lives in Amman. Iyad, the son of Palestinian refugee from Acre, lives Apolid (stateless) in Italy, and had flown to Amman to join us. They had played all the rehearsals for the concerts.
+
+Tom Suarez at the Erez crossing, 2008. (Photo: ActiveStills)
+The roughly 40 km from Amman, through the Jordan Valley, over the Allenby Bridge, and west to Ramallah took the six hours we expected, most of it at the Israeli-controlled border facility. The Israeli “processing” is an arduous and often demeaning affair, especially for Palestinians, and one must work around its limited weekend hours. Israel collects a punitive exit tax at the Palestine-Jordan crossing which it does not impose on the Tel Aviv airport (which Palestinians are forbidden from using).
+Bringing instruments and equipment through Israeli control of Palestine’s border is also problematic and expensive. Musical instruments are detained, refused entry, and sometimes damaged by the Israeli authorities. In our case, we were assisted by the French government: they provided a government vehicle that enjoys diplomatic immunity from search. With it, the PNO transported its timpani and basses between Jordan and the West Bank.
+After the first couple of security checks, I and two Palestinians were pulled aside for special screening, then released to the interminable wait at the holding facility with the rest of the orchestra. As time passed with our entrance to Palestine uncertain, musicians began unpacking their instruments and doodling. Soon we risked the first movement of the Haffner symphony from memory, and then turned to the Schumann ‘cello concerto with one part per section propped up on chairs. (Someone videoed part of this, and it can be found on Youtube.) Israeli officials approached and reacted with differing body language, some baffled, others annoyed or bemused, or even visible touched.
+Israeli control of the movement of Palestinian and foreign musicians, and the havoc wreaked by its military occupation, make reliable planning impossible. If this presents the PNO with daunting challenges and significantly higher expenses for a limited concert series close to home, it makes a more ambitious and international schedule for a Palestinian ensemble all but impossible.
+Viewed thus, calls one hears for the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions are nothing more than calls for simply fair play, for a host country to insist that no guest block another guest.
+And it is this that we, citizens of nations that empower the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, must face. The war against Palestinian culture is not the unfortunate side-effect of bureaucracy intended, if perhaps over-zealously, to “defend Israel”. That war is, rather, the explicit purpose of that bureaucracy. The occupation is much more than colonies and tanks, more than its blocking the return of displaced persons, more than its campaigns of expropriation and ethnic cleansing. It is even more than Israel’s core MO: that, like the Orwell novel written in the year of its founding, it must forever manufacture an ever-present external threat in order to justify its actions.
+The occupation is, most insidiously, the occupation of a people—the systematic destruction or theft of their history, culture, arts, and self-worth. And as with past regimes predicated on racial supremacy, it has maintained a theatre of integrity through a system of laws that is internally consistent.[4] There are checks and balances, precedent, courts, systems for redress, and all the other trappings of legal procedure, enabling the state to claim that theirs is a system based on justice and democracy.
+But the PNO is vivid proof that Israel’s efforts to define Palestinians will fail. My time with the PNO was musically and intellectually exhilarating, one of camaraderie and solidarity of purpose. The musicians are sophisticated, with wide interests and diverse experiences, all determined to work together to produce a Palestinian orchestra that would be at home on any concert stage the world over.
+Thanks to Tim Pottier for help clarifying details of bureaucracy and legal status.
+1. “Palestinian orchestra to hold debut concert in Ramallah,” BBC, 31 Dec 2010.
+2. Ben, Noam Zeev, “In Israel, Palestinian orchestra produces sounds of independence,” Haaretz. 14 Jan. 2011.
+3. There is no transparency to the laws of Israel’s siege, but on musical instruments see, e.g., Hass, Amira, “Israel bans books, music and clothes from entering Gaza,” Haaretz. 17 May 2009.
+4. For a good analysis of this, see Baker, Abeer and Matar, Anat (eds), Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel. Pluto Press. 2011.

mondoweiss/texts/1867.txt

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-The big news on our issue in Washington is that Benjamin Netanyahu is gone, and Joe Biden and the Israel lobby are celebrating. Yair Lapid, the foreign minister and alt-PM in the new Naftali Bennett government, came to Washington this week and was treated like a rock star by the lobby. Here at last is an attractive Israeli leader who is media-genic and loves Democrats.
-
-And who is effectively as rightwing as Netanyahu: Lapid had nothing to say about Palestinians except some lukewarm comments about them having a “better life.” He devoted his comments to the threat Iran supposedly poses to Israel, likening it to Nazi Germany, and praised Israel’s normalization with Arab monarchies. Just as Prime Minister Bennett ignored Palestinians entirely in his recent speech to the U.N.
-
-The pity is that American leaders go along with this charade. Secretary of State Tony Blinken amped up his anti-Iran rhetoric for Lapid’s benefit, pleasing Israelis by saying that the “runway” back to the Iran deal is getting shorter all the time.
-
-With every passing day and Iran’s refusal to engage in good faith, the runway gets short.
-
-Blinken and Lapid offered empty statements about the Palestinian future. Blinken mentioned “the importance” of “finding a two-state solution” and Lapid said Palestinians deserve a “decent life.” But there is nothing concrete here (even though the U.S. recommitted to reopening the consulate Jerusalem).
-
-In rhetoric straight out of the Netanyahu playbook, Lapid cited Blinken’s father’s Holocaust background to justify an attack on Iran:
-
-Secretary of State Blinken and I are sons of Holocaust survivors.  We know there are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil.  If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act.  We must make clear that the civilized world won’t allow it.  If the Iranians don’t believe the world is serious about stopping them, they’ll race to the bomb.
-
-(Blinken of course emphasized the same background when he appeared at Congressional hearings seeking the job of Secretary of State.)
-
-VP Kamala Harris was also vague and empty about the Palestinian future after her meeting with Lapid Tuesday:
-
-Vice President Harris reaffirmed the United States’ strong support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, and our unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.  The two leaders also discussed the importance of advancing peace, security, and prosperity for Palestinians and Israelis, in particular the need to improve living conditions and ensure calm in Gaza.
-
-While Lapid embraced Harris as one of Israel’s best friends in Washington/
-
-Lapid met with Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and this readout also offered nothing substantive about Palestinians.
-
-Mr. Sullivan emphasized the importance of practical steps to improve the lives of the Palestinians.
-
-The meeting with Nancy Pelosi October 12 was even worse. Pelosi said not a word about Palestinians. Pelosi seemed enthused by the get-together. She published a video of the two leaders’ appearance before the press and said Israel support was in her “DNA” and in the U.S. “national interest”.  She heralded the bipartisanship of the issue.
-
-“On any occasion… it is a privilege to talk about the importance of the U.S. Israel bond… It is one that is based on our mutual security, it is based on our mutual values. And it is again something that is the source of pride to all of us in the Congress who work on this. Support for Israel has always been bipartisan in the Congress of the United States and it continues to be so.”
-
-Well not every Democrat loves Israel: eight Dems voted against giving Israel another $1 billion two weeks ago.
-
-But this is very much what Pelosi told an Israel lobby group a couple years back, the Capitol would crumble and fall before the Congress stopped supporting Israel.
-
-And Lapid picked up the theme: “Being pro-Israel is being bipartisan.”
-
-That bipartisanship is obviously what Netanyahu and Trump eroded by undertaking extreme and provocative measures. Though Lapid is in no way altering Netanyahu’s policy, of doing all Israel can to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.
-
-Lapid gave this lame lip service to Palestinians with Pelosi.
-
-“And the Palestinians deserve a better life.”
-
-Lapid also met with the rightwing Democratic Party Israel lobby group — Democratic Majority for Israel — and said, “Israel is grateful for the support of all its friends in both parties.” Democratic Majority was over the moon to get the meeting:
-
-Thank you, Minister Lapid, for recognizing the importance of our work. We are also deeply grateful for all of your efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance.
-
-Democratic Majority also issued a “thrilled” statement that made no reference to Palestinians but leaned hard on the new accords between Israel and Arab neighbors which of course was a theme of the Blinken and Pelosi and Harris meetings as well.
-
-Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid meets with Tom Cotton, Washington, Oct. 13, 2021. From Lapid’s twitter feed.
-
-In the bipartisan rightwing spirit, Lapid met with the leading hawk in the Senate, Tom Cotton (who was elevated to the Senate with $1 million in support of the Emergency Committee for Israel):
-
-Great to see @SenTomCotton again today. We discussed the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and malign activities in the region. Israel is grateful for your leadership and commitment to strengthening the alliance between our two countries.
-
-In that same bipartisan rightwing spirit, Lapid met with Ted Deutch, the Democratic congressman and hack for Israel who smeared Rashida Tlaib as an antisemite on the floor of the House because she dared to say that Human Rights Watch says Israel is an apartheid state when she voted against giving Israel another $1 billion.
-
-Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid meets with Ted Deutch, Washington, Oct. 13, 2021. From Lapid’s twitter feed.
-
-So calm was restored in Washington, and the Democrats are feeling confident that the party is behind Israel going into the 2022 election cycle. Because Israel support is crucial to the party’s fundraising.
+“Joppa from the sea,” photograph by P. Bergheim, between 1860 and 1880. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-106225.[1]
+What fault have we Palestinian Arabs committed … Release us from the Zionists greed which is increasing from day to day … Were we liberated by the Allies from the Turkish yoke to be put under the Zionist yoke? (—telegram from the Jaffa Moslem-Christian Committee to the British government, March, 1919) [2]
+A century after that plea from Jaffa, this article is a plea not to forget Jaffa on the 1947 partition map of the sequence illustrating the Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to the present. It is a cartographically cleansed dot’s right-of-return.
+In this detail from a 1475 map of Palestine, note Jaffa, just to the left of the center binding, by the ship. East is at the top, so Gaza is in the lower right (south). Woodcut, from the Rudimentum Novitiorum, published in Lübeck by Lucas Brandis, 1475.
+The ancient port city of Jaffa was long a hub of Palestinian life — culturally, commercially, politically, artistically — until European invaders brutalized the city and drove its people into the sea in early 1948. Much of this gem on the Mediterranean was destroyed, and more than ninety-five percent of its population expelled by the Zionist militias in their pursuit of ethnic purity in their settler state. [3]
+In this sequence, the “UN PLAN 1947” map is correct (dot enlarged slightly here for visibility). Click image for source, Palestine Awareness Coalition.
+But like much of the area conquered by the Zionists that year, Jaffa was not even in their settler state. The Jewish Agency (/Israeli government) had agreed that Jaffa would be part of the Palestinian state — or, rather, it agreed when within earshot of the United Nations, until after UNGA Resolution 181, the UN Partition plan that effectively created the Israeli state, was shoved through the UN by the United States.
+Partition’s architects acknowledged that keeping Jaffa non-contiguous with the rest of Palestine created problems for the Palestinians; but alternatives that kept Jaffa contiguous created a parallel problem for the Zionists. Resolution 181 made Jaffa a Palestinian island, accessible to the rest of Palestine either by sea or through Israel.
+Anti-Palestinian settler violence had begun to escalate during the summer of 1947, and in December, once the ink on Resolution 181 was dry, the Jewish Agency already began breaking its territorial agreements, as anti-Palestinian violence escalated markedly. The Irgun launched a seaborne attack on Jaffa on December 29, with a final onslaught by the Irgun and Hagana in April (the Irgun then formally incorporated into the Hagana, ‘official’ Jewish Agency military).
+When in 2015, a major US television station, MSNBC, aired this land loss map, it caused such outrage among the Narrative-keepers that the station apologized. The apology should, rather, have been to the Palestinians for its omission of Jaffa as part of Resolution 181’s allocation to the promised Palestinian state. Click image for Mondoweiss article.
+“It should be made clear,” High Commissioner Cunningham reported, that the attacks were “indiscriminate and designed to create panic amongst civilian inhabitants. It was not a Military operation.” When Cunningham found the media reporting the ethnic cleansing as “Jewish military successes,” he sent a telegram to British and US officials in protest: these “successes” are, in truth, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children.”
+A half century later, a book published by the Israeli Ministry of Defence justified the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa by calling it “a festering cancer in the middle of the Jewish population.” [4]
+By the time the fateful day of May 15, 1948 arrived — the end of the British Mandate and the unilateral declaration of the Israeli state — most of the original 120,000 inhabitants of Jaffa and its environs were already refugees, destitute, many trapped in Gaza forty miles to the south. Of the roughly 4,000 that were still in Jaffa, the Israeli militias rounded up these ethnically-wrong hold-outs and sealed them off, using the al-Ajami neighborhood as a virtual military prison.
+In December that year, UNGA Resolution 194 reaffirmed what should never have needed anyone’s reaffirmation: the refugees’ right to return home. For many of those now facing starvation in camps in Gaza, ‘home’ meant Jaffa; yet throughout the years that followed, they were shot dead on sight if they tried.
+Thus Israel’s deadly siege of Gaza was in full force by the end of 1948. The election of Hamas in 2006, to which Israel now falsely attributes its siege, was instead the result of fifty-eight years of Israeli intransigence.
+With the theft of this jewel of Palestinian civilization, tens of thousands of settlers from abroad quickly poured in and commandeered Jaffa, its homes, its orchards, it businesses, its libraries, its presses. In October of that year the Israeli cabinet formally decreed Jaffa’s union with Tel Aviv. Both the United States and the United Nations were suddenly impotent. [5]
+That impotence was described in a telegram from Sir Hugh Dow, British Consul-General in Jerusalem, to the Foreign Office (September 1, 1948):
+If, instead of the Jews seizing Jaffa, the Arabs had succeeded in establishing themselves in Tel Aviv, would the United Nations have agreed to the retention of Tel Aviv in an Arab State? [6]
+In 2012, the creators of these brilliant billboards got them up in Boston transit. In no way to detract from that Herculean feat, note that the green dot for Jaffa is missing on the Partition map. Click image for Mondoweiss article.
+Fast-forward to today. That Jaffa was on the Palestinian side of partition is usually forgotten in the familiar series of maps used to illustrate ‘disappearing’ Palestine. Jaffa is shown as Israeli, a serious error in Israel’s favor. The omission of Jaffa also minimizes the absurdity of the Partition scheme itself.
+The maps are otherwise correct, showing an interior region and a coastal region corresponding to today’s West Bank and Gaza, roughly twice the size of what remained by the end of 1948. (The so-called ‘1967 borders’ delineate a Palestine about half that specified by the UN in 1947, and those 1947 borders were already disproportionately generous to the Zionists, an attempt to delay Israel’s expansionist desires).
+The Israeli Creation Myth is losing its efficacy these days, thanks largely to the increase in understanding of the period preceding 1948. It is in that spirit that I ask that we check the 1947 UN Partition map in our land-loss map sequences — and if there’s no conspicuous dot for Jaffa in the color of the Palestinian side of Partition (usually green), let’s add it.
+That dot is a stolen gem that must be returned to its owners — and its owners returned to it.
+
+Tom Suárez is the author of three major books on the history of cartography.
+
+“Joppa. Approach from the east” [between 1870 and 1880], by the important French photographer Félix Adrien Bonfils (1831-1885), “one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale” (Wikipedia). Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-106226
+
+Note that the author has conservatively modified the Library of Congress scan as follows: changed from grayscale to color; discreetly restored some contrast along the top of the buildings to undo loss; remove the extra margin with the catalog number. The LoC listing dates the photograph between 1860 and 1890, but other listings for Bergheim, from the LoC and auction listings, state 1860-1880, suggesting that 1890 is unlikely.
+The National Archives (Kew), FO 608/99.
+Grim footage of Jaffa after its conquest by Israel has been rescued from obscurity by Rona Sela and can be seen in her new film, “Looted and Hidden” (2017). At writing, the filmmaker, a curator and researcher of visual history and culture, has made her film available online. Captions in English https://vimeo.com/213851191; Captions in Arabic and Hebrew https://vimeo.com/257286457
+See Suárez, State of Terror, 259-260. The “festering cancer” quote is from Joseph Kister, The Irgun the Story of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Eretz-Israel [Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 2000]
+Sami Abu Shehadeh and Fadi Shbaytah, “Jaffa: from eminence to ethnic cleansing,” The Electronic Intifada, February 26, 2009
+The National Archives (Kew), FO 800/487, numbered ‘240’ in file.

mondoweiss/texts/1868.txt

@@ -1,57 +1,6 @@
-U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is scheduled to travel this weekend to Saudi Arabia and Israel. The trip is the latest attempt by U. S. President Joe Biden’s administration to patch up its tattered Middle East policy, while Israel and its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continue the gradual uptick of their assault on the civilian population of Gaza.
-
-Sullivan will be primarily striving to prop up the plan that has become a farcical cornerstone of Biden’s policy: a normalization deal between the Saudis and Israel that he has convinced himself will somehow revive the long-since desiccated corpse of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. The strategy, if one can call it that, has taken on renewed importance as the November election looms and Biden flails about desperately trying to salvage a foreign policy win.
-
-In Israel, Sullivan’s task is straightforward. Netanyahu has agreed not to escalate his assault in Rafah before Sullivan’s trip. While Netanyahu is hardly a man of his word, he has no reason to break his promise here. Sullivan will reinforce Biden’s desire to keep the slaughter in Rafah to the steady pace Israel has been going at so far. As I’ve noted, this works well for Netanyahu, and allows Biden to claim he is putting some restraint on Netanyahu’s excesses, but does little but stretch out the same amount of destruction and of Palestinian deaths and injuries over a slightly longer period of time.
-
-Sullivan also hopes to bring an update to Netanyahu about a proposal for Israeli-Saudi normalization, an agreement that is likely impossible without an end to the Gaza genocide and some show by Netanyahu that Israel is willing to revive the idea of a Palestinian state.
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-The normalization fantasy
-
-The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, or MBS as he’s known, is not seen as a serious supporter of the Palestinian cause, but most Saudi citizens are, and many in the royal family consider it at least an important responsibility in terms of their image in the Arab and Muslim world. Whatever temptations MBS might feel to simply abandon the Palestinians and make whatever deal he sees fit is constrained by those facts and by the position Saudi Arabia has and wishes to hold as a leader of the Arab and Muslim world.
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-Since Netanyahu’s political future depends on both maintaining the genocidal operation in Gaza and ensuring that Palestinians never recognize their basic rights, MBS is well aware that a normalization deal is unlikely for now. He has time, however, and the prize—a defense agreement with the U.S. sealed by a treaty and American help in putting together a civilian nuclear program—is so great, he is willing to pursue it.
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-The passion with which Biden has pursued this quixotic goal has kept the process alive and caused some alarm in some Washington quarters. It’s been a particular concern because the Saudis have recently tried to devise a path where they can get the package they want without Israel and Palestine being a part of it.
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-That idea is a clear non-starter. The Saudis already have defense agreements with the U.S. What they want is an upgrade to the status of a treaty, a deal that prevents a recurrence of Donald Trump’s failure to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense in 2019, when their oil facilities were attacked by Ansar Allah (the Houthis) from Yemen.
-
-That means a treaty, which would require Senate approval, and that is out of the question without the Israel component. Even then, many Democrats are extremely skeptical of a Saudi deal, and with good reason. Biden’s obsession with this agreement is extremely dangerous, and a defense pact with Saudi Arabia is just terrible policy, even purely from a security point of view.
-
-Saudi aggression in the Mideast should be a major concern for Biden, though it appears not to be. Saudi Arabia’s shadow is long in the region, with the kingdom supporting militias and fighters in areas which could, at some point, lead to wider conflicts. That includes not only its high-profile involvement in Yemen and Syria, but also in Libya and Sudan, with ever-simmering tensions with Iran and an unsteady relationship with Türkiye thrown into the mix. They have even come into friction with their Gulf partners in the United Arab Emirates in recent years. A stronger defense pact with the United States would increase the risk of U.S. involvement in those conflicts, which has been proven repeatedly to end badly for everyone.
-
-A domestic nuclear program for Saudi Arabia, even a civilian one, has severe implications for the future of a region already badly de-stabilized by decades of foreign intervention and internal authoritarianism and corruption. As with virtually every lesson of history, Biden and his team have utterly failed to learn from the experience of the United States having almost single-handedly built Iran’s nuclear program, only to then wail to the heavens that now the Islamic Republic might use it for military means. Even aside from that worrisome possibility, a Saudi nuclear program will only enhance Iran’s motivation to escalate its own nuclear capabilities.
-
-A U.S.-Saudi defense pact and nuclear cooperation is simply terrible policy, born out of narrow-minded, militaristic thinking. It is a simplistic “Iran is bad, and must be countered by force, whatever the risks” line of thinking. Biden’s basic hatred of diplomacy, ironically shared by his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, means that this is the only strategy available to his mind, regardless of how destabilizing it will be for the region and how badly it will undermine U.S. security and other interests.
-
-But the Senate does not seem poised to grant Biden his wish. Democrats share many of the concerns I’ve listed and Republicans, who won’t be inclined to give Biden a win, would only come on board if it were clear that a deal was what Netanyahu wanted. That seems impossible, as even in a best-case scenario for Biden, Netanyahu would have to be dragged into it, overwhelmed with carrots and probably pressured with at least some minor sticks.
-
-Biden’s obsession with normalization is only likely to grow between now and November. Donald Trump is certain to point to the fact that he brokered normalization deals between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, and Biden has tried to expand those deals and found himself incapable of accomplishing it. That’s a point that is likely to play well to undecided voters, and Trump—who, for all his insanity and narcissism, reads his audience far better than Biden does—will recognize that. Biden’s advisors probably know it, too, and that is feeding into this blind determination to pursue this awful policy.
-
-Yoav Gallant and the future of Gaza
-
-Biden would certainly like to see the Gaza operation end. He clearly did not anticipate it going on for this long, and has been thoroughly unprepared for the political problems it is causing him (the loss of Palestinian life, as he, Blinken, and most of the rest of his close advisers have repeatedly made clear, means absolutely nothing to him).
-
-But for all the mass slaughter in Gaza, it has been mostly civilians and civilian infrastructure that Israel has hit. Hamas, which has obviously suffered great losses, is still quite capable of functioning, even after all this time. Neither Netanyahu nor Biden want to deal with the reality that Israeli forces are continuing to face fierce fighting even in the northern and central parts of Gaza, where Israel claimed Hamas had been eradicated.
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-Obviously, if Hamas is still capable of fighting, Netanyahu cannot afford to stop the onslaught. It would lay bare the reality that this entire genocide has not only destroyed Israel’s image and standing around the world, but it has utterly failed even on Israel’s own terms. Its operations have killed far more of the hostages than it has saved, and it has devastated civilians while leaving Hamas standing.
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-As much as Netanyahu cannot afford that outcome, although at this point it is already a fait accompli neither can Biden. But Biden needs something Netanyahu does not care much about: a path forward in Gaza post-genocide.
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-While that does not concern Netanyahu, there are those in his government who are very much concerned with this question. It is no coincidence that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant chose this time, just days before Sullivan’s arrival to declare that he will refuse to help Netanyahu reoccupy Gaza.
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-“I will not agree to the establishment of Israeli military rule in Gaza. Israel must not establish civilian rule in Gaza,” Gallant said.
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-This is, of course, the U.S. view as well. There has been much hand-wringing over the day after in Gaza, but there are few real options. The Palestinian Authority will have a task far beyond its capabilities if it tries to take over the running of Gaza. It will simply have no chance of keeping control over the various militant factions in the Strip, including Hamas. The PA would need enormous assistance from the U.S. and Israel just to maintain some semblance of control.
-
-The PA would not be capable of replicating what it does in the West Bank in Gaza. The militant factions are more powerful in Gaza, and much more deeply connected. Fatah doesn’t have nearly the presence or infrastructure in Gaza, even before the complete destruction of the Strip since October 7. And the PA has little legitimacy among Palestinians in general. It’s one thing to cling to power in a place where you already run the administrative bureaucracy and have networks set up. It’s quite another to have such small respect and try to establish those networks of support in a war-torn area.
-
-Another idea that’s been floated about is a sort of international assemblage that would “temporarily” govern Gaza. The problem there is that no one wants to be part of it, and with good reason. The task is fraught with problems. Any country, including and perhaps especially, Arab countries, that takes on such a role will be seen, correctly, as working with Israel and the United States to stifle Palestinian aspirations.
-
-Moreover, the U.S. and Israel will see the role of whoever is governing Gaza primarily through the lens of “security,” and will insist that the first task is to ensure that militant groups, Hamas or otherwise, be hunted down. That would be prioritized far above reconstruction of the Strip and rebuilding the Gaza economy. In other words, they would essentially be treated like the PA. There is no good reason for other countries to do that.
-
-Israel has, in the past, floated the idea of selecting Palestinians not tied to either Hamas or Fatah to run Gaza. But, again, they are likely to find this exceedingly difficult. The idea of gathering disparate individuals from all over Gaza and expecting them to form even the most technocratic, but still cohesive, unit is folly. Plus, Israel would certainly be talking about Palestinians who could be bribed or extorted into serving the occupation rather than opposing it. That is obviously not a recipe for stability, much less for healing the people and rebuilding the infrastructure of Gaza.
-
-All of this, of course, is based on a single principle: that Palestinians never be allowed freedom or self-governance, much less self-determination. Reparations in the form of funds, equipment, and any other assistance Palestinians should request, and the very self-governance that Israel and the U.S. so passionately oppose is the only practical way forward, but this will not even be thought of in Washington or Israel.
-
-Instead, Sullivan will be debating Netanyahu, who will argue for indefinite Israeli control of Gaza. It’s just more of the same delusional discussion that undergirds Biden’s strategy for normalization. There is no chance normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia will solve or even mildly mitigate the problem. Nor will changing the form of colonial governance in Gaza. Recognition of Palestinian rights is the only way forward, but that is simply not something Joe Biden is capable of considering.
+Representative Ilhan Omar’s straight-talk about the corruption of the US political process by a foreign government was a service to her country, as well as to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East. Omar impaled a great taboo with the first name of a remarkable, multi-talented eighteenth century American hero whose portrait appears on $100 bills. Outraged agents of that foreign government, aided by US politicians who know the truth of her words better than anyone, kicked in the center beam holding up the sky — but to their horror, the sky did not quite fall. True, she was branded a peddler of age-old tropes; yet it was difficult not to notice that the emperor was, indeed, naked. Self-righteous condemnation from the most powerful human on earth (you know, the one who shoved his weight on Jerusalem and Iran in exchange for millions from a gambling magnate on behalf of Israel, and who says that Jews are good negotiators who use their money to buy politicians) instantly dissipated into fodder for comedy by no less a mainstream media as CNN, which posted a video collage juxtaposing Trump’s feigned outrage at Omar with clips of his true, classic antisemitism.
+Yet the outrage over Omar’s truth-telling addressed only a lesser taboo, not the single, core taboo that is at the heart of Israel’s seemingly inexplicable ability to ‘hypnotize’ (to use Omar’s word) the West.
+The real taboo that Ilhan Omar broke was not accusing AIPAC of buying politicians. That was just the way it manifested. The taboo itself was freeing the hostage — Jews — from Zionism and the Israeli state. Outrage over Omar’s tweets requires — requires— that Jews and Israel are seen as synonymous. Even to ‘apologize’, Omar, too, had to engage in this antisemitic lie.
+Thus it is the very people who feign outrage at Omar who are the purveyors of antisemitic tropes. They, not Omar, took the simple concept of a political interest using money and pressure to buy influence, and conflated ‘Israeli influence’ as ‘Jewish influence’.
+Indeed even anti-Zionists are complicit in this when they qualify that criticism of Israel is not ‘necessarily’ antisemitic, or that ‘legitimate’ criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. These qualifiers implicitly accept the Zionist premise of some obligatory connection between Jews, as Jews, and the Israeli state — otherwise the qualifier is nonsensical. Something is, or isn’t, antisemitic independent of whether it has to do with Israel or not. And if by happenstance it does happen to concern criticism of that nation-state in the Middle East, it is, or isn’t, antisemitic independent of whether the criticism was justified. Try this on a friend and see the odd looks you get: “Legitimate criticism of Burma is not necessarily anti-Buddhist.” Or try: “Legitimate criticism of Liechtenstein is not necessarily anti-Catholic.”
+It makes no difference how many people self-identifying as Jews protest to the contrary — no one has the right to make Jewry itself into a tribe headquartered in Tel Aviv. It is time to acknowledge that Israel’s claim on Jewry is categorically unlike any other state’s claim on any other ‘people’. It is a vestige of a sorry era of ethnic nationalism to which we bid good riddance in the mid 1940s. That it continues to be inflicted on Jews, and that it is used to empower ongoing crimes against humanity in their name, should outrage us all.

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-The latest hacked emails from the Clinton campaign expose a lot of fawning toward the Israel lobby, especially during the run-up to the Iran deal, when Hillary Clinton had to balance her devotion to Israel with her loyalty to the Obama administration.
-
-For instance, when Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to give his speech to Congress in March 2015 seeking to submarine President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, Clinton’s top foreign policy aide Jake Sullivan expressed concern that Clinton not say anything publicly to offend “Bibi.”
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-At the time, Sullivan was advised by Stuart Eisenstat, Clinton’s ambassador from the Jewish community, that Clinton needed to make an “adult” statement, so as to ameliorate “the deteriorating U.S.-Israel relationship, with the increasingly bitter Obama-Bibi tiff.”
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-Here a simple call from Hillary that it is important to stop the downward spiral of events with our close ally, notwithstanding mistakes, so we can focus on the key issues of Middle East peace and preventing Iran for acquiring a bomb would be a welcome positive, “adult” statement.
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-Sullivan responded:
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-Stu – how would you craft the… statement so it doesn’t look like a rebuke of potus [President of the United States], bibi, or both?
-
-Clinton soon made the “simple call” that Eisenstat had advised so as to placate the Israel lobby. She called Malcolm Hoenlein, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (and the very  man Obama had used to feel Clinton out in 2008 when he wanted to hire her as secretary of state), and Hoenlein released a statement:  “Secretary Clinton thinks we need to all work together to return the special U.S.-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.” And the New York Times, among other publications, ran a story on the call, headlined, “Clinton Wants to Improve Ties to Israel.”
-
-One of Clinton’s biggest financial supporters was pleased. Haim Saban sent an email to Clinton aides Huma Abedin and John Podesta describing the Clinton comments as “Very smart and politically correct” because they did not criticize the Obama administration. “Pls say thanks to the lady.”
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-Saban added that “thousands” of people, meaning pro-Israel donors, were going to like the call, because they wondered Where Hillary is on Israel.
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-Also pls be aware that these articles will be mailed to thousands of people who are interested in the subject matter and who have been asking themselves ,,,,and me ,many times ”Where is Hillary on this”
-
-Iran was still a problem, though. That summer of 2015, the Iran deal came to Congress, and Politico published an article saying that Hillary Clinton was confusing “Jewish donors,” as it said in the headline. On the one hand, she was telling them, “I’ll be better for Israel than Obama.” On the other, these same donors came out of meetings with her with “sometimes widely varying interpretations” of her view of the Iran deal. Mixed signals!
-
-The article caused considerable consternation in the Clinton braintrust. Virtually the entire campaign leadership discussed what to do over the course of an afternoon, July 3, 2015. Campaign manager Robby Mook said he got the Israeli questions from “donors all the time”:
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-I was just thinking: has she made a clear statement on Israel yet? I get this question from donors all the time. Does she need to state her principles on Israel before Iran? Or do both at the same time?
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-In saying “before Iran,” Mook was anticipating Clinton’s public support for the Iran deal, which she announced ten days later.
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-Speechwriter Dan Schwerin said Clinton was taking care of her position on Israel:
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-That’s basically the goal of the BDS letter.
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-The BDS letter was a letter Clinton had written to Saban the day before, dated July 2, promising to fight Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, along with Republicans. The letter had not yet gone public.
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-Mook responded that the letter wasn’t enough.
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-Do we need to push it harder over the next few days? Get something written? I feel like we’re going to want something to point to. Or maybe even just content on the website?
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-Deputy communications director Christina Reynolds suggested:
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-We could either get a donor to leak it or just give it to a reporter if we want to get it out there. I’m semi-surprised it’s not out yet.
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-Reynolds added:
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-If Haim’s going to give it to the Jewish media, I think that solves our problem. Once they write, we can make sure it gets picked up by some of our beat guys.
-
-Jake Sullivan also got into the act that afternoon, July 3:
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-We have a two pager I’m getting clearance from her on. That is what we have to ship around.
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-Reynolds again emphasized the need to cover her “Israel support”:
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-Right, but if we wanted to have a reporter cover the Israel support now, a leak of the letter could probably get written. Otherwise, we can work around the Israel support for reporters covering Iran.
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-Mook responded that afternoon that it was vital to get the word out before Hillary Clinton endorsed the Iran deal:
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-Let’s def give it to someone. I see zero downside to a story. Then we can circulate around right away (hopefully) in advance of Iran
-
-The Clinton-to-Saban letter against BDS appeared in Politico on July 6. Politico wrote, “A campaign aide said Clinton was motivated to write the letter after hearing from a number of people on the issue over the past few months.”
-
-A week later Stu Eizenstat warned the campaign that “in Israel there is wall-to-wall opposition” to the Iran Deal, including from the center-left Jewish leaders Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni.
-
-Another warning came on January 27, 2016. M Bronfein, who would seem to be Michael Bronfein, a big contributor to the Clintons. warned the campaign about an article in the Washington Post by the neoconservative Jennifer Rubin pointing out that Chelsea Clinton had held a fundraiser in California at the home of a board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which Rubin called “a notorious group with links to the Iranian regime that opposed, among other things, any sanctions on Iran.” Bronfein wrote:
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-I am fielding quite a few concerns over this.. , seems to have some viral qualities.. FYI
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-Dennis Cheng, the national finance chair for the Clinton campaign, wrote back the same day to Bronfein:
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-Thanks for flagging – will look into this asap
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-As you read these emails, which were hacked from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email accounts, remember that after the Iran Deal was signed in 2015, Netanyahu was invited to an embarrassingly-obsequious interview by the person holding Podesta’s former job as head of the Center for American Progress: Neera Tanden. Part of the strategy from on high.
+Israel’s quest to strangle Palestine until it falls lifeless into the abyss of posterity will ultimately fail. But for the present, the crunch of its West Bank choke-hold is an area known as E-1.
+Bedouin being squeezed out of the E-1 area, along the road connecting points north, such as Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin, with points south, such as Bethlehem and Hebron. The stone wall and terracing are new, part of Israeli confiscation over the past couple of years. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+E-1 is a strip of land between Israeli-occupied Jerusalem and the vast Israeli colony-city of Ma’ale Adumim, along with a few smaller neighboring Jewish-only Israeli colonies such as Geva Binyamin (also known as Adam). E-1 now separates them from Jerusalem; what Israel wants is for E-1 to connect them.
+Palestinians can still squeeze through this choke-hold separating the northern and southern West Bank, but once Israel fully commandeers E-1, the West Bank will be contiguous only for settlers. For Palestinians, it will be dissected into two. Politicians who can still enunciate “two state solution” with a straight face fret that E-1 may be the final nail in the two-state coffin; yet, as with everything that has happened over the past seven decades, they wring their hands in faux powerlessness to stop it.
+(top:) Ma’ale Adumim as seen from Jabal al-Baba; and (bottom:) a satellite view with a red dot marking the spot of the photograph. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Indeed it was because of the catastrophe of 1948, when the Zionist militias ethnically cleansed them from the Negev, that these Bedouin settled what is now called E-1, then under Jordanian occupation.
+Among the people on E-1 who fled the 1948 Nakba, and whom Israel is now trying to erase again, are the Jahalin of Jabal al-Baba. As if to rub salt into the Nakba wound, it was Nakba Day that Israel selected in 2016 to raze many of the village’s homes, homes provided by a European Economic Community aid programme. Ninety people, most of them children, were left homeless.
+‘Nice’ ethnic cleansing tactics against Jabal al-Baba, designed to avoid bad publicity, have failed: Israel tried to bribe them with money and new land elsewhere, but the Bedouin are not interested in selling themselves, the new land promised them is already stolen by Israel from other Palestinians, and they know that Israel would eventually evict them from that (already stolen) land as well. So force, with its PR blemishes, would have to do.
+Jabal al-Baba’s kindergarten stood on this site until destroyed earlier this year by Israel. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Israel used to issue eviction orders to individual families, one at a time, on any of its stock pretexts (‘permits’, ‘illegal structures’, ‘closed military zone’, etc.), hoping to wear down the community’s resolve. But Israeli confidence has hardened in the Age of Trump, and last November (2017), Jabal al-Baba became one of the communities on E-1 which was handed a collective expulsion order. The entire village, a bit more than three hundred people, was “illegal”.
+As seen from Jabal al-Baba, the tip of Ma’ale Adumim (right) and, on the distant hill, the small settlement of Geva Binyamin (also known as Adam). (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Schools are a bedrock of any community, and so when Jabal al-Baba defied the ethnic cleansing order, it was their kindergarten that Israel destroyed in an attempt to strain the community’s resilience. Instead, the villagers tried a new strategy.
+It happens that some of Jabal al-Baba is Vatican-owned land, and so the villagers left the original school site barren and rebuilt it on a spot clearly marked as papal soil.
+Sign identifying as Vatican-owned the land upon which the Jabal al-Baba kindergarten was built, destroyed … and rebuilt. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Israel was unimpressed: On the morning of July 25, its forces destroyed the new kindergarten and a women’s center.
+As reported by UNRWA:
+Jerusalem 26 July, 2018: Yesterday morning at 0700hrs the Israeli Security Forces entered the Jabal al Baba Bedouin Palestine refugee community in the West Bank, close to the outskirts of East Jerusalem and dismantled and removed a donor funded structure that serves as a kindergarten for 28 children (3-6 years old) and a women’s centre. The school has been demolished once and dismantled twice so this is the third time within a year that the pre-school refugee children in this community have been deprived of having a safe place to play and learn.
+The European Union chastised Israel while doing nothing to hold it accountable. Instead, it warned that forced transfers “threaten the two-state solution,” as though the past seventy years had never happened.*
+Abdulwahab Sabbah holds a CADFA cap after his community center was trashed by the IDF. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Nearby to E-1 lies the town of Abu Dis, which Israel has tried to promote as the future capital of the Palestinian state it would never let exist, to counter criticism over its seizure of East Jerusalem. In Abu Dis is a modest but powerfully effective community center, Dar Assadaqa, the Palestinian half of the London-based human rights organization, Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association (CADFA). Formed in 2004, CADFA became a registered UK charity the following year, dedicated to promoting human rights and respect for international humanitarian law. Its approach has been to link people in order to build awareness and understanding, and to encourage people to be active in the pursuit of human rights.
+During the night of July 20-21, the IDF broke into the Dar Assadaqa community center, trashed it, destroyed both its computers, and left a swastika on a nearby wall. I met my friend, the community center’s head, Abdulwahab Sabbah (‘Abed’) outside the building on the following morning to be a witness the crime scene. We entered together.
+Israeli soldiers taking property of Jabal al-Baba. Photo from Pope Mountain Facebook page.
+The IDF were apparently not moved by Dar Assadaqa’s map of 1948 Palestine. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Abed got the center functioning again and continued his human rights work undeterred. On August 8 he took a group of medical students from abroad to Jabal al-Baba. I accompanied him.
+A chance visitor to Jabal al-Baba could be forgiven for assuming that the poor dirt approach road and primitive nature of the village are facts of Bedouin life — but they are not. Since the people are non-Jews in an area “C” (under full Israeli control by the Oslo Accords), they are blocked from building any permanent (concrete) houses, from paving their roads, or creating rudimentary infrastructure such as sewers, safe electricity access, or on-site running water — the latter two presently accessed by distant, independent hook-ups, barely adequate and, in the case of electricity, dangerous. The village’s once-lucrative trade in their own products has long been destroyed by Israel’s bantustan system.
+August 8, 2018: Hastily-constructed kindergarten, the second built alongside the sign identifying the land as belonging to the Vatican. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+When we arrived, a new structure stood on the same Vatican soil, a single large room that was almost ready for students. It was not clear what facilities or supplies for the school were still in the village. A man testified that during the July 25 assault, Israeli soldiers moved from household to household, stealing whatever they wished. When he tried to block a soldier from taking his family’s property, the soldier put a gun to his head: “All I need to do is pull the trigger and plant a knife by your side.”
+
+Israel’s battle to ethnically cleanse Jabal al-Baba is but one of myriad ongoing stories in its singular quest for a ‘racially’ pure fundamentalist Zionist state. I am able to offer this report because it is possible to witness and document it. Had the people’s 1948 ancestors been among those who fled the Negev west to Gaza, rather than northeast to what became the West Bank, I would not. They would now be among the two million human experiments in that hermetically sealed laboratory.
+We should not be surprised that Israel’s propagandists in its patron states, principally the United States and Britain, work to keep its crimes-in-progress out of public visibility by threatening  the media and politicians with anti-Semitism smears. But we must not tolerate that our media and representatives acquiesce.
+See also:
+Mersiha Gadzo’s ‘We shall remain’: Bedouin of Jabal al-Baba face an uphill battle to keep their land, in Mondoweiss, May 10, 2017)
+and:
+The Pope Mountain community تجمع بدو جبل البابا Facebook page, which contains photographs and updates.
+* The Office of the European Union Representative (West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA), Local EU statement on the dismantling by Israeli authorities of a women’s center and kindergarten in Jabal al-Baba. Jerusalem, 30/07/2018.
+Jewish Voice for Peace
+International Jewish anti-Zionist Network
+If Not Now

mondoweiss/texts/1870.txt

@@ -1,83 +1,21 @@
-Days after Israel began its attacks on Lebanon, Politico reported that White House officials had privately told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that it would support his military push against Hezbollah. That push led to an Iranian missile attack on Israel, which Netanyahu has vowed to avenge. Once again, the region seems to be teetering on the verge of a large-scale war.
-
-Why is Biden administration supporting such actions and what does the U.S. hope to gain? Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, and a non-resident fellow with the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, about U.S. motivations in the region, Biden’s consistent support for Israel, and how the administration’s Iran policy has made things worse.
-
-Mondoweiss: I’m sure you probably saw the recent Politico report on Biden officials quietly backing Israel’s military push in Lebanon. What do you think the U.S. motivation is there? What do they gain from backing these moves?
-
-I think what we’re seeing here is that Israel, when it initially went into Gaza, it didn’t really have a strategy. It was motivated kind of by bloodlust and revenge.
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-I think as a crisis it escalated regionally, and there’s a growing belief in Israel, which is supported by the U.S., that this represents a real opportunity to redraw the political map of the Middle East, to change the strategic equation of the Middle East and dismantle the “Axis of Resistance”, which is held together by a common agenda of seeking to confront and reduce Israeli influence in the region.
-
-I think we need to see expansion of the war in this context. Particularly after Israel’s recent successes of hitting Hezbollah hard, the U.S., which initially put forward the position that it is against regional escalation, I think is now on board with it because it believes there are achievable objectives to be had.
-
-Every modern president has backed Israel, but there have been some red lines in rare cases, or public criticisms of the country. You see people citing Ronald Reagan’s harsh words about Israel’s attack on Beirut or George H.W. Bush holding up loans, for example. We even saw Biden move to reel in Netanyahu during Israel’s 2021 assault on Gaza.
-
-Why do you believe the Biden administration has been so supportive of Israel over the past year and do you think there’s been any real attempt to end the bombings?
-
-I think there’s several factors.
-
-The famous Reagan incident everyone keeps referring to from 1982, when he called [former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and told him,”This is turning into a Holocaust” or something to that effect. What actually preceded that was a call from the Saudi Crown Prince at the time, Prince Fahd, basically telling Reagan that he was putting America’s Arab allies in an increasingly difficult position. That, more than anything else I think, spurred Reagan to act.
-
-Similarly, when Biden called Netanyahu in 2021, and I think the term he used was something like, “You’ve run out of road.” I think it was only a day or two earlier that the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Mark Milley in congressional testimony said that the continuation of this conflict was beginning to impact U.S. interests in the region and that kind of rang alarm bells.
-
-I think an important part of it is that in 2023 and 2024, the U.S. has not seen any impact of Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip or its regional escalation, at least until now, on the strength of its relationships with other Arab governments. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and so on. These relationships have remained as solid as they were on October 6. And I think that’s affecting the U.S.
-
-I also think there is, in a sense, a personal factor. I do think that Biden, compared to his predecessors, is uniquely pro-Israeli in several respects.
-
-First of all, he’s a self-proclaimed Zionist and has said so on numerous occasions. Secondly, he has also made it clear on numerous occasions that, at least in public, there can be no daylight between Israel and the United States. I think I’m quoting him verbatim in this respect. This means that any ability of the U.S. to use its enormous influence and leverage over Israel is already drastically reduced.
-
-I think what Israel fears most is not what the U.S. says to it in private, but what it signals in public, because that then also provides guidance, if you will, to other countries, particularly Washington’s European allies and their dealings with Israel. So Israel has had exceptionally broad room from the United States to basically act as it pleases.
-
-That’s if you accept that the U.S. has not necessarily been on board with Israeli policy. In other words, that the U.S. may not like what Israel is doing, but is unprepared to take any measures to to force Israel to change course because it doesn’t want to be publicly seen as opposing Israel.
-
-I think it’s quite clear that the U.S. is now fully on board with what I wouldn’t call an Israeli agenda, I would call a joint U.S.-Israeli agenda. An agenda to change the face of the region.
-
-I think that may well have been the case in the early months. But if you’re now talking about late 2024, I think it’s quite clear that the U.S. is now fully on board with what I wouldn’t call an Israeli agenda, I would call a joint U.S.-Israeli agenda. An agenda to change the face of the region. And here, again, there’s also, I think, an important geopolitical element that we shouldn’t ignore, which is that the United States is committed to Israel, perhaps for multiple reasons, but an important one is that it sees Israel as a key outpost of U.S. interests in the Middle East.
-
-If you look at it from that perspective, then any Israeli loss weakens the U.S. and any Israeli victory strengthens the U.S. position, not only in the region, but around the world as well.
-
-So, as I’ve been saying, for the U.S., the only serious, real red line is Israeli failure. That is the one thing that the the United States will not accept.
-
-I’m wondering how you’d assess the Biden administration’s approach to Iran over the past four years and how that policy has contributed to the current situation?
-
-It’s a very good question because it’s a very important issue.
-
-I was contacted at the beginning of Biden’s period in office by a researcher for a prominent think tank who was putting together a paper on recommendations for U.S. policy towards Iran. This researcher asked me what I thought and I said, well, my view is that if the U.S. does not immediately and unconditionally re-enter the Iran nuclear agreement, which, again, is not a bilateral U.S.-Israeli, Iranian agreement, but an international agreement in which the U.S. was one player, admittedly a key player, but one player. I said, if the U.S. does not immediately and unconditionally reenter the agreement and then deal with any differences it has with Iran and negotiates them from within the agreement, this is going to end very badly.
-
-There was a fairly long silence on the other end of the line, because, of course, only a lunatic or an Iranian agent would propose that the U.S. enter the agreement without conditions, but look what’s happened.
-
-Iran is one more issue where the U.S. failed to clearly repudiate Trump’s policy and to a large extent sought to continue it. Instead of reentering the agreement and even instead of seeking a resolution of only those issues arising from U.S. renouncing the agreement, what the U.S. tried to do was to negotiate an entirely new agreement. It tried to address, for example, Iran’s regional role as part of the price for the U.S. re-entering the agreement.
-
-This was never going to work. The Iranians had been very clear that any agreement is only going to be about two things, the Iranian nuclear program and sanctions on Iran. And they were not prepared to address any other issues until after that initial agreement had been implemented.
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-We’re now in a position where Israel is actively exploiting this deterioration in U.S.-Iranian relations. In fact, the lack of any relationship between the U.S. and Iran could engineer a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran. That’s how dangerous the present moment is.
-
-The point I’m making is that by refusing to reenter the agreement and by continuing with Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran, a key factor that could have helped prevent much of the escalation that we’ve seen over the past year was forfeited. We’re now in a position where Israel is actively exploiting this deterioration in U.S.-Iranian relations.
-
-In fact, the lack of any relationship between the U.S. and Iran could engineer a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran. That’s how dangerous the present moment is.
-
-Getting back to an earlier question of yours, this is not just an Israeli agenda. I believe there are senior officials within the Biden administration who are fully on board with this and feel that now more than ever is the time to promote it.
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-We continually hear that support for Israel is somehow connected to U.S. security. I’m not really sure how many Americans actually buy that claim anymore. I think it probably had traction with the Americans in the years immediately following 9/11, but there’s a lot of recent polling that suggests people no longer make that connection.
-
-I’m wondering if you think there’s any truth to the claim about U.S. security and, if there’s not, why do you believe the vast majority of U.S. lawmakers still support Israel’s actions in the region? Is it as simple as politicians fearing groups like AIPAC or are there larger factors to consider?
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-I think the premise about security could have been a topic for discussion during the Cold War, when Israel was clearly a U.S. proxy in the Middle East helping to confront regimes that were allied with the Soviet Union.
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-Once the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated, I’m not sure to what extent Israel served U.S. regional interests. I’m not talking about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, but your question about what role the Israel plays in promoting U.S. interests in the region or globally. I think if you make a cost-benefit ratio, it’s a little difficult to sustain.
-
-You mentioned 9/11. In one of his first interviews after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, claimed that the seeds of the attack were planted in his head as he was watching scenes of slaughter in Beirut in 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
-
-Now, it’s one of two things that are true. Either that actually was the case, or he was making it up, but felt that trying to tie the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to opposition to Israel was the best way to mobilize support for his actions.
-
-If you look at the current situation a lot of people are saying that in the long run 9/11 is going to be child’s play compared to the impact of not just Israeli conduct, but just as importantly unconditional, uncritical Western endorsement support and complicity in Israeli conduct. I very much hope that will be proven wrong, but if it’s proven wrong, it will be primarily because of the tsunami of voices in the West that have come up against this genocide, whether on campuses or on the streets of European capitals or elsewhere that have made such a clear distinction between Western citizens and Western governments.
-
-I think this is a very clear example of how the U.S. doesn’t need Israel to promote its interest in the region, particularly because the U.S. now also, since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, has a very extensive direct presence in the Middle East. It doesn’t have a need for proxies to the extent that it would have had during the Cold War when it had very few open military bases, even on the territory of its closest allies.
-
-Regarding the final part of your question, why do so many politicians continue to support Israel? Yes, AIPAC is certainly a factor, but I wouldn’t say it’s the only factor. There are certainly cases like Jamaal Bowman, where the resources and money of organizations are able to determine outcomes of particular electoral contests.
-
-But I think that’s only part of the picture. I also think we have to recognize the very deep ideological investment of many elected officials to the Israel project, either because they are evangelical Christians or because support for Israel and Islamophobia have become increasingly important principles to to a very large extent.
-
-Islamophobia has replaced the role that antisemitism played in the 19th and 20th century for these types of politicians and they see it as an electoral asset. You said some politicians might fear of AIPAC, but that suggests these people don’t want to support Israel or that it’s an issue that really doesn’t matter to them.
-
-I’m sure there are politicians who fit that bill, but I think that’s only part of the story. I think there’s quite a lot of politicians who do take money and support from AIPAC, but if AIPAC didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be all that different.
+September 4, 2018: Today, as expected, the UK’s Labour Party adopted in full the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and rejected a clarification about free speech that had been put forward by Jeremy Corbyn.
+London, Sept 4: Demonstrators waving Israeli flags demand that Labour adopt the full IHRA definition and examples of anti-Semitism. [photo: Andy Rain/EPA, from The Guardian]Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected head of the UK’s Labour Party, dire warnings of anti-Semitism have been a mainstay of the country’s daily headlines (MW articles). Prominent figures claiming to fight this wave of anti-Jewish hatred unfailingly cited one silver bullet: the so-called IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism. Only by enforcing this definition in full, the argument went, will Britain be a country in which Jews will be safe.
+Now that IHRA has been adopted by all major British political parties, it is de facto British policy.
+Despite all the attention given to IHRA, its core claim of fighting anti-Semitism is never challenged. Yet even a cursory examination of it demonstrates quite the opposite: it is IHRA that is anti-Semitic, institutionalizing racism against Jews.
+The major media safely contained the spectrum of debate into two camps. On one side, we read that IHRA is needed to address rampant anti-Semitism; on the other, we hear (correctly) that IHRA will imperil honest debate. IHRA’s advocates managed criticism regarding free speech by branding such speech hate speech. Even as the ‘debate’ raged, IHRA achieved its goal: the fabricated hysteria vanquished Israel’s ongoing crimes from the news.
+IHRA’s purpose is to help Israel continue business-as-usual without interference. Since the state claims to ‘be’ Jews, any accusation against it is an accusation against Jews, as Jews — that is, racism. With ethnic-nationalism’s sell-by date having expired even before Israel was born, this tactic of holding Jewish identity hostage is about all it has left.
+To dismiss in advance the argument that most Jews support IHRA (and Zionism), and therefore, it can’t be anti-Semitic: Neither evidence nor linear reasoning are subject to anyone’s ethnicity. Why individuals, whatever their nationality or religion or political predilections or anything else, might support a document that exploits their ethnic identity to commit crimes, may be an interesting topic for sociologists, but is immaterial to the issue at hand. Nor should we forget that the media rely religiously on Zionist organizations, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to speak for Jews.
+To quote from IHRA, there is such a thing as “the Jewish people”, and this “Jewish people” have a right to “self-determination”. Lest we err in thinking that a person’s right to self-destiny is an individual matter neither dictated by ethnicity nor owned by some political project, IHRA corrects us. This “self-determination” is “the State of Israel”.
+This alone should horrify us in principle, no matter which state claims to embody which ethnicity. There is no parallel to this on earth, no other political entity’s claim of ownership over people by virtue of their ethnicity. Any such claim would be universally condemned as outrageous, as abusive, and at best, laughable. But Zionism has conditioned us to believe one of the most repugnant of classic anti-Semitic tropes, that of Jews as a tribe, a ‘race’ apart, somehow distinct from the rest of humanity, and placed a pariah state in the Middle East as the tribal leader.
+What IHRA’s smoke and mirrors can not do is hide the consequences of its abuse: it cannot make its organic Jews = Zionism/Israel linkage one-way only. If criticism of Israel equals criticism of Jews as Jews (anti-Semitism), then Jews, simply by virtue of being Jews, are the doers of whatever the Israeli state has done, is doing, and may in the future do. This ethnic blackmail extends beyond any abstract fig-leafs, fully to what IHRA calls “Israeli policy”. In short, when Israel is accused of crimes, it substitutes ‘Israel’ with ‘Jews’, enabling it to claim that the allegations are anti-Semitic. The original accuser is perceived as having blamed Jews, when it was Israel that framed Jews for the crime it knew it itself had committed.
+The framers of IHRA were clearly aware of this fatal flaw, because IHRA also contains an antidote. This states — absolutely correctly — that it is anti-Semitic to hold Jews “collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” But since holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel is precisely IHRA’s purpose, the only antidote is to make it ‘anti-Semitic’ to say so.
+Nationalism has long been used by nation-states to insure the consent of its citizenry. Dissidents are condemned as enemies of the people. But if it is traitorous to oppose a country’s behavior, then that behavior is integral to the ‘values’, the morality, of the citizenry. Zionism replaced nation-state nationalism with far more potent ethnic nationalism: Jewish ‘patriotism’ to a particular political ideology and a particular state. To allege that is traitorous to Jews to oppose Israel’s behavior, is to allege that Israel’s behavior, whatever it is or will be, is integral to the ‘values’, the morality of Jews, not as individuals, nor just citizens of that state, but Jews as Jews.
+That is profound, insidious anti-Semitism.
+The exploitation of the word “Holocaust” to lend moral weight to IHRA, implicit in its name, is a further betrayal. Living Jews can speak for themselves and denounce IHRA’s attempt to exploit their identity on behalf of Israel’s crimes. Hitler’s victims can’t.
+In the occupied Old City in Hebron, cats perch on a dumpster by settler’s graffiti. An Israeli settler, his life about to be cut short, shakes hands in friendship with a Palestinian, who with a third hand hides a knife in preparation for his kill. [photo: T Suárez] UPDATE, February 21, 2019: the blue color in this graffiti was added, presumably by a settler. The blue behind the settler (left-side) figure covers a gun in his third hand. It was drawn by one ‘Kai’ who left such artwork around Palestine in Banksy style.
+Israel alone is IHRA’s winner. Its losers are Palestinians, British democracy, fact-based speech, and Jews. Now that Labour has caved to political pressure and adopted IHRA and all its “examples”, the Party is now what its critics could formerly only allege: anti-Semitic.
+“Trump make Israel great”, one of several such signs, this one in East Jerusalem. One is left wondering whether “make” is a grammatical error for “makes”, or whether the sentence is a command. Other signs say “Trump is a friend of Zion”. [photo: T Suárez]
+Relevant Mondweiss articles here
+See also:
+J’accuse: Zionism, Israel, And The IHRA
+Zionism, anti-Semitism, Israel — and the UK Labour party

mondoweiss/texts/1871.txt

@@ -1,81 +1,41 @@
-Casualties
-
-41,788 + killed* and at least 96,794 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 32,280 of the slain have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the casualties, and 2,770 elderly as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*
-
-722+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
-
-1,974 Lebanese killed and more than 9,384 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
-
-Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
-
-The Israeli army recognizes the death of 716 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,100 others since October 7.****
-
-* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on October 3, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of October 1, 2024.*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on October 3, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
-
-Key Developments
-
-Gaza branch of Palestinian Health Ministry says death toll surpasses 41,788, with 96,794 wounded since October 7, including 33% children, 18.4% women, and 8.6% elderly; at least 115 Palestinian children born and killed by Israeli forces since October 7.
-
-Palestinian Health Ministry says death toll by Israeli army or settlers in West Bank and Jerusalem reaches 722 since October 7.
-
-Lebanese Ministry of Health says 1,974 Lebanese people killed, over 9,384 wounded in hundreds of Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon, especially in the south and the Beqaa Valley since the beginning of escalating hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel began in September 2024.
-
-Iran strikes Israel with at least 180 ballistic missiles in response of the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut.
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-The Israeli army admits damage to airfields and bases during Iran attack, says infrastructure of bases was not affected.
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-Biden says that he is discussing retaliation options against Iran with Israel, reiterates opposition to strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities as Netanyahu pledges retaliation against Iran.
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-Iranian president Masoud Pezashkian says Iran will make a “harsher response” in the event of an Israeli retaliation, adds that Iran doesn’t seek war with Israel.
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-Israeli army admits eight soldiers killed, including three officers, alongside injury of 35 others, in first 24 hours of Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon.
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-Israel conducts 20 strikes on Beirut’s southern Dahiya district, continues striking towns across Lebanon.
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-Nine Israelis killed on Tuesday in Tel Aviv in shooting attack carried out by two Palestinians from Hebron; Israeli forces raid and seal off Hebron following attack, arresting family members of the two shooters.
-
-UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warns against expansion of Israeli settlements in West Bank, condemns “broadening of the Middle East conflict with escalation after escalation” after Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
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-Israel declares Guterres persona non grata for failure to “unequivocally” condemn Iran missile attack.
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-Israeli strikes kill 150 Palestinians across Gaza Strip in two days.
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-Oxfam says in report that more women and children killed by Israeli military in Gaza than in any other recent conflict in a single year.
-
-Iran retaliates against Israel
-
-The U.S. is discussing the nature of Israel’s response to Iran’s missile strikes last Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, adding that he does not support an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
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-Biden’s remarks came a day after Iran launched a large missile attack against Israeli targets on Tuesday in response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July, as well as the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hasan Nasrallah, and the Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Abbas Nilforushan, according to the IRGC.
-
-Israeli media reported that 180 missiles struck Israeli targets on Tuesday, many of which were allegedly intercepted by Israeli air defenses. Since Tuesday, a large amount of video footage taken by individuals has circulated on the internet, showing dozens of missiles falling and exploding in Israel.
-
-The Israeli army recognized on Wednesday that Iranian rockets caused damage to its airfields and bases, while stressing that the damage didn’t reach their infrastructure. Axios quoted an unnamed Israeli army official saying that several Iranian rockets targeted the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, but that none fell inside the Mossad compound.
-
-ِAlthough Israeli censorship bans the publication of details or images of Israeli casualties or damage sustained by the attack, the Israeli municipality of Hod Hasharon, near Tel Aviv, said that some 100 buildings were damaged by Iranian rockets, some of them suffering damage that “will take a long time to repair.”
-
-Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised speech from an underground shelter hours after the Iranian attack that “Iran made a big mistake,” vowing that “it will pay the price.” For his part, the Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian said during a visit to Qatar that Iran “does not seek a war” with Israel, while pledging “a harsher response” if Israel attacks Iran again.
-
-On Wednesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned of “the expansion of the conflict in the Middle East with an escalation after the other,” calling for an immediate ceasefire.
-
-Eight Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon fighting
-
-The Israeli army admitted to the killing of 8 of its soldiers, including three officers, and the wounding of 30 other soldiers, in the first round of face-to face combat with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, three days after it announced the beginning of a “limited” ground offensive in southern Lebanese territory. The Israeli army’s Arabic-speaking spokesperson had ordered Lebanese civilians in a number of border towns and villages to leave their homes as the Israeli army had also evacuated several areas on the Israeli side of the border, declaring them “military zones” while concentrating large forces at the border.
-
-On Tuesday, the Israeli army announced that it had begun ground operations in southern Lebanon and that its forces were engaged in heavy fighting with Hezbollah units. Hezbollah denied the Israeli claims through its spokesperson, Muhammad Afif, who said that no Israeli forces had entered Lebanon. On Wednesday, however, the military wing of Hezbollah confirmed that Israeli forces had crossed the “Blue Line” — the demarcation delineating Israeli and Lebanese territory — and that its fighters had clashed with Israeli forces in the areas of Maroun al-Ras and Idaiseh, inflicting casualties.
-
-According to Hezbollah reports, its fighters engaged Israeli soldiers and armored vehicles near the towns of Yaroun, Kufr Kila, and Maroun al-Ras, allegedly destroying three tanks and killing and wounding an unspecified number of soldiers.
-
-The Israeli public broadcaster reported that an Israeli force fell into a Hezbollah ambush in the southern Lebanese town of Idaiseh, suffering numerous casualties, while the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot said that Israeli forces were fighting Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, however, said in a statement that the Radwan Force had not yet entered the battle and that its regular forces were the only ones fighting so far.
-
-Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanese towns continued across southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, Mount Lebanon, and Beirut throughout the week. On Thursday, an Israeli strike on the Bashoura neighborhood in Beirut killed nine people.
-
-Since the beginning of Israel’s offensive on Lebanon on October 8, 2023, Israel has killed 1,974 Lebanese, wounded 9,384, and displaced 1.2 million, according to Lebanese authorities.
-
-Massacres in Gaza continue
-
-Israeli strikes killed 150 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours, according to the Gaza branch of the Palestinian Health Ministry. Local media reports indicated that Israeli strikes targeted houses and shelters for the displaced since Tuesday, October 1.
-
-In Khan Younis, Israeli warplanes destroyed a residential block that included a four-floor building, killing an unspecified number of Palestinians, including 13 members of a single family. In the Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, an Israeli strike targeted the Masqat school sheltering displaced families, killing 17 people. In the Rimal neighborhood in central Gaza City, another airstrike on the Amal al-Aytam College, which was also used as a shelter for the displaced, killed 10 people. In Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, an Israeli strike on an open area where displaced families concentrated killed nine people, including a young girl.
-
-On Tuesday, Oxfam concluded in a report that “more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.” The report pointed out that during the past 12 months in Gaza, an Israeli explosive weapon has hit a home in Gaza every four hours, a tent or temporary shelter every 17 hours, schools and hospitals every four days, and aid distribution points and warehouses every 15 days.
+“Accusing Jews of making accusations of antisemitism in bad faith in order to aid a hidden agenda is a well-established antisemitic slur.” — from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British pro-Israeli organization established in August 2014 to counter media fallout from that summer’s “Protective Edge” assault against Gaza.
+Israel’s most powerful weapon is the smearing of its critics. This weapon — made from the hijacking of Jewish identity and historic persecution, and launched through Zionist media and organizations — silences opposition and keeps attention away from its crimes in Palestine. If we can defang this weapon, Israel’s arsenal of bombs will be impotent. Israel is keenly aware of this, and so front organizations such as that quoted above have declared that exposing Israel’s exploitation of antisemitism is … antisemitic.
+What follows is a summary of one effort to challenge one such media “making accusations of antisemitism in bad faith in order to aid” the “hidden agenda” of Israel, the London-based Jewish Chronicle (JC); and indirectly challenge one such organization, the UK’s Board of Deputies of British Jews.
+In April of 2018 I lodged a formal complaint against the JC with Britain’s main media watchdog, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)[1], concerning two JC articles about me, published a year apart:
+• Lee Harpin, “Board halt Israel hate author talk”, May 8, 2017
+• Ben Weich, “Quakers row as venue is rented out to anti-Zionist”, April 20, 2018
+IPSO, to be sure, does not address defamation. Its Code of Practice, rather, addresses “accuracy” and the need to “distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact”. These, I thought, were essentially interchangeable for the seven points I wished to challenge.
+Jewish Chronicle refers to Tom Suarez as a hate author, without quotations.
+Jewish Chronicle says that Quakers are in disagreement about hosting an anti-Zionist when there was no such disagreement.
+Although two “Complaints Officers” through whom I communicated were always cordial and helpful, for the better part of a year, my case went nowhere. The JC simply insisted that its sources, two UK pro-Israel activists named Jonathan Hoffman and David Collier, “are considered strong sources by the JC, their insights have proved to be reliable in the past and their [the JC‘s] journalists have no hesitation in seeking their views on such matters.” For “evidence”, the JC would, for example, paste in urls to Zionist blogs with unflattering words about me.
+IPSO did nothing to keep the case focused on the facts and not on what seemed to be the JC’s attempts to wear me out. Even when the JC pasted in a link to a 59-page alleged “review” of my book State of Terror by its own sources, Hoffman and Collier — a document which in any event had no bearing whatsoever on the case — I composed a point-by-point rebuttal of allegations cited.
+But after eight months, the tone began to change, and JC editor Stephen Pollard offered me a published response. That was all I had wanted, and although they refused to have it in print — only online — I agreed.
+This was however short-lived. Pollard insisted on eliminating any mention of IPSO, so that it looked as though the JC had acted on its own initiative; and he forbade any mention of the duo that the paper had boasted as its iron-clad sources, allegedly for fears of “defamation”. I declined, and let the case go to IPSO’s Committee for a formal Decision.
+I. Three complaints upheld by IPSO
+
+IPSO ruled in my favor on three points, requiring the JC to publish a correction online and in print:
+• The JC had falsely reported that I claimed that Zionist leaders “encouraged antisemitism in Germany to force Jews to move to Palestine”.
+• The JC had falsely reported that Jesus Lane (Quakers) Friends Meeting House (Cambridge, UK) had “banned” me.
+• The JC had falsely reported that Jesus Lane had said that my talk was “not in line with Quaker values” (2018 only).
+JC publishes a correction after IPSO ruling.
+II. Four complaints dismissed by IPSO
+• The 2017 JC headline referred to me as a hate author, without quotes. The article itself described me as a person “peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories [who] rose to notoriety after an hour-long rant on Jews.” I argued that the JC‘s failure to put the words hate author in quotes in the headline presented an opinion as news; and I argued that it was factually wrong to state that “Jews” had ever been the subject of my statements, whatever one’s opinion of those statements. IPSO ruled (oddly, as it seemed to confirm my point) that the JC‘s reporting “was plainly an expression of the publication’s views of the complainant”.
+• After Jonathan Hoffman and the Board of Deputies failed to close down a talk I gave at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI), the JC headline stated that it had precipitated a “Quakers row,” or disagreement among Quakers. I argued that only one Quaker organization was cited by the paper, Jesus Lane Friends Meeting, and it supported my right to speak. BRLSI obviously supported my right to speak as well, and anyway it is not a Quaker institution. Rather, the JC‘s claim of a “Quakers row” over my talk rests posthumously with the name of Edmund Rack, a Quaker who lived in Bath in the eighteenth century. Rack was involved with one of several forerunner organizations to BRLSI. He died in 1797. The Bath Literary and Scientific Institution was established in 1824, and in 1837 it received royal patronage, becoming BRLSI, the organization we know today. Fast-forward to 2018, and the JC quoted one Penny Williamson (unknown to me), who expressed the view that Rack, were he alive, would not want me to speak. IPSO accepted this argument.
+• IPSO agreed with the JC that when I quote someone saying something, it is fair to quote me as the source of the statements. The JC reported that “Thomas Suarez has repeatedly and unapologetically made statements comparing Zionists to Nazis.” In response, I offered IPSO a complete unedited video of the very Bath talk that is the topic of the article.  The video proves, not only that I never made any such comparison myself — in each case I was quoting 1940s British and US intelligence, as well as Jews who had fled the Nazis — but that I ended that segment of the talk with the following statement:
+A quick word about all these Zionist-Nazi parallels, which continued with the behavior of the early Israeli state: Unless there is some historical reason for doing so, I myself don’t make the comparison. If anyone is curious abut my reasoning, please ask me in the Q&A.[4]
+IPSO however sided with the JC, because I had “accepted that [my] talks involved quoting sources making such claims”.
+• In May 2017, Jonathan Hoffman and the Board of Deputies pressured Jesus Lane to cancel a talk I was to give there. The JC then quoted BoD’s President, Jonathan Arkush, as saying that the reason Jesus Lane cancelled the talk was that it was not “in line with Quaker values” — but this phrase was Arkush’s invention. Jesus Lane cancelled, in its own words, “under pressure of time and with incomplete information” after the eleventh-hour intervention. Although the article falsely led the reader to believe that Arkush was quoting Jesus Lane, IPSO ruled that there was no accuracy breach, since the words themselves were “accurately attributed to the President [Arkush]”.
+III. My Appeal
+IPSO allows for an appeal, confined to issues of process. I limited my appeal to two points.
+• I contested the hate author issue, arguing that in its written Decision the Committee had in every instance put hate author in quotes, whereas the very point of my complaint was that the JC had failed to do so. The Independent Complaints Reviewer dismissed my appeal, arguing that the absence of quotation marks was a “fine distinction”.
+• I contested the Quakers row headline, arguing that the JC had failed to demonstrate any Quaker opposition to my talk, and that words put in the mouth of a man who has been dead for more than two centuries cannot seriously be considered “evidence”. This was dismissed as well, because my argument “does not seem to be the key issue being considered by the Committee” and thus does not constitute “a flaw in the decision making process”.
+IV. Conclusion
+IPSO is not the watchdog it should be, but it’s what we have at present, and it should be used. Israel’s cynical abuse of the charge of antisemitism is on the front lines of its tactics. The mere fact of an IPSO judgement against the JC is a victory.
+Happily, thanks to a harmless glitch by the JC online, the year-long case ended with some unintended, welcome humor. As caught in the screen-grab below, the JC accidentally reported its IPSO loss as “related” to Israel’s crash landing on the moon that same day.
+Jewish Chronicle relates its loss in IPSO case to Israeli space vehicle crashing on moon.
+
+Notes:
+1. IPSO is funded by member publications. It oversees most of the UK’s national newspapers, but membership is voluntary; among the non-participating papers are The Financial Times, The Independent, and The Guardian, which have their own internal system of redress. In my case, the JC’s reporting was the most egregious among the “legitimate” media, though the tabloid Daily Mail — also a member of IPSO — was stiff competition.
+2. Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution here; Bath Friends of Palestine here. My thanks to Huw Spanner of BFP.
+3. “03222-18 Suárez v The Jewish Chronicle”, ruling here
+4. One can cite parallels, and differences, between Nazism and Zionism. My objection to the exercise itself is that it reveals our need to invoke European suffering in order to see what is right in front our eyes. If the reality in Palestine and the refugee camps only shocks us if we invoke the word “Nazi”, it means that we are not seeing Palestinians as equal human beings.

mondoweiss/texts/1872.txt

@@ -1,33 +1,17 @@
-The Podesta emails keep dripping out of Wikileaks. As Haaretz notes flatly, “Many of the leaked Clinton campaign emails deal with Israel.” Yes: the emails demonstrate the centrality of Israel as an issue for the Clintonites, and the agony they went through over President Obama’s Iran deal. Last week we picked up the emails showing the Clinton team’s knee-jerk responsiveness to prodding by megadonor Haim Saban: Clinton must not “rebuke” Netanyahu over his opposition to Obama over the deal, but send positive signals re Israel, including opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement– statements that could then be sent out to “thousands” of donors to help them understand where Hillary is on Israel.
-
-The emails keep coming, and in the last day or so, Israeli publications have picked up a Clinton comment approving the idea of a “Potemkin” peace process.
-
-Here’s the context. In a March 2015 email, right after Netanyahu’s victory in the Israeli election, Clinton foreign policy aide Jake Sullivan passed along a Times article in which Netanyahu offered a mild apology for his racist election-eve warning to Jewish voters that Palestinians were coming out to the polls “in droves,” and in which he flip-flopped on his promise that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch. Per the Times:
-
-The two-state solution “remains our goal today, because it is the only way to secure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state,” [Netanyahu] added.
-
-Sullivan comments:
-
-Unsurprisingly, Pragmatic Bibi makes an appearance.
-
-Clinton steps right in:
-
-This is an opening that should be exploited. A Potemkin process is better than nothing.
-
-A Potemkin process is of course just what the United States has had for twenty years or so. It is our contribution to the managed conflict undertaken by the Israelis; we never put any real pressure on the Israelis, and yet, affirming the Potemkin process gives the U.S. cover to claim that it is working hard to bring about a two-state solution. Even as apartheid solidifies across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
-
-It is not clear what the “opening” Clinton refers to was. Netanyahu was obviously insincere about any Palestinian state; for several years now he has paid grudging lip service to one while expanding Israeli control over the territories. Clinton points to a Jodi Rudoren piece in the Times where the former Jerusalem bureau chief says, Netanyahu “believes in the concept of two states but thinks the current circumstances make it impossible — [and this] is reflective of a very broad view among Israel’s Jews.” I.e., never.
-
-Michael Omer-Man has this angry comment on the Potemkin process at +972:
-
-It’s hard to imagine a more troubling statement about Israel/Palestine from a politician who will in all likelihood be the next president of the United States, even if it represents only part of her thinking on the region…when American politicians like Hillary Clinton say that the façade of a peace process is better than no process, they mean it is better for the United States and Israel, not for Palestinians. A Potemkin peace process expressly means maintaining the status quo of occupation and oppression while neutralizing any consequences Israel might face for its actions.
-
-Clinton’s statement about a Potemkin process would seem to echo her advice in a 2013 speech to Goldman, Sachs— also leaked in the Podesta emails — that leaders need both a public and a private position on difficult issues.
-
-You just have to sort of figure out… how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today. That, I think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.
-
-Though in this case, the backroom pressure on Netanyahu is just as pathetic as the public statements. Nothing happens.
-
-Lastly, a running theme in the emails is pro-Israel Jewish donors. That’s why the Clinton team wants to do nothing to alienate Netanyahu. And speaking of the Israel lobby, here’s an email earlier this year from Neera Tanden, the head of the Clintonite Center for American Progress, welcoming on the CAP board Jonathan Lavine, a co-managing partner at Bain Capital. Lavine is a big supporter of Israel. From the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston:
-
-For decades, Jonathan and his wife Jeannie have… in recent years increased focused [sic] on their investment in Israel, and in the Jewish future. Jonathan says that his experience on a CJP mission to Israel in 2012 opened his eyes “to the diverse fabric of CJP’s work, and how we can pursue our desire for social change and express our Jewish identity.”
+My friend Abdulwahab (Abed) Sabbah is the director of Dar Assadaqa, a community center in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem. He is the Palestinian half of London’s human rights organization CADFA, the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association. He sent me an account of an IDF attack on his family in their apartment in Abu Dis on September 4, and followups.
+IDF vehicle in Abu Dis. [photo: Abdulwahab Sabbah]What a day. We started early, at around 2:30 AM, when savage mercenaries from the Israel IDF invaded my father’s and my house. They started to knock hard on the main door, and when my father open the door, eight of them entered with their weapons into the house before I woke up and went down to see what was happening. By that time, five of them went up to my house [apartment], woke my family and pushed them downstairs to my father’s. All of us were held in one room; and the soldiers started to go into the rooms, one by one. They took our mobiles [cell phones] and IDs [and] birth certificates. My little daughters were sitting staring, not knowing what is happening. Who are these people with guns and masks wandering in our house, and shouting and pushing? My father was as usual the strongest and fought back.
+First, they wanted to arrest my son Mohammed. They took him up stairs without allowing me to go with him, and when he was ready they asked about my youngest son Yassar, who was out helping to prepare our cousin’s wedding, which is today. By the end they gave me a military order: to come to the Israeli military camp in Abu Dis at 10 AM.
+Four other young people, together with the wife of a “wanted man” (as they said), were arrested. And 10 houses at least were invaded at the same time in Abu Dis today.
+None of my five kids were able to to go to school today. My poor mother and father did not manage to sleep worrying about my sons and me. As for me, I went to the military camp at ten, as they wanted. They take my ID and hold me until three thirty PM. No one spoke to me; just waiting. Then they gave me my ID and asked me to leave.
+Schoolboy running from tear gas, Abu Dis. [photo: Abdulwahab Sabbah]
+Abed Sabbah wrote to me again on September 10:
+Today the army came back to Abu Dis boys school. I was there also, and again more teargas. It became my daily meal. I am going back to what I used to do last year: to go early near the schools to try and save the school day and help kids reaching the school safely because the army returns early and makes a checkpoint next to the schools.
+I asked him for his view of the reason for the IDF’s attacks.
+I don’t know if you can explain about the place, the East Jerusalem area, and its complete isolation by the wall, settlements, and checkpoints controlled by Israeli military camps, as it is all considered as areas B and C [of the occupied territories, in which Israel has complete control]. Among the past 30 years hundreds of young people, including children under the age of 16, were arrested by the Israeli army, and sent to prison for months if not years for joining demonstrations against the occupation or throwing stones.
+These young people will be arrested from their schools or in the middle of the night from their house, and will be sent to Israeli settlements around the area for interrogation, where they will be tortured and made to signs on statements written in Hebrew language, which they can’t read. Then they use [the ‘confessions’] in the military courts, where the young ones will be given sentences, including making their family pay thousands of shekels to release their children. Our children are facing this situation for years, together with having to be all the time targets for the Israeli soldiers, on the streets, and inside their schools. Many, including my own son, was shot by [rubber bullets]. When he was 13 one of the [bullets] hit him in his face.
+Israeli military vehicles in occupied Abu Dis. Photo by Abed Sabbah.
+In the night they came to the town, they entered 10 houses and arrested 5 people and one woman, and searched their house, destroyed their furnitures, and in the end they released the women and two men without any charges. Next morning we saw a film published by the Israeli army, talking about finding guns and weapons in Abu Dis — just to say to their people that they are doing their job.
+For me, I [have often been] a prisoner. I was arrested by the Israeli army 7 times– which none of them I was charged. It was all administrative detention, which is imprisonment without a trial. The first time I was 16. So now my sons are facing the same punishment, maybe because I am working for a human rights organization calling for justice for Palestine. My sons and family are targeted. All I want is to protect my family and my people from this wild daily harassment which is getting harder and harder.
+The life that we are living is not at all acceptable. Generation after generation have to face this terror and live in fear. It’s about time to break this inhuman situation and have free equal life for Palestinians.
+I asked Abed about the risk that publishing this account might put his family at even higher risk.
+My family should be prepared for that. We are living inside it. Let the world know who are these people and stop finding excuses for their crimes.

mondoweiss/texts/1873.txt

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-Days after Israel began its attacks on Lebanon, Politico reported that White House officials had privately told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that it would support his military push against Hezbollah. That push led to an Iranian missile attack on Israel, which Netanyahu has vowed to avenge. Once again, the region seems to be teetering on the verge of a large-scale war.
+The ten-year-old — we’ll call her Bisan — got off the choir bus at France’s Dieppe coast and ran over the sandy beach toward the gray North Atlantic. After wading excitedly, but cautiously, into the chilly waves, she turned around and ran back to the bus to grab her sweater. Newly confident, Bisan raced back to the water and plunged in, only to discover that sweaters do not keep you warm in the ocean.
 
-Why is Biden administration supporting such actions and what does the U.S. hope to gain? Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya, and a non-resident fellow with the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, about U.S. motivations in the region, Biden’s consistent support for Israel, and how the administration’s Iran policy has made things worse.
+Bisan grew up in the Palestinian city of Hebron, perhaps an hour’s drive from her country’s gorgeous Mediterranean beaches. But she had never seen the ocean until reaching France, which, in turn, she could not get to except by way of Jordan. Like everything else in her young life, her ability to reach her own country’s beaches was dictated by a foreign government in Tel Aviv in which her parents have no vote and over which international law has no power.
 
-Mondoweiss: I’m sure you probably saw the recent Politico report on Biden officials quietly backing Israel’s military push in Lebanon. What do you think the U.S. motivation is there? What do they gain from backing these moves?
+Imagine Parisians blocked by a neighboring country from going to the English Channel or Mediterranean coast… The world would not (and decades past did not) tolerate foreign occupation in France; in Palestine, we support it and pay for it. Bisan was luckier than most of her peers — she got to experience the ocean because she had joined a children’s choir created by a musician from France, Dr. Mathilde Vittu.
 
-I think what we’re seeing here is that Israel, when it initially went into Gaza, it didn’t really have a strategy. It was motivated kind of by bloodlust and revenge.
+The Amwaj Choir (in blue) performs at the celebrated Philharmonie de Paris, June, 2018. Click here for video.
 
-I think as a crisis it escalated regionally, and there’s a growing belief in Israel, which is supported by the U.S., that this represents a real opportunity to redraw the political map of the Middle East, to change the strategic equation of the Middle East and dismantle the “Axis of Resistance”, which is held together by a common agenda of seeking to confront and reduce Israeli influence in the region.
+One must be careful not to be misunderstood when writing about non-Palestinians “bringing” music to Palestine, lest it sound as though Palestinians need outsiders to do this for them. But equally, it would be patronizing to treat Palestinians as some static Orientalist construct who cannot decide for themselves when they welcome other influences into their own cultural inheritance — especially as seven decades of dispossession and suppression have done much to suffocate the collaborative and absorptive streams of cultural life that are natural and that we take for granted for ourselves.
 
-I think we need to see expansion of the war in this context. Particularly after Israel’s recent successes of hitting Hezbollah hard, the U.S., which initially put forward the position that it is against regional escalation, I think is now on board with it because it believes there are achievable objectives to be had.
+Mathilde Vittu coaching the Amwaj Choir.
 
-Every modern president has backed Israel, but there have been some red lines in rare cases, or public criticisms of the country. You see people citing Ronald Reagan’s harsh words about Israel’s attack on Beirut or George H.W. Bush holding up loans, for example. We even saw Biden move to reel in Netanyahu during Israel’s 2021 assault on Gaza.
+Vittu comes from the highest tradition of European ‘classical’ music. She is a professor of music analysis at the Conservatoire de Paris, as well as an expert in voice training, a conductor, and violist. With such elite credentials it might seem unexpected that in September 2013, on sabbatical from her Paris teaching commitments, Vittu accepted a teaching position at the Ramallah branch of Palestine’s Edward Said National Conservatory of Music.
 
-Why do you believe the Biden administration has been so supportive of Israel over the past year and do you think there’s been any real attempt to end the bombings?
+Over the course of the following year, she served the Conservatory far beyond her actual obligations, formed a strong bond with Palestine, acquired a fine viola by the Palestinian luthier Aref Sayed, and began a serious study of the Arabic language. Her expertise in voice training and choral music, her love for children, her love of Palestine, and her desire to contribute to a better future in the best way she is able, all coalesced into a single vision: She would create a children’s choir — which in turn meant creating a children’s choir school. Her vision was of a choir singing far and wide, the effects radiating out, and of children eventually teaching other children, like ripples — and so its name became obvious: Amwaj, Arabic for ‘waves’.
 
-I think there’s several factors.
+True to its name, Amwaj is conceived not as a single school, but as a network. In addition to choral singing, Amwaj offers voice training, foreign languages, music theory, conducting, introduction to piano, percussion, and theatre.
 
-The famous Reagan incident everyone keeps referring to from 1982, when he called [former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and told him,”This is turning into a Holocaust” or something to that effect. What actually preceded that was a call from the Saudi Crown Prince at the time, Prince Fahd, basically telling Reagan that he was putting America’s Arab allies in an increasingly difficult position. That, more than anything else I think, spurred Reagan to act.
+Word of the project was spread in Bethlehem by the Ghirass Cultural Center, and in Hebron by the Association d’Échanges Culturels Hébron France. Initially, there were no auditions, and no requirements other than that the children attend all lessons and rehearsals that they are able to. A monthly tuition of ten shekels (approximately $2.70) was charged, though this was essentially symbolic: no one is turned away should the fee present a hardship, and food is provided that far exceeds the cost.
 
-Similarly, when Biden called Netanyahu in 2021, and I think the term he used was something like, “You’ve run out of road.” I think it was only a day or two earlier that the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Mark Milley in congressional testimony said that the continuation of this conflict was beginning to impact U.S. interests in the region and that kind of rang alarm bells.
+In August, 2015, the Amwaj Choir held its first summer camp, hosted by Association d’Échanges Culturels Hébron-France, which has run intercultural programs for children and adults for nearly 20 years. The children sang in Arabic as well as in French, English, German, Italian, Armenian, and Welsh; small workshops explored body percussion, vocal technique, jazz singing, theatre, vocal games., and introduction to music notation.
 
-I think an important part of it is that in 2023 and 2024, the U.S. has not seen any impact of Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip or its regional escalation, at least until now, on the strength of its relationships with other Arab governments. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and so on. These relationships have remained as solid as they were on October 6. And I think that’s affecting the U.S.
+(Video above: The song Hal Asmar Ellon, from a performance at the Bethlehem Convention Palace in January, 2017. The Amwaj Choir (blue shirts) is accompanied by a professional ensemble of 30 musicians from Palestine and abroad, and joined by children of St Joseph School, École des frères, and Sounds of Palestine. The violinist Amandine Beyer is among the ensemble (pink ornament in hair and purple keffiyeh around the waist).
 
-I also think there is, in a sense, a personal factor. I do think that Biden, compared to his predecessors, is uniquely pro-Israeli in several respects.
+September brought regular courses in Hebron, and the following month in Bethlehem’s Ghirass Cultural Center, whose other programs include fine arts, dance, music, library activities, adult literacy, and teacher training.
 
-First of all, he’s a self-proclaimed Zionist and has said so on numerous occasions. Secondly, he has also made it clear on numerous occasions that, at least in public, there can be no daylight between Israel and the United States. I think I’m quoting him verbatim in this respect. This means that any ability of the U.S. to use its enormous influence and leverage over Israel is already drastically reduced.
+As news of the school spread, applicants soon outnumbered available places, and auditions are now held to fill vacancies — though the informal, non-intimidating nature of the selection process barely merits the word ‘audition’. Sixty voices is considered the Choir’s ideal size, split evenly between Hebron and Bethlehem.
 
-I think what Israel fears most is not what the U.S. says to it in private, but what it signals in public, because that then also provides guidance, if you will, to other countries, particularly Washington’s European allies and their dealings with Israel. So Israel has had exceptionally broad room from the United States to basically act as it pleases.
+The nascent Choir was invited to participate in October’s El Atlal Festival in Jericho, but heightened tension in the West Bank led to the festival’s cancellation. Two months later, in December 2015 — a mere three months after the Choir’s inauguration — the Hebron and Bethlehem branches performed a joint concert in the Chapel of Bethlehem University as part of the Christmas Nights festival organized by the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Bethlehem Strings, a baroque ensemble comprised of professionals and the more advanced Palestinian music students, accompanied the Amwaj Choir in a series of Christmas carols in several languages and songs from the Palestinian tradition. As described on the Choir’s website, “the experience of sharing the stage with professional musicians allowed the children to understand the setting of a public performance.”
 
-That’s if you accept that the U.S. has not necessarily been on board with Israeli policy. In other words, that the U.S. may not like what Israel is doing, but is unprepared to take any measures to to force Israel to change course because it doesn’t want to be publicly seen as opposing Israel.
+Mathilde Vittu conducting members of the Amwaj Choir, accompanied by some of Palestine’s professional musicians, in Saint-Anne’s Church, Jerusalem.
 
-I think it’s quite clear that the U.S. is now fully on board with what I wouldn’t call an Israeli agenda, I would call a joint U.S.-Israeli agenda. An agenda to change the face of the region.
+If all this seemed perfectly natural to those involved, some on the outside wondered whether there might have been any negative reaction from the predominantly Muslim families to the concert’s Christian context. There was none. Hebron is predominantly Muslim, but even in Bethlehem, which is largely Christian, most of the children who apply are Muslim.
 
-I think that may well have been the case in the early months. But if you’re now talking about late 2024, I think it’s quite clear that the U.S. is now fully on board with what I wouldn’t call an Israeli agenda, I would call a joint U.S.-Israeli agenda. An agenda to change the face of the region. And here, again, there’s also, I think, an important geopolitical element that we shouldn’t ignore, which is that the United States is committed to Israel, perhaps for multiple reasons, but an important one is that it sees Israel as a key outpost of U.S. interests in the Middle East.
+The summer of 2016 brought the Choir’s first chance to share the stage with a professional choir when the Choir of London came to Hebron. More opportunity for the children to work alongside professionals followed in December, when the Oslo Philharmonic Choir came to Palestine (rehearsal video). This culminated in a concert  at Bethlehem’s Nativity Church (Saint Catherine’s), in which the children joined the Oslo choir in five songs spanning German, English, Norwegian, and Arabic. January 2017 brought another concert with the Bethlehem Strings, now at the Bethlehem Convention Palace and joined by the extraordinary Baroque violinist Amandine Beyer.
 
-If you look at it from that perspective, then any Israeli loss weakens the U.S. and any Israeli victory strengthens the U.S. position, not only in the region, but around the world as well.
+Amwaj Choir in performance with the Oslo Philharmonic Choir in Saint Catherine’s Church by the traditional site of Christ’s birth.
 
-So, as I’ve been saying, for the U.S., the only serious, real red line is Israeli failure. That is the one thing that the the United States will not accept.
+The French Children’s Choir, Les Petits chanteurs de Lyon, visited Palestine in the spring and summer of 2017 and joined forces with Amwaj (video). In July, Amwaj performed with the Ramallah Orchestra, a symphony orchestra under the Palestinian conservatory Al Kamandjati. The Israeli journalist Amira Hass attended, chatted with a few of the Amwaj children, and wrote about it. “We met,” she wrote, “in the most unexpected place: the desert. A procession of camels was marching towards the sunset.”
 
-I’m wondering how you’d assess the Biden administration’s approach to Iran over the past four years and how that policy has contributed to the current situation?
+Hass described the desperation that led a Palestinian youth to attack the West Bank settlement of Halamish, which caused the cancellation of the ensemble’s scheduled concert in Jerusalem. The attack, she wrote, was in line with the Israeli “plan” of pushing Palestinians past the breaking point: it’s “part of the logic of control. You escalate, you incite, you detain more young people, you scare more children to create more reasons for preventive activities and oppression, and to maintain the apparatus.”
 
-It’s a very good question because it’s a very important issue.
+But any nurturing of Palestinian achievement and self-worth, such as Amwaj, is powerful defiance, powerful resistance, of a sort that Israel is powerless to exploit. It will try to stymie such defiance, but, ultimately, cannot control it.
 
-I was contacted at the beginning of Biden’s period in office by a researcher for a prominent think tank who was putting together a paper on recommendations for U.S. policy towards Iran. This researcher asked me what I thought and I said, well, my view is that if the U.S. does not immediately and unconditionally re-enter the Iran nuclear agreement, which, again, is not a bilateral U.S.-Israeli, Iranian agreement, but an international agreement in which the U.S. was one player, admittedly a key player, but one player. I said, if the U.S. does not immediately and unconditionally reenter the agreement and then deal with any differences it has with Iran and negotiates them from within the agreement, this is going to end very badly.
+Les Petits Chanteurs de Lyon returned to Palestine in the spring of 2018, partly in preparation for the summer and the Amwaj Choir’s most impressive accomplishment to date: its first international residency and concert series. This included a six-day residency at the Philharmonie de Paris; a concert at the Institut du Monde Arabe with the DEMOS children’s orchestra; a concert at the church Notre-Dame des Vertus at Aubervilliers with the Children’s choir of the Orchestre de Paris; a concert at the Philharmonie de Paris with the DEMOS children’s orchestra; a concert in Lille, Le Grand Sud, with the child singers of Finoreille; a residency in Lyon with Les Petits Chanteurs de Lyon; and a concert at the Cathedral of Vaise with Les Petits Chanteurs de Lyon.
 
-There was a fairly long silence on the other end of the line, because, of course, only a lunatic or an Iranian agent would propose that the U.S. enter the agreement without conditions, but look what’s happened.
+Nothing happens easily under military occupation, and no child born into such injustice is free of its scars. And so it was inevitable that the Amwaj Choir would become not just a choir, not just a social network for its members, but a powerful safety net and antidote. Knowing life only under military repression, many children harbor repressed anger, not just from the visible dehumanization imposed by Israeli control, but from the unseen pressure it exerts on home life and on their parents. Mathilde and her small staff have not infrequently found themselves acting as adviser, as consoler, as friend, and as social worker. As but one example, a boy — we’ll call him Khalil — attended all rehearsals, but never sang a note. He always took his place in the choir, and never made a sound. But since he fulfilled the sole requirement of attending the rehearsals, his right to remain in the Choir was not questioned. Even when he wanted to join the Choir’s tour to France, he was not excluded. Yet no one could have anticipated that in France, with his first breaths free of apartheid, suddenly, he began to sing, and his outlook changed.
 
-Iran is one more issue where the U.S. failed to clearly repudiate Trump’s policy and to a large extent sought to continue it. Instead of reentering the agreement and even instead of seeking a resolution of only those issues arising from U.S. renouncing the agreement, what the U.S. tried to do was to negotiate an entirely new agreement. It tried to address, for example, Iran’s regional role as part of the price for the U.S. re-entering the agreement.
+Dr. Vittu and the Choir’s General Director, Michele Cantoni, have maintained a consistently high level of staff and visiting teachers, despite Israeli deterrents to Palestinian achievement. To begin with, all teachers from abroad must accept the endless specter of losing Israeli “permission” to be in Palestine. Lucie Tronche is one who was not deterred.
 
-This was never going to work. The Iranians had been very clear that any agreement is only going to be about two things, the Iranian nuclear program and sanctions on Iran. And they were not prepared to address any other issues until after that initial agreement had been implemented.
+Lucie Tronche instructing the Amwaj musicians.
 
-We’re now in a position where Israel is actively exploiting this deterioration in U.S.-Iranian relations. In fact, the lack of any relationship between the U.S. and Iran could engineer a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran. That’s how dangerous the present moment is.
+I had the pleasure of meeting Tronche soon after she first arrived in Palestine, and met up with her again a year later.  Tronche had been teaching in several conservatoires in France, when (as she described it to me) she “discovered Palestine, its cultural and musical richness, and I decided to move there in order to work within the continuity of a musical and artistic project.” She became involved full-time with the Amwaj Choir as coach, conductor, and theory teacher. A year later, “that human and artistic experience has proven to be well beyond my expectations.”
 
-The point I’m making is that by refusing to reenter the agreement and by continuing with Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on Iran, a key factor that could have helped prevent much of the escalation that we’ve seen over the past year was forfeited. We’re now in a position where Israel is actively exploiting this deterioration in U.S.-Iranian relations.
+Given its newness and the challenges imposed by foreign repression, what the Amwaj Choir has accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. But there is still a long way to go before it is a world-class children’s choir. While Vittu is constantly challenging the choir to improve, she is careful not to over-extend the children, and to train them with a solid technique free of shortcuts.
 
-In fact, the lack of any relationship between the U.S. and Iran could engineer a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran. That’s how dangerous the present moment is.
+In a decade, she predicts, the Amwaj Choir will be ready for the world.
 
-Getting back to an earlier question of yours, this is not just an Israeli agenda. I believe there are senior officials within the Biden administration who are fully on board with this and feel that now more than ever is the time to promote it.
+Author’s note: I met Mathilde Vittu in 2013 at Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music, where she and I were both teaching. Although we taught at different branches — she in Ramallah, I in Jerusalem — we got to know each other through music projects, string quartets, and beer.
 
-We continually hear that support for Israel is somehow connected to U.S. security. I’m not really sure how many Americans actually buy that claim anymore. I think it probably had traction with the Americans in the years immediately following 9/11, but there’s a lot of recent polling that suggests people no longer make that connection.
+Acknowledgements: The choir is supported by Instruments of Peace – Geneva, Fondazione Giovanni Paolo II, Institut Français de Jérusalem, and many individual donors through its support page. It maintains partnerships with several arts organizations, and has enlisted the collaboration of a long roster of professional and advanced student musicians.
 
-I’m wondering if you think there’s any truth to the claim about U.S. security and, if there’s not, why do you believe the vast majority of U.S. lawmakers still support Israel’s actions in the region? Is it as simple as politicians fearing groups like AIPAC or are there larger factors to consider?
+• Amwaj Choir, website.• Interviews with choir members.• Youtube Channel• Support the Amwaj Choir• Amira Hass, Music, Children’s Choirs and Camels in the Desert, Haaretz, Aug 1, 2017
 
-I think the premise about security could have been a topic for discussion during the Cold War, when Israel was clearly a U.S. proxy in the Middle East helping to confront regimes that were allied with the Soviet Union.
-
-Once the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union disintegrated, I’m not sure to what extent Israel served U.S. regional interests. I’m not talking about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, but your question about what role the Israel plays in promoting U.S. interests in the region or globally. I think if you make a cost-benefit ratio, it’s a little difficult to sustain.
-
-You mentioned 9/11. In one of his first interviews after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, claimed that the seeds of the attack were planted in his head as he was watching scenes of slaughter in Beirut in 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
-
-Now, it’s one of two things that are true. Either that actually was the case, or he was making it up, but felt that trying to tie the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to opposition to Israel was the best way to mobilize support for his actions.
-
-If you look at the current situation a lot of people are saying that in the long run 9/11 is going to be child’s play compared to the impact of not just Israeli conduct, but just as importantly unconditional, uncritical Western endorsement support and complicity in Israeli conduct. I very much hope that will be proven wrong, but if it’s proven wrong, it will be primarily because of the tsunami of voices in the West that have come up against this genocide, whether on campuses or on the streets of European capitals or elsewhere that have made such a clear distinction between Western citizens and Western governments.
-
-I think this is a very clear example of how the U.S. doesn’t need Israel to promote its interest in the region, particularly because the U.S. now also, since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, has a very extensive direct presence in the Middle East. It doesn’t have a need for proxies to the extent that it would have had during the Cold War when it had very few open military bases, even on the territory of its closest allies.
-
-Regarding the final part of your question, why do so many politicians continue to support Israel? Yes, AIPAC is certainly a factor, but I wouldn’t say it’s the only factor. There are certainly cases like Jamaal Bowman, where the resources and money of organizations are able to determine outcomes of particular electoral contests.
-
-But I think that’s only part of the picture. I also think we have to recognize the very deep ideological investment of many elected officials to the Israel project, either because they are evangelical Christians or because support for Israel and Islamophobia have become increasingly important principles to to a very large extent.
-
-Islamophobia has replaced the role that antisemitism played in the 19th and 20th century for these types of politicians and they see it as an electoral asset. You said some politicians might fear of AIPAC, but that suggests these people don’t want to support Israel or that it’s an issue that really doesn’t matter to them.
-
-I’m sure there are politicians who fit that bill, but I think that’s only part of the story. I think there’s quite a lot of politicians who do take money and support from AIPAC, but if AIPAC didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be all that different.
+Jerusalem, 1940: A glimpse of Palestinian musical life before the Nakba. [Library of Congress, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection; LC-M33-11118. Reproduced in Suárez, State of Terror, p61.]

mondoweiss/texts/1874.txt

@@ -1,81 +1,90 @@
-Casualties
-
-41,788 + killed* and at least 96,794 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 32,280 of the slain have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the casualties, and 2,770 elderly as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*
-
-722+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
-
-1,974 Lebanese killed and more than 9,384 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
-
-Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
-
-The Israeli army recognizes the death of 716 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,100 others since October 7.****
-
-* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on October 3, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of October 1, 2024.*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on October 3, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
-
-Key Developments
-
-Gaza branch of Palestinian Health Ministry says death toll surpasses 41,788, with 96,794 wounded since October 7, including 33% children, 18.4% women, and 8.6% elderly; at least 115 Palestinian children born and killed by Israeli forces since October 7.
-
-Palestinian Health Ministry says death toll by Israeli army or settlers in West Bank and Jerusalem reaches 722 since October 7.
-
-Lebanese Ministry of Health says 1,974 Lebanese people killed, over 9,384 wounded in hundreds of Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon, especially in the south and the Beqaa Valley since the beginning of escalating hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel began in September 2024.
-
-Iran strikes Israel with at least 180 ballistic missiles in response of the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut.
-
-The Israeli army admits damage to airfields and bases during Iran attack, says infrastructure of bases was not affected.
-
-Biden says that he is discussing retaliation options against Iran with Israel, reiterates opposition to strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities as Netanyahu pledges retaliation against Iran.
-
-Iranian president Masoud Pezashkian says Iran will make a “harsher response” in the event of an Israeli retaliation, adds that Iran doesn’t seek war with Israel.
-
-Israeli army admits eight soldiers killed, including three officers, alongside injury of 35 others, in first 24 hours of Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon.
-
-Israel conducts 20 strikes on Beirut’s southern Dahiya district, continues striking towns across Lebanon.
-
-Nine Israelis killed on Tuesday in Tel Aviv in shooting attack carried out by two Palestinians from Hebron; Israeli forces raid and seal off Hebron following attack, arresting family members of the two shooters.
-
-UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warns against expansion of Israeli settlements in West Bank, condemns “broadening of the Middle East conflict with escalation after escalation” after Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
-
-Israel declares Guterres persona non grata for failure to “unequivocally” condemn Iran missile attack.
-
-Israeli strikes kill 150 Palestinians across Gaza Strip in two days.
-
-Oxfam says in report that more women and children killed by Israeli military in Gaza than in any other recent conflict in a single year.
-
-Iran retaliates against Israel
-
-The U.S. is discussing the nature of Israel’s response to Iran’s missile strikes last Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, adding that he does not support an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
-
-Biden’s remarks came a day after Iran launched a large missile attack against Israeli targets on Tuesday in response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July, as well as the assassination of Hezbollah’s Secretary General, Hasan Nasrallah, and the Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Abbas Nilforushan, according to the IRGC.
-
-Israeli media reported that 180 missiles struck Israeli targets on Tuesday, many of which were allegedly intercepted by Israeli air defenses. Since Tuesday, a large amount of video footage taken by individuals has circulated on the internet, showing dozens of missiles falling and exploding in Israel.
-
-The Israeli army recognized on Wednesday that Iranian rockets caused damage to its airfields and bases, while stressing that the damage didn’t reach their infrastructure. Axios quoted an unnamed Israeli army official saying that several Iranian rockets targeted the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, but that none fell inside the Mossad compound.
-
-ِAlthough Israeli censorship bans the publication of details or images of Israeli casualties or damage sustained by the attack, the Israeli municipality of Hod Hasharon, near Tel Aviv, said that some 100 buildings were damaged by Iranian rockets, some of them suffering damage that “will take a long time to repair.”
-
-Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised speech from an underground shelter hours after the Iranian attack that “Iran made a big mistake,” vowing that “it will pay the price.” For his part, the Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian said during a visit to Qatar that Iran “does not seek a war” with Israel, while pledging “a harsher response” if Israel attacks Iran again.
-
-On Wednesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned of “the expansion of the conflict in the Middle East with an escalation after the other,” calling for an immediate ceasefire.
-
-Eight Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon fighting
-
-The Israeli army admitted to the killing of 8 of its soldiers, including three officers, and the wounding of 30 other soldiers, in the first round of face-to face combat with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, three days after it announced the beginning of a “limited” ground offensive in southern Lebanese territory. The Israeli army’s Arabic-speaking spokesperson had ordered Lebanese civilians in a number of border towns and villages to leave their homes as the Israeli army had also evacuated several areas on the Israeli side of the border, declaring them “military zones” while concentrating large forces at the border.
-
-On Tuesday, the Israeli army announced that it had begun ground operations in southern Lebanon and that its forces were engaged in heavy fighting with Hezbollah units. Hezbollah denied the Israeli claims through its spokesperson, Muhammad Afif, who said that no Israeli forces had entered Lebanon. On Wednesday, however, the military wing of Hezbollah confirmed that Israeli forces had crossed the “Blue Line” — the demarcation delineating Israeli and Lebanese territory — and that its fighters had clashed with Israeli forces in the areas of Maroun al-Ras and Idaiseh, inflicting casualties.
-
-According to Hezbollah reports, its fighters engaged Israeli soldiers and armored vehicles near the towns of Yaroun, Kufr Kila, and Maroun al-Ras, allegedly destroying three tanks and killing and wounding an unspecified number of soldiers.
-
-The Israeli public broadcaster reported that an Israeli force fell into a Hezbollah ambush in the southern Lebanese town of Idaiseh, suffering numerous casualties, while the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot said that Israeli forces were fighting Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, however, said in a statement that the Radwan Force had not yet entered the battle and that its regular forces were the only ones fighting so far.
-
-Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanese towns continued across southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, Mount Lebanon, and Beirut throughout the week. On Thursday, an Israeli strike on the Bashoura neighborhood in Beirut killed nine people.
-
-Since the beginning of Israel’s offensive on Lebanon on October 8, 2023, Israel has killed 1,974 Lebanese, wounded 9,384, and displaced 1.2 million, according to Lebanese authorities.
-
-Massacres in Gaza continue
-
-Israeli strikes killed 150 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours, according to the Gaza branch of the Palestinian Health Ministry. Local media reports indicated that Israeli strikes targeted houses and shelters for the displaced since Tuesday, October 1.
-
-In Khan Younis, Israeli warplanes destroyed a residential block that included a four-floor building, killing an unspecified number of Palestinians, including 13 members of a single family. In the Tuffah neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, an Israeli strike targeted the Masqat school sheltering displaced families, killing 17 people. In the Rimal neighborhood in central Gaza City, another airstrike on the Amal al-Aytam College, which was also used as a shelter for the displaced, killed 10 people. In Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, an Israeli strike on an open area where displaced families concentrated killed nine people, including a young girl.
-
-On Tuesday, Oxfam concluded in a report that “more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.” The report pointed out that during the past 12 months in Gaza, an Israeli explosive weapon has hit a home in Gaza every four hours, a tent or temporary shelter every 17 hours, schools and hospitals every four days, and aid distribution points and warehouses every 15 days.
+Last October, Jonathan Ofir reported on alleged anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party, after the expulsion of Moshé Machover, Professor of Philosophy at the University of London (see Moshe Machover and the battle for the soul of British Labour, Oct 6, 2017). Professor Machover was reinstated, while others have not been, and now Labour member Tony Greenstein, well-known in the UK for his work against racism—Zionist and otherwise—has been expelled, and his Facebook account suspended.[1]
+Bigotry, of which anti-Semitism is but one variety, persists among humankind; and so any large organization composed of a cross-section of people might include anti-whatever bigots among its members. But the ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis in Labour flared up suddenly when Jeremy Corbyn, who as a Member of Parliament was known for supporting human rights in Palestine, upset the British political stage with his surprise victory as party leader. Four months before that December 2015 victory, when polls demonstrated Corbyn’s strong grass-roots popularity, the Jewish Chronicle panicked and warned of his “alleged funding of Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright antisemites.” Labour itself tried to block likely Corbyn voters, but to no avail. He won.
+The moment he did, suddenly Labour was crawling with anti-Semites. They all had one thing in common: all these ‘anti-Semites’ were known to be critical of Israel. Rattled by Corbyn’s win, chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis made plain that these—anti-Semitism, and criticism of Israel—were synonymous. He warned that “the hard Left” is “spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism,” which is manifested as criticism of Zionism, “one of the axioms of Jewish belief … a noble and integral part of Judaism … a belief in the right to Jewish self-determination.”
+The notorious UK tabloid, the Daily Mail, tries to smear Jeremy Corbyn by juxtaposing him against author Tom Suárez, after the latter’s scheduled talk on Israel-Palestine was closed down by PREVENT, the UK’s alleged anti-radicalization program[7]. Contrary to the headline, Suárez never “accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust,” and his branding of Zionism as “fascist” at London’s SOAS—a talk brought to a halt by disruptions—were actually verbatim quotes of Jews fleeing the Nazis, and of US & British intelligence.The month after the election, the DailyMail, quoting unnamed “experts”, reported that anti-Semitism was now so bad that “European Jews feel as threatened as they did in the Holocaust”—a grotesque belittling of what Hitler’s victims endured. Then in April (2016), the National Review ran a piece entitled “Why the Left hates Jews,” and jumped right to the UK Labour party in the first sentence. The following month, the DailyMail said the rate of “hate crimes against Jews soars as report says anti-semitism is at the ‘core’ of far-Left beliefs” . By January 2017, anti-Semitism had increased again, specifically because of Labour (the Telegraph). It continued to get even worse: in July, the BBC and Independent reported “Anti-Semitic attacks hit record high in UK,” and at writing, February 2018, it—yes—has soared even higher (Independent), with Labour said to be in “total disarray” for its failure to confront what one would surmise are the hordes of seething anti-Semities comprising its members.
+None of these media betrayed any sense of wonder at the endless series of ever-higher ‘records’, nor any curiosity as to the methodology, data, and motives of the sources, typically the Community Security Trust. The BBC did not even question why, in a September 2017 report headlined “Over a quarter of British people ‘hold anti-Semitic attitudes’,” the survey correlated “attitudes towards Jews” with attitudes towards Israel.
+After taking the helm at Labour, Corbyn behaved as politicians do. He suspended an initial eighteen members on charges of criticizing Israel anti-Semitism, with high-profile members Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone making headlines—Shah for reposting a cartoon from Norman Finkelstein’s site, and former London mayor Livingstone for quoting, if very clumsily, from Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Corbyn further tried to quell the outcry by appointing prominent barrister Shami Chakrabarti to head an Inquiry to investigate anti-Semitism in the Party. But as long as Labour is led by someone who has previously been tarred as ‘pro-Palestinian’, the witchhunt will continue—even though Corbyn himself went silent on Palestine upon his election win.
+Among the prominent Labour members complaining that the party was “failing to act on antisemitism” was Jeremy Newmark, an avid supporter of the Israeli state. No action was taken against him when in February it was exposed that he had defrauded the Jewish Leadership Council out of tens of thousands of pounds as chief executive, and misled charities about his finances.[2]
+So let’s just blurt it out and get it over with: This inquisition has nothing, nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It is about Israel. It is about protecting that state from censure to insure that it can continue its violations of everything for which we as a civilization claim to stand, without interference.
+The core of the debacle—indeed the crux and cause of the entire Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ [sic]—is that Israel imposes an obligatory moral linkage between it, and world Jewry. Jews, simply by virtue of being Jews, are inexorably, organically welded to the Israeli state. This would be racist on its very principle, even if Israel were the nicest state in the galaxy. Israel forges this construct into its most powerful military weapon: the claim of indivisability between the state and Jewry itself.
+After the Chakrabarti Commission found no endemic anti-Semitism in Labour, the claims of anti-Semitism were adjusted to the reality that most anti-Zionists were noted as progressive anti-racists. To quote from this article, “The Home Affairs Select Committee questioned whether Mr Corbyn “fully appreciates the distinct nature of contemporary anti-Semitism, and the fact that it is perfectly possible for an ‘anti-racist campaigner’ to express anti-Semitic views.”
+Herewith are three parallel scenarios. Two are fictitious. Everything in all three is factual if applied to the third.
+Burma has silenced criticism of its ongoing ethnic cleansing and repression of the Rohingya people by smearing critics as anti-Buddhist bigots. The US, UK, and various EU countries have adopted this new Burmese definition of anti-Buddhism, and have moved to criminalize any attempt to boycott Burma as anti-Buddhist prejudice. The UK’s anti-terror PREVENT program has blocked discussion of the Rohingya plight as extremist speech, and the US has made federal flood relief, and the right of scholars to speak on campus, contingent on forswearing any boycott of Burma. The US has reassured the Burmese leadership that their war is our war, their value our values, to the extent of framing it in Biblical, apocalyptic terms, the Burmese regime representing Good, the Rohingya Evil.
+After ISIS announced that its terror campaigns are being conducted in the name of worldwide Muslims and Islam, the US, UK, and various EU governments fell in line, legislating that criticism of ISIS therefore equals hate speech. The US Congress, many of whose members receive generous donations from pro-ISIS Muslim Americans, have condemned as anti-Muslim hatred attempts to challenge ISIS in the Security Council. The American peace group Muslim Voice for Peace has been accused of supporting terror for seeking to hold ISIS to international law. The UK has forced the closure of bank accounts of organizations seeking human rights in ISIS-held territory.
+As Israel continues its seven decades of ethnic cleansing and repression of non-Jews, the US, UK, and various EU governments continue to accept its claim that its terror is being conducted in the name of Jews and Judaism, and thus to criticize its terror is anti-Jewish bigotry. The US has passed various laws to criminalize any censure of the terror, and both the US and UK have adopted definitions of anti-Jewish bigotry that legislate, in essence, that world Jewry, and whatever Israel does, are one and the same.
+The first two scenarios would be universally condemned as an affront against Buddhism or Islam, the obvious attempt to exploit people and faith to empower the atrocities of a political entity. Why do we allow Zionism to similarly sell Jewry down the river?
+Pro-Palestinian activists focus, understandably, on exposing Israel’s injustice against the Palestinians. But these efforts towards peace have so far failed because the Zionist narrative that informs the Western mindset has reduced Palestinians to a lesser people who are to blame for the violence on both ‘sides’. This is why the lopsided statistics of the so-called ‘conflict’, in which Palestinians are the vastly disproportionate victims, have no effect: Palestinian suffering is the suffering of lesser humans who are the cause of both their adversaries’ suffering and, equally, of their own.
+But Jews are also victims of Zionism. Like its violence against the Palestinians, this was both physical violence, and dehumanization—that is, racism.
+Zionism’s physical violence was to force mass human migration: Just as Palestinians could not be removed from their land except by violence against them, Zionism could not install the critical mass of Jews necessary for its settler state to succeed, without violence against Jews.[3]
+Jeremy Corbyn, despite his silence on Palestine since assuming Labour leadership, and despite his complicity with unjust suspensions, continues to be held responsible in what is described as yet-again unprecedented levels of anti-Semitism. (The Telegraph, Feb 1, 2018)
+The removal of Palestinians was achieved through outright ethnic cleansing and massacres, as well as starving them off the land by expropriating all means of livelihood. At the same time, the Zionist project secured settlers by systematically blocking safe haven for persecuted Jews other than in Palestine, by manufacturing violence to force the uprooting of Jews living elsewhere in peace, by removing Jewish orphans from their adoptive families to be sent to Palestine, and by blinding an entire society into a permanent psychosis, messianic fundamentalism coupled with the conviction of an existential anti-Jewish threat that is an incurable part of the human condition. Even during the darkest days of anti-Jewish persecution, Zionism’s first concern was its ethnic-nationalist settler project, not the welfare of persecuted Jews.[4]
+Ben-Gurion’s comments to Jewish Agency leaders in October of 1942 offer a brief glimpse into this. Although Hitler had made Jews suffer, he told them, that suffering was reviving feelings of Jewish “nationalism” (Zionism), which they would exploit. But he warned that Zionism was being weakened by the democracies, because they “recognise the Jews as people having full rights of citizenship,” and he blamed setbacks for Zionism on what he called America’s “democratic attitude.”[5] Precisely the opposite of the endlessly-heard mantra that Zionism is ‘Jewish self-determination’, Zionism is the global theft of Jewish individual self-determination.
+But all this anti-Palestinian and anti-Jewish terror is, obviously, violence against civilians to force a political goal—the core definition of terrorism. There is no way around this: The only way you can force a population from its own land, replace it with a different population, and keep the remnants of the indigenous population subservient, is by massive violence against civilians. In other words, the Zionist project itself is by its very nature one of terrorism. If to condemn this terror is anti-Semitic—if, as the chief rabbi claims, Zionism (and, implicitly, the Israeli state) is core to Jewish identity—then Jews as a people want, and are the doers of this terror. This would, to say the least, be a fatal marketing blemish for Zionism. The solution was to dehumanize both the Palestinians and Jews.
+Israel’s dehumanization of the Palestinians, the obstacle to its settler state, is more obvious. It had to repackage its ethnic cleansing and ethnic subjugation into something good—defense—so it dehumanized Palestinians into an eternal threat, irredeemably violent as a race.
+But Zionism also had to explain its profound violence against Jews, the means to its settler state; and it needed extraordinary impunity, to be able to operate outside the norms of civilized nations. It achieved both objectives by dehumanizing Jews—by dehumanizing Jews into the settler state itself. Zionism’s success in spinning Jewry as interchangeable with its ethnic-nationalist political invention is the core of the entire tragic ‘conflict’.
+Israeli influence in UK domestic politics: a screen-grab from al-Jazeera’s four-part documentary, The Lobby [8].But it will also be Zionism’s, and the ‘conflict’s,’ Achilles Heel, once we are no longer afraid to confront it.
+Israel is constantly reminding us that it is ‘the’ Jewish State— not ‘a’ Jewish state, in the sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt, but the Jewish State, the very embodiment of Jews themselves, all Jews, in a tribal sense, regardless of their nationality, regardless of their own self-identity. There is no parallel to this claimed synthesis between nation-state and ethnicity in the modern world. Israel, if we accept it, is Jewry, back to the Jewish kingdoms cited in the Old Testament, of which it claims to be the rebirth in order to claim that it is not a settler state. To maintain this theatre, archaeological artifacts associated with the Old Testament are transformed into artifacts of the nation-state’s history. The prize-winner of UN intransigence hides behind the messianic ‘return’ of the Biblical realm’s inhabitants, who will now build the Third Temple.
+The result is that whatever the Israeli state does is done by Jews because they are Jews, not simply by individuals who happen to be Jewish. Condemnation of that state therefore equals condemnation of Jews, and so criticism of Zionism and Israel is thus anti-Semitic by definition.
+And so Zionism, if we accept it, succeeds where all the bigots through the centuries never could. Traditional anti-Semitism can only attack externally—despite all its murder, all its horrors, all its desecration, traditional anti-Semitism is powerless to lessen the integrity of Jews or Judaism. Zionism, if we accept it, does. If we accept the Zionist narrative, then we have corrupted Jewry itself from within.
+In this book by Dave Rich, anti-Semitism is defined by certain “ways of thinking about Jews, Zionism and Israel”. “Pro-Palestinian” signs at the top implicitly link Palestinian human rights activists with anti-Semitism.
+In order to call itself ‘The Jewish State’, Israel ethnically cleansed much of the non-Jewish population and continues to block their return, keeps an entire population under a brutal military dictatorship in the name of Jews, and has reduced Gaza to a cesspool for lesser humans, in the name of Jews.
+It is time to challenge this anti-Semitism in our official institutions. These include the US State Department and its Zionist definition of anti-Semitism, the British government and its use of the Zionist ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ definition—which by its very name exploits the memory of Hitler’s victims to empower new ethnic/racial atrocities—along with cynically-named Zionist pressure groups such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, and Community Security Trust.
+The response to politically-motivated smears of anti-Semitism must no longer be mere defense—it must be offense, to expose the true anti-Semitism of the smear itself, and of those wielding it.
+Zionism and (true) anti-Semitism have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Anti-Semitism gives Zionism meaning, while Zionism offers bigots a way to send Jews to a far-off ghetto while looking like they’re doing something nice.[6] These continually reinforce each other: by positioning itself as the embodiment of Jewry, Zionism ‘vindicates’ bigots who blame ‘the Jews’ for the crimes of the Israeli state. This ‘vindication’ reinforces more (true) anti-Semitism, which in turn re-‘vindicates’ Zionism.
+One hundred and one years ago, Edwin Montagu, a Jewish member of the British Cabinet, accused his government of anti-Semitism for colluding with the Zionists. History has proven him correct, and we must do the same. Zionism’s devotees’ great libel against Jews must be called out for what it is: spinning its crimes as those of Jewry itself in order to use Jews as a human shield.
+
+See also:
+Labout Against the Witchhunt
+Jewish Voice for Labour
+Free Speech on Israel
+Short video of extracts of a talk related to this article’s topic
+Long video about the larger issue of the ‘conflict’
+
+1. The Machover and Greenstein expulsions:
+• Moshé Machover: My response to my expulsion.
+• Tony Greenstein: My Expulsion Letter from the Labour Party and my response.
+2. Jeremy Newmark:
+• The Jewish Chronicle: Revealed: JLC audit reports Jeremy Newmark deceived it out of thousands of pounds
+• Newmark complaining of anti-Semitism two weeks before his scandal broke: Jewish Labour group accuses party of failing to act on antisemitism complaints
+3. For Zionist anti-Jewish violence, especially during the British Mandate period, see Suárez, State of Terror.
+4. Following are brief references for the large topics cited in this paragraph
+• Ethnic cleansing: The best single source is Ilan Pappe’s classic Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
+• Blocking of safe haven: This was a recurrent theme during the Mandate period, the most dramatic example being US Zionist leaders’ sabotaging of resettlement scheme created by President Roosevelt that would have given 300,000 DPs homes in the US and Britain, and 200,000 more in South America and Australia. Roosevelt’s aide, Morris Ernst, who handled the project, records this in his 1948 book, So Far So Good. The present author found further evidence in The National Archives (UK), FO 800/487, 110. Among other examples was the blocking of the attempt to get new homes in Denmark for the Exodus passengers (e.g., Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, 46, 50, 178). Future Israeli prime ministers Ben-Gurion and Sharett both spoke at Jewish Agency meetings of the importance of preventing Jewish DPs from any option but Palestine. Decades later, during the US Reagan years, Russian Jews were stopped from emigrating to the US at the request of Israel (see Lazin, Fred A., “Refugee Resettlement and “Freedom of Choice’ – The Case of Soviet Jewry”)
+• Manufactured violence: The most catastrophic example is the ‘false flag’ anti-Jewish terror in the early 1950s that destroyed the Jewish community in Iraq. See Suarez, State of Terror, 282-285, and Naeim Giladi, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. North African Jews were the targets of displacement by the early 1940s. See, e.g., see The National Archives (UK), KV 5/33, 37a, 38a, 35a (10 pages) London, “from our Palestine representative on the Jewish situation, as viewed by him.”
+• Removal of Jewish orphans: The systematic removal of orphans from their adoptive families, as documented in author’s State of Terror, has elicited particular condemnation from the book’s critics, who maintain that the children were being safeguarded during the war, after which they were reunited with their parents. The book’s principal source is the account left by the Ashkenazy chief rabbi of Palestine, which the author has made available at paldocs.net (see Rabbi Herzog kidnapping trip, 1946). The reader is encouraged to read this declassified source document. Herzog, indeed, announced his intentions to the New York Times, with ten thousand children being his stated goal (Feb 25 1946). Independently, Professor Yosef Grodzinsky had earlier addressed this issue, based on entirely different sources, in his important book, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II.
+• Psychosis: This, too, is a common theme among British, US, and Jewish sources during the Mandate One example follows, from Henry Hunloke, Defence Security Officer in Palestine, January, 1943: The Jewish Agency “make one think that they have picked the strangest parts of Nazism, Fascism, Communism with a spicing of Tammany Hall as the system best suited for the control of Jews in Palestine.” Those with more moderate views are tolerated only until they become influential. “From a tender age,” children are brought up to have one aim only, the fulfillment of Zionism, and children have walked out on their parents when the parents try to instill some moderation on that aim. The system “is closely akin to that adopted by the Nazis,” and as history has shown, “in a comparatively short space of time, such teaching is very hard to eradicate.” The National Archives (UK), KV 5/33, 37a, 38a, 35a. Another example, from a Mr. Newton who had lived in the settlements: “Violence and intransigent nationalism,” he testified, “was fostered by the Jewish educational system,” and “the incitement and hysteria fostered systematically among the Jewish youth in Palestine. This education and political propaganda has produced youths and girls who were ready to use murder for their political ends.” (The National Archives, FO 371/45382, penciled ‘233’). As an example of instilled fear, Jewish DPs were separated into Zionist-run camps that proved to be virtual brain-washing camps, such that when the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry visited such camps in 1946, the DPs threatened mass suicide if sent to the US, because they would never be safe there (New York Times, Feb 18 1946). Into statehood, John Wilson, upon leaving the British delegation in Tel Aviv in mid-1953, described how Israeli officials have built up “a sickening jargon … the air is thick with propaganda … Misleading stories and press campaigns are worked up [and] censorship stifles the dissemination of honest news.” Several observers noted how the Israeli state, following in the footsteps of the Jewish Agency, conjured such hysteria with its manipulation of the news that it found itself having to take action against the threats it had invented. Regarding the Israeli government’s control of the domestic media, and thus of its population’s beliefs and attitudes, see Ilan Pappé’s Israel Out of the Frame.
+5. The National Archives (Britain), Kew, WO 169/4334, G.S.I. HQ Palestine, Summary No. 12 (1-31 Oct 1942). This document can be seen at the website paldocs.net, under ‘Democracy /Democracy as obstacle to Zionist plans’.
+6. Evidence that much of Zionism’s non-Jewish support came from people who saw it as an opportunity to keep Jews from immigrating, and get rid of those already present, is seen as early as Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveller, archaeologist, and spy. She cited her diplomatic experience “to prove that the French are anxious to establish Jews anywhere [i.e., support Zionism] if only to have an excuse for getting rid of them.” Similarly, C.G. Montefiore, President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, testified in 1917 that “It is very significant that anti-Semites are always very sympathetic to Zionism.” (The National Archives, CAB 24/28/0063, 2; CAB 24/4/0014, 7). Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin reported this, and it is acknowledged, and exploited, by Jewish Agency leaders like Ben-Gurion, and blatantly exploited by the Irgun in its US funding ads in the major newspapers (see Suárez, State of Terror, ch 5 & 6).
+7. The UK “Prevent” program, official statement, and criticism. After blocking the author from speaking in Portsmouth (UK), Prevent failed to deliver on a verbal promise to clear the author’s name from suspicion. Several months later, the talk was rescheduled without incident. At writing, the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has filed a new complaint against Corbyn, which also cites Suárez as evidence (CAA files fresh disciplinary complaint against Jeremy Corbyn…). At writing, Suárez does not know, and has never met or had any contact with, Jeremy Corbyn.
+8. Al-Jazeera’s documentary The Lobby.
+
+Sampling of media reports since Corbyn’s rise as a serious contender for Labour leadership
+July 2015
+• Anti-Semitic incidents in UK see sharp rise, figures suggest — BBC
+• Big rise in anti-semitic hate attacks in West Midlands – Shock statistics — Birmingham Mail
+Aug 2015
+• The key questions Jeremy Corbyn must answer — Jewish Chronicle
+Sept 2015
+• [anti-Semitism] attacks double in a year — Daily Record
+Dec 2015
+• London Rocked by Sharp Spike in Anti-Semitic Attacks in 2015 — Sputnik News
+Jan 2016
+• Anti-Semitic assaults SPIKE after WORST year on record for attacks on Jewish people — Express
+• Jewish immigration to Israel from western Europe hits an all-time high following rise in anti-Semitic attacks — DailyMail
+• European Jews feel as threatened as they did in the Holocaust, experts say — DailyMail
+April 2016
+• Why the Left Hates Jews — National Review
+May 2016
+• Number of hate crimes against Jews soars as report says anti-semitism is at the ‘core’ of far-Left beliefs — DailyMail
+• Hate crimes against Jews up sharply in Britain, audit finds — Times of Israel
+• Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism — Telegraph
+Feb 2017
+• Labour party linked to increase in anti-Semitic incidents — Telegraph
+July 2017
+• Anti-Semitic attacks hit record high in UK  Independent
+• Anti-Semitic incidents in UK see sharp rise, figures suggest — BBC
+Sept 2017
+• Over a quarter of British people ‘hold anti-Semitic attitudes’, study finds — BBC
+Feb 2018
+• Antisemitic hate crimes hit record high — Independent
+• Labour ‘in total disarray’ over antisemitism allegations, campaigners claim — Independent

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-The latest hacked emails from the Clinton campaign expose a lot of fawning toward the Israel lobby, especially during the run-up to the Iran deal, when Hillary Clinton had to balance her devotion to Israel with her loyalty to the Obama administration.
-
-For instance, when Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to give his speech to Congress in March 2015 seeking to submarine President Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, Clinton’s top foreign policy aide Jake Sullivan expressed concern that Clinton not say anything publicly to offend “Bibi.”
-
-At the time, Sullivan was advised by Stuart Eisenstat, Clinton’s ambassador from the Jewish community, that Clinton needed to make an “adult” statement, so as to ameliorate “the deteriorating U.S.-Israel relationship, with the increasingly bitter Obama-Bibi tiff.”
-
-Here a simple call from Hillary that it is important to stop the downward spiral of events with our close ally, notwithstanding mistakes, so we can focus on the key issues of Middle East peace and preventing Iran for acquiring a bomb would be a welcome positive, “adult” statement.
-
-Sullivan responded:
-
-Stu – how would you craft the… statement so it doesn’t look like a rebuke of potus [President of the United States], bibi, or both?
-
-Clinton soon made the “simple call” that Eisenstat had advised so as to placate the Israel lobby. She called Malcolm Hoenlein, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (and the very  man Obama had used to feel Clinton out in 2008 when he wanted to hire her as secretary of state), and Hoenlein released a statement:  “Secretary Clinton thinks we need to all work together to return the special U.S.-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.” And the New York Times, among other publications, ran a story on the call, headlined, “Clinton Wants to Improve Ties to Israel.”
-
-One of Clinton’s biggest financial supporters was pleased. Haim Saban sent an email to Clinton aides Huma Abedin and John Podesta describing the Clinton comments as “Very smart and politically correct” because they did not criticize the Obama administration. “Pls say thanks to the lady.”
-
-Saban added that “thousands” of people, meaning pro-Israel donors, were going to like the call, because they wondered Where Hillary is on Israel.
-
-Also pls be aware that these articles will be mailed to thousands of people who are interested in the subject matter and who have been asking themselves ,,,,and me ,many times ”Where is Hillary on this”
-
-Iran was still a problem, though. That summer of 2015, the Iran deal came to Congress, and Politico published an article saying that Hillary Clinton was confusing “Jewish donors,” as it said in the headline. On the one hand, she was telling them, “I’ll be better for Israel than Obama.” On the other, these same donors came out of meetings with her with “sometimes widely varying interpretations” of her view of the Iran deal. Mixed signals!
-
-The article caused considerable consternation in the Clinton braintrust. Virtually the entire campaign leadership discussed what to do over the course of an afternoon, July 3, 2015. Campaign manager Robby Mook said he got the Israeli questions from “donors all the time”:
-
-I was just thinking: has she made a clear statement on Israel yet? I get this question from donors all the time. Does she need to state her principles on Israel before Iran? Or do both at the same time?
-
-In saying “before Iran,” Mook was anticipating Clinton’s public support for the Iran deal, which she announced ten days later.
-
-Speechwriter Dan Schwerin said Clinton was taking care of her position on Israel:
-
-That’s basically the goal of the BDS letter.
-
-The BDS letter was a letter Clinton had written to Saban the day before, dated July 2, promising to fight Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, along with Republicans. The letter had not yet gone public.
-
-Mook responded that the letter wasn’t enough.
-
-Do we need to push it harder over the next few days? Get something written? I feel like we’re going to want something to point to. Or maybe even just content on the website?
-
-Deputy communications director Christina Reynolds suggested:
-
-We could either get a donor to leak it or just give it to a reporter if we want to get it out there. I’m semi-surprised it’s not out yet.
-
-Reynolds added:
-
-If Haim’s going to give it to the Jewish media, I think that solves our problem. Once they write, we can make sure it gets picked up by some of our beat guys.
-
-Jake Sullivan also got into the act that afternoon, July 3:
-
-We have a two pager I’m getting clearance from her on. That is what we have to ship around.
-
-Reynolds again emphasized the need to cover her “Israel support”:
-
-Right, but if we wanted to have a reporter cover the Israel support now, a leak of the letter could probably get written. Otherwise, we can work around the Israel support for reporters covering Iran.
-
-Mook responded that afternoon that it was vital to get the word out before Hillary Clinton endorsed the Iran deal:
-
-Let’s def give it to someone. I see zero downside to a story. Then we can circulate around right away (hopefully) in advance of Iran
-
-The Clinton-to-Saban letter against BDS appeared in Politico on July 6. Politico wrote, “A campaign aide said Clinton was motivated to write the letter after hearing from a number of people on the issue over the past few months.”
-
-A week later Stu Eizenstat warned the campaign that “in Israel there is wall-to-wall opposition” to the Iran Deal, including from the center-left Jewish leaders Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni.
-
-Another warning came on January 27, 2016. M Bronfein, who would seem to be Michael Bronfein, a big contributor to the Clintons. warned the campaign about an article in the Washington Post by the neoconservative Jennifer Rubin pointing out that Chelsea Clinton had held a fundraiser in California at the home of a board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which Rubin called “a notorious group with links to the Iranian regime that opposed, among other things, any sanctions on Iran.” Bronfein wrote:
-
-I am fielding quite a few concerns over this.. , seems to have some viral qualities.. FYI
-
-Dennis Cheng, the national finance chair for the Clinton campaign, wrote back the same day to Bronfein:
-
-Thanks for flagging – will look into this asap
-
-As you read these emails, which were hacked from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email accounts, remember that after the Iran Deal was signed in 2015, Netanyahu was invited to an embarrassingly-obsequious interview by the person holding Podesta’s former job as head of the Center for American Progress: Neera Tanden. Part of the strategy from on high.
+My friend Abdulwahab (Abed) Sabbah is the director of Dar Assadaqa, a community center in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem. He is the Palestinian half of London’s human rights organization CADFA, the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association. He sent me an account of an IDF attack on his family in their apartment in Abu Dis on September 4, and followups.
+IDF vehicle in Abu Dis. [photo: Abdulwahab Sabbah]What a day. We started early, at around 2:30 AM, when savage mercenaries from the Israel IDF invaded my father’s and my house. They started to knock hard on the main door, and when my father open the door, eight of them entered with their weapons into the house before I woke up and went down to see what was happening. By that time, five of them went up to my house [apartment], woke my family and pushed them downstairs to my father’s. All of us were held in one room; and the soldiers started to go into the rooms, one by one. They took our mobiles [cell phones] and IDs [and] birth certificates. My little daughters were sitting staring, not knowing what is happening. Who are these people with guns and masks wandering in our house, and shouting and pushing? My father was as usual the strongest and fought back.
+First, they wanted to arrest my son Mohammed. They took him up stairs without allowing me to go with him, and when he was ready they asked about my youngest son Yassar, who was out helping to prepare our cousin’s wedding, which is today. By the end they gave me a military order: to come to the Israeli military camp in Abu Dis at 10 AM.
+Four other young people, together with the wife of a “wanted man” (as they said), were arrested. And 10 houses at least were invaded at the same time in Abu Dis today.
+None of my five kids were able to to go to school today. My poor mother and father did not manage to sleep worrying about my sons and me. As for me, I went to the military camp at ten, as they wanted. They take my ID and hold me until three thirty PM. No one spoke to me; just waiting. Then they gave me my ID and asked me to leave.
+Schoolboy running from tear gas, Abu Dis. [photo: Abdulwahab Sabbah]
+Abed Sabbah wrote to me again on September 10:
+Today the army came back to Abu Dis boys school. I was there also, and again more teargas. It became my daily meal. I am going back to what I used to do last year: to go early near the schools to try and save the school day and help kids reaching the school safely because the army returns early and makes a checkpoint next to the schools.
+I asked him for his view of the reason for the IDF’s attacks.
+I don’t know if you can explain about the place, the East Jerusalem area, and its complete isolation by the wall, settlements, and checkpoints controlled by Israeli military camps, as it is all considered as areas B and C [of the occupied territories, in which Israel has complete control]. Among the past 30 years hundreds of young people, including children under the age of 16, were arrested by the Israeli army, and sent to prison for months if not years for joining demonstrations against the occupation or throwing stones.
+These young people will be arrested from their schools or in the middle of the night from their house, and will be sent to Israeli settlements around the area for interrogation, where they will be tortured and made to signs on statements written in Hebrew language, which they can’t read. Then they use [the ‘confessions’] in the military courts, where the young ones will be given sentences, including making their family pay thousands of shekels to release their children. Our children are facing this situation for years, together with having to be all the time targets for the Israeli soldiers, on the streets, and inside their schools. Many, including my own son, was shot by [rubber bullets]. When he was 13 one of the [bullets] hit him in his face.
+Israeli military vehicles in occupied Abu Dis. Photo by Abed Sabbah.
+In the night they came to the town, they entered 10 houses and arrested 5 people and one woman, and searched their house, destroyed their furnitures, and in the end they released the women and two men without any charges. Next morning we saw a film published by the Israeli army, talking about finding guns and weapons in Abu Dis — just to say to their people that they are doing their job.
+For me, I [have often been] a prisoner. I was arrested by the Israeli army 7 times– which none of them I was charged. It was all administrative detention, which is imprisonment without a trial. The first time I was 16. So now my sons are facing the same punishment, maybe because I am working for a human rights organization calling for justice for Palestine. My sons and family are targeted. All I want is to protect my family and my people from this wild daily harassment which is getting harder and harder.
+The life that we are living is not at all acceptable. Generation after generation have to face this terror and live in fear. It’s about time to break this inhuman situation and have free equal life for Palestinians.
+I asked Abed about the risk that publishing this account might put his family at even higher risk.
+My family should be prepared for that. We are living inside it. Let the world know who are these people and stop finding excuses for their crimes.

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-On the last day of June, shortly after three Israeli teens had been kidnapped and Palestine was about to be attacked, Rachel Maddow ran a three-minute segment on the developing issues in the region. The short piece ran at the very end of her show, but she explained to her viewers that, “No one quite knows what daybreak is going to bring. We’ll keep you apprised of developments.”
-This turned out to be something of an inaccurate statement, especially if she was not just referring to her network, MSNBC, but specifically referencing her program, The Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow hasn’t mentioned the conflict once since touching upon it fleetingly last month; not one word about dead Palestinian civilians, not even Muhammed Abu Khdeir, the boy who was burned to death by Israeli vigilantes. Since the ascent of Barack Obama, MSNBC has been defined by its liberal outlook and, like many American progressives, they frequently come up short when it comes to the subject of Israel. However, Maddow’s silence is especially glaring, even by the standards of MSNBC: Joy Reid did a segment on Tariq Abu Khdeir, the Florida teen, who was beaten by Israeli police while protesting his cousin’s murder and Chris Hayes analyzed the vast differential between civilian deaths.
-During the first week of July, Maddow’s producer Steve Benen defended the show’s lack of coverage, to journalist Zaid Jilani, by citing that one three-minute clip and pointing out that the staff had been off for the holiday. However, their return from Independence Day celebrations yielded no new analysis of America’s favorite client state. Maddow spent the week covering things like John McCain confusing two people with similar names, the Republican National Convention “jinx”, and, of course, Chris Christie. These are all staples of the MSNBC experience, red meat for an Obama-supporting demographic that loves to hear about how silly the GOP is and the only people who don’t groan when Ed Schultz conducts audience polls like, “Are Republicans Angier than Two Black Labs Fighting Over a Toy?” Of course, one of the problems with trusting MSNBC, as some sort of viable alternative to other corporate media, is that this entire act is frequently trotted out in lieu of developing stories that transcend the contours of America’s rotted two-party system. So, viewers hear about Sarah Palin’s latest wacky observation rather than hear something about Chelsea Manning, Obama breaking a strike in Philly, or the demolition of Palestinian homes. During an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher, Maddow defended MSNBC’s unrelenting coverage of The Christie Bridge Scandal, which has become the liberal Benghazi, explaining that she was, “totally obsessed with the Christie story, unapologetically.” When, the admittedly ridiculous, Charles Cooke suggested that, perhaps, MSNBC was focusing on the Governor of New Jersey so much because he might be the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, Maddow mocked the idea as if it was one of the craziest things she had ever heard.
-Maddow’s snark is symbolic. Unlike Fox News, which seems to be stocked with a decent amount of snake oil salesmen, the MSNBC staff are some of the least cynical people working in media today. Last summer, I wrote a book on the politics of the network and, if there was one consistent element that popped up with each personality I researched, it was their unrelenting belief that they can work on any story they want. Rachel Maddow really thinks she has the freedom to cover anything in Israel if she wanted to and, if she did decide to cover it, she really believes she would produce something completely objective. People who think Maddow is being censored, on the subject of Israel, have probably never heard her pontificate on the subject. For a good crash-course on her perception of the conflict, watch her intro to a story from 2009:
-
-“You undoubtedly saw the headlines today: ‘Israel Launches Third Day of Attacks on Gaza,’ It is a tiny country, a Jewish state, right smack-dab in the middle of the Arab world. Surrounded on all sides by Arab nations, many of whom do not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israel was, in a sense, conceived by war. A day after it declared its independence in May, 1948, it was attacked by five neighboring countries, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. What followed were decades of endless wars, fought on and near Israeli soil. A war with Egypt in 1956, another with Egypt and Jordan and Syria in 1967, another with Egypt and Syria in 1973, one with Lebanon in 1982, and so on, and so on, and so on. And on top of various military entanglements with its neighbors, Israel has also been embroiled in various uprisings within its own borders, among the Palestinian people. You all recall that famous handshake, at the White House, right? Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, agreeing to a Declaration of Principles, that said the Palestinians would be allowed to govern themselves in two areas, in the West Bank, a swath of land along Israel’s border with Jordan, and another tiny sliver of land along the Mediterranean Sea, that’s known as the Gaza Strip. The war being fought at this hour is in that little sliver of land, the Gaza Strip—it’s actually only about twice the size of Washington D.C.
-Now, Israel withdrew from that land in 2005, but they still control the airspace, the territorial waters, and the Gaza-Israeli border. They’re currently [uh] enforcing an embargo on the Gaza Strip. Once the Palestinians [aggrieved some uh] achieved some degree of independence there, they did what independent people do—what the U.S. in fact, encouraged them to do. They held elections. And in those elections, the ruling nationalist party, Yassar Arafat’s party, Fatah, was defeated soundly by Hamas. Now, Fatah was no League of Women Voters, but say what you will about them, they did begrudgingly accept, theoretically, Israel’s right to exist. Hamas? Not so much. Not so much at all. The charter of Hamas explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel. [Uh] Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the European Union. The net result of that election for Israel? Yet another neighbor bent on its complete destruction. Israel says rockets and mortars lobbed from Gaza into Israel killed nine Israeli civilians since the beginning of this year. A shaky ceasefire between Gaza and Israel that had been brokered by Egypt, that expired just a little more than a week ago. On Saturday then, there was a surprise, broad-daylight, coordinated air-assault, by the Israeli military, on what Israel says were military targets in Gaza.
-Another round of headlines that scream, ‘Chaos in the Middle East,’ ‘Chaos in the Middle East Erupts Again.’ More than 300 dead on the Palestinian side in the last three days. Three confirmed dead so far on the Israeli side. Israel’s critics decry a ‘disproportionate response’ to the rocket fire, and emboldened Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei says that any Muslim who dies in defense of Gaza would be deemed a martyr. Israel’s defenders decry the Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and, of course, the unprovoked missile fire into southern Israel. Today, Israel’s United Nations ambassador said the goal of Israel’s military offensive is to, quote, ‘destroy completely’ Hamas.
-Meanwhile, Palestinian rocket fire into Israel continued, despite the massive Israeli military attack. Now, as President Bush refuses to interrupt his last vacation as President to say anything about the Middle East tinderbox he purports to focus on so intently, is there hope that our new Presidential leadership in our country could make a difference there? Or [i-is] is this a situation in which there will always be violence which precludes a political solution—and without a political solution, we can’t ever have anything but more violence? Do you think that our kids, and their kids, and their kids will inexorably, inevitably, read the same headlines from the Middle East that we do now, and that we have for so many years?
-
-There are many problems with Maddow’s historical analysis here, but let’s start with, perhaps, the biggest one: she doesn’t mention the United States government’s connection to Israel, or the billions of dollars, in American taxpayer money, that Israel receives every year. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is, frequently, covered in mainstream media like it’s a confounding puzzle that can’t possibly be solved, but yanking United States support for it is, quite obviously, the logical starting point. The fact Maddow stays within this narrative is interesting, as she is the author a book critiquing America’s devotion to war, but don’t read Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, expecting to hear much about Israel: the country is barely mentioned and the longest passage, has nothing to do with Palestine, but concerns its connection to Reagan’s Iran policy.
-Maddow also references the election of Hamas as if it occurred in a vacuum, with no mention of fact the organization was incubated by Israel or any comment regarding why their message resonated with the citizens of Palestine. She doesn’t point out that Hamas has, previously, sought to negotiate a state along the 1967 borders, contrary to popular belief. She doesn’t say anything about how Palestinian leadership has colluded with Israel and, continually, sold out the population.
-Maddow’s concluding speculation, that this conflict might rage on for future generations, presents the situation as nothing more than a senseless cycle of violence, perpetrated by both sides, possibly for the rest of our lives. But there’s nothing senseless about it, if one understands the basic principles of US hegemony or the idea of Zionism. Palestine isn’t a puzzle that can only be comprehended by policy experts, it’s a country being subjected to daily brutalities and an international scandal far more disturbing than any nefarious traffic jam in New Jersey.
+Representative Ilhan Omar’s straight-talk about the corruption of the US political process by a foreign government was a service to her country, as well as to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East. Omar impaled a great taboo with the first name of a remarkable, multi-talented eighteenth century American hero whose portrait appears on $100 bills. Outraged agents of that foreign government, aided by US politicians who know the truth of her words better than anyone, kicked in the center beam holding up the sky — but to their horror, the sky did not quite fall. True, she was branded a peddler of age-old tropes; yet it was difficult not to notice that the emperor was, indeed, naked. Self-righteous condemnation from the most powerful human on earth (you know, the one who shoved his weight on Jerusalem and Iran in exchange for millions from a gambling magnate on behalf of Israel, and who says that Jews are good negotiators who use their money to buy politicians) instantly dissipated into fodder for comedy by no less a mainstream media as CNN, which posted a video collage juxtaposing Trump’s feigned outrage at Omar with clips of his true, classic antisemitism.
+Yet the outrage over Omar’s truth-telling addressed only a lesser taboo, not the single, core taboo that is at the heart of Israel’s seemingly inexplicable ability to ‘hypnotize’ (to use Omar’s word) the West.
+The real taboo that Ilhan Omar broke was not accusing AIPAC of buying politicians. That was just the way it manifested. The taboo itself was freeing the hostage — Jews — from Zionism and the Israeli state. Outrage over Omar’s tweets requires — requires— that Jews and Israel are seen as synonymous. Even to ‘apologize’, Omar, too, had to engage in this antisemitic lie.
+Thus it is the very people who feign outrage at Omar who are the purveyors of antisemitic tropes. They, not Omar, took the simple concept of a political interest using money and pressure to buy influence, and conflated ‘Israeli influence’ as ‘Jewish influence’.
+Indeed even anti-Zionists are complicit in this when they qualify that criticism of Israel is not ‘necessarily’ antisemitic, or that ‘legitimate’ criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. These qualifiers implicitly accept the Zionist premise of some obligatory connection between Jews, as Jews, and the Israeli state — otherwise the qualifier is nonsensical. Something is, or isn’t, antisemitic independent of whether it has to do with Israel or not. And if by happenstance it does happen to concern criticism of that nation-state in the Middle East, it is, or isn’t, antisemitic independent of whether the criticism was justified. Try this on a friend and see the odd looks you get: “Legitimate criticism of Burma is not necessarily anti-Buddhist.” Or try: “Legitimate criticism of Liechtenstein is not necessarily anti-Catholic.”
+It makes no difference how many people self-identifying as Jews protest to the contrary — no one has the right to make Jewry itself into a tribe headquartered in Tel Aviv. It is time to acknowledge that Israel’s claim on Jewry is categorically unlike any other state’s claim on any other ‘people’. It is a vestige of a sorry era of ethnic nationalism to which we bid good riddance in the mid 1940s. That it continues to be inflicted on Jews, and that it is used to empower ongoing crimes against humanity in their name, should outrage us all.

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-Congressional Democrats have introduced legislation to sanction Israeli settlers that commit acts of violence in the West Bank.
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-The bicameral Sanctions and Accountability for Non-Compliance and Transparent Investigative Oversight for National Security (SANCTIONS) in the West Bank Act, was introduced by Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) and Representative Summer Lee (D-PA).
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-“Sanctions have been an effective tool to deter violence in this deadly year for those living in the West Bank, where lives have been lost, homes have been destroyed, and families have been forever changed,” said Welch in a statement. “We must ensure accountability for extremists who perpetrate violence against civilians in the West Bank and reaffirm our commitment to a lasting Middle East peace.”
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-“This bill is about accountability, justice, and ensuring that U.S. policy stands firmly against extremist violence and destabilization,” said Lee.
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-The SANCTIONS Act has a number of cosponsors. Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jill Tokuda (D-HI), Al Green (D-TX), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Sara Jacobs (D-CA); Jim McGovern (D-MA), and Andre Carson (D-IN) in the House. Dick Durbin (D-IL); Bernie Sanders (I-VT); Jack Reed (D-RI); Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), ad Jeff Merkley (D-OR) in the Senate.
-
-Settler violence has surged in the illegally occupied West Bank in the last 14 months. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, over 800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded by settler violence since October 7, 2023.
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-“This violence is not new to us. We suffered their [settlers] attacks in Al-Mu’arrajat since 2018, and it scarily intensified since October 7,” a displaced Palestinian woman told Amnesty international earlier this year. “Every place we move to, they come and displace us again. People come visit and tell us to stay steadfast, but how can we stay steadfast when our lives and livelihood and the lives of our children are in danger?… This is a systematic policy that allows the settlers to attack residents and burn everything down, and no one is doing anything to stop it.”
-
-The new bill codifies President Joe Biden’s February 2024 Executive Order, which allowed the Treasury Department to impose sanctions against individuals “undermining peace and stability in the West Bank.” The move was met with anger from various pro-Israel groups and the administration was even sued by U.S.-Israeli citizens who claimed that their free-speech and religious rights were violated by the order.
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-Last month the White House announced a new round of sanctions on groups and individuals connected to illegal settlements in the West Bank. According State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller the Biden administration has sanctioned 33 individuals and entities over the last 10 months.
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-“There is no justification for extremist violence against civilians – period,” Miller told reporters. “We are committed to working with Israel and the Palestinian Authority to de-escalate violence in the West Bank, which has cost the lives of too many Israeli and Palestinian civilians.”
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-“The President and the Secretary have repeatedly stressed with their Israeli counterparts that Israel must do more to stop violence against civilians in the West Bank and hold accountable those responsible for it,” he continued.
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-Palestinians in the West Bank have been critical of the U.S. policy, with many saying that sanctions on settlers has done, and will do little to stop the violence against them in the West Bank, particularly as settlers feel more emboldened than ever under Netanyahu’s current right wing government.
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-The SANCTIONS Act isn’t the only current legislative effort aimed at Israel. This week Lee and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) led a letter (signed by an additional 18 Democratic House members) urging Biden official to adhere to its own ultimatum on military aid.
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-In October Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had threatened to cut off offensive weapons shipments to Israel if the country’s government failed to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
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-“Last month, as the 30-day deadline arrived, your Administration said it would not suspend military assistance to Israel because it determined that the Netanyahu government took some steps to improve the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. While Israel made nominal progress in some areas, it overwhelmingly failed to meet the minimum standards laid out in the Administration’s own letter,” reads the letter.
-
-“Simply put, the Netanyahu government has not complied with the United States’ repeated requests to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered safely to innocent people. Under U.S. law, the United States government must suspend offensive weapons to any nation that fails to meet these basic standards,” it continues.
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-Earlier this month 77 House Democrats sent the administration a letter seeking a full assessment of Israeli compliance with U.S. law, including the National Security Memorandum and the Foreign Assistance Act.
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-“Our concerns remain urgent and largely unresolved,” read the letter.
+Last October, Jonathan Ofir reported on alleged anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party, after the expulsion of Moshé Machover, Professor of Philosophy at the University of London (see Moshe Machover and the battle for the soul of British Labour, Oct 6, 2017). Professor Machover was reinstated, while others have not been, and now Labour member Tony Greenstein, well-known in the UK for his work against racism—Zionist and otherwise—has been expelled, and his Facebook account suspended.[1]
+Bigotry, of which anti-Semitism is but one variety, persists among humankind; and so any large organization composed of a cross-section of people might include anti-whatever bigots among its members. But the ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis in Labour flared up suddenly when Jeremy Corbyn, who as a Member of Parliament was known for supporting human rights in Palestine, upset the British political stage with his surprise victory as party leader. Four months before that December 2015 victory, when polls demonstrated Corbyn’s strong grass-roots popularity, the Jewish Chronicle panicked and warned of his “alleged funding of Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright antisemites.” Labour itself tried to block likely Corbyn voters, but to no avail. He won.
+The moment he did, suddenly Labour was crawling with anti-Semites. They all had one thing in common: all these ‘anti-Semites’ were known to be critical of Israel. Rattled by Corbyn’s win, chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis made plain that these—anti-Semitism, and criticism of Israel—were synonymous. He warned that “the hard Left” is “spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism,” which is manifested as criticism of Zionism, “one of the axioms of Jewish belief … a noble and integral part of Judaism … a belief in the right to Jewish self-determination.”
+The notorious UK tabloid, the Daily Mail, tries to smear Jeremy Corbyn by juxtaposing him against author Tom Suárez, after the latter’s scheduled talk on Israel-Palestine was closed down by PREVENT, the UK’s alleged anti-radicalization program[7]. Contrary to the headline, Suárez never “accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust,” and his branding of Zionism as “fascist” at London’s SOAS—a talk brought to a halt by disruptions—were actually verbatim quotes of Jews fleeing the Nazis, and of US & British intelligence.The month after the election, the DailyMail, quoting unnamed “experts”, reported that anti-Semitism was now so bad that “European Jews feel as threatened as they did in the Holocaust”—a grotesque belittling of what Hitler’s victims endured. Then in April (2016), the National Review ran a piece entitled “Why the Left hates Jews,” and jumped right to the UK Labour party in the first sentence. The following month, the DailyMail said the rate of “hate crimes against Jews soars as report says anti-semitism is at the ‘core’ of far-Left beliefs” . By January 2017, anti-Semitism had increased again, specifically because of Labour (the Telegraph). It continued to get even worse: in July, the BBC and Independent reported “Anti-Semitic attacks hit record high in UK,” and at writing, February 2018, it—yes—has soared even higher (Independent), with Labour said to be in “total disarray” for its failure to confront what one would surmise are the hordes of seething anti-Semities comprising its members.
+None of these media betrayed any sense of wonder at the endless series of ever-higher ‘records’, nor any curiosity as to the methodology, data, and motives of the sources, typically the Community Security Trust. The BBC did not even question why, in a September 2017 report headlined “Over a quarter of British people ‘hold anti-Semitic attitudes’,” the survey correlated “attitudes towards Jews” with attitudes towards Israel.
+After taking the helm at Labour, Corbyn behaved as politicians do. He suspended an initial eighteen members on charges of criticizing Israel anti-Semitism, with high-profile members Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone making headlines—Shah for reposting a cartoon from Norman Finkelstein’s site, and former London mayor Livingstone for quoting, if very clumsily, from Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Corbyn further tried to quell the outcry by appointing prominent barrister Shami Chakrabarti to head an Inquiry to investigate anti-Semitism in the Party. But as long as Labour is led by someone who has previously been tarred as ‘pro-Palestinian’, the witchhunt will continue—even though Corbyn himself went silent on Palestine upon his election win.
+Among the prominent Labour members complaining that the party was “failing to act on antisemitism” was Jeremy Newmark, an avid supporter of the Israeli state. No action was taken against him when in February it was exposed that he had defrauded the Jewish Leadership Council out of tens of thousands of pounds as chief executive, and misled charities about his finances.[2]
+So let’s just blurt it out and get it over with: This inquisition has nothing, nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It is about Israel. It is about protecting that state from censure to insure that it can continue its violations of everything for which we as a civilization claim to stand, without interference.
+The core of the debacle—indeed the crux and cause of the entire Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ [sic]—is that Israel imposes an obligatory moral linkage between it, and world Jewry. Jews, simply by virtue of being Jews, are inexorably, organically welded to the Israeli state. This would be racist on its very principle, even if Israel were the nicest state in the galaxy. Israel forges this construct into its most powerful military weapon: the claim of indivisability between the state and Jewry itself.
+After the Chakrabarti Commission found no endemic anti-Semitism in Labour, the claims of anti-Semitism were adjusted to the reality that most anti-Zionists were noted as progressive anti-racists. To quote from this article, “The Home Affairs Select Committee questioned whether Mr Corbyn “fully appreciates the distinct nature of contemporary anti-Semitism, and the fact that it is perfectly possible for an ‘anti-racist campaigner’ to express anti-Semitic views.”
+Herewith are three parallel scenarios. Two are fictitious. Everything in all three is factual if applied to the third.
+Burma has silenced criticism of its ongoing ethnic cleansing and repression of the Rohingya people by smearing critics as anti-Buddhist bigots. The US, UK, and various EU countries have adopted this new Burmese definition of anti-Buddhism, and have moved to criminalize any attempt to boycott Burma as anti-Buddhist prejudice. The UK’s anti-terror PREVENT program has blocked discussion of the Rohingya plight as extremist speech, and the US has made federal flood relief, and the right of scholars to speak on campus, contingent on forswearing any boycott of Burma. The US has reassured the Burmese leadership that their war is our war, their value our values, to the extent of framing it in Biblical, apocalyptic terms, the Burmese regime representing Good, the Rohingya Evil.
+After ISIS announced that its terror campaigns are being conducted in the name of worldwide Muslims and Islam, the US, UK, and various EU governments fell in line, legislating that criticism of ISIS therefore equals hate speech. The US Congress, many of whose members receive generous donations from pro-ISIS Muslim Americans, have condemned as anti-Muslim hatred attempts to challenge ISIS in the Security Council. The American peace group Muslim Voice for Peace has been accused of supporting terror for seeking to hold ISIS to international law. The UK has forced the closure of bank accounts of organizations seeking human rights in ISIS-held territory.
+As Israel continues its seven decades of ethnic cleansing and repression of non-Jews, the US, UK, and various EU governments continue to accept its claim that its terror is being conducted in the name of Jews and Judaism, and thus to criticize its terror is anti-Jewish bigotry. The US has passed various laws to criminalize any censure of the terror, and both the US and UK have adopted definitions of anti-Jewish bigotry that legislate, in essence, that world Jewry, and whatever Israel does, are one and the same.
+The first two scenarios would be universally condemned as an affront against Buddhism or Islam, the obvious attempt to exploit people and faith to empower the atrocities of a political entity. Why do we allow Zionism to similarly sell Jewry down the river?
+Pro-Palestinian activists focus, understandably, on exposing Israel’s injustice against the Palestinians. But these efforts towards peace have so far failed because the Zionist narrative that informs the Western mindset has reduced Palestinians to a lesser people who are to blame for the violence on both ‘sides’. This is why the lopsided statistics of the so-called ‘conflict’, in which Palestinians are the vastly disproportionate victims, have no effect: Palestinian suffering is the suffering of lesser humans who are the cause of both their adversaries’ suffering and, equally, of their own.
+But Jews are also victims of Zionism. Like its violence against the Palestinians, this was both physical violence, and dehumanization—that is, racism.
+Zionism’s physical violence was to force mass human migration: Just as Palestinians could not be removed from their land except by violence against them, Zionism could not install the critical mass of Jews necessary for its settler state to succeed, without violence against Jews.[3]
+Jeremy Corbyn, despite his silence on Palestine since assuming Labour leadership, and despite his complicity with unjust suspensions, continues to be held responsible in what is described as yet-again unprecedented levels of anti-Semitism. (The Telegraph, Feb 1, 2018)
+The removal of Palestinians was achieved through outright ethnic cleansing and massacres, as well as starving them off the land by expropriating all means of livelihood. At the same time, the Zionist project secured settlers by systematically blocking safe haven for persecuted Jews other than in Palestine, by manufacturing violence to force the uprooting of Jews living elsewhere in peace, by removing Jewish orphans from their adoptive families to be sent to Palestine, and by blinding an entire society into a permanent psychosis, messianic fundamentalism coupled with the conviction of an existential anti-Jewish threat that is an incurable part of the human condition. Even during the darkest days of anti-Jewish persecution, Zionism’s first concern was its ethnic-nationalist settler project, not the welfare of persecuted Jews.[4]
+Ben-Gurion’s comments to Jewish Agency leaders in October of 1942 offer a brief glimpse into this. Although Hitler had made Jews suffer, he told them, that suffering was reviving feelings of Jewish “nationalism” (Zionism), which they would exploit. But he warned that Zionism was being weakened by the democracies, because they “recognise the Jews as people having full rights of citizenship,” and he blamed setbacks for Zionism on what he called America’s “democratic attitude.”[5] Precisely the opposite of the endlessly-heard mantra that Zionism is ‘Jewish self-determination’, Zionism is the global theft of Jewish individual self-determination.
+But all this anti-Palestinian and anti-Jewish terror is, obviously, violence against civilians to force a political goal—the core definition of terrorism. There is no way around this: The only way you can force a population from its own land, replace it with a different population, and keep the remnants of the indigenous population subservient, is by massive violence against civilians. In other words, the Zionist project itself is by its very nature one of terrorism. If to condemn this terror is anti-Semitic—if, as the chief rabbi claims, Zionism (and, implicitly, the Israeli state) is core to Jewish identity—then Jews as a people want, and are the doers of this terror. This would, to say the least, be a fatal marketing blemish for Zionism. The solution was to dehumanize both the Palestinians and Jews.
+Israel’s dehumanization of the Palestinians, the obstacle to its settler state, is more obvious. It had to repackage its ethnic cleansing and ethnic subjugation into something good—defense—so it dehumanized Palestinians into an eternal threat, irredeemably violent as a race.
+But Zionism also had to explain its profound violence against Jews, the means to its settler state; and it needed extraordinary impunity, to be able to operate outside the norms of civilized nations. It achieved both objectives by dehumanizing Jews—by dehumanizing Jews into the settler state itself. Zionism’s success in spinning Jewry as interchangeable with its ethnic-nationalist political invention is the core of the entire tragic ‘conflict’.
+Israeli influence in UK domestic politics: a screen-grab from al-Jazeera’s four-part documentary, The Lobby [8].But it will also be Zionism’s, and the ‘conflict’s,’ Achilles Heel, once we are no longer afraid to confront it.
+Israel is constantly reminding us that it is ‘the’ Jewish State— not ‘a’ Jewish state, in the sense of a national faith that any nation might adopt, but the Jewish State, the very embodiment of Jews themselves, all Jews, in a tribal sense, regardless of their nationality, regardless of their own self-identity. There is no parallel to this claimed synthesis between nation-state and ethnicity in the modern world. Israel, if we accept it, is Jewry, back to the Jewish kingdoms cited in the Old Testament, of which it claims to be the rebirth in order to claim that it is not a settler state. To maintain this theatre, archaeological artifacts associated with the Old Testament are transformed into artifacts of the nation-state’s history. The prize-winner of UN intransigence hides behind the messianic ‘return’ of the Biblical realm’s inhabitants, who will now build the Third Temple.
+The result is that whatever the Israeli state does is done by Jews because they are Jews, not simply by individuals who happen to be Jewish. Condemnation of that state therefore equals condemnation of Jews, and so criticism of Zionism and Israel is thus anti-Semitic by definition.
+And so Zionism, if we accept it, succeeds where all the bigots through the centuries never could. Traditional anti-Semitism can only attack externally—despite all its murder, all its horrors, all its desecration, traditional anti-Semitism is powerless to lessen the integrity of Jews or Judaism. Zionism, if we accept it, does. If we accept the Zionist narrative, then we have corrupted Jewry itself from within.
+In this book by Dave Rich, anti-Semitism is defined by certain “ways of thinking about Jews, Zionism and Israel”. “Pro-Palestinian” signs at the top implicitly link Palestinian human rights activists with anti-Semitism.
+In order to call itself ‘The Jewish State’, Israel ethnically cleansed much of the non-Jewish population and continues to block their return, keeps an entire population under a brutal military dictatorship in the name of Jews, and has reduced Gaza to a cesspool for lesser humans, in the name of Jews.
+It is time to challenge this anti-Semitism in our official institutions. These include the US State Department and its Zionist definition of anti-Semitism, the British government and its use of the Zionist ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ definition—which by its very name exploits the memory of Hitler’s victims to empower new ethnic/racial atrocities—along with cynically-named Zionist pressure groups such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, and Community Security Trust.
+The response to politically-motivated smears of anti-Semitism must no longer be mere defense—it must be offense, to expose the true anti-Semitism of the smear itself, and of those wielding it.
+Zionism and (true) anti-Semitism have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Anti-Semitism gives Zionism meaning, while Zionism offers bigots a way to send Jews to a far-off ghetto while looking like they’re doing something nice.[6] These continually reinforce each other: by positioning itself as the embodiment of Jewry, Zionism ‘vindicates’ bigots who blame ‘the Jews’ for the crimes of the Israeli state. This ‘vindication’ reinforces more (true) anti-Semitism, which in turn re-‘vindicates’ Zionism.
+One hundred and one years ago, Edwin Montagu, a Jewish member of the British Cabinet, accused his government of anti-Semitism for colluding with the Zionists. History has proven him correct, and we must do the same. Zionism’s devotees’ great libel against Jews must be called out for what it is: spinning its crimes as those of Jewry itself in order to use Jews as a human shield.
+
+See also:
+Labout Against the Witchhunt
+Jewish Voice for Labour
+Free Speech on Israel
+Short video of extracts of a talk related to this article’s topic
+Long video about the larger issue of the ‘conflict’
+
+1. The Machover and Greenstein expulsions:
+• Moshé Machover: My response to my expulsion.
+• Tony Greenstein: My Expulsion Letter from the Labour Party and my response.
+2. Jeremy Newmark:
+• The Jewish Chronicle: Revealed: JLC audit reports Jeremy Newmark deceived it out of thousands of pounds
+• Newmark complaining of anti-Semitism two weeks before his scandal broke: Jewish Labour group accuses party of failing to act on antisemitism complaints
+3. For Zionist anti-Jewish violence, especially during the British Mandate period, see Suárez, State of Terror.
+4. Following are brief references for the large topics cited in this paragraph
+• Ethnic cleansing: The best single source is Ilan Pappe’s classic Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
+• Blocking of safe haven: This was a recurrent theme during the Mandate period, the most dramatic example being US Zionist leaders’ sabotaging of resettlement scheme created by President Roosevelt that would have given 300,000 DPs homes in the US and Britain, and 200,000 more in South America and Australia. Roosevelt’s aide, Morris Ernst, who handled the project, records this in his 1948 book, So Far So Good. The present author found further evidence in The National Archives (UK), FO 800/487, 110. Among other examples was the blocking of the attempt to get new homes in Denmark for the Exodus passengers (e.g., Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, 46, 50, 178). Future Israeli prime ministers Ben-Gurion and Sharett both spoke at Jewish Agency meetings of the importance of preventing Jewish DPs from any option but Palestine. Decades later, during the US Reagan years, Russian Jews were stopped from emigrating to the US at the request of Israel (see Lazin, Fred A., “Refugee Resettlement and “Freedom of Choice’ – The Case of Soviet Jewry”)
+• Manufactured violence: The most catastrophic example is the ‘false flag’ anti-Jewish terror in the early 1950s that destroyed the Jewish community in Iraq. See Suarez, State of Terror, 282-285, and Naeim Giladi, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews. North African Jews were the targets of displacement by the early 1940s. See, e.g., see The National Archives (UK), KV 5/33, 37a, 38a, 35a (10 pages) London, “from our Palestine representative on the Jewish situation, as viewed by him.”
+• Removal of Jewish orphans: The systematic removal of orphans from their adoptive families, as documented in author’s State of Terror, has elicited particular condemnation from the book’s critics, who maintain that the children were being safeguarded during the war, after which they were reunited with their parents. The book’s principal source is the account left by the Ashkenazy chief rabbi of Palestine, which the author has made available at paldocs.net (see Rabbi Herzog kidnapping trip, 1946). The reader is encouraged to read this declassified source document. Herzog, indeed, announced his intentions to the New York Times, with ten thousand children being his stated goal (Feb 25 1946). Independently, Professor Yosef Grodzinsky had earlier addressed this issue, based on entirely different sources, in his important book, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II.
+• Psychosis: This, too, is a common theme among British, US, and Jewish sources during the Mandate One example follows, from Henry Hunloke, Defence Security Officer in Palestine, January, 1943: The Jewish Agency “make one think that they have picked the strangest parts of Nazism, Fascism, Communism with a spicing of Tammany Hall as the system best suited for the control of Jews in Palestine.” Those with more moderate views are tolerated only until they become influential. “From a tender age,” children are brought up to have one aim only, the fulfillment of Zionism, and children have walked out on their parents when the parents try to instill some moderation on that aim. The system “is closely akin to that adopted by the Nazis,” and as history has shown, “in a comparatively short space of time, such teaching is very hard to eradicate.” The National Archives (UK), KV 5/33, 37a, 38a, 35a. Another example, from a Mr. Newton who had lived in the settlements: “Violence and intransigent nationalism,” he testified, “was fostered by the Jewish educational system,” and “the incitement and hysteria fostered systematically among the Jewish youth in Palestine. This education and political propaganda has produced youths and girls who were ready to use murder for their political ends.” (The National Archives, FO 371/45382, penciled ‘233’). As an example of instilled fear, Jewish DPs were separated into Zionist-run camps that proved to be virtual brain-washing camps, such that when the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry visited such camps in 1946, the DPs threatened mass suicide if sent to the US, because they would never be safe there (New York Times, Feb 18 1946). Into statehood, John Wilson, upon leaving the British delegation in Tel Aviv in mid-1953, described how Israeli officials have built up “a sickening jargon … the air is thick with propaganda … Misleading stories and press campaigns are worked up [and] censorship stifles the dissemination of honest news.” Several observers noted how the Israeli state, following in the footsteps of the Jewish Agency, conjured such hysteria with its manipulation of the news that it found itself having to take action against the threats it had invented. Regarding the Israeli government’s control of the domestic media, and thus of its population’s beliefs and attitudes, see Ilan Pappé’s Israel Out of the Frame.
+5. The National Archives (Britain), Kew, WO 169/4334, G.S.I. HQ Palestine, Summary No. 12 (1-31 Oct 1942). This document can be seen at the website paldocs.net, under ‘Democracy /Democracy as obstacle to Zionist plans’.
+6. Evidence that much of Zionism’s non-Jewish support came from people who saw it as an opportunity to keep Jews from immigrating, and get rid of those already present, is seen as early as Gertrude Bell, the famous English writer, traveller, archaeologist, and spy. She cited her diplomatic experience “to prove that the French are anxious to establish Jews anywhere [i.e., support Zionism] if only to have an excuse for getting rid of them.” Similarly, C.G. Montefiore, President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, testified in 1917 that “It is very significant that anti-Semites are always very sympathetic to Zionism.” (The National Archives, CAB 24/28/0063, 2; CAB 24/4/0014, 7). Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin reported this, and it is acknowledged, and exploited, by Jewish Agency leaders like Ben-Gurion, and blatantly exploited by the Irgun in its US funding ads in the major newspapers (see Suárez, State of Terror, ch 5 & 6).
+7. The UK “Prevent” program, official statement, and criticism. After blocking the author from speaking in Portsmouth (UK), Prevent failed to deliver on a verbal promise to clear the author’s name from suspicion. Several months later, the talk was rescheduled without incident. At writing, the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has filed a new complaint against Corbyn, which also cites Suárez as evidence (CAA files fresh disciplinary complaint against Jeremy Corbyn…). At writing, Suárez does not know, and has never met or had any contact with, Jeremy Corbyn.
+8. Al-Jazeera’s documentary The Lobby.
+
+Sampling of media reports since Corbyn’s rise as a serious contender for Labour leadership
+July 2015
+• Anti-Semitic incidents in UK see sharp rise, figures suggest — BBC
+• Big rise in anti-semitic hate attacks in West Midlands – Shock statistics — Birmingham Mail
+Aug 2015
+• The key questions Jeremy Corbyn must answer — Jewish Chronicle
+Sept 2015
+• [anti-Semitism] attacks double in a year — Daily Record
+Dec 2015
+• London Rocked by Sharp Spike in Anti-Semitic Attacks in 2015 — Sputnik News
+Jan 2016
+• Anti-Semitic assaults SPIKE after WORST year on record for attacks on Jewish people — Express
+• Jewish immigration to Israel from western Europe hits an all-time high following rise in anti-Semitic attacks — DailyMail
+• European Jews feel as threatened as they did in the Holocaust, experts say — DailyMail
+April 2016
+• Why the Left Hates Jews — National Review
+May 2016
+• Number of hate crimes against Jews soars as report says anti-semitism is at the ‘core’ of far-Left beliefs — DailyMail
+• Hate crimes against Jews up sharply in Britain, audit finds — Times of Israel
+• Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism — Telegraph
+Feb 2017
+• Labour party linked to increase in anti-Semitic incidents — Telegraph
+July 2017
+• Anti-Semitic attacks hit record high in UK  Independent
+• Anti-Semitic incidents in UK see sharp rise, figures suggest — BBC
+Sept 2017
+• Over a quarter of British people ‘hold anti-Semitic attitudes’, study finds — BBC
+Feb 2018
+• Antisemitic hate crimes hit record high — Independent
+• Labour ‘in total disarray’ over antisemitism allegations, campaigners claim — Independent

mondoweiss/texts/1878.txt

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-On the last day of June, shortly after three Israeli teens had been kidnapped and Palestine was about to be attacked, Rachel Maddow ran a three-minute segment on the developing issues in the region. The short piece ran at the very end of her show, but she explained to her viewers that, “No one quite knows what daybreak is going to bring. We’ll keep you apprised of developments.”
-This turned out to be something of an inaccurate statement, especially if she was not just referring to her network, MSNBC, but specifically referencing her program, The Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow hasn’t mentioned the conflict once since touching upon it fleetingly last month; not one word about dead Palestinian civilians, not even Muhammed Abu Khdeir, the boy who was burned to death by Israeli vigilantes. Since the ascent of Barack Obama, MSNBC has been defined by its liberal outlook and, like many American progressives, they frequently come up short when it comes to the subject of Israel. However, Maddow’s silence is especially glaring, even by the standards of MSNBC: Joy Reid did a segment on Tariq Abu Khdeir, the Florida teen, who was beaten by Israeli police while protesting his cousin’s murder and Chris Hayes analyzed the vast differential between civilian deaths.
-During the first week of July, Maddow’s producer Steve Benen defended the show’s lack of coverage, to journalist Zaid Jilani, by citing that one three-minute clip and pointing out that the staff had been off for the holiday. However, their return from Independence Day celebrations yielded no new analysis of America’s favorite client state. Maddow spent the week covering things like John McCain confusing two people with similar names, the Republican National Convention “jinx”, and, of course, Chris Christie. These are all staples of the MSNBC experience, red meat for an Obama-supporting demographic that loves to hear about how silly the GOP is and the only people who don’t groan when Ed Schultz conducts audience polls like, “Are Republicans Angier than Two Black Labs Fighting Over a Toy?” Of course, one of the problems with trusting MSNBC, as some sort of viable alternative to other corporate media, is that this entire act is frequently trotted out in lieu of developing stories that transcend the contours of America’s rotted two-party system. So, viewers hear about Sarah Palin’s latest wacky observation rather than hear something about Chelsea Manning, Obama breaking a strike in Philly, or the demolition of Palestinian homes. During an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher, Maddow defended MSNBC’s unrelenting coverage of The Christie Bridge Scandal, which has become the liberal Benghazi, explaining that she was, “totally obsessed with the Christie story, unapologetically.” When, the admittedly ridiculous, Charles Cooke suggested that, perhaps, MSNBC was focusing on the Governor of New Jersey so much because he might be the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, Maddow mocked the idea as if it was one of the craziest things she had ever heard.
-Maddow’s snark is symbolic. Unlike Fox News, which seems to be stocked with a decent amount of snake oil salesmen, the MSNBC staff are some of the least cynical people working in media today. Last summer, I wrote a book on the politics of the network and, if there was one consistent element that popped up with each personality I researched, it was their unrelenting belief that they can work on any story they want. Rachel Maddow really thinks she has the freedom to cover anything in Israel if she wanted to and, if she did decide to cover it, she really believes she would produce something completely objective. People who think Maddow is being censored, on the subject of Israel, have probably never heard her pontificate on the subject. For a good crash-course on her perception of the conflict, watch her intro to a story from 2009:
-
-“You undoubtedly saw the headlines today: ‘Israel Launches Third Day of Attacks on Gaza,’ It is a tiny country, a Jewish state, right smack-dab in the middle of the Arab world. Surrounded on all sides by Arab nations, many of whom do not recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israel was, in a sense, conceived by war. A day after it declared its independence in May, 1948, it was attacked by five neighboring countries, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. What followed were decades of endless wars, fought on and near Israeli soil. A war with Egypt in 1956, another with Egypt and Jordan and Syria in 1967, another with Egypt and Syria in 1973, one with Lebanon in 1982, and so on, and so on, and so on. And on top of various military entanglements with its neighbors, Israel has also been embroiled in various uprisings within its own borders, among the Palestinian people. You all recall that famous handshake, at the White House, right? Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, agreeing to a Declaration of Principles, that said the Palestinians would be allowed to govern themselves in two areas, in the West Bank, a swath of land along Israel’s border with Jordan, and another tiny sliver of land along the Mediterranean Sea, that’s known as the Gaza Strip. The war being fought at this hour is in that little sliver of land, the Gaza Strip—it’s actually only about twice the size of Washington D.C.
-Now, Israel withdrew from that land in 2005, but they still control the airspace, the territorial waters, and the Gaza-Israeli border. They’re currently [uh] enforcing an embargo on the Gaza Strip. Once the Palestinians [aggrieved some uh] achieved some degree of independence there, they did what independent people do—what the U.S. in fact, encouraged them to do. They held elections. And in those elections, the ruling nationalist party, Yassar Arafat’s party, Fatah, was defeated soundly by Hamas. Now, Fatah was no League of Women Voters, but say what you will about them, they did begrudgingly accept, theoretically, Israel’s right to exist. Hamas? Not so much. Not so much at all. The charter of Hamas explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel. [Uh] Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by both the United States and the European Union. The net result of that election for Israel? Yet another neighbor bent on its complete destruction. Israel says rockets and mortars lobbed from Gaza into Israel killed nine Israeli civilians since the beginning of this year. A shaky ceasefire between Gaza and Israel that had been brokered by Egypt, that expired just a little more than a week ago. On Saturday then, there was a surprise, broad-daylight, coordinated air-assault, by the Israeli military, on what Israel says were military targets in Gaza.
-Another round of headlines that scream, ‘Chaos in the Middle East,’ ‘Chaos in the Middle East Erupts Again.’ More than 300 dead on the Palestinian side in the last three days. Three confirmed dead so far on the Israeli side. Israel’s critics decry a ‘disproportionate response’ to the rocket fire, and emboldened Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei says that any Muslim who dies in defense of Gaza would be deemed a martyr. Israel’s defenders decry the Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and, of course, the unprovoked missile fire into southern Israel. Today, Israel’s United Nations ambassador said the goal of Israel’s military offensive is to, quote, ‘destroy completely’ Hamas.
-Meanwhile, Palestinian rocket fire into Israel continued, despite the massive Israeli military attack. Now, as President Bush refuses to interrupt his last vacation as President to say anything about the Middle East tinderbox he purports to focus on so intently, is there hope that our new Presidential leadership in our country could make a difference there? Or [i-is] is this a situation in which there will always be violence which precludes a political solution—and without a political solution, we can’t ever have anything but more violence? Do you think that our kids, and their kids, and their kids will inexorably, inevitably, read the same headlines from the Middle East that we do now, and that we have for so many years?
-
-There are many problems with Maddow’s historical analysis here, but let’s start with, perhaps, the biggest one: she doesn’t mention the United States government’s connection to Israel, or the billions of dollars, in American taxpayer money, that Israel receives every year. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is, frequently, covered in mainstream media like it’s a confounding puzzle that can’t possibly be solved, but yanking United States support for it is, quite obviously, the logical starting point. The fact Maddow stays within this narrative is interesting, as she is the author a book critiquing America’s devotion to war, but don’t read Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, expecting to hear much about Israel: the country is barely mentioned and the longest passage, has nothing to do with Palestine, but concerns its connection to Reagan’s Iran policy.
-Maddow also references the election of Hamas as if it occurred in a vacuum, with no mention of fact the organization was incubated by Israel or any comment regarding why their message resonated with the citizens of Palestine. She doesn’t point out that Hamas has, previously, sought to negotiate a state along the 1967 borders, contrary to popular belief. She doesn’t say anything about how Palestinian leadership has colluded with Israel and, continually, sold out the population.
-Maddow’s concluding speculation, that this conflict might rage on for future generations, presents the situation as nothing more than a senseless cycle of violence, perpetrated by both sides, possibly for the rest of our lives. But there’s nothing senseless about it, if one understands the basic principles of US hegemony or the idea of Zionism. Palestine isn’t a puzzle that can only be comprehended by policy experts, it’s a country being subjected to daily brutalities and an international scandal far more disturbing than any nefarious traffic jam in New Jersey.
+I reached checkpoint 300 at 7:00 AM sharp. My rehearsal was not until nine o’clock, but I allowed extra time in case the soldiers decide to pull over the rickety minibus that takes me from the other side of 300 to the Damascus Gate. I had reason to expect such extra “security”, where I have seen Palestinians carted away for some irregularity in their “permission” to be in their own country: The previous afternoon I’d taken a short cut through Jerusalem’s Old City and found myself in the midst of a particularly aggressive onslaught by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
+Checkpoint 300 separates occupied Bethlehem from occupied East Jerusalem — in other words, Israeli checkpoint 300 separates Palestine from Palestine. Before even reaching the entrance to its long human cattle-way, I knew something was wrong.
+“Closed,” a man sitting on the sidewalk sipping coffee told me. “Checkpoint closed.” I moved closer and gazed at the packed mass of people, most of them men trying to get to work, overflowing out the entrance. Beethoven’s ninth symphony would have to do without me this morning.
+This last symphony of the revolutionary composer is iconic of freedom, of liberation, of peace. If Beethoven were to observe the military occupation now blocking me from rehearsing his radical fourth movement — whose text celebrates how “what custom has sternly divided, all men shall become brothers” — he’d conclude that we’ve learned nothing in these two centuries.
+Then the news came. Our closed checkpoint was the aftermath of a previous rehearsal, an Israeli rehearsal, now concluded. Downbeat had been four hours earlier: 3:00 AM.
+In 1949, about 3,400 of the roughly 800,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed by the Israeli militias the year before were given shelter in tents in what became the Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. The refugees would (obviously) be returning home very soon — the moment hostilities cease.
+That was seventy years ago. For seven decades, they and their descendants have had the absolute right to return home. But for seven decades they have been blocked by Israel from doing so because they are the wrong ethnicity; and for seven decades the “international community” has rewarded Israel for the crime. Dismal tents have long since given way to dismal concrete.
+The entrance to Dheisheh. Witnesses say that it was here that Arkan was gunned down by the IDF. Note the banner with Arkan’s image, on the far right. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+Israel’s military has however found the camp to be an ideal rehearsal venue. It comes fully equipped: multiple entrances, winding alleyways, hills, hiding spots, observation points, endless things to blow up, and a large supply of expendable human beings. And during one such “rehearsal” a few hours earlier, as I was making coffee a few kilometers to the north, the soldiers murdered fifteen-year-old Arkan Thaer Mezher. My own rehearsal, the one about liberation and brother(/sister)hood, was collateral damage.
+(Read Yumna Patel’s excellent Mondoweiss report, which is based on a eye-witness account: Israeli forces kill 15-year-old Palestinian in refugee camp raid.)
+As described by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), “undercover units dressed like Palestinian civilians” infiltrated the camp, after which “Israeli forces backed by 8 military vehicles moved into the camp from all its entrances … the Israeli soldiers raided and topped roofs of dozens of houses and buildings, raided many shops after blowing up their doors and damaged their contents.”
+Far more important than rehearsing Beethoven, I went to the camp. Its streets were quiet, save for a brief thunder of Israeli fighter jets overhead. A covered area had been erected in front, inside of which men and boys sat on plastic chairs. I peered in discreetly, trying not to look rude, but this did not last long. A couple of men saw me and motioned me to come in. Welcome, they said in English and Arabic. Welcome. Do you know why we are here? they asked. “Arkan,” I replied. Yes. Please, sit down. You are welcome. A young man handed me a cup of Arabic coffee, and pointed out Arkan’s father. He was seated facing a banner with his son’s photo. I watched as he rose to greet and hug two men who had just arrived.
+Arkan’s father with friends and family. His son’s photo is superimposed on the Palestinian flag. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+“It was there at the entrance,” a man next to me said, pointing through the tent opening to the entrance of the camp. “They killed him there. Not inside the camp. At the end of the invasion.” Another man translated for a third: “We don’t understand, Israel took our homes, our land, our trees. They have everything now. So why do they still need to attack us?” There was “nothing happening” at the camp — no “terror” (resistance) as the Israelis claimed. Dheisheh, they said, served as “practice” for the IDF. Rehearsals.
+Dheisheh Camp: Men try to stabilize the central tent support for the gathering in honor of the slain teenager. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+A boy, perhaps a year or two younger than Arkan, heard there was a man in the tent who spoke English. He wanted to practice. My name? Tom. I asked him his. What do I do? In terrible Arabic, I told him that I play violin. “I play drums!” he replied. I mentioned an acquaintance of mine from Dheisheh who played oud. He was too young to know him, but the men nodded. Ahmad. Then the boy got very quiet. He pointed to the photo of Arkan that hung from the tent wall and started shaking his head. He was my friend, was all he said now.
+Two older bearded men on concrete steps motioned me to join them. They said little but I stayed there for some time, humbled by their dignity and humanity despite injustice upon injustice heaped upon them. When I left, I thanked those around me and said good-bye to the drummer boy.
+I exited the tent into the sunlight, thinking about everything I had heard. What struck me most was not what they had said — what struck me was what they had not said.
+Well-tended plants bring some warmth to the cold Dheisheh complex. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+They live as non-people because of Israel, live in depredation because of Israel, live with little hope because of Israel, and live in unremitting fear of the next Israeli “rehearsal”. Their young son’s life was just cut short by Israel — and he is far from the first and, they know, will not be the last. Yet not once did any of them use the word “Jews”. The soldiers attacked and killed Arkan. Israel murdered Arkan. The IDF shot Arkan dead. The Zionists came again last night and killed him. Not once did anyone say “the Jews” killed Arkan.
+This, in stark contrast to the core tactic of Zionism and the Israeli state, which is to deny any distinction between the ethno-nationalist political ideology and its nation-state — and Jews. Israel’s propagandists are determined to make this organic oneness between Jews and Israel accepted law, so determined that they are wreaking havoc on other country’s domestic politics to do so. In the UK, for example, Israeli front organizations are fighting to force legal recognition of the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, whose specific purpose is make Jews one and the same with the Israeli state. The reason is obvious: condemnation of Israel or Zionism would then legally equal condemnation of Jews as a people — i.e., any attempt to expose Israeli crimes would be anti-Semitic.
+In the afternoon the day of the murder, youths from Aida Camp begin a now-ritual protest by burning tires and pulling up pavement. The notorious gate through which the IDF comes to put down resistance is the large solid piece between the tree and the watch tower. It is that gate at which Pope Francis made his allegedly unscripted stop after a brief visit to Dheisheh in 2014 that provided a photo frenzy for the media. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+If we allow the Israeli state this abuse against Jews, then, indeed, it was not Israel that murdered Arkan, it was not the IDF that murdered Arkan, it was not the Zionists that murdered him. If we accept Israel at its word, it was the Jews.
+When in 2014 Pope Francis made a brief visit to Dheisheh, many in the camp hoped it would bring attention to their own situation, as well as the wider injustice of Palestinian refugees. But posterity’s news and iconic image of the visit to Dheisheh was not of the camp at all. It was of the pope touching the “wall” (actually the vehicle gate in the wall) a few kilometers north of the camp.
+When that massive papal gate came into sight as I reached Bethlehem, it was accompanied by the stench of burning rubber. Protests from Aida Camp — another favored IDF rehearsal venue — were beginning.

mondoweiss/texts/1879.txt

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-After 16 years behind bars, Mufid Abdulqader, a member of the “Holy Land Five” has been released from prison into a halfway house. The Palestinian American is slated to spend one year at the facility.
-
-The case of the Holy Land 5 has become a symbol of the unconstitutional overreach associated with U.S. counterterrorism since 9/11.
-
-In 2009, five Palestinian-American Muslims received prison sentences as a result of their work with the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) charity. Prosecutors claimed that HLF funneled money to Hamas and charged the men with “material support for terrorism,” as the United States has designated Hamas as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
-
-Abdulqader received a 20-year prison sentence. Mohammad el-Mezain and Abdulrahman Odeh were given 15 years. Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu Baker, 65 years.
-
-Odeh was released from prison in 2021. El-Mezain was released from detention in 2022 before being deported to Turkey.
-
-The Holy Land 5 received a criminal trial in 2007, which didn’t result in a single guilty verdict but the case was controversially deemed a mistrial. The judges in both allowed key evidence to be provided by two anonymous Israeli witnesses, an Israeli Security Agency employee and a Israeli Defense Forces intelligence officer.
-
-The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups had been pressuring the U.S. government to target the HLF for years. In 2001 the Washington Post reported that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had called on then-President George W. Bush to move against the HLF during an Oval Office meeting:
-
-Administration officials said that during an Oval Office meeting on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked Bush to move against the Holy Land Foundation, and the president speedily obliged. “We — bam — did it,” a senior official said.
-
-After blocking the bank accounts of the organization Bush addressed reporters in a Rose Garden ceremony. “Those who do business with terror will do no business with the United States — or anywhere else the United States can reach,” he declared. “The net is closing. Today it just got tighter.”
-
-The men’s appeal was denied and the testimony of the anonymous Israeli witnesses was deemed “harmless.” A decision that HLF lawyer John Cline called, “The most ridiculous, dishonest, indefensible call by a federal court I ever saw in my life.”
-
-Earlier this year the Palestine advocacy group Samidoun launched a Week of Action to free the Holy Land 5 and mark 15 years since their sentencing and conviction.
-
-“From the initial attacks on the Holy Land Foundation, to the raids of the homes and offices, to the eventual convictions – these actions were all in an attempt to stop the Holy Land Foundation’s continued support of the Palestinian people,” wrote Samidoun Network organizer Salma Al Nour at Mondoweiss. “They were providing Palestinians with essential and life-saving resources and care that they needed in order to continue to remain steadfastly in their homes in the face of occupation and displacement by the Israeli government.”
-
-“The story of the Holy Land Five and its destruction at the hands of the United States and Israeli governments is unique in the nature of these specific events, but not its essence,” she continued. “Distilled, it is a simple story of Palestinian survival, self-determination, and joy – three things that Palestinian are not allowed to have, at least not today, in the United States or in Occupied Palestine. However, through their steadfastness, struggle, and refusal to give up on life and freedom – the Holy Land 5 have dared to take these things anyway.”
+September 4, 2018: Today, as expected, the UK’s Labour Party adopted in full the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and rejected a clarification about free speech that had been put forward by Jeremy Corbyn.
+London, Sept 4: Demonstrators waving Israeli flags demand that Labour adopt the full IHRA definition and examples of anti-Semitism. [photo: Andy Rain/EPA, from The Guardian]Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected head of the UK’s Labour Party, dire warnings of anti-Semitism have been a mainstay of the country’s daily headlines (MW articles). Prominent figures claiming to fight this wave of anti-Jewish hatred unfailingly cited one silver bullet: the so-called IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism. Only by enforcing this definition in full, the argument went, will Britain be a country in which Jews will be safe.
+Now that IHRA has been adopted by all major British political parties, it is de facto British policy.
+Despite all the attention given to IHRA, its core claim of fighting anti-Semitism is never challenged. Yet even a cursory examination of it demonstrates quite the opposite: it is IHRA that is anti-Semitic, institutionalizing racism against Jews.
+The major media safely contained the spectrum of debate into two camps. On one side, we read that IHRA is needed to address rampant anti-Semitism; on the other, we hear (correctly) that IHRA will imperil honest debate. IHRA’s advocates managed criticism regarding free speech by branding such speech hate speech. Even as the ‘debate’ raged, IHRA achieved its goal: the fabricated hysteria vanquished Israel’s ongoing crimes from the news.
+IHRA’s purpose is to help Israel continue business-as-usual without interference. Since the state claims to ‘be’ Jews, any accusation against it is an accusation against Jews, as Jews — that is, racism. With ethnic-nationalism’s sell-by date having expired even before Israel was born, this tactic of holding Jewish identity hostage is about all it has left.
+To dismiss in advance the argument that most Jews support IHRA (and Zionism), and therefore, it can’t be anti-Semitic: Neither evidence nor linear reasoning are subject to anyone’s ethnicity. Why individuals, whatever their nationality or religion or political predilections or anything else, might support a document that exploits their ethnic identity to commit crimes, may be an interesting topic for sociologists, but is immaterial to the issue at hand. Nor should we forget that the media rely religiously on Zionist organizations, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to speak for Jews.
+To quote from IHRA, there is such a thing as “the Jewish people”, and this “Jewish people” have a right to “self-determination”. Lest we err in thinking that a person’s right to self-destiny is an individual matter neither dictated by ethnicity nor owned by some political project, IHRA corrects us. This “self-determination” is “the State of Israel”.
+This alone should horrify us in principle, no matter which state claims to embody which ethnicity. There is no parallel to this on earth, no other political entity’s claim of ownership over people by virtue of their ethnicity. Any such claim would be universally condemned as outrageous, as abusive, and at best, laughable. But Zionism has conditioned us to believe one of the most repugnant of classic anti-Semitic tropes, that of Jews as a tribe, a ‘race’ apart, somehow distinct from the rest of humanity, and placed a pariah state in the Middle East as the tribal leader.
+What IHRA’s smoke and mirrors can not do is hide the consequences of its abuse: it cannot make its organic Jews = Zionism/Israel linkage one-way only. If criticism of Israel equals criticism of Jews as Jews (anti-Semitism), then Jews, simply by virtue of being Jews, are the doers of whatever the Israeli state has done, is doing, and may in the future do. This ethnic blackmail extends beyond any abstract fig-leafs, fully to what IHRA calls “Israeli policy”. In short, when Israel is accused of crimes, it substitutes ‘Israel’ with ‘Jews’, enabling it to claim that the allegations are anti-Semitic. The original accuser is perceived as having blamed Jews, when it was Israel that framed Jews for the crime it knew it itself had committed.
+The framers of IHRA were clearly aware of this fatal flaw, because IHRA also contains an antidote. This states — absolutely correctly — that it is anti-Semitic to hold Jews “collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” But since holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel is precisely IHRA’s purpose, the only antidote is to make it ‘anti-Semitic’ to say so.
+Nationalism has long been used by nation-states to insure the consent of its citizenry. Dissidents are condemned as enemies of the people. But if it is traitorous to oppose a country’s behavior, then that behavior is integral to the ‘values’, the morality, of the citizenry. Zionism replaced nation-state nationalism with far more potent ethnic nationalism: Jewish ‘patriotism’ to a particular political ideology and a particular state. To allege that is traitorous to Jews to oppose Israel’s behavior, is to allege that Israel’s behavior, whatever it is or will be, is integral to the ‘values’, the morality of Jews, not as individuals, nor just citizens of that state, but Jews as Jews.
+That is profound, insidious anti-Semitism.
+The exploitation of the word “Holocaust” to lend moral weight to IHRA, implicit in its name, is a further betrayal. Living Jews can speak for themselves and denounce IHRA’s attempt to exploit their identity on behalf of Israel’s crimes. Hitler’s victims can’t.
+In the occupied Old City in Hebron, cats perch on a dumpster by settler’s graffiti. An Israeli settler, his life about to be cut short, shakes hands in friendship with a Palestinian, who with a third hand hides a knife in preparation for his kill. [photo: T Suárez] UPDATE, February 21, 2019: the blue color in this graffiti was added, presumably by a settler. The blue behind the settler (left-side) figure covers a gun in his third hand. It was drawn by one ‘Kai’ who left such artwork around Palestine in Banksy style.
+Israel alone is IHRA’s winner. Its losers are Palestinians, British democracy, fact-based speech, and Jews. Now that Labour has caved to political pressure and adopted IHRA and all its “examples”, the Party is now what its critics could formerly only allege: anti-Semitic.
+“Trump make Israel great”, one of several such signs, this one in East Jerusalem. One is left wondering whether “make” is a grammatical error for “makes”, or whether the sentence is a command. Other signs say “Trump is a friend of Zion”. [photo: T Suárez]
+Relevant Mondweiss articles here
+See also:
+J’accuse: Zionism, Israel, And The IHRA
+Zionism, anti-Semitism, Israel — and the UK Labour party

mondoweiss/texts/1880.txt

@@ -1,91 +1,38 @@
-On August 29, 12-16 police officers, some of them from the UK’s counter-terrorism unit, arrested Palestine activist and journalist Sarah Wilkinson, 61, under the Terrorism Act 2000, for content she had posted online.
-
-The bail conditions, which included not being allowed to use any electronic devices or any form of public transportation, were dropped a week later. She has also returned to reporting via her social media accounts.
-
-Wilkinson has been advocating for Palestine long before October 7, but over the past eleven months, the suppression of voices like hers in the UK has increased.
-
-Other well-known figures such as freelance journalist Richard Medhurst and co-founder of Palestine Action Richard Barnard were also arrested last month under the Terrorism Act 2000.
-
-What is the Terrorism Act?
-
-The Terrorism Act 2000 is not new in the UK and has been used for over two decades. It is the centerpiece of counter-terrorism legislation that went into effect in 2001.
-
-Since then, Amnesty International has issued several reports in which the organization has voiced its concerns surrounding the counter-terrorism legislation in the UK.
-
-In a report published in January 2023, they express their concern about the definition of terrorism in section 1 of the act:
-
-“In August 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee expressed concern that the UK had maintained the broadly formulated definition of terrorism in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 “that can include a politically motivated action which is designed to influence a government or international organization, despite significant concern…that the definition is ‘unduly restrictive of political expression’.”
-
-The recent arrests of people opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza could be an example of how the act is abused, Julia Hall, researcher on counter-terrorism and lawyer with Amnesty International, explained to Mondoweiss.
-
-Hall says the use of the law has escalated since October last year and that this is very concerning, as it could have a “chilling effect.” “This means that the use of the Terrorism Act leaves people in a state where they are afraid of what they can say, and many people then choose to stay silent,” Hall said, speaking to Mondoweiss from the United States.
-
-She explained that the use of the law is far from new. According to a 2017 Amnesty International report, the right to freedom of expression has been “under direct and sustained assault across Europe in recent years.”
-
-Hall said that using the counter-terrorism laws on people who are opposing the genocide is “draconian, but it is not new: the tools have been in the drawer for two decades, and this is a regional issue.”
-
-Now, the use of the Terrorism Act against protesters, activists, and journalists that oppose the illegal Israeli occupation, apartheid, and the ongoing genocide is on the rise, Hall tells Mondoweiss.
-
-Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which Wilkinson was arrested under, is against international law, according to Amnesty International. “It is overly broad and vague and does not conform to international law,” Hall explained.
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-She highlighted how it is important to see how the current situation is connected with the racist and Islamophobic riots that took place in the UK in August this year, as well as the rise of racism in other European countries.
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-“You cannot divorce the clampdown on freedom of expression in solidarity with Palestinian human rights from the broader situation in the UK and across the region,” Hall told Mondoweiss. “Many marginalized racial and ethnic communities are being targeted for hate and violence – migrants and refugees, for example – and activists, journalists, and protesters that are speaking out against racism and discrimination in many contexts, including in solidarity with Palestinians, are being silenced.”
-
-Hall also pointed out that this also has coincided with an uptick in the referrals of children to the UK’s Prevent anti-terrorism program. Amnesty International has called for the abolition of this program, as it disproportionately targets Arabs and Muslims.
-
-“I do think Islamophobia, racism and white supremacy is on the rise across Europe”, she said.
-
-The Prevent program is UK program meant to “stop people becoming terrorists.” But as Amnesty International has shown it has a track record of creating “chilling effects” on human rights.
-
-Attacks on a growing movement for Palestine
-
-Hiba Hajaj, a British-born Jordanian of Palestinian origin, tells Mondoweiss that the turning point for a lot of people now protesting in the UK started on October 7 last year. She has worked as an activist for Palestine for over 25 years.
-
-Last week, 125,000 people attended the Palestine protest in London, demanding an end to the Israeli genocide and the 75-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestine. “The tactic from the police and government does not work. The movement is only growing bigger,” Hajaj told Mondoweiss over the phone from London.
-
-Hajaj said she had never seen this many people out on the streets since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003: “ I have worked with establishing student societies for Palestine in the UK for more than twenty-five years, and now I see the seed I planted grow into life.”
-
-Hajaj has attended every Palestine protest in London for over twenty-five years. She thinks the police want to shut down the Palestine movement by arresting well-known figures such as Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst using the Terrorism Act. “They are trying to send an indirect message that this could happen to anyone,” Hajaj says. “If peaceful activists get arrested, then people will start getting scared.”
-
-‘Purely to silence journalists‘
-
-Wilkinson is a well-known figure and has continuously expressed her critique of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians since October 7 last year. Earlier this year, she took part in the “Freedom Flotilla Coalition.”
-
-Her son Jack Wilkinson wrote on X that
-
-“The police came to her house just before 7.30 AM – 12 them in total, some of them in plain clothes from the counter terrorism police. They said she was under arrest for “content that she has posted online.”
-
-Wilkinson said in a video interview with The Crispin Flintoff Show that she was arrested because:
-
-“(…) I am pro Palestinian,  it is because I am broadcasting news from Gaza, it is because I am connected, if you like, with the people in Gaza. And it is purely to silence journalists, it is like what they did to Richard Medhurst (…)  It is to silence the people who are reporting on a genocide. And the point of that, is so that if no one is reporting on it, they can continue the genocide, they can kill everybody(…)”
-
-She also said that the government does not want the people to know what is happening to the people in Gaza.“The only way they can do this is by silencing the journalists and the people that broadcast the news,” she explained to Flintoff.
-
-The police also requested details of contacts Wilkinson has in Gaza, a request which she refused.
-
-MENA Uncensored, where Wilkinson was working as a roving reporter, wrote in a post on X:
-
-“We hold the anti-media British government full responsibility of this stupid act of intimidating and oppressing journalists as well as human rights activist in favor of the Israeli occupation entity, and we demand that this zionist-run puppet British government releases our reporter Sarah Wilkinson immediately.”
-
-Complicity in genocide
-
-The UK government recently suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel. But rights organizations have criticized this move as being insufficient.
-
-Dr. Nehad Khanfar, a member of the Palestinian community and lecturer of law and politics, says that this act from the UK government is “below the minimal of what should be expected of them.” He is also the Head of the Emergency Committee at the Association of the Palestinian Community in the UK (APCUK) but is not speaking on behalf of them in this article.
-
-“The British government is complicit in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. It is very concerning that they can go on like this, and the danger is that this could be taken as a role model in the future,” Khanfar said via phone to Mondoweiss from his home in London.
-
-Khanfar said that he sees the arrests of journalists “seriously concerning,” and that several students who are engaged in the Palestinian community have experienced being detained during peaceful protests.
-
-“I have never seen the police like this in the UK before. I believe it is the extreme-right narrative in British politics that is now manifesting,” Khanfar said.
-
-‘Freedom is coming‘
-
-Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, has also been charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and is accused of “expressing support for Hamas and has been charged with two counts of criminal damage.”
-
-He will appear before the court in mid-September, and he also faces two charges of “encouraging or intending to encourage criminal damage.” In August, activists from Palestine Action were also detained under the Terrorism Act.
-
-Hiba Hajaj, who has also had social media profiles removed from Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook by the platforms after posting about the ongoing genocide, says this is all part of the effort to censor and silence Palestine advocates. But she says that nothing can stop her from telling the truth.
-
-“You cannot take the whole concept of freedom away from Palestinians. We believe in freedom,” Hajaj tells Mondoweiss. “You can block our social media accounts and do anything to stop us, but you cannot control what we feel in our hearts, and that is that freedom is coming.”
+Israel’s quest to strangle Palestine until it falls lifeless into the abyss of posterity will ultimately fail. But for the present, the crunch of its West Bank choke-hold is an area known as E-1.
+Bedouin being squeezed out of the E-1 area, along the road connecting points north, such as Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin, with points south, such as Bethlehem and Hebron. The stone wall and terracing are new, part of Israeli confiscation over the past couple of years. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+E-1 is a strip of land between Israeli-occupied Jerusalem and the vast Israeli colony-city of Ma’ale Adumim, along with a few smaller neighboring Jewish-only Israeli colonies such as Geva Binyamin (also known as Adam). E-1 now separates them from Jerusalem; what Israel wants is for E-1 to connect them.
+Palestinians can still squeeze through this choke-hold separating the northern and southern West Bank, but once Israel fully commandeers E-1, the West Bank will be contiguous only for settlers. For Palestinians, it will be dissected into two. Politicians who can still enunciate “two state solution” with a straight face fret that E-1 may be the final nail in the two-state coffin; yet, as with everything that has happened over the past seven decades, they wring their hands in faux powerlessness to stop it.
+(top:) Ma’ale Adumim as seen from Jabal al-Baba; and (bottom:) a satellite view with a red dot marking the spot of the photograph. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Indeed it was because of the catastrophe of 1948, when the Zionist militias ethnically cleansed them from the Negev, that these Bedouin settled what is now called E-1, then under Jordanian occupation.
+Among the people on E-1 who fled the 1948 Nakba, and whom Israel is now trying to erase again, are the Jahalin of Jabal al-Baba. As if to rub salt into the Nakba wound, it was Nakba Day that Israel selected in 2016 to raze many of the village’s homes, homes provided by a European Economic Community aid programme. Ninety people, most of them children, were left homeless.
+‘Nice’ ethnic cleansing tactics against Jabal al-Baba, designed to avoid bad publicity, have failed: Israel tried to bribe them with money and new land elsewhere, but the Bedouin are not interested in selling themselves, the new land promised them is already stolen by Israel from other Palestinians, and they know that Israel would eventually evict them from that (already stolen) land as well. So force, with its PR blemishes, would have to do.
+Jabal al-Baba’s kindergarten stood on this site until destroyed earlier this year by Israel. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Israel used to issue eviction orders to individual families, one at a time, on any of its stock pretexts (‘permits’, ‘illegal structures’, ‘closed military zone’, etc.), hoping to wear down the community’s resolve. But Israeli confidence has hardened in the Age of Trump, and last November (2017), Jabal al-Baba became one of the communities on E-1 which was handed a collective expulsion order. The entire village, a bit more than three hundred people, was “illegal”.
+As seen from Jabal al-Baba, the tip of Ma’ale Adumim (right) and, on the distant hill, the small settlement of Geva Binyamin (also known as Adam). (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Schools are a bedrock of any community, and so when Jabal al-Baba defied the ethnic cleansing order, it was their kindergarten that Israel destroyed in an attempt to strain the community’s resilience. Instead, the villagers tried a new strategy.
+It happens that some of Jabal al-Baba is Vatican-owned land, and so the villagers left the original school site barren and rebuilt it on a spot clearly marked as papal soil.
+Sign identifying as Vatican-owned the land upon which the Jabal al-Baba kindergarten was built, destroyed … and rebuilt. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Israel was unimpressed: On the morning of July 25, its forces destroyed the new kindergarten and a women’s center.
+As reported by UNRWA:
+Jerusalem 26 July, 2018: Yesterday morning at 0700hrs the Israeli Security Forces entered the Jabal al Baba Bedouin Palestine refugee community in the West Bank, close to the outskirts of East Jerusalem and dismantled and removed a donor funded structure that serves as a kindergarten for 28 children (3-6 years old) and a women’s centre. The school has been demolished once and dismantled twice so this is the third time within a year that the pre-school refugee children in this community have been deprived of having a safe place to play and learn.
+The European Union chastised Israel while doing nothing to hold it accountable. Instead, it warned that forced transfers “threaten the two-state solution,” as though the past seventy years had never happened.*
+Abdulwahab Sabbah holds a CADFA cap after his community center was trashed by the IDF. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Nearby to E-1 lies the town of Abu Dis, which Israel has tried to promote as the future capital of the Palestinian state it would never let exist, to counter criticism over its seizure of East Jerusalem. In Abu Dis is a modest but powerfully effective community center, Dar Assadaqa, the Palestinian half of the London-based human rights organization, Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association (CADFA). Formed in 2004, CADFA became a registered UK charity the following year, dedicated to promoting human rights and respect for international humanitarian law. Its approach has been to link people in order to build awareness and understanding, and to encourage people to be active in the pursuit of human rights.
+During the night of July 20-21, the IDF broke into the Dar Assadaqa community center, trashed it, destroyed both its computers, and left a swastika on a nearby wall. I met my friend, the community center’s head, Abdulwahab Sabbah (‘Abed’) outside the building on the following morning to be a witness the crime scene. We entered together.
+Israeli soldiers taking property of Jabal al-Baba. Photo from Pope Mountain Facebook page.
+The IDF were apparently not moved by Dar Assadaqa’s map of 1948 Palestine. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+Abed got the center functioning again and continued his human rights work undeterred. On August 8 he took a group of medical students from abroad to Jabal al-Baba. I accompanied him.
+A chance visitor to Jabal al-Baba could be forgiven for assuming that the poor dirt approach road and primitive nature of the village are facts of Bedouin life — but they are not. Since the people are non-Jews in an area “C” (under full Israeli control by the Oslo Accords), they are blocked from building any permanent (concrete) houses, from paving their roads, or creating rudimentary infrastructure such as sewers, safe electricity access, or on-site running water — the latter two presently accessed by distant, independent hook-ups, barely adequate and, in the case of electricity, dangerous. The village’s once-lucrative trade in their own products has long been destroyed by Israel’s bantustan system.
+August 8, 2018: Hastily-constructed kindergarten, the second built alongside the sign identifying the land as belonging to the Vatican. (Photo: Tom Suárez)
+When we arrived, a new structure stood on the same Vatican soil, a single large room that was almost ready for students. It was not clear what facilities or supplies for the school were still in the village. A man testified that during the July 25 assault, Israeli soldiers moved from household to household, stealing whatever they wished. When he tried to block a soldier from taking his family’s property, the soldier put a gun to his head: “All I need to do is pull the trigger and plant a knife by your side.”
+
+Israel’s battle to ethnically cleanse Jabal al-Baba is but one of myriad ongoing stories in its singular quest for a ‘racially’ pure fundamentalist Zionist state. I am able to offer this report because it is possible to witness and document it. Had the people’s 1948 ancestors been among those who fled the Negev west to Gaza, rather than northeast to what became the West Bank, I would not. They would now be among the two million human experiments in that hermetically sealed laboratory.
+We should not be surprised that Israel’s propagandists in its patron states, principally the United States and Britain, work to keep its crimes-in-progress out of public visibility by threatening  the media and politicians with anti-Semitism smears. But we must not tolerate that our media and representatives acquiesce.
+See also:
+Mersiha Gadzo’s ‘We shall remain’: Bedouin of Jabal al-Baba face an uphill battle to keep their land, in Mondoweiss, May 10, 2017)
+and:
+The Pope Mountain community تجمع بدو جبل البابا Facebook page, which contains photographs and updates.
+* The Office of the European Union Representative (West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA), Local EU statement on the dismantling by Israeli authorities of a women’s center and kindergarten in Jabal al-Baba. Jerusalem, 30/07/2018.
+Jewish Voice for Peace
+International Jewish anti-Zionist Network
+If Not Now

mondoweiss/texts/1881.txt

@@ -1,63 +1,25 @@
-I’m sitting on a bench at the Cardiff University Encampment for Palestine, listening to the birds singing and hearing the quiet voices from a community talk taking place about the genocide in Sudan.
-
-The site is one of friendship and solidarity. Quite the opposite of what a statement released by Cardiff University wants you to believe:
-
-“The existence of the camp is disturbing for some of our community. Some staff and students have written to me to tell us that some of the materials being displayed at the camp and on social media are causing them distress.”
-
-I read these lines on my Instagram feed, and I look up at the posters that surround me.
-
-“Kick imperialism off campus,” “You cannot build a Holy Land for your children on the graves of other children.” These are the signs displayed at the camp. Simple messages of hope and peace.
-
-The moment I set foot on the encampment, I was greeted with smiles and warmth and offered a big bowl of food. The sense of community at the camp is like no other.
-
-Cardiff is the capital city of Wales, in the United Kingdom, to the west of England. Wales is home to several immigrant communities, with around 18% of the population being Black, Asian mixed, or other ethnic groups. Cardiff University is not particularly known to be much of an activist hub, so this makes the strength and size of the Cardiff encampment even more impressive.
-
-I’m speaking to Emily (who asked for her surname not to be included), a student at Cardiff University who has been at the encampment for 16 days now.
-
-She speaks on her experience at the encampment, and we touch on how it’s strange to live through the dichotomy of a privileged normal life, while wanting to acknowledge the genocide.
-
-“Here you’re somewhere where being deeply upset that there’s a genocide happening isn’t strange. In the way it is in the rest of the world where it comes second, whereas here it comes first. A lot of people have felt like they’ve been going crazy for a long time. We’re all thinking, is anyone else seeing this?”
-
-I ask Emily how the encampment has been received by the university. She softly sighs and says, “It’s clear that their priorities are themselves and their jobs. In their first meeting with us, they said, ‘We’re not talking about demands. We want to talk about health and safety.’ The audacity of them to talk about safety when they’re actively pouring money into bomb factories through investments into Israeli weapons, and then lying about it!”
-
-We talk about the local community, since Cardiff is almost 10% Muslim. The presence of brown immigrant communities in Cardiff is prevalent, with a vast number of local shops and restaurants owned by Muslims.
-
-“We owe so much to the local Muslim community,” Emily says. “They’re incredible and have treated us so well. They set up a rota bringing us hot food, with people coming by every day. They often pray here, and we set everything up. It’s beautiful.”
-
-She also mentions that the protests in America have made people very scared about police brutality.
-
-“A speaker came here from CAGE International for a talk,” she says, referring to the advocacy charity in London that which works to empower communities impacted by state oppression of Muslims. “And the police were involved because they were worried about terrorism. It was blatantly racist. The university even called CAGE an extremist organization. We held it in the park because we couldn’t have him on university grounds. We haven’t had police brutality yet. South Wales police are very racist, but they’re not violent with us.”
-
-Just three days later on June 3, South Wales Police arrested around 16 protestors (most of whom came from the encampment) outside Cardiff Bay police station, using unprecedented levels of violence to do so. The protestors and members of the camp were there to demand the release of a fellow activist by the name of Neezo, who was disabled and who they believe was unlawfully arrested two days beforehand.
-
-The violence involved pulling their hair, kicking them to the floor, pushing them to the ground, and twisting their limbs so aggressively they have physical signs of bruising and cuts.
-
-One protestor was heard crying out, “You’re hurting us. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Witnesses said they saw specific instances of racial profiling, with police officers intentionally reaching for girls wearing hijabs and people of color, in one instance even arresting a Palestinian girl who wasn’t even involved in the protest. She was simply standing by the police station.
-
-They were held for roughly 19 hours before being released, but not before they had their phones confiscated.
-
-The Cardiff encampment for Palestine three days before the June 3rd attack by the South Wales police. (Photo: Mouna Madanat)
-
-I speak with Qasim Falasteen, a local activist and photographer who has several first-hand experiences with the South Wales police. We talk specifically about the course of events that led to the police brutality experienced on June 3.
-
-He says, “Because of the way we felt Neezo was unlawfully detained and arrested, we as a community proceeded to the police station to hold a peaceful demonstration for his release. Over a couple of hours we saw police officers gathering to the rear of the building, and we knew it could only mean one thing. We were protesting peacefully. There was no criminal damage, there was no violence.”
-
-Around 45 police officers gathered. They were kneeing us in the back, pinching our arms, pushing, shoving, and kicking people. We were told that if we didn’t vacate we would be arrested, to stand up and leave now, so people got up to leave and were pulled back down and arrested.”
-
-Qasim tells me how one boy was aggressively thrown to the ground and then dragged away. He says, “I saw the police officer ‘accidentally’ fall on his back. He was a 21-year-old first-year student. He told me he thought he was about to die. Six or seven big officers were holding him down, and the way they threw him to the ground was so violent and brutal. He was somebody of color, young, and very peaceful.”
-
-“Out of the 16 people that were arrested, three were white. Everybody else was Palestinian, Jordanian, Middle Eastern, or other Muslims. It was very aggressive and it’s always a different response when it’s a non-white person. Whether it’s attacking a group or singling out the people of color or religion, those people are receiving worse treatment than others. That’s really visible.”
-
-“South Wales police can employ 40 or 50 people with vast amounts of technology, vehicles, surveillance equipment etc., but they can’t employ a single person that is representative of the community,” Qasim goes on to say. “Not a single person speaks Arabic, not a single officer can translate. They’ve openly said, ‘yes we have been labelled as institutionally racist, but we are trying to change that,’ what are they doing to change that? On the 3rd of June, every single police officer was white!”
-
-“The police don’t get involved until we respond in an angry way,” he continues. “They’ll let people drive their motorbikes through our protests, throw food and drinks at us. The police just wait until we say something, and then they get aggressive towards us. This is designed — it’s not by accident. This is designed to intimidate and bring out the worst in us. We’ve shown for nine months that we are not violent and not aggressive.”
-
-As of today, Cardiff University has finally agreed to sit down, open negotiations, and discuss the demands with the students.
-
-Something in particular that Emily said rings loud in my mind: “I think a university should inherently be about activism. The point of university is to research, educate, and make the world a better place. If it’s not working to improve the world, why is it existing?”
-
-I think about this as I re-read Cardiff University’s statement, “We appreciate and understand that many would like the University to take up a clear position in relation to the conflict. The conflict has been, and remains, incredibly distressing to many members of our community. We will not be issuing a statement as requested.”
-
-As an alumni student from Cardiff University and an Arab myself, I can’t help but feel disappointed at the university’s stance on the genocide. Instead of condemning the violence from Israel and now the South Wales Police, they have chosen silence.
-
-One can only hope it’s up from here.
+I reached checkpoint 300 at 7:00 AM sharp. My rehearsal was not until nine o’clock, but I allowed extra time in case the soldiers decide to pull over the rickety minibus that takes me from the other side of 300 to the Damascus Gate. I had reason to expect such extra “security”, where I have seen Palestinians carted away for some irregularity in their “permission” to be in their own country: The previous afternoon I’d taken a short cut through Jerusalem’s Old City and found myself in the midst of a particularly aggressive onslaught by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
+Checkpoint 300 separates occupied Bethlehem from occupied East Jerusalem — in other words, Israeli checkpoint 300 separates Palestine from Palestine. Before even reaching the entrance to its long human cattle-way, I knew something was wrong.
+“Closed,” a man sitting on the sidewalk sipping coffee told me. “Checkpoint closed.” I moved closer and gazed at the packed mass of people, most of them men trying to get to work, overflowing out the entrance. Beethoven’s ninth symphony would have to do without me this morning.
+This last symphony of the revolutionary composer is iconic of freedom, of liberation, of peace. If Beethoven were to observe the military occupation now blocking me from rehearsing his radical fourth movement — whose text celebrates how “what custom has sternly divided, all men shall become brothers” — he’d conclude that we’ve learned nothing in these two centuries.
+Then the news came. Our closed checkpoint was the aftermath of a previous rehearsal, an Israeli rehearsal, now concluded. Downbeat had been four hours earlier: 3:00 AM.
+In 1949, about 3,400 of the roughly 800,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed by the Israeli militias the year before were given shelter in tents in what became the Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. The refugees would (obviously) be returning home very soon — the moment hostilities cease.
+That was seventy years ago. For seven decades, they and their descendants have had the absolute right to return home. But for seven decades they have been blocked by Israel from doing so because they are the wrong ethnicity; and for seven decades the “international community” has rewarded Israel for the crime. Dismal tents have long since given way to dismal concrete.
+The entrance to Dheisheh. Witnesses say that it was here that Arkan was gunned down by the IDF. Note the banner with Arkan’s image, on the far right. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+Israel’s military has however found the camp to be an ideal rehearsal venue. It comes fully equipped: multiple entrances, winding alleyways, hills, hiding spots, observation points, endless things to blow up, and a large supply of expendable human beings. And during one such “rehearsal” a few hours earlier, as I was making coffee a few kilometers to the north, the soldiers murdered fifteen-year-old Arkan Thaer Mezher. My own rehearsal, the one about liberation and brother(/sister)hood, was collateral damage.
+(Read Yumna Patel’s excellent Mondoweiss report, which is based on a eye-witness account: Israeli forces kill 15-year-old Palestinian in refugee camp raid.)
+As described by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), “undercover units dressed like Palestinian civilians” infiltrated the camp, after which “Israeli forces backed by 8 military vehicles moved into the camp from all its entrances … the Israeli soldiers raided and topped roofs of dozens of houses and buildings, raided many shops after blowing up their doors and damaged their contents.”
+Far more important than rehearsing Beethoven, I went to the camp. Its streets were quiet, save for a brief thunder of Israeli fighter jets overhead. A covered area had been erected in front, inside of which men and boys sat on plastic chairs. I peered in discreetly, trying not to look rude, but this did not last long. A couple of men saw me and motioned me to come in. Welcome, they said in English and Arabic. Welcome. Do you know why we are here? they asked. “Arkan,” I replied. Yes. Please, sit down. You are welcome. A young man handed me a cup of Arabic coffee, and pointed out Arkan’s father. He was seated facing a banner with his son’s photo. I watched as he rose to greet and hug two men who had just arrived.
+Arkan’s father with friends and family. His son’s photo is superimposed on the Palestinian flag. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+“It was there at the entrance,” a man next to me said, pointing through the tent opening to the entrance of the camp. “They killed him there. Not inside the camp. At the end of the invasion.” Another man translated for a third: “We don’t understand, Israel took our homes, our land, our trees. They have everything now. So why do they still need to attack us?” There was “nothing happening” at the camp — no “terror” (resistance) as the Israelis claimed. Dheisheh, they said, served as “practice” for the IDF. Rehearsals.
+Dheisheh Camp: Men try to stabilize the central tent support for the gathering in honor of the slain teenager. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+A boy, perhaps a year or two younger than Arkan, heard there was a man in the tent who spoke English. He wanted to practice. My name? Tom. I asked him his. What do I do? In terrible Arabic, I told him that I play violin. “I play drums!” he replied. I mentioned an acquaintance of mine from Dheisheh who played oud. He was too young to know him, but the men nodded. Ahmad. Then the boy got very quiet. He pointed to the photo of Arkan that hung from the tent wall and started shaking his head. He was my friend, was all he said now.
+Two older bearded men on concrete steps motioned me to join them. They said little but I stayed there for some time, humbled by their dignity and humanity despite injustice upon injustice heaped upon them. When I left, I thanked those around me and said good-bye to the drummer boy.
+I exited the tent into the sunlight, thinking about everything I had heard. What struck me most was not what they had said — what struck me was what they had not said.
+Well-tended plants bring some warmth to the cold Dheisheh complex. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+They live as non-people because of Israel, live in depredation because of Israel, live with little hope because of Israel, and live in unremitting fear of the next Israeli “rehearsal”. Their young son’s life was just cut short by Israel — and he is far from the first and, they know, will not be the last. Yet not once did any of them use the word “Jews”. The soldiers attacked and killed Arkan. Israel murdered Arkan. The IDF shot Arkan dead. The Zionists came again last night and killed him. Not once did anyone say “the Jews” killed Arkan.
+This, in stark contrast to the core tactic of Zionism and the Israeli state, which is to deny any distinction between the ethno-nationalist political ideology and its nation-state — and Jews. Israel’s propagandists are determined to make this organic oneness between Jews and Israel accepted law, so determined that they are wreaking havoc on other country’s domestic politics to do so. In the UK, for example, Israeli front organizations are fighting to force legal recognition of the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, whose specific purpose is make Jews one and the same with the Israeli state. The reason is obvious: condemnation of Israel or Zionism would then legally equal condemnation of Jews as a people — i.e., any attempt to expose Israeli crimes would be anti-Semitic.
+In the afternoon the day of the murder, youths from Aida Camp begin a now-ritual protest by burning tires and pulling up pavement. The notorious gate through which the IDF comes to put down resistance is the large solid piece between the tree and the watch tower. It is that gate at which Pope Francis made his allegedly unscripted stop after a brief visit to Dheisheh in 2014 that provided a photo frenzy for the media. (Photo: T. Suárez)
+If we allow the Israeli state this abuse against Jews, then, indeed, it was not Israel that murdered Arkan, it was not the IDF that murdered Arkan, it was not the Zionists that murdered him. If we accept Israel at its word, it was the Jews.
+When in 2014 Pope Francis made a brief visit to Dheisheh, many in the camp hoped it would bring attention to their own situation, as well as the wider injustice of Palestinian refugees. But posterity’s news and iconic image of the visit to Dheisheh was not of the camp at all. It was of the pope touching the “wall” (actually the vehicle gate in the wall) a few kilometers north of the camp.
+When that massive papal gate came into sight as I reached Bethlehem, it was accompanied by the stench of burning rubber. Protests from Aida Camp — another favored IDF rehearsal venue — were beginning.

mondoweiss/texts/1882.txt

@@ -1,63 +1,41 @@
-I’m sitting on a bench at the Cardiff University Encampment for Palestine, listening to the birds singing and hearing the quiet voices from a community talk taking place about the genocide in Sudan.
-
-The site is one of friendship and solidarity. Quite the opposite of what a statement released by Cardiff University wants you to believe:
-
-“The existence of the camp is disturbing for some of our community. Some staff and students have written to me to tell us that some of the materials being displayed at the camp and on social media are causing them distress.”
-
-I read these lines on my Instagram feed, and I look up at the posters that surround me.
-
-“Kick imperialism off campus,” “You cannot build a Holy Land for your children on the graves of other children.” These are the signs displayed at the camp. Simple messages of hope and peace.
-
-The moment I set foot on the encampment, I was greeted with smiles and warmth and offered a big bowl of food. The sense of community at the camp is like no other.
-
-Cardiff is the capital city of Wales, in the United Kingdom, to the west of England. Wales is home to several immigrant communities, with around 18% of the population being Black, Asian mixed, or other ethnic groups. Cardiff University is not particularly known to be much of an activist hub, so this makes the strength and size of the Cardiff encampment even more impressive.
-
-I’m speaking to Emily (who asked for her surname not to be included), a student at Cardiff University who has been at the encampment for 16 days now.
-
-She speaks on her experience at the encampment, and we touch on how it’s strange to live through the dichotomy of a privileged normal life, while wanting to acknowledge the genocide.
-
-“Here you’re somewhere where being deeply upset that there’s a genocide happening isn’t strange. In the way it is in the rest of the world where it comes second, whereas here it comes first. A lot of people have felt like they’ve been going crazy for a long time. We’re all thinking, is anyone else seeing this?”
-
-I ask Emily how the encampment has been received by the university. She softly sighs and says, “It’s clear that their priorities are themselves and their jobs. In their first meeting with us, they said, ‘We’re not talking about demands. We want to talk about health and safety.’ The audacity of them to talk about safety when they’re actively pouring money into bomb factories through investments into Israeli weapons, and then lying about it!”
-
-We talk about the local community, since Cardiff is almost 10% Muslim. The presence of brown immigrant communities in Cardiff is prevalent, with a vast number of local shops and restaurants owned by Muslims.
-
-“We owe so much to the local Muslim community,” Emily says. “They’re incredible and have treated us so well. They set up a rota bringing us hot food, with people coming by every day. They often pray here, and we set everything up. It’s beautiful.”
-
-She also mentions that the protests in America have made people very scared about police brutality.
-
-“A speaker came here from CAGE International for a talk,” she says, referring to the advocacy charity in London that which works to empower communities impacted by state oppression of Muslims. “And the police were involved because they were worried about terrorism. It was blatantly racist. The university even called CAGE an extremist organization. We held it in the park because we couldn’t have him on university grounds. We haven’t had police brutality yet. South Wales police are very racist, but they’re not violent with us.”
-
-Just three days later on June 3, South Wales Police arrested around 16 protestors (most of whom came from the encampment) outside Cardiff Bay police station, using unprecedented levels of violence to do so. The protestors and members of the camp were there to demand the release of a fellow activist by the name of Neezo, who was disabled and who they believe was unlawfully arrested two days beforehand.
-
-The violence involved pulling their hair, kicking them to the floor, pushing them to the ground, and twisting their limbs so aggressively they have physical signs of bruising and cuts.
-
-One protestor was heard crying out, “You’re hurting us. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Witnesses said they saw specific instances of racial profiling, with police officers intentionally reaching for girls wearing hijabs and people of color, in one instance even arresting a Palestinian girl who wasn’t even involved in the protest. She was simply standing by the police station.
-
-They were held for roughly 19 hours before being released, but not before they had their phones confiscated.
-
-The Cardiff encampment for Palestine three days before the June 3rd attack by the South Wales police. (Photo: Mouna Madanat)
-
-I speak with Qasim Falasteen, a local activist and photographer who has several first-hand experiences with the South Wales police. We talk specifically about the course of events that led to the police brutality experienced on June 3.
-
-He says, “Because of the way we felt Neezo was unlawfully detained and arrested, we as a community proceeded to the police station to hold a peaceful demonstration for his release. Over a couple of hours we saw police officers gathering to the rear of the building, and we knew it could only mean one thing. We were protesting peacefully. There was no criminal damage, there was no violence.”
-
-Around 45 police officers gathered. They were kneeing us in the back, pinching our arms, pushing, shoving, and kicking people. We were told that if we didn’t vacate we would be arrested, to stand up and leave now, so people got up to leave and were pulled back down and arrested.”
-
-Qasim tells me how one boy was aggressively thrown to the ground and then dragged away. He says, “I saw the police officer ‘accidentally’ fall on his back. He was a 21-year-old first-year student. He told me he thought he was about to die. Six or seven big officers were holding him down, and the way they threw him to the ground was so violent and brutal. He was somebody of color, young, and very peaceful.”
-
-“Out of the 16 people that were arrested, three were white. Everybody else was Palestinian, Jordanian, Middle Eastern, or other Muslims. It was very aggressive and it’s always a different response when it’s a non-white person. Whether it’s attacking a group or singling out the people of color or religion, those people are receiving worse treatment than others. That’s really visible.”
-
-“South Wales police can employ 40 or 50 people with vast amounts of technology, vehicles, surveillance equipment etc., but they can’t employ a single person that is representative of the community,” Qasim goes on to say. “Not a single person speaks Arabic, not a single officer can translate. They’ve openly said, ‘yes we have been labelled as institutionally racist, but we are trying to change that,’ what are they doing to change that? On the 3rd of June, every single police officer was white!”
-
-“The police don’t get involved until we respond in an angry way,” he continues. “They’ll let people drive their motorbikes through our protests, throw food and drinks at us. The police just wait until we say something, and then they get aggressive towards us. This is designed — it’s not by accident. This is designed to intimidate and bring out the worst in us. We’ve shown for nine months that we are not violent and not aggressive.”
-
-As of today, Cardiff University has finally agreed to sit down, open negotiations, and discuss the demands with the students.
-
-Something in particular that Emily said rings loud in my mind: “I think a university should inherently be about activism. The point of university is to research, educate, and make the world a better place. If it’s not working to improve the world, why is it existing?”
-
-I think about this as I re-read Cardiff University’s statement, “We appreciate and understand that many would like the University to take up a clear position in relation to the conflict. The conflict has been, and remains, incredibly distressing to many members of our community. We will not be issuing a statement as requested.”
-
-As an alumni student from Cardiff University and an Arab myself, I can’t help but feel disappointed at the university’s stance on the genocide. Instead of condemning the violence from Israel and now the South Wales Police, they have chosen silence.
-
-One can only hope it’s up from here.
+“Accusing Jews of making accusations of antisemitism in bad faith in order to aid a hidden agenda is a well-established antisemitic slur.” — from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British pro-Israeli organization established in August 2014 to counter media fallout from that summer’s “Protective Edge” assault against Gaza.
+Israel’s most powerful weapon is the smearing of its critics. This weapon — made from the hijacking of Jewish identity and historic persecution, and launched through Zionist media and organizations — silences opposition and keeps attention away from its crimes in Palestine. If we can defang this weapon, Israel’s arsenal of bombs will be impotent. Israel is keenly aware of this, and so front organizations such as that quoted above have declared that exposing Israel’s exploitation of antisemitism is … antisemitic.
+What follows is a summary of one effort to challenge one such media “making accusations of antisemitism in bad faith in order to aid” the “hidden agenda” of Israel, the London-based Jewish Chronicle (JC); and indirectly challenge one such organization, the UK’s Board of Deputies of British Jews.
+In April of 2018 I lodged a formal complaint against the JC with Britain’s main media watchdog, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)[1], concerning two JC articles about me, published a year apart:
+• Lee Harpin, “Board halt Israel hate author talk”, May 8, 2017
+• Ben Weich, “Quakers row as venue is rented out to anti-Zionist”, April 20, 2018
+IPSO, to be sure, does not address defamation. Its Code of Practice, rather, addresses “accuracy” and the need to “distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact”. These, I thought, were essentially interchangeable for the seven points I wished to challenge.
+Jewish Chronicle refers to Tom Suarez as a hate author, without quotations.
+Jewish Chronicle says that Quakers are in disagreement about hosting an anti-Zionist when there was no such disagreement.
+Although two “Complaints Officers” through whom I communicated were always cordial and helpful, for the better part of a year, my case went nowhere. The JC simply insisted that its sources, two UK pro-Israel activists named Jonathan Hoffman and David Collier, “are considered strong sources by the JC, their insights have proved to be reliable in the past and their [the JC‘s] journalists have no hesitation in seeking their views on such matters.” For “evidence”, the JC would, for example, paste in urls to Zionist blogs with unflattering words about me.
+IPSO did nothing to keep the case focused on the facts and not on what seemed to be the JC’s attempts to wear me out. Even when the JC pasted in a link to a 59-page alleged “review” of my book State of Terror by its own sources, Hoffman and Collier — a document which in any event had no bearing whatsoever on the case — I composed a point-by-point rebuttal of allegations cited.
+But after eight months, the tone began to change, and JC editor Stephen Pollard offered me a published response. That was all I had wanted, and although they refused to have it in print — only online — I agreed.
+This was however short-lived. Pollard insisted on eliminating any mention of IPSO, so that it looked as though the JC had acted on its own initiative; and he forbade any mention of the duo that the paper had boasted as its iron-clad sources, allegedly for fears of “defamation”. I declined, and let the case go to IPSO’s Committee for a formal Decision.
+I. Three complaints upheld by IPSO
+
+IPSO ruled in my favor on three points, requiring the JC to publish a correction online and in print:
+• The JC had falsely reported that I claimed that Zionist leaders “encouraged antisemitism in Germany to force Jews to move to Palestine”.
+• The JC had falsely reported that Jesus Lane (Quakers) Friends Meeting House (Cambridge, UK) had “banned” me.
+• The JC had falsely reported that Jesus Lane had said that my talk was “not in line with Quaker values” (2018 only).
+JC publishes a correction after IPSO ruling.
+II. Four complaints dismissed by IPSO
+• The 2017 JC headline referred to me as a hate author, without quotes. The article itself described me as a person “peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories [who] rose to notoriety after an hour-long rant on Jews.” I argued that the JC‘s failure to put the words hate author in quotes in the headline presented an opinion as news; and I argued that it was factually wrong to state that “Jews” had ever been the subject of my statements, whatever one’s opinion of those statements. IPSO ruled (oddly, as it seemed to confirm my point) that the JC‘s reporting “was plainly an expression of the publication’s views of the complainant”.
+• After Jonathan Hoffman and the Board of Deputies failed to close down a talk I gave at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI), the JC headline stated that it had precipitated a “Quakers row,” or disagreement among Quakers. I argued that only one Quaker organization was cited by the paper, Jesus Lane Friends Meeting, and it supported my right to speak. BRLSI obviously supported my right to speak as well, and anyway it is not a Quaker institution. Rather, the JC‘s claim of a “Quakers row” over my talk rests posthumously with the name of Edmund Rack, a Quaker who lived in Bath in the eighteenth century. Rack was involved with one of several forerunner organizations to BRLSI. He died in 1797. The Bath Literary and Scientific Institution was established in 1824, and in 1837 it received royal patronage, becoming BRLSI, the organization we know today. Fast-forward to 2018, and the JC quoted one Penny Williamson (unknown to me), who expressed the view that Rack, were he alive, would not want me to speak. IPSO accepted this argument.
+• IPSO agreed with the JC that when I quote someone saying something, it is fair to quote me as the source of the statements. The JC reported that “Thomas Suarez has repeatedly and unapologetically made statements comparing Zionists to Nazis.” In response, I offered IPSO a complete unedited video of the very Bath talk that is the topic of the article.  The video proves, not only that I never made any such comparison myself — in each case I was quoting 1940s British and US intelligence, as well as Jews who had fled the Nazis — but that I ended that segment of the talk with the following statement:
+A quick word about all these Zionist-Nazi parallels, which continued with the behavior of the early Israeli state: Unless there is some historical reason for doing so, I myself don’t make the comparison. If anyone is curious abut my reasoning, please ask me in the Q&A.[4]
+IPSO however sided with the JC, because I had “accepted that [my] talks involved quoting sources making such claims”.
+• In May 2017, Jonathan Hoffman and the Board of Deputies pressured Jesus Lane to cancel a talk I was to give there. The JC then quoted BoD’s President, Jonathan Arkush, as saying that the reason Jesus Lane cancelled the talk was that it was not “in line with Quaker values” — but this phrase was Arkush’s invention. Jesus Lane cancelled, in its own words, “under pressure of time and with incomplete information” after the eleventh-hour intervention. Although the article falsely led the reader to believe that Arkush was quoting Jesus Lane, IPSO ruled that there was no accuracy breach, since the words themselves were “accurately attributed to the President [Arkush]”.
+III. My Appeal
+IPSO allows for an appeal, confined to issues of process. I limited my appeal to two points.
+• I contested the hate author issue, arguing that in its written Decision the Committee had in every instance put hate author in quotes, whereas the very point of my complaint was that the JC had failed to do so. The Independent Complaints Reviewer dismissed my appeal, arguing that the absence of quotation marks was a “fine distinction”.
+• I contested the Quakers row headline, arguing that the JC had failed to demonstrate any Quaker opposition to my talk, and that words put in the mouth of a man who has been dead for more than two centuries cannot seriously be considered “evidence”. This was dismissed as well, because my argument “does not seem to be the key issue being considered by the Committee” and thus does not constitute “a flaw in the decision making process”.
+IV. Conclusion
+IPSO is not the watchdog it should be, but it’s what we have at present, and it should be used. Israel’s cynical abuse of the charge of antisemitism is on the front lines of its tactics. The mere fact of an IPSO judgement against the JC is a victory.
+Happily, thanks to a harmless glitch by the JC online, the year-long case ended with some unintended, welcome humor. As caught in the screen-grab below, the JC accidentally reported its IPSO loss as “related” to Israel’s crash landing on the moon that same day.
+Jewish Chronicle relates its loss in IPSO case to Israeli space vehicle crashing on moon.
+
+Notes:
+1. IPSO is funded by member publications. It oversees most of the UK’s national newspapers, but membership is voluntary; among the non-participating papers are The Financial Times, The Independent, and The Guardian, which have their own internal system of redress. In my case, the JC’s reporting was the most egregious among the “legitimate” media, though the tabloid Daily Mail — also a member of IPSO — was stiff competition.
+2. Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution here; Bath Friends of Palestine here. My thanks to Huw Spanner of BFP.
+3. “03222-18 Suárez v The Jewish Chronicle”, ruling here
+4. One can cite parallels, and differences, between Nazism and Zionism. My objection to the exercise itself is that it reveals our need to invoke European suffering in order to see what is right in front our eyes. If the reality in Palestine and the refugee camps only shocks us if we invoke the word “Nazi”, it means that we are not seeing Palestinians as equal human beings.

mondoweiss/texts/1883.txt

@@ -1,95 +1,34 @@
-We are no longer able to ignore institutions operating across British university campuses that seek to insulate Israel from critique. Like the many “charitable” British institutions that have been flagged as complicit in Israel’s colonial project, hasbara hubs operating across British universities are also implicated in rationalizing Israel’s Zionist project. Furthering the de-legitimization of Palestinian narratives and deflecting from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, they provide the necessary rationale and distraction for “unfinished Zionist business.”[1]
-
-British campuses now form an epicenter of resistance to the genocide, but for some time, they have also figured as key sites for the management of Israel’s legitimacy. Pro-Israel advocates have long inferred that the boycott movement comprises “pro-Palestinian troublemakers” who are “importing divisions” onto British campuses. Yet this conveniently sidesteps the spectrum of invested communities seeking to uphold Israel’s expansionist endeavor whose commitments are a priori inscribed into campus life. One such community, often overlooked for various reasons, is the Union of Jewish Students (UJS).
-
-The Union of Jewish Students, the self-proclaimed representative body for over 9,000 Jewish students in the United Kingdom and Ireland, is a key cog but often unscrutinized player in British Zionist hasbara politics. Its Israel advocacy is well-known. Like many of its parent bodies, it is preoccupied with the management of Israel’s legitimacy by “explaining away” and deflecting from Israel’s coloniality. Their settler-colonial links often escape scrutiny, are dwarfed by bigger friends of Israel, or remain buried under unfounded charges of antisemitism, as in the case of Professor David Miller.
-
-The very tangible links between the UJS and its Israeli sponsors have been dismissed as a vague association or a “four times removed connection between a JSoc [Jewish Students Society] in Bristol and the World Zionist Organization.” One might consider such assertions evasive, representing something of an inversion of the antisemitic conspiracies of which Miller has been deemed guilty.
-
-Likewise, the Community Security Trust (CST) insists the UJS is a “Union for Jewish students” rather than an “agent for Israel,” an accusation also listed as an example of antisemitism.
-
-But of course, few people would maintain the latter. The UJS is not an “agent” of Israel, but it is committed to Israel. Certainly, in its capacity as a union, the UJS provides core services for its membership, which has diversified over the years — but this pastoral element is arguably surpassed by its Zionist leanings, an outcome of the intimate and reciprocal relation with the Zionist movement through Israel’s “quasi-governmental” institutions[2], which function to uphold Israel’s settler colonial occupation.
-
-Looking past customary deflections, it is clear that the UJS is both a beneficiary of and embedded within a Zionist settler colonial movement through which Israel’s prerogatives are invariably, albeit not always successfully, upheld.
-
-Revisiting these external links, I trace how they manifest in their institutional commitments and remain normalized within the fabric of campus life. For some, involvement in such organizations can mean the beginning of lifelong careerist trajectories in sync with Israel’s colonial endeavor.
-
-‘Enduring commitments’
-
-Like any other student collective, the UJS is neither homogeneous nor monolithic in membership. However, despite the odd anti-Zionist candidate and signs of dissent, its prescribed organizational remit means there is a uniformly pro-Israel outlook reflected in its institutional links, campaigns, conference motions, and electoral outcomes. While its membership rotates, its institutional commitments do not waver against its (pro)Israeli sponsors and a highly partisan executive structure, currently led by Arieh Miller, who was formerly employed by the Zionist Federation and the Israeli Embassy.
-
-This pro-Israel skew is evidenced by UJS’s largest funders. The United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA), the UK branch of the Keren Hayesod, is the backbone of Israel’s economy. It is also possibly the main source of the UJS’s funding. The Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) and Community Security Trust (CST), and allegedly the Israeli Embassy, also fund the UJS, as do other “charitable” trusts/trustees believed to have highly dubious investments in “right-wing” think tanks.
-
-Enshrined in its constitution, the UJS professes an “enduring commitment” to Israel and maintains this in its four core principles. Its efforts on this front are well recognized and rewarded within global and national student circles.
-
-This explains why the tenor of accepted union policy may, at times, read remotely sympathetic, at least to (newer forms of) Palestinian dispossession, it does not translate into a defining institutional position.
-
-Settler-colonial networks
-
-UJS’s historical and contemporary ties to Israel’s national institutions provide the central plank for its advocacy — the World Zionist Organization (WZO), the Jewish Agency, and the Keren Hayesod. These are the founding institutions of Israel’s settler colonial and apartheid regime.
-
-From its earliest configuration, the UJS was a constituent member of the World Zionist Organization. UJS’s parent body, B’nai B’rith, and the WUJS (World Union of Jewish Students), to which the UJS is party, both squarely fall within the WZO as direct members and Hasbara advocates.
-
-Although a national institution of Zionist settler colonialism, the Jewish Agency has a strong diasporic presence. Historically it played a pivotal role in establishing Israel, notoriously through its  “Population Transfer” Committee[3]. Ever since, it has been integral to realizing the Zionist dream of aliyah (immigration to Israel) and the establishment of a Jewish ethno-state. It offers Jews worldwide a stress-free relocation package and facilitates the maintenance of  “Jewish domination”[4] across Israel and the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
-
-Normalizing settler colonialism on campus
-
-It is quite something, then, to learn that the Agency plays an active and integral role in the life of the UJS, so integral that the UJS is home for two, sometimes three, of the Agency’s schlichim (emissaries), who are also IDF-trained campus fellows and sit directly within the UJS Executive body.
-
-Agency schlichim, alongside JSoc sabbatical officers, engage Jewish students from the moment they step foot on campus, and are recipients of UJS annual ‘Israel Engagement’ Awards.
-
-Much like settler-chaplains working in British universities, these IDF-trained emissaries are very much Israel’s “in-house” advocates who assume a student “support” function that some might consider far exceeds their “pastoral” role of cultivating a “living connection” to Israel. An analogous scenario involving any member of the Palestinian resistance sitting on the executive body of a Palestinian, Muslim, or solidarity student union would raise more than eyebrows.
-
-This signals the way pro-Israeli institutions remain integrated and normalized within British higher education, with little of the scandal and surveillance associated with their pro-Palestinian, especially Muslim, counterparts.
-
-The recent case of IDF reservist and Chaplain Zecharia Deutsche serving Leeds and other Northern Universities has spotlighted the embedded infrastructure of pro-Israel institutions, and their urgency to entrench their position, within British higher education.
-
-In one way or another, these institutions sustain UJS’s commitment to Israel within Higher education. Campus security (CST) Chaplaincy services (UJC) and campus-based ‘educational thinktanks’  privilege a Zionist framework where advocating for Israel remains a prerequisite for inclusion in the Jewish Zionist student community. Non- Zionist Jewish students calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have been virtually ex-communicated, ostracised, and excluded from stated pastoral remits. This reflects political objectives, not the prioritization of welfare, often projected on behalf of Jewish students.
-
-No less influential in exerting pressure, and (in)directly aiding JSOCs on campus, however, are the assembly of external bodies, agitating to quell anti-Zionist activity and delegitimize Palestinian voices, often by litigious means.
-
-Hasbara on campus
-
-How these intimate ties to Israel translate into institutional commitments is indicated by the portfolio of “Israel Engagement,” “Incubator” programmes,” the role in anti-BDS initiatives, IHRA campaigns, and Birthright tours.
-
-Perhaps the most egregious of commitments are the Birthright tours, a UJS fixture since 1999. Despite new Israeli settlements being prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, UJS’s itinerary has come to include new settlements, including controversial sites of settler land-grab. The unease (CA2) it has generated amongst some students has been ignored and leadership delegations have continued, even amidst the ongoing genocide.
-
-However, even campaigns that do not directly relate to “Israel engagement” are circumscribed by pro-Israel prerogatives. This is most obviously evidenced in UJS’s “relentless campaigning” across universities to adopt the highly contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, widely evidenced as instrumental to repressing anti-Zionist critiques.
-
-This Israel-heavy skew bears out in UJS’s scale of expenditure. In 2018-19, of UJS’s reported annual budget of 1 million GBP, 15% was allocated to ‘Israel Engagement’ and 25% to ‘Campaigns’ featuring a predominantly anti-BDS outlook. At this point, the overall budget pertaining directly to Israel was in excess of Jewish welfare (‘Life on campus’) and broader services, meriting 12% and 15% respectively. Whilst the focus on welfare appears to have since expanded, so too, if only marginally, has its budget on “Israel Engagement.” One might consider this a welfare issue.
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-Compared with other student unions, this scope of funding and support from (quasi)statist and British institutions are unparalleled. Yet, paradoxically, despite this degree of investment, it does not signal UJS’s efficacy as an advocacy group on campus. Rather, where they arguably find favor, lies in the status they occupy within university spaces, as students, and the attendant (affective) politics of “feeling safe,” routinely harnessed in campaigns to intimidate Israel’s critics. The impact of this strategy in shaping campus relations historically and constraining the scope for Palestinian activism is yet to be fully acknowledged.
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-The East is a career
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-While it is clear that the UJS is anchored to Israel’s quasi-national institutions, it is also host to numerous beneficiaries of a pro-Zionist careerism.
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-Through an active pro-Israel campus coterie, hasbara culture is rewarded and upgraded for life-long candidates. During and long after their departure from campus, Israel’s most ardent advocates provide a stream of labor into pro-Zionist institutions in Britain and Israel, including advocacy thinktanks, the Knesset, and the IDF, as UJS are proud to declare.
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-This is why allusions to the UJS as “Pawns of Israel,” or as “infiltrated by the Israeli lobby” remain at best partial, not only because they infer a lack of agency amongst activists and characterize the lobby as “Israel meddling in British politics,” but because they submerge the way Israel’s endeavor, reminiscent of Europe’s colonialism in the “East,” is in its widest sense something of a career.
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-The recently suspended mouthpiece for Israel’s genocide, British-Israeli settler Eylon Levy, is just one example of a UJS executive member “progressing,” or rather failing, in pro-Zionist institutions. There are many others whose trajectory from the UJS to pro-Israel establishment politics has not gone unnoticed.
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-These obvious examples should not eclipse the diffuse nature of Zionist advocacy across a range of well-documented “civil society” networks and the even wider range of non-Jewish right-wing collectives that have extended their unequivocal allyship on campus. This represents a distinct political alignment that prevails in the establishment, although remains widely undisclosed.
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-If the dismantling of Israel’s punitive regime is to begin with arms embargoes and calls for divestment, it can only end by decolonizing Zionist institutions that sustain its settler-colonial logic.
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-It is worth learning from historical example. In the early seventies, expressions of support for Palestinian emancipation in the wider Zionist student movement (then deemed radical) were swiftly quashed by the World Zionist Organization, leaving them ostracized and under-funded to the point of dissolution.[5] At this juncture, Jewish students condemned “the attempt to create artificial student bodies” and the “imposition of the Israeli party structure on Jewish…student movements in particular.”[6] These were, it seems, unplanted seeds for a future that might have shed the role of upholding Israel’s colonial project. That decolonial future is still to be realized, but first, those ties must be dissolved.
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-For Nadine Abdel-Latif and the children of Gaza.
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-Appreciation to my Reviewers. Any errors are mine.
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-Notes
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-[1] Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, p. 221
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-[2] David Miller at al, What Is Islamophobia? pp. 23-25.
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-[3] Jeff Halper, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine, p. 62.
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-[4] Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed, p.7.
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-[5] Julian Voloj, “Einstein’s Children: Chapters in the History of the European Union of Jewish Students,” p. 76.
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-[6] Ibid, p.87, fn.10
+“Joppa from the sea,” photograph by P. Bergheim, between 1860 and 1880. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-106225.[1]
+What fault have we Palestinian Arabs committed … Release us from the Zionists greed which is increasing from day to day … Were we liberated by the Allies from the Turkish yoke to be put under the Zionist yoke? (—telegram from the Jaffa Moslem-Christian Committee to the British government, March, 1919) [2]
+A century after that plea from Jaffa, this article is a plea not to forget Jaffa on the 1947 partition map of the sequence illustrating the Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to the present. It is a cartographically cleansed dot’s right-of-return.
+In this detail from a 1475 map of Palestine, note Jaffa, just to the left of the center binding, by the ship. East is at the top, so Gaza is in the lower right (south). Woodcut, from the Rudimentum Novitiorum, published in Lübeck by Lucas Brandis, 1475.
+The ancient port city of Jaffa was long a hub of Palestinian life — culturally, commercially, politically, artistically — until European invaders brutalized the city and drove its people into the sea in early 1948. Much of this gem on the Mediterranean was destroyed, and more than ninety-five percent of its population expelled by the Zionist militias in their pursuit of ethnic purity in their settler state. [3]
+In this sequence, the “UN PLAN 1947” map is correct (dot enlarged slightly here for visibility). Click image for source, Palestine Awareness Coalition.
+But like much of the area conquered by the Zionists that year, Jaffa was not even in their settler state. The Jewish Agency (/Israeli government) had agreed that Jaffa would be part of the Palestinian state — or, rather, it agreed when within earshot of the United Nations, until after UNGA Resolution 181, the UN Partition plan that effectively created the Israeli state, was shoved through the UN by the United States.
+Partition’s architects acknowledged that keeping Jaffa non-contiguous with the rest of Palestine created problems for the Palestinians; but alternatives that kept Jaffa contiguous created a parallel problem for the Zionists. Resolution 181 made Jaffa a Palestinian island, accessible to the rest of Palestine either by sea or through Israel.
+Anti-Palestinian settler violence had begun to escalate during the summer of 1947, and in December, once the ink on Resolution 181 was dry, the Jewish Agency already began breaking its territorial agreements, as anti-Palestinian violence escalated markedly. The Irgun launched a seaborne attack on Jaffa on December 29, with a final onslaught by the Irgun and Hagana in April (the Irgun then formally incorporated into the Hagana, ‘official’ Jewish Agency military).
+When in 2015, a major US television station, MSNBC, aired this land loss map, it caused such outrage among the Narrative-keepers that the station apologized. The apology should, rather, have been to the Palestinians for its omission of Jaffa as part of Resolution 181’s allocation to the promised Palestinian state. Click image for Mondoweiss article.
+“It should be made clear,” High Commissioner Cunningham reported, that the attacks were “indiscriminate and designed to create panic amongst civilian inhabitants. It was not a Military operation.” When Cunningham found the media reporting the ethnic cleansing as “Jewish military successes,” he sent a telegram to British and US officials in protest: these “successes” are, in truth, “operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children.”
+A half century later, a book published by the Israeli Ministry of Defence justified the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa by calling it “a festering cancer in the middle of the Jewish population.” [4]
+By the time the fateful day of May 15, 1948 arrived — the end of the British Mandate and the unilateral declaration of the Israeli state — most of the original 120,000 inhabitants of Jaffa and its environs were already refugees, destitute, many trapped in Gaza forty miles to the south. Of the roughly 4,000 that were still in Jaffa, the Israeli militias rounded up these ethnically-wrong hold-outs and sealed them off, using the al-Ajami neighborhood as a virtual military prison.
+In December that year, UNGA Resolution 194 reaffirmed what should never have needed anyone’s reaffirmation: the refugees’ right to return home. For many of those now facing starvation in camps in Gaza, ‘home’ meant Jaffa; yet throughout the years that followed, they were shot dead on sight if they tried.
+Thus Israel’s deadly siege of Gaza was in full force by the end of 1948. The election of Hamas in 2006, to which Israel now falsely attributes its siege, was instead the result of fifty-eight years of Israeli intransigence.
+With the theft of this jewel of Palestinian civilization, tens of thousands of settlers from abroad quickly poured in and commandeered Jaffa, its homes, its orchards, it businesses, its libraries, its presses. In October of that year the Israeli cabinet formally decreed Jaffa’s union with Tel Aviv. Both the United States and the United Nations were suddenly impotent. [5]
+That impotence was described in a telegram from Sir Hugh Dow, British Consul-General in Jerusalem, to the Foreign Office (September 1, 1948):
+If, instead of the Jews seizing Jaffa, the Arabs had succeeded in establishing themselves in Tel Aviv, would the United Nations have agreed to the retention of Tel Aviv in an Arab State? [6]
+In 2012, the creators of these brilliant billboards got them up in Boston transit. In no way to detract from that Herculean feat, note that the green dot for Jaffa is missing on the Partition map. Click image for Mondoweiss article.
+Fast-forward to today. That Jaffa was on the Palestinian side of partition is usually forgotten in the familiar series of maps used to illustrate ‘disappearing’ Palestine. Jaffa is shown as Israeli, a serious error in Israel’s favor. The omission of Jaffa also minimizes the absurdity of the Partition scheme itself.
+The maps are otherwise correct, showing an interior region and a coastal region corresponding to today’s West Bank and Gaza, roughly twice the size of what remained by the end of 1948. (The so-called ‘1967 borders’ delineate a Palestine about half that specified by the UN in 1947, and those 1947 borders were already disproportionately generous to the Zionists, an attempt to delay Israel’s expansionist desires).
+The Israeli Creation Myth is losing its efficacy these days, thanks largely to the increase in understanding of the period preceding 1948. It is in that spirit that I ask that we check the 1947 UN Partition map in our land-loss map sequences — and if there’s no conspicuous dot for Jaffa in the color of the Palestinian side of Partition (usually green), let’s add it.
+That dot is a stolen gem that must be returned to its owners — and its owners returned to it.
+
+Tom Suárez is the author of three major books on the history of cartography.
+
+“Joppa. Approach from the east” [between 1870 and 1880], by the important French photographer Félix Adrien Bonfils (1831-1885), “one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale” (Wikipedia). Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-106226
+
+Note that the author has conservatively modified the Library of Congress scan as follows: changed from grayscale to color; discreetly restored some contrast along the top of the buildings to undo loss; remove the extra margin with the catalog number. The LoC listing dates the photograph between 1860 and 1890, but other listings for Bergheim, from the LoC and auction listings, state 1860-1880, suggesting that 1890 is unlikely.
+The National Archives (Kew), FO 608/99.
+Grim footage of Jaffa after its conquest by Israel has been rescued from obscurity by Rona Sela and can be seen in her new film, “Looted and Hidden” (2017). At writing, the filmmaker, a curator and researcher of visual history and culture, has made her film available online. Captions in English https://vimeo.com/213851191; Captions in Arabic and Hebrew https://vimeo.com/257286457
+See Suárez, State of Terror, 259-260. The “festering cancer” quote is from Joseph Kister, The Irgun the Story of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Eretz-Israel [Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 2000]
+Sami Abu Shehadeh and Fadi Shbaytah, “Jaffa: from eminence to ethnic cleansing,” The Electronic Intifada, February 26, 2009
+The National Archives (Kew), FO 800/487, numbered ‘240’ in file.