Jerusalem, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph; by Jonathan Cook) - Israel has been told that its accession to an exclusive club of the world's most developed economies is all but assured when the 30 member states meet in May.

But a draft report of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), seen by The National, concedes that Israel has breached one of the organisation's key requirements on providing accurate and transparent data on its economic activity.

The information supplied by Israel, the report notes, includes not only the economic activity of its citizens inside its recognised borders but also Jewish settlers who live in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan in violation of international law.

Israel's accession to the OECD on such terms threatens to severely embarrass many of the organisation's member states, especially those in the European Union that are publicly committed to avoiding collusion with the occupation.

The OECD report proposes that these legal difficulties may be circumvented by asking Israel to produce new statistics within a year of its accession excluding the settler population - even though, an OECD official has admitted, Israel would have the power to veto such a demand after it becomes a member.

"The OECD seems to be so determined to get Israel through its door that it is prepared to cover up the crimes of the occupation," said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist.

Israel has been lobbying for nearly 20 years to be admitted to the OECD, founded in 1961 for wealthy industrialised democracies to meet and co-ordinate economic and social policies. It includes the United States and most of Europe.

"The financial privileges are relatively modest, but there is great prestige to being accepted," Mr Hever said. "Israel has worked so hard to gain admission because it believes accession will confer international legitimacy on its occupation."

Several countries with a lower development level than Israel have already been accepted, including Turkey, Mexico and the Czech Republic.

Israel's past rejections, it is widely assumed, were because many states were uncomfortable about admitting Israel while it was occupying the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank and the Syrian-owned Golan Heights.

However, Israel was formally invited to begin discussions about membership in 2007 after intense lobbying by Stanley Fischer, the governor of the Bank of Israel. Membership is expected to bring financial stability to Israel's economy, attract investment and reduce the country's risk premium.

The OECD's secretary general, Angel Gurria, visited in January, after a review of Israel's economy, and suggested that admission this year was a sure thing.

However, a leaked draft report by the OECD's committee on statistics, produced last month after the review, shows there are major problems with the data presented by Israel.

According to its rules, the OECD takes account of economic activity outside a candidate state's recognised borders in very limited circumstances, such as with remittances from migrant workers.

But given that this status does not apply to the illegal settlers living in the occupied territories, the OECD committee argues that either the settlers be excluded from the data or everyone living in the territories - including Palestinians - should be factored in.

"Israel has been caught out because it has always refused, even in its own internal data, to differentiate between Israel and the occupied territories," Mr Hever said. Both East Jerusalem and the Golan have been annexed by Israel in violation of international law.

"The OECD is treating Israel as though it has seven million citizens when, in reality, it has 11 million subjects, of whom four million are Palestinians living under occupation," Mr Hever said. "If they were included in the figures submitted to the OECD, Israel would have to be refused accession because of the enormous disparities in wealth."

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, noted recently that there was a 20:1 ratio in the difference in gross domestic product per capita between an Israeli and a Palestinian living in Gaza.

But rather than conclude that Israel has failed to meet the organisation's entry criteria, the committee proposes a workaround: Israel can be accepted to the organisation and given a year to submit new data excluding the settlers.

Tim Davis, an OECD official with the statistics committee in Paris, said he could not comment on the report because its contents were confidential but agreed that there was nothing to stop Israel reneging on such a commitment in the future. "In a case like that, nothing could be done in practice. We work on the basis of co-operation, not pressure."

Israel is reported to have failed other entry conditions, including corruption and copyright violations.

The OECD has required member states to crack down on corrupt practices since it approved a convention against bribery in 1997. Israel, however, was ranked in 32nd place in a major index on corruption last year, with much of it relating to the country's US$6 billion arms industry.

European and US defence firms have threatened to derail Israel's OECD bid if it does not clean up its act.

Israel is also believed to be violating intellectual property rights, again in breach of OECD rules. US and Swiss firms have accused Israel of failing to regulate the international marketing of drugs produced by its largest pharmaceuticals company, Teva.

Israel's bid for OECD membership has been opposed by the leaders of its Arab minority, one-fifth of the population. Last month the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the minority's main political body, petitioned the OECD to reject Israel.

It has pointed out that half of Israel's Arab citizens are living below the poverty line, a rate three times higher than among Israeli Jews, and that on average Arab citizens earn salaries that are one-third less than Jews. Mohammed Zeidan, head of the committee, blamed the disparities in wealth on what he called Israel's "racist and discriminatory polices".

Another OECD report, published in January, showed that, even on the basis of Israel's figures excluding the Palestinians, Israel would still have the widest social gaps of any member state if it were accepted.

This article first appeared in The National.

World, March 11, 2010 (Pal Telegraph)- Palestinians - like many oppressed people around the world - have no right to their own narrative

The killing of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh on Jan. 19, 2010 was clearly a well-planned, violent and sadistic act, committed by Israeli assassins in the supposed safety of a sovereign country.

Yes, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was a Palestinian activist. We have no reason to believe otherwise. He spent years of his life in Israeli prison - and one year in an Egyptian jail - for his political activism. This, however, gives no credibility to Israel's accusation that Al-Mabhouh was a killer of Israelis. This assertion becomes even more problematic when considering that Al-Mabhouh's assassination was, according to the British media, ordered by accused Israeli war criminals and rightwing politicians.

According to the Sunday Times, Meir Dagan, the current director of Mossad, briefed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the assassination plan during a meeting in early January. " The people of Israel trust you. Good luck," Netanyahu reportedly said at the end of this meeting.

It is disgraceful enough that the assassins used " fraudulent" European passports, as well as credit cards linked to an American bank to carry out their plans. But more upsetting is the fact that this cruel and calculated action has inspired little more than expressions of " outrage." Have we accepted the Israeli impunity?

What about the sanctity of life, the sovereignty of nations and the respect for international law? Are these immediately disposable when the victim is Palestinian and the location of the crime an Arab country?

Al-Mabhouh was also callously deprived of his own relevance to the story. We don't really know much about the man aside from what Israelis want us to know - a senior Hamas operative who was responsible for the abduction and killings of two Israeli soldiers; one of the founders of the militant arm of Hamas, Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam; the middleman between Hamas in Gaza and Al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran.

Who has woven this fascinatingly reductionist account of Al-Mabhouh's life in such a short span of time? His family? Hamas? The Palestinian media? No, none of these. The creator of this biography is Israel, the very country that assassinated him. Now that is truly outrageous: the murderer writes and convinces the world of the story of the murder victim. And the media gladly runs with it. OT surprisingly, a Palestinian would tell Al-Mabhouh's story in entirely different terms. He was born in Jabalia, one of Gaza's poorest and most crowded refugee camps. These key words alone - Gaza, poor, crowded, refugee - help to unravel the real story of Al-Mabhouh. It is the story shared by so many people who still live a life of utter anguish, poverty and resistance in the Gaza Strip - and elsewhere - which is under inhumane siege and successive wars by the world's fourth strongest army. The story is not about abducted occupation soldiers, but about millions of refugees, not about Iran, but about Gaza and Palestine, not about luxury hotels, but about horrifyingly desolate refugee camps.

But Palestinians - like many oppressed people around the world - have no right to their own narrative. Their story is negligible, if not wholly irrelevant. Israel commits the murder, Israel offers the explanation, and eventually Israel gets away with both the crime and the lie.

Al-Mabhouh's murder might eventually inspire several documentaries that highlight the murderous nature of Palestinian militants, and the unequaled brilliance of Israeli retaliation. Another of Steven Spielberg's " Munich" might already be in the making. The first scene of this would not be Al-Mabhouh's family forced to flee their village in Palestine after untold butchery by Zionist militants in 1948. Instead it might show a dark-skinned, menacing Palestinian slaughtering two helpless Israeli soldiers pleading for their lives.

WE are, more or less, told to forget about Al-Mabhouh. After all, his name is used along with Hamas and Iran in the same sentence. That should be enough to tell us that his life is dispensable - just like the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli Army in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. Israel may well be preparing for yet another attack on the impoverished Strip. The tunnels that represent the lifeline for the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are being routinely blown up by Israeli warplanes, detonated by dynamite and blocked by an Egyptian steel wall. Gazans cannot be allowed any weapon to defend themselves.

The "international community" has held many meetings to ensure that no weapons find their way to Gaza. The US in particular is utterly firm regarding this issue - although not at all firm about ensuring that food or medicine reach the Strip. Al-Mabhouh may have been killed due to Israel's belief he was arming the resistance.

This partly explains why the "international community" is apparently unmoved by the murder. Al-Mabhouh might have been involved in breaking the Western consensus on denying Gaza both food and arms.

The EU is only worried about its link to the story, and not the murder itself. A EU statement issued in Brussels on Feb. 22 condemned the "fact that those involved in this action used fraudulent EU member states' passports."

They didn't name Israel though. As the Financial Times resolved, "criticism of Israel was as strongly worded as the EU could manage, given that Germany, Italy and several other countries place great emphasis on close relations with Israel."

One can only imagine what would happen if Hamas decides to strike back, expanding the battleground from Gaza to the rest of the world.

Would the EU express disapproval of Hamas' use of fraudulent passports, but then refrain from actually naming the group - due to a fear, say, of upsetting Muslim countries?

No. But when the victim is a Palestinian and the murderers are Israelis - 27 of them so far - it's an entirely different story, and an entirely different concept of justice.

US, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) - Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa, is the story of one Palestinian family over four generations. It can be argued, however, that it is also a story about any and every Palestinian family. The novel begins in the picturesque village of Ein Hod in the north of Palestine. The Abulheja family leads the simple life that most Palestinian farmers led before their tragic dispossession in 1948. Love was plentiful in Ein Hod. Love for life, for family, for God and for the land. This was the essence of a farming society for generation upon generation.

The Abulhejas and their countrymen are forced out of their villages and homes only to find refuge in foreign towns and lands. They find themselves in a refugee camp in Jenin, their lives totally turned upside-down after losing everything they knew in their simple but beautiful, Palestinian village.

As they struggle in the refugee camp, in the early period after their exile, olive harvest season approaches. Haj Yehya, the family's patriarch, sneaks across the armistice line to tend to his olive groves despite the threat of death from an Israeli bullet. When he returns to the camp in Jenin where his family anxiously waits, he brings them the fruits of his labor, and the labor of generations before him, plucked from their trees in their village. Nothing could stop this old man from returning to his village, but on his next trip, he never made it back to Jenin.

That was the last time any Abulheja attempted to return, but the dreams of return only grew stronger. Amal, with a long vowel (a name meaning "hopes" in Arabic), was born in the refugee camp of Jenin to Haj Yehya's son Hasan. Her older brother, Yousef, spent his early years in Ein Hod before the Nakba. Another older brother, Ismael, was taken from his mother's arms during the exodus from Ein Hod. It would be through Amal's eyes, however, that the family's story is told.

Susan Abulhawa's masterful writing is delightful to read. She writes with an element of metaphor, undoubtedly owing its origins to the Arabic language, which brings color and feeling to every page of this novel. The characters are well-developed and one cannot help but grow attached to them. After each tragedy, be it 1948, 1967 and 1982, a new generation of the family is born, providing hope not only for the characters, but also for the reader who will inevitably experience a sense of depression in parts of the book.

Amal is born into refugee life. She grows up in the shadow of a mother who was devastated by the loss of a child. In 1967, Amal experiences six days of horror in a hole in the ground that will forever change her family's life. The father who read poetry to her in the early hours of the morning, the scenes that lend the book its title, is never seen again. Her mother slips into dementia, and her brother Yousef will soon leave to join the resistance.

She grows up away from Jenin, and seeks an education in the United States. Her father's wish was that she be educated and a scholarship makes this possible. In her ghorba (life away from home) Amal experiences western life and the contradictions it poses for Palestinians like herself. She will eventually travel to a refugee camp in Lebanon to reconnect with her brother. In Lebanon, she remembers her past, her love for the land and her family, and starts a family of her own. And just as stability seems to be coming back to her life, anchored by the cornerstone of family, tragedy strikes again. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila will devastate the Abulhejas in 1982, just as 1967 devastated them in Jenin, just as 1948 devastated them in Ein Hod.

Amal raises her daughter, Sara, as a single mother. She wants her to have nothing to do with Palestine, politics, and the wars that scared Amal literally and figuratively for decades. But a twist of fate, which brings Amal's long-lost brother back into her life, sparks an interest in Sara who is now old enough to start hearing about the secrets of her mother's past.

Ultimately it will be Sara, and her generation, which will carry the hopes of Palestine and Palestinians after Amal is gone.

Mornings in Jenin is a must read. It is sure to be an eye opening experience for those who know little about Palestine and an eye-watering experience for those who do. Abulhawa's style is magnificent, descriptive and passionate. While the story is fictional, it is built on entirely plausible circumstances and entirely factual events and places.

Many have waited for a literary contribution capable of explaining the Palestinian experience to the West. The wait is over, Mornings in Jenin is it.

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center, Washington DC.

World, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) -Over the past 10 years a new wave of Palestinian filmmakers has constructed a specific national identity on screen. It is more directly political than the earlier film portrayals of Palestinian lives and stories.

While the second intifada (which started in September 2000) was still raging in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, the Nazareth-born filmmaker Elia Suleiman's film Divine Intervention (2002) was submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the nominated entry from Palestine for the best foreign language film Oscar category. The Academy rejected the film because, it said, "Palestine is not a country". In 2006, when the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad's film Paradise Now (2005) was nominated in the same category, the Academy accepted it, and identified its country as "the Palestinian Authority".

The scholar Edward Said wrote in an introduction to a book about Palestinian cinema, Dreams of a Nation: "The whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible." This desire is what has driven the new wave of Palestinian films in the past decade. Palestinian cinema has reinvented itself many times over the past 40 years, but it's the films made since the second intifada began in 2000 that have been getting international attention. Not because they exist, but because they make an unprecedented social, cultural and political statement.

Thousands of supporters of the Palestinian cause around the world - not just Palestinians - have picked up cameras over the past 10 years, helped by digital technology, to make films about Palestine and the continued plight of Palestinians today. Their cinema is characterised by its use of common historical and social facts to document the Palestinian struggle, Israeli occupation and cultural identity.

Leading scholars on Palestinian cinema, Nureth Gertz and Michel Khleifi, identified four distinct periods in their book Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory. The first is between 1935 and 1948, the year of the nakba (or catastrophe, describing the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948). The second, "the epoch of silence", was between 1948 and 1967, when no films were produced. The third encompasses the films of the revolutionary period between 1968 and 1982 - triggered by the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Day War - which were mostly made in exile in Lebanon by the PLO and other Palestinian organisations. The fourth period, which began in 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, continues to this day.
Stateless but national

Dr Lina Khatib, an Arab cinema expert and academic at Stanford University in California, says a film's relationship with history is 
subjective. The Arab-Israeli conflict is, she says, the clearest example of the same historical event being given "different, often contradictory interpretations" in Hollywood and Arab cinemas. She says the truths constructed by each side are produced by specific, different historical contexts, and reflect those differences.

The films of the Palestinian new wave are inherently political. They are cinematic constructs of resistance specific to the post-2000 period. The second intifada is a key event in the Palestinian struggle, the point at which a construction of national identity defined by social and historical facts developed. Subsequent films, with a Palestinian voice as an alternative to the dominant Israeli discourse on the conflict, form this new wave.

Palestinian cinema is really a stateless national cinema that represents the socially, economically and geographically fragmented 9.7 million Palestinians worldwide - an estimated 74% of Palestinians are refugees. Throughout the occupied territories, Palestinians have had almost no access to cinemas: during the first intifada Israel shut down all entertainment facilities, including cinemas. The Israeli state immobilised the people it occupied and asphyxiated their cultural efforts, and banned public displays of culture and cultural gatherings.

Defining Palestinian cinema is not easy. In an essay, the Beirut-born, British-raised filmmaker Omar al-Qattan questions what makes him a Palestinian filmmaker, other than being born to Palestinian parents. He says his relationship with Palestine is an ethical imperative for which he is equipped by family history, cultural heritage and friendships with other Palestinians. Al-Qattan is adamant that he calls "Palestinian any film engaged with Palestine, and [does] not limit the name to narrow nationalist boundaries". By adopting al-Qattan's definition, we can understand how Bab el Shams (2005) is considered to be a Palestinian film, despite having an Egyptian director and French funding.
Hope and despair

Hamid Dabashi, editor of Dreams of a Nation, wrote: "The very proposition of a Palestinian cinema points to the traumatic disposition of its origin and originality. The world of cinema does not know quite how to deal with Palestinian cinema precisely because it is emerging as a stateless cinema of the most serious national consequences" (1). This is perhaps reflected well in Elia Suleiman's new film The Time That Remains (2009), the final film of his Palestinian trilogy (Chronicles of a Disappearance (1996) and Divine Intervention are the other two), in which he says the viewers are to consider the fact that, very simply, "time is running out".

Films of the Palestinian new wave rely on common key social facts, such as occupation, statelessness and the struggle for a right of return, to construct a national identity that transcends the fragmented diaspora. Israeli occupation and oppression are portrayed through the depiction of checkpoints, roadblocks and ID cards. A continued statelessness and the aspiration for a national homeland are shown as both hope and hopelessness - the hopeful go on looking for a sovereign nation; those who lack hope, such as the characters in Elia Suleiman's films, suffer from frustration and despair. The right of return underlies all these films as the characters seek to eliminate the cause of their suffering and return to a state of peace and security at home.

The second intifada made it possible to see symbols of the uprising: Yasser Arafat, checkpoints and roadblocks, the West Bank barrier wall and settlement expansion. Most of the films of the new wave are set in the West 
Bank where Palestinians live behind the wall and use the common pillars of struggle - statelessness, oppression, resistance and the right of return. It has been difficult to make films in the Gaza Strip since the Israeli blockade, although last year a powerful feature film, Imad Aqel (2009), about a Hamas resistance fighter killed in the conflict, emerged from Gaza. Making a film under occupation, within the Israeli blockade, in a poverty-stricken place, was something of an achievement, although international headlines focused on the fact that the film was funded and produced by Hamas. Four of the actors in the film were later killed in Operation Cast Lead - the 22-day Israeli war on Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009.
A cultural weapon

The idea of "specific historical contexts" that Khatib speaks of is linked to the idea of identifying key underlying "social facts" - a term coined by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. In his view, social facts can be simultaneously "objective, resistant and persistent" and are key to understanding the collective will or consciousness and identity of a group. Durkheim defines social facts as being "ways of acting or thinking with the peculiar characteristic of exercising a coercive influence on individual consciousness... Even the symbols that represent these conceptions change according to the type of society" (2).

In the films of the Palestinian new wave, the relationship between film and reality is historically and politically inflected to make a cultural weapon that also acts as resistance. These films are historical texts of the oppressed.

Few hipsters in London or New York are aware of the political significance of the kuffiyah scarf they bought at H&M or Top Shop. The kuffiyah became a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and of resistance at the time of the nakba, not entirely deliberately. It was cultural coincidence. Palestine was an agrarian society before the creation of Israel, and land and farming are a great part of the Palestinian cultural heritage. During the nakba, when the Zionists destroyed the villages and the Palestinians fled, the rural villages were destroyed first. Those who left were farmers, who had worn the kuffiyah to protect them from the sun in summer, and the cold in winter, in their fields and citrus and olive groves. The kuffiyah is a recurring symbol in the new Palestinian cinema.

Other symbols are the original map of Palestine (pre-1948), the land itself, and the Palestinian flag. History shows that, as humans, we rely on symbols to project our identity when our voices and actions can't (in France, Bastille Day wouldn't be the same without the French flag); and the Palestinian flag is the foremost symbol of solidarity, resistance and nationalism in the new wave films.

Suleiman's Divine Intervention and Abu Assad's Paradise Now, for example, depend on relating the atmosphere of Israeli occupation and the landscape of the Occupied Territories to the characters; it gives them a context and also becomes part of the narrative. In the fantasy fight sequence in Divine Intervention, the main character's girlfriend is masked by a kuffiyah as she fights Israeli soldiers, and destroys them. Without the kuffiyah, the subtext could have been perceived as feminist. However, with the kuffiyah masking her identity, she becomes a symbol of Palestinian resistance.

Both of these films identify a collective goal of a return to the homeland. But Divine Intervention can be read as an allegory for the collapse of national aspiration, whereas Paradise Now can be seen as an extended allegory for determination. In Salt of this Sea (2008) by Palestinian-American filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, the main character, Soraya, is a stubborn Brooklyn-born third-generation Palestinian refugee and young American. She goes on a quest to reach her ancestral home in Jaffa (now in Israel) to come to terms with her personal identity and family history, and longs to reclaim her family home. As the historian Issam Nassar said: "The exodus and forced expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the eventual erection of refugee camps all over the Middle East presented the context for the transformation of the old Palestinian local and communal affiliations into nationalist ones" (3).

The filmmakers of the new wave have succeeded in constructing a Palestinian national identity that transcends the fragmented diaspora; they have made cinema a key medium for the documentation and preservation of the history of their struggle. Crucially, they preserve the Palestinian Arabic dialect - not easy, considering the geographic dispersion of the community. The American-Arab journalist Nana Asfour says: "What binds Palestinian films together are the language - Palestinian Arabic - the subject - Palestinian lives - and the desire of each director to portray his own take on what being Palestinian means" (4).

I recently met Elia Suleiman in Beirut, where he was promoting his new film The Time that Remains, which premiered at Cannes last year. He suggested that the multiplicity of voices of Palestinian filmmakers was worth considering. "I don't know if the microcosm of the Arab-Israeli conflict is a reflection of the world, or if the world is a microcosm of Palestine. Globally, Palestine has multiplied and generated into so many Palestines. I feel if you go to Peru, you will find Palestine in a grave state there too."

by Sabah Haider.

UK, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) -LFPME held an event in Manchester on the 6th March to launch the organisation officially in the North West. Hosted by Lord Nazir Ahmed the event brought together Parliamentarians, PPCs and supporters of Labour and Palestine.

Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, leader of the recent delegation that broke the illegal siege on Gaza spoke passionately about the plight of Palestinians and updated guests on his recent visit to Gaza. He reminded everyone that ‘as we all enjoy our meal tonight, there are many families and children in Gaza without enough food, water or shelter. More than a year after Israel's assault on Gaza, the siege continues to block vital aid and reconstruction materials for people that need it most'. He urged guests to become active supporters of LFPME, saying ‘I am extremely proud to be involved with LFPME and we must build a strong and active base for the organisation in the North West'.

Tony Lloyd MP reiterated that the solution for peace in the region would be a political one and added ‘It is our duty to put political pressure on our government to ensure they take decisive action which helps ensure peace and justice for Palestinians'. He praised LFPME's campaign to promote justice in the Middle East within the Labour movement.

Lord Ahmed emphasised the need to support the work of LFPME, stating ‘Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East's work is entirely supportive of international law, peace and the international consensus for a two-state solution. It is vital that LFPME continue to represent the strengths of the pro-Palestine solidarity movement at the highest political levels. The Israel lobby has spent millions in the last couple of years to maintain their strong influence in parliament, including taking PPCs on free trips to Israel. This is what we have to compete against and it is vital that Labour members get behind LFPME and support its work'.

Several PPCs committed themselves to be active voices for peace and justice for

Palestine. PPC Maryam Khan vowed to be a strong voice for justice for Palestine in the next parliament and PPCs Yasmin Qureshi and Julie Hilling stressed the importance of carrying out work that raises public awareness of the injustice in Palestine.

LFPME executive committee member Simon Danczuk stressed that a strong lobby within the Labour movement was vital if the British government is to apply real pressure on Israel to obey international law and end its illegal occupation.

Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East Event Report

Official North West Launch, Manchester, 6th March 2010

For more :- www.labourfriendsofpalestine.co.uk

Brussels, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) - The European Parliament on Wednesday urged its 27-member states to monitor the Israeli and Palestinian probes into alleged war crimes committed during last year's late-winter conflict in Gaza.

The resolution backed the findings of a UN-appointed expert panel chaired by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, which concluded that both sides committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the war that began in December 2008 and ended in January 2009.

The parliamentary move, which would give the EU an unprecedented role in evaluating the progress of Israel's war crimes probe, was sharply criticized by Israel.

"We find this resolution flawed and counterproductive," said Yoel Mester, spokesman for Israeli mission to EU. "While other players are striving to support the peace process and to start the proximity talks between Israel and Palestinians, it is regrettable that the European Parliament chooses to concentrate on a highly controversial issue."

In December, the EU accused Israel of trying to divide the bloc to stop it from passing a resolution calling for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of Israel and for a future Palestinian state. The measure was adopted despite Israel's opposition.

The European Union also has criticized Israel over its suspected role in the slaying of a Hamas militant in Dubai and the killers' alleged use of forged EU passports.

The European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton also recently asked to be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip, which remains under Hamas control.

The European Parliament measure, passed by 335-287, said Ashton should monitor actively the implementation of recommendations included in the Goldstone report.

In January, the UN General Assembly gave the two sides five more months to finalize their own investigations into war crimes allegations during the conflict, in which 13 Israelis and almost 1,400 Palestinians were killed.

On Monday, Israel's Foreign Ministry said it would allow Ashton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon into Gaza. Israel has routinely banned foreign officials from crossing into Gaza since Hamas' violent takeover of the strip in 2007, maintaining that such visits bolster the Islamic militant group.

The European Parliament also said it was "concerned" about "pressure placed on NGOs involved in the document's preparation."

Jewish leaders said they were "deeply disappointed" and puzzled by the motion.

"The clause referring to NGO is very puzzling," Arie Zuckerman, a senior executive of the European Jewish Congress, said, adding it was "an apparent reference" to a recent Israeli publicity campaign targeting the New Israel Fund for its role in the preparation the controversial report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza last year.

"Europe, which preaches to Israel and to the whole world about freedom of expression, is now calling to stifle criticism ensured by freedom of expression because it's directed at the Goldstone report," said Zuckerman.

He added: "How is the campaign the business of the EP?"

Contacted by Haaretz, Professor Naomi Chazan, the president of the New Israel fund, which describes itself as a nongovernmental organization championing human rights in Israel, said she was not available for comment on this.

The campaign against the fund was launched by the Im Tirtzu movement, which describes itself as centrist Zionist. It cited a study which calculates that 92 percent of footnotes sourcing negative information to Israeli sources in the Goldstone report come from NIF grantees.

The European Parliament's resolution was a softened version of an earlier draft which called for implementing the Goldstone report. The draft was scrapped after European Jewish Congress Moshe Kantor warned party leaders that the resolution would damage EU-Israel relations.

The final resolution said EU member states should "demand the implementation of the Goldstone report's recommendations and accountability for all violations of international law."

Kantor told Haaretz last week that if the European Parliament adopts the Goldstone report, it will be the "strongest endorsement the document has received so far."

Zuckerman said the European Parliament "gave indirect endorsement to Hamas" by passing Wednesday's resolution on the Goldstone report, and added it "damaged the peace process with the Palestinians."

"The fact that over 45 percent of MEPs voted against the resolution is cause for some satisfaction," Kantor said. "The resolution passed by only a narrow margin, and not the consensus that was expected."

The European United Left-Nordic Green Left (EUL-NGL) - which has 25 MEPs - meanwhile, said it welcomed the European Parliament's resolution.

MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides from the group said: "For the first time, a resolution voted in the European Parliament acknowledges Israeli's violations of international humanitarian law."

The party called "for the immediate adoption of its findings by EU Member States and the implementation of its recommendations," demanding, "that no upgrading of EU - Israel Association Agreement is conceded given the violations committed by Israel.

Ramallah, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will visit Ramallah today to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Biden is expected to discuss with Abbas on a strategy for ensuring the Israeli surrender of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to the PA.

The settlement issue is certain to dominate the meeting in Ramallah, which Biden hopes will facilitate the indirect talks Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to hold after a 14-month hiatus in peace negotiations.

Criticism of Israel's green light for the construction of 1,600 new settler homes in East Jerusalem mounted today as Biden prepared to meet Abbas and Prime Minister of the Fatah-led government, Salam Fayyad.

Earlier in the morning, Biden held talks in Jerusalem with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the representative of the Middle East diplomatic "quartet."

Source: Various agencies

You may have noticed that our Vice President is having a spat with Israel that’s in all the headlines because of Israel’s plans to build more illegal settlements in East Jerusalem. The other day 5000 people demonstrated against the settlements. And today Andrew Sullivan has a piece on the Sheikh Jarrah evictions.

When I got to East Jerusalem in January, the first place I went was Sheikh Jarrah, a short walk from my hotel. And my busiest day was Friday. That was the day of the Sheikh Jarrah demo and all the demos on the West Bank! I wanted to witness the rise of the anti-Jim Crow passive resistance movement and went to three demos. In Sheikh Jarrah, I saw a number of journalists, Bernard Avishai, Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker, and the writer David Shulman.

Now here is Ari Goldman’s seminar at the Columbia Journalism School, called Covering Religion, going to the Holy Land for 10 days, and if you check their itinerary, they’re not covering any of the demos on Friday. They’re going to Yad Vashem that day, the Holocaust memorial. And Mount Herzl. 

I know this is not a political class per se, but is Yad Vashem religious? If you look at the front page of "Covering Religion," they’re covering Christian Zionists (the usual dodge for the Israel lobby) and the I/P "conflict."

I wonder if the blinders on the big story don’t have something to do with Ari Goldman’s close connection to a traditional Jewish community and the time he spent in Israel.

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Last night’s moving, silent protest outside the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan as Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi gave the keynote speech at the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces gala was powerful and inspiring.

I asked Dorothy Zellner, a founding member of Jews Say No!, whether the hundreds of people who showed up to march and the two dozen or so organizations who co-sponsored the action was indicative of a larger shift in public opinion regarding Israel.

“Something about Gaza, so horrible, so horrific, has pushed a lot of people who were sitting on the fence over,” the long-time civil rights activist replied. But, she said, “Last year, even though it was after Gaza, it hadn’t penetrated. And mostly it hadn’t penetrated because Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, those weren’t in the news. But the Goldstone report,” changed things.

But Americans who solely read and watch corporate, mainstream media don’t know—about Goldstone, about the crimes of Israel, about why it is that there is a fundraiser on behalf of a foreign army in New York City, or that hundreds of people, including many Jews, were outraged enough to demonstrate against it. We have here—exemplified in last night’s demonstration—the makings of a global, diverse, and loud movement against Israeli apartheid and the occupation, and of a growing rift between Jews and the mainstream Jewish establishment on the question of Israel. Yet, there’s not a peep from the mainstream media.

The local papers in New York didn’t touch it. The Daily News, which is owned by ultra Zionist Mort Zuckerman, or the Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, didn’t feel the need to send a reporter to the Waldorf. The New York Times didn’t either. Nor did any other corporate publication, or MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. The list goes on and on. Instead, we’re stuck with Chris Matthews smiling with Joe Biden and Ethan Bronner in Israel, engaging in vapid conversation about a dead-end “peace process.”

Many outlets in Israel covered it, for god’s sake, another indication (as many others have said) of how constrained the American mainstream media conversation about Israel is.

It’s what I expect. Corporate media’s profit-model has no interest in social justice, nor do the advertisers behind their profit, nor do powerful media moguls who cozy up to those in power and who share their interests. And, particularly on this issue, we have the Israel lobby, and big journalists who march in lockstep with Israel.

Thankfully, we also have the Internet, where progressive, independent voices are being heard. Democracy Now!, Grit TV, and the Indypendent covered the protest in-depth, as did this site. Through the web, the Palestine solidarity movement, and the independent media who cover it, are circumventing mainstream media.

Photo above by Andrew.

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I felt nauseated when I heard that the big gesture by Joe Biden, in response to Israel announcing more settlements on his arrival in Jerusalem, was being late to dinner. Paul Woodward nails it:

The administration either needs to threaten to apply real pressure on the Israeli government, or, if it wants to confine itself to diplomatic gestures then it should do so under the tutelage of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In response to Israel’s latest contemptuous behavior, Biden could — he really could — have turned around and said adiós. He does after all belong to an administration that less than a year ago was advising Netanyahu to complete his “homework” on freezing settlements before it would be worth arranging a meeting.

I don’t think it would take that much by the U.S. government to break the Netanyahu coalition. Why not try? And yes, the U.S. are finally talking about a break in the special relationship; but Chris Matthews and the Washington Post both called East Jerusalem "disputed East Jerusalem." It’s not disputed. It’s annexed, unilaterally, in defiance of international law, the so-called future Palestinian capital.

Oh and here’s Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post saying it’s Biden’s mistake, and Obama doesn’t know how to reassure the Israelis.

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Notice how the mainstream press (Time Magazine) dissed the Israeli government and Bibi. This is new. Change that we can believe in (We hope):

Guardian:

It doesn’t seem to realise it, but Israel cannot afford to keep on behaving in this disobliging manner towards its friends. Whether it is blatant disregard for international rules concerning the protection of civilian life, as in Gaza; whether it is calculated insults aimed at neighbours, as with Turkey; or whether it is the theft of passports and identities from friendly countries and the lawless assassination of its enemies, as in Dubai, it goes too far.

Tony Karon in Time:

Biden made no secret of his pique. He reportedly kept Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for 90 minutes before arriving at a scheduled dinner (a harsh slap-down in the vocabulary of diplomatic protocol) and issued a stern statement condemning the planned construction and accusing Israel of "undermining the trust we need right now" to relaunch peace talks.

Time’s blog:

The press pool following Biden reports that the Vice President showed up 90 minutes late for dinner with Netanyahu, and that reporters were wondering if he would show up at all.

Even the New York Post is honest about the "slap." Oh but look at today’s Pravda, the New York Times: smiling Bibi and Biden (photo) and a caption that downplays the tension and rift between Israel and the US.

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Astonishing interview of the Corrie family, mom Cindy, dad Craig, and sister Sarah Corrie Simpson, by Amy Goodman, just before they left for the civil suit trial that’s taking place in Israel this week. Baird portion is halfway down. Also Craig’s meeting with Obama in Iowa. Obama knew the name Rachel Corrie, who died in Rafah, Gaza, seven years ago next week. Of course.

Cindy Corrie:

She went—she chose to go to Gaza, to Rafah particularly, because she felt that it was maybe the most forsaken part of the Occupied Territories. It was where she felt her focus and attention was needed. She was there for about seven weeks. She was working, doing a lot of things during the time. Part of what she was doing was writing back and informing us about what she was seeing. And her words have since been incorporated into a play, and her writing from there is in a book of her work….

The home that Rachel stood in front of that day had two families in it—two brothers, an accountant and a pharmacist, and their five young children. Craig and I have come to know that family. We visit them whenever we go. We have communications with them. Part of the family came to the United States. The Israeli government had nothing against this family. They allowed them to go to Tel Aviv in order to get their visa to come to the United States to travel with us in the year 2005. And yet, their home was destroyed without any, you know, accommodation of any sort and under great threat to the family, as well. It didn’t happen the day Rachel stood there; it happened later that year.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Rachel standing there that day, what did she decide to do? What happened that day?

CINDY CORRIE: I think Rachel knew that Reem and Iman, that Kareem, that those children were behind that wall. She had been helping them with their English homework and with their—they were helping her learn Arabic. She had slept at the foot of their parent’s bed, because they couldn’t sleep in their own bedroom because of the shots that would be fired through the wall as Israeli military equipment drove past the house. So she slept at the foot of the family’s—the parent’s bed with the other children to offer some international protection to that family.

The bulldozer was coming toward their house, and she knew that the kids and the parents were behind her. I don’t think there’s any way that—you know, I think she also believed that the bulldozer would stop.

 Goodman: I asked Rachel’s father Craig to lay out the particulars of the court case.

CRAIG CORRIE: This is a culmination, really, of seven years of our family searching for some sort of justice in the killing of Rachel. And we’ve tried to do that through diplomatic means, and we’ve asked for a US-led investigation into Rachel’s killing. We also understand that the Israelis, through Prime Minister Sharon, promised President Bush a thorough, credible and transparent investigation of Rachel’s killing. But, by our own government’s measure, that has not happened. So we’re left with simply a civil lawsuit.

So, we’re accusing the state of Israel of either intentionally killing Rachel or guilty of gross negligence in her killing seven years ago. And so, we’re seeking—the only thing you can seek in a civil case is damages. You know, so it’s really a very small part of the story that’s gone on in our lives. But it’s critical to have our time in court.

AMY GOODMAN: Cindy Corrie, speaking of blocking information, the Palestinian doctor who first treated your daughter, who first treated Rachel, is not being allowed out of Gaza to testify? Is that right?

CINDY CORRIE: That’s our understanding at this point. We were alerted by our attorney, really about a week or so ago, that the Israeli government seemed to be dragging its feet about having our eyewitnesses. We have four international eyewitnesses. There were seven on the scene when Rachel was killed. Four will be coming to testify. Our attorney told us that the Israelis were not agreeing to let them into Israel. We sought help from the US government, from the State Department, and from our ambassador. And subsequently, the four international eyewitnesses have been given approval to come, and they will be entering the same day that we are.

But the doctor, who’s in Gaza, who was with Rachel at the end of her life, or soon after, who administered to her there in Gaza in the hospital, was called as a witness on our side, and the Israeli government has not yet approved entry for him. He also could testify, we hoped, by video conference. That’s what’s been offered, and they have not agreed either to having him come into Israel or to testify by video conference. And we are pursuing that. We know that Ambassador Cunningham has also been pursuing this with Israeli officials.

AMY GOODMAN: The US ambassador to Israel?

CINDY CORRIE: The US ambassador to Israel, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s been pushing for the Palestinian doctor to be able to testify.

CINDY CORRIE: To be able to testify by video conference, yes….

CRAIG CORRIE: It was. It’s our first meeting within—actually in the State Department in June of 2003, and we were discussing trying to get an independent investigation. And Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Larry Wilkerson, so chief of staff to Colin Powell, turned to me, and he said, “If it was my daughter, I’d sue them. I don’t care about money. I wouldn’t care about anything. I would sue the state of Israel.” And we were surprised—

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: And I think that was reiterated.

CRAIG CORRIE: —but ended up doing it.

… AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, this is your first time in Israel?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: Yes, it is. It will be my first time in Israel. And honestly, I wish that there would have been a way for me to go without the focus being entirely on the trial, because, you know, I do feel like I need to get a chance to experience a little bit of the culture, meet some of the people. And I’m sure there’ll be some opportunity, but the focus is entirely on the trial at this time, and, you know, it’s a difficult time for our family because of that.

I also—one of my main purposes in going was just, personally, I wanted to be able to hear the IDF’s side of the story. We were asked very early on whether or not we would want to meet any of the military that were involved in killing Rachel, and I’ve always said, “Yes, that’s true.” I’ve told our US government that if given the opportunity to meet the bulldozer driver, that’s something I would want to do. I know it would be very difficult and very challenging, but I think it’s a step that I would have to be open to. And now I feel like it’s been a real violation that in the time that it was set to go to see those soldiers hopefully testify, hopefully they would be called, that that opportunity is not going to be available to me. And I don’t know whether or not I’ll be able to travel back when the government presents its side. So, you know, it’s going to be a challenging time when we’re there.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know, Craig, if the man who drove the bulldozer will be there?

CRAIG CORRIE: We don’t know that. If he comes, it’ll be because the state calls him as a witness, and that’ll allow our attorney to cross-examine him. And we certainly hope that he comes. As Sarah alludes, I mean, there’s another way to handle some of this. We would like to meet that person.

There are lots of victims, Amy, when you look at a war and what happens. And we lost Rachel, and that hurts every day, but that bulldozer driver lost a lot of his humanity when he crushed Rachel. We’re told by B’Tselem, for instance, that in 2004, I believe, the highest—the cause, proportionately, of deaths in the Israeli soldiers, the highest one is suicide. There’s a big toll to soldiers. And I guess I have to hold out my hand, in some way, that if that man could understand what he’s done, in terms of our loss, if he could mourn our loss of Rachel, I could mourn his loss of humanity.

There’s a lot of steps, as Sarah says, that would have to happen that way. But yeah, I’d like to meet him. And it’s not about trying to put him in jail. It doesn’t do me any good if his children don’t have a father, if he has children. But some way, like Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society, and I think it’s more like a wound in your arm, and to expect that one half of a wound would heal and the other half stay unhealed is impossible. Both halves have to heal….

AMY GOODMAN: Before, then, I ask about Biden, OK, Craig, what did you ask—

CRAIG CORRIE: Well, actually, it’s a pretty—

AMY GOODMAN: —President-to-be Obama?

CRAIG CORRIE: Yeah, it was strange, because we were in Atlantic, Iowa, so western part of Iowa, farmland, huge farmland. We’re in county fairgrounds in a cow barn. And I’m sitting on a fence behind the crowd, and the President-to-be Obama is actually asking people for questions, and he called on me.

And so, I ask a very easy question, because I just simply said I have friends in Palestine whose homes are being destroyed, whose farms are being taken from them by the Israelis, with no compensation. And I also have—and it’s true—I have Israeli friends who have lost family members in suicide bombings and stuff. So what could he do to protect the farms of my friends in Palestine and also assure my friends in Israel that there wouldn’t be any more suicide bombings? And then I told him why I was interested in the case and about Rachel’s killing there. And he recognized the name Rachel Corrie. He was familiar with that without an aide or his wife or somebody explaining it to him.

And so, he went on about five minutes talking about what was necessary, and essentially a two-state solution is what he said, for that and giving his commitment to a viable, contiguous state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel, living in peace and dignity and having a future for their people. So it was pretty much a standard US stated foreign policy, not actually the foreign policy we often pursue and enforce, but what we state, and a pretty good answer. And he went on, like I say, for about five minutes. It was very personal.

AMY GOODMAN: So back to Joe Biden. Talk about the questioning—

CINDY CORRIE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —that he did of the—

CINDY CORRIE: Well, it was also during the Iowa campaign, with my Iowa family members. Rachel’s case was brought to his attention in quite a large way. He was asked repeatedly about her case. And he did become interested. He finally said he wanted to see what was going on. And we know—we have copies of questions that he then submitted to Ambassador-Designate—the American ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, who now is the Israeli ambassador, questions that he asked about Rachel’s case. He asked about what had been done in the State Department and in the embassy in Tel Aviv to pursue a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. And he also asked whether or not they thought that there had been a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. Clearly, getting this is important to officials in the US government.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did James Cunningham answer?

CINDY CORRIE: He laid out the steps that had been taken in pursuit of a transparent investigation and the communications that have occurred between the Department of State and Israel about the case and indicated that they have continued to ask the Israelis to answer questions and to comply with a thorough, credible and transparent investigation….

CRAIG CORRIE: When we’re talking about US officials and US government showing some interest in this case, Congressman Brian Baird, who is our congressman and was the congressman for Rachel when she was killed—and it was his office that we were right after Rachel was killed. He has now written a letter to the judge and is asking that he be able to testify in the case, come to Israel overnight, but he needs that to be—him to be heard on either Sunday the 21st or Monday the 22nd, because, of course, there are votes in Congress and all that. But it’s pretty amazing to me that a US congressman would be willing to take a redeye to Israel, come and testify, and then pop back onto a redeye back to Washington, DC. And, you know, my thanks go out to the congressman. I hope he’s allowed to do that. But his willingness to do it is just flooring to me.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting. He also went to Gaza, right?

CINDY CORRIE: He did.

AMY GOODMAN: Along with Keith Ellison, the congressman.

CRAIG CORRIE: Three times ago. He just got back, actually, a couple of weeks ago from his third trip to Gaza. And so, you can see, with him, because he’s somebody that we now have, you know, had personal contact with over a number of years. And he got there and saw, you know, worse than what Rachel saw, but he got there and saw it, and it was, as his chief of staff said, life-changing. And you can see that in what he writes and says about it.

…SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: One of my frustrations in all the work that we did in Congress was that I think we thought, in the initial days after Rachel was killed, if the US government took a very strong stance against her killing, that perhaps it would have given some more protection to the others—I mean, to US citizens that are traveling in that region. And what we know is that shortly after Rachel was killed, Tom Hurndall, who was a British peace activist, was killed in the same two-mile stretch of Rafah, Gaza. Then there was James Miller, who was a British reporter that was also shot and killed in that same two-mile stretch. On the US side, we had Brian Avery in the West Bank, who was severely injured when he was shot in the face by the IDF. And now we have Tristan Anderson. And some of the frustration was that if there was accountability in Rachel’s case, I wonder how many of those other cases would not have happened.

I do like to point out that in the case of the British citizens, that the British government took a very strong stance against those killings. In the case of Tom Hurndall, they actually managed to get a criminal conviction. And much of that came by the work of the family and the work of the UK government to put pressure on Israel to do a credible investigation. In the case of James Miller, that criminal process did not occur. It was very similar to our case. They closed the case without bringing charges. But the British government continued to push so that there would be basically a damages claim. I believe that it was about $2.4 or $2.5 million to that family. And I don’t think it’s about the dollar figure, but it’s about saying that there was something very wrong that went on in that case. Iain Hook was another British citizen that they did not get—he was killed, as well, and they did not get a criminal conviction in that case. But again, that damages claim does say that the [UK] government believed that there should be accountability in that case.

And I just think that the US government certainly has the ability to push for the rights of their citizens and the safety of their citizens as hard as the UK government does. And I think both President Obama and Vice President Biden would understand that and want to make sure that the safety of the US citizens that are traveling in Gaza and the West Bank is the highest priority, when we’re over there.

AMY GOODMAN: The anniversary of Rachel’s death will be taking place in the midst of the trial. Trial begins March 10th. Her death occurred on March 16th. What are you calling on people to do?

CINDY CORRIE: We’re calling on people to be visible on March 16th, calling for accountability in Rachel’s case, but also making the linkages between accountability for her and the lack of accountability that’s occurred in—particularly with Gaza, with what happened in Operation Cast Lead in December of 2008 and January of 2009, but really for all of the acts of violence against Palestinians and others in the Occupied Territories.

And we’re also calling for attention to the assault on nonviolent human rights observers and activists that continues in various ways. There are Palestinians, now a growing number of Palestinians, who have died in nonviolent protests to the wall in the West Bank. People can find their names, I think, by going to the International Solidarity Movement website.

AMY GOODMAN: The separation wall.

CINDY CORRIE: The separation wall. And sometimes I read the list of those names. Palestinians resist nonviolently in many different ways. But this is in nonviolent protest to the wall.

And also, I think it’s important for people to make the link between our ability to access the Israeli courts and the fact that Palestinians have really little opportunity to do that. We understand that currently Palestinians who want to operate in the courts or to take their cases to the courts have to put a bond forward of something between twenty and fifty thousand dollars in order to bring a suit. And this is, of course, very prohibitive to them to be able to do that.

B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch and other organizations have talked about the impunity that the Israeli military enjoys because of lack of accountability through the courts and in other ways. And I hope that people will be visible to say, “We’ve had enough of this,” and to call for accountability for Rachel, but to link it to these other larger issues.

CRAIG CORRIE: Amy, one other very specific thing that people could do, and I’m calling for people to do—the US government has come out against the blockade or the continued occupation and siege on Gaza. The children that were behind the wall that Rachel stood in front of are still under a state of siege. And I think that, very specifically, people around the world and certainly in this country could write, call or fax the White House and say, not only should we be working to have the Israelis lift that siege, but if they continue to be unwilling to do so, then the United States should come in there, work out a way that they could come in and—the Berlin airlift, it sent a message to the world about our ability to protect people around the world and our willingness to do so. If we did something similar by sea to the Gaza Strip, it would change the view of Americans around the world for maybe another fifty years. It is something that’s doable, and it’s something that the people out, your fans, could actually physically do and ask the White House to do that.

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People are talking excitedly about a big new paper on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, coming out of the "Global Forum on Anti-Semitism,"a conference organized by the Israeli government. The paper is evidently authored by Israel lobbyists Mitchell Bard and Gil Troy, here it is:

BDS Working Group Final draft

I say excitedly because the authors admit they can’t defend their position in the west– settlement and occupation are indefensible. Well for now, anyway! Maybe not after the next big war?

In the current climate, Israel advocates are always going to lose a fight over settlements and occupation, or at best get mired in stalemate. BDS shifts the terrain, making the battle one over Israel’s right to exist, over the legitimacy of Zionism, over the anti-Semitic tropes shaping the anti-Israel movement, and the rank anti-Semitism behind the disproportionate, obsessive focus on Israel.

So they need to smear the messenger with wild mischaracterizations of BDS: that it is connected to Islamists, and that the campaign is well funded, and that it is linked to 9/11. Why not Saddam Hussein?

BDS is also part of the broader Islamist strategy to undermine the West. Especially in North America, activists need to understand how positions they are taking are aiding the same people who support shooting up Fort Hood, trying to down commercial jets on Christmas, and succeeded in killing nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001.

These people are in total denial that the boycott movement is a growing grassroots effort in response to Israeli intransigence and international compliance with same.

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Pesach is right around the corner. And while Israel will go through the motions of the holiday, it won’t reach the spirit of Passover. Why?

Israel has lost its moral compass.

I’m not talking about Gaza, the Occupation, or 1948, although the expulsion of the Palestinians is where Israel’s steps first foundered. With Pesach in mind, I’m talking about how Israel is treating the strangers in its land.

The Oz Unit, an arm of the immigration police, is on the streets now cracking down on illegal residents and those that employ them. The campaign, part of Israel’s ongoing attempt to rid the country of non-Jewish foreigners, has been given the revolting name "Clean and Tidy", evoking images not of law enforcement but of ethnic cleansing.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Oded Feller, an attorney with the Association of Civil Rights in Israel remarked, “The state authorities are of course entitled to enforce the law; what we oppose is the disgraceful language that accompanies these sorts of operations. Human beings are not dirt.” 

The Jerusalem Post continued, "Feller said names like ‘Clean and Tidy’ incite hatred of foreigners, and added that it is shameful the government chooses such titles for its operations."

During Pesach, a holiday that commemorates the ancient Hebrews’ flight from oppressive conditions in Africa, we read the Exodus portion of the Torah, which includes the reminder: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt.” 

It is shameful to me that Israel will speak these words out of one corner of its mouth while saying "Clean and Tidy" with the other side. Rather than caring for the foreigners in our midst, as Judaism instructs us to, the state is attempting to sweep them away. Considered fair game for deportation are children who were born and raised in Israel, African refugees who have fled war and genocide, and foreign workers who have lost their visas simply because they are were victimized by the flying visa scam—which the government is aware of and does nothing to stop. 

This isn’t a state guided by Judaic values. 

The Conversion Law, currently making its way through Knesset, also flies in the face of Jewish tradition. Under the proposed legislation, some converts—people who were once strangers but now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Jewish people—will no longer have a home in Israel. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the bill includes a provision stating that those "who convert in Israel will only receive automatic citizenship if they were entitled to immigrate under the Law of Return." 

This means that even those who convert in Israel, under the auspices of an Orthodox rabbi, would still need to prove that they have at least one Jewish grandparent.

Taken together, the message of the "Clean and Tidy" campaign and the Conversion Law is loud and clear: whether you are a stranger past or present, you aren’t welcome in the land of Israel. Unless you meet her increasingly stringent ethnic standards.

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Often these days I hear people talk about how much progress the left has made in breaking open the Israel/Palestine issue in the U.S., and yes I make this claim myself, but last night offered clear evidence that we are doing so. At the behest of 20-odd peace groups, several hundred people marched around the Waldorf Astoria silently as the Israeli military held a million-dollar fundraiser inside. Now and then donors in black tie got out of cabs, but here we were in single file, most of us wearing black, stretching all the way round the hotel and holding signs naming 5-year-olds who were slaughtered in Gaza.

My guess is there were 700 of us. "We are marching single file in a silent, dignified, slow procession," our organizers had written on the slips of paper they handed out, and though they couldn’t stop us talking, we did as they planned for two hours as night fell. Slide show here.

The night was memorable for two things: the looniness of the counterdemonstators and a conversation I had about the possible end of Israel with a soulful Jewish friend.

The counterdemonstrators were unhinged angry. One of them followed people up and down the line talking about the training of three-year-old suicide bombers. Another screamed about the Arab countries being all dictatorships. Another said, "you don’t care what happens in Sudan, you don’t care when Assad senior kills 3000 people in Syria. [30 years ago!] No you only care when Israel was trying to defend itself." "You’re not liberals," an older guy in a suit kept shouting. A woman carried a sign with a Muslim crescent = a Swastika. Wow, creepy. A woman wrapped herself in an Israeli flag big as a bedsheet and tagged along with us for a while. The official sign of the counters was Hamas Is Destroying the Palestinian Future. A crazy statement, at many levels, beginning with the idea that Israel has no agency.

A friend said that the counterdemonstrators were getting aneurysms from the fact that we were so silent and in such abundance with our black signs saying "Israeli soldiers shot handcuffed civilians," "Israeli forces destroyed the Gaza water plant."

Their biggest signs asserted, "Israel has a right to exist and be secure." Or, "Israel has a right to exist and it is here to stay." So that is the ground they are choosing to fight on: the delegitimization issue.

That brings me to my conversation with my soulful Jewish friend. A couple years ago he told me he is a post-Zionist out of politeness, because he doesn’t want to take away the feeling of achievement that Jews in Israel have about what they created, and he understands the urgency that Israel came out of a generation ago. But tonight he told me he has very bleak feelings about the future. Israel is in crisis, and two states is over; and on the one hand he believes Israel will undertake a total ethnic cleansing operation, on the other that the South Africa declension is begun, and it won’t happen peacefully.

I said What if they have a handshake on the White House lawn, will you get behind that? He looked at me like I was crazy, then got a delighted smile. When that happens, I’ll give you an opinion, he said. Then: What could it be? I said, well, landswaps, warmed-over Geneva; that’s what Obama will announce.

Oh, he said, a deal with a bankrupt leadership for three Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza? That will last another generation, and there will be no peace.

I said, how do you imagine the binational state comes about? He laughed and said he hadn’t really thought about it. But at best it is like South Africa and an Israeli leader understands that they have no choice. There is an internal crisis of national identity, there is no way forward, and they give in and say, let us give these people equal rights.

Sort of consociational, I thought, two federated entities? He shrugged. As more and more Jews leave and move to the west it becomes a mixed state, he said.

My friend was talking just like Henning Mankell, who sees the insurrection beginning from within, and also like a lot of Israelis who are trying to be creative now about civil outcomes.

I reflect that Noam Chomsky, who is for the two state solution, used to say that Israel has a right to exist but not on the land of its neighbors. It was a legitimate position for a long time, but you can’t promise people something forever, and Israel won’t disgorge that land and the Palestinians have balked at a piecemeal Jerusalem, and the world moves forward. I give the two state solution air time on this site, because I’m openminded and because I like status and power politics, but in spite of Chris Matthews and Ethan Bronner indulging happy-talk about the solution, it sure looks like the 25 years of the two state solution are over, the Palestinians helped kill it and so did the Israelis.

A lot of folks I know believe in Israel’s right to exist as much as China’s right to exist or Pakistan’s or John Gotti’s. I do myself. The problem is that the continued failure to base that existence on policies other than permanent war and ethnic cleansing means that American political support must be at stake, and as anyone who has set foot in West Jerusalem can tell you, American opinion is the ballgame. Some said there were 1000 of us last night, and what we stand for is pretty obvious: No more slaughter, no more Jim Crow, no more In-our-name (the lobby). 

The Jewish state has not figured out a way to be without Jim Crow and the lobby to grant it immunity, and so it is slowly destroying its raison-d’etre in the liberal discourse. That is what last night was about: 1, a wide consensus among progressives, many of them the Israel base (Jews) that we will condemn this behavior—-and 2, the resultant fear on the part of Israel’s supporters that our views are catching on, and that this grassroots process is undermining Israel’s legitimacy.

So the existential crisis has come here. Through its own actions, Israel is destroying the ground it stands on. The answer to the big sign is, Israel is not secure, it is casting away its own means of existence, it is not here to stay. Sorry but that is the news. The ultimate business of this site and the Jewish left too is to help those who were committed to Zionism out of a belief in the endurance of anti-semitism and the need for Jewish nationalism amid other nationalisms to understand that the moment is over, and that they should support other outcomes in the name of liberal democracy. The presence of Jews Say No and 20-odd other groups outside the Waldorf, as warmongers dined, suggests that there will be a lot of creative thinking towards those ends.

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