What Should Be Done in Palestine

Israel Shamir’s Talk at the Ankara Conference…

Dear Turkish friends and fellow guests from abroad,

I am glad to speak again to you, the people of our great neighbour and former sovereign Turkey. Your latest developments inspire optimism. You are doing fine! Turkey is growing stronger and more independent; your leaders’ obsession with joining the European Union has been exorcised. You have restored the power of the parliament, bridled military excesses, streamlined your economy and improved relations with Syria and Iran. Turkey is no longer an American colony. You stopped joint air force exercises with Israel and the US. You expressed your clear anger over the horrors of Gaza. Now you pay more attention to the area where you live; you play an important role already and are destined to play an even greater role. So much depends on you! We feel it every day in Palestine.

I will not waste your time describing the horrors of Zionist rule in Palestine. You already know them, you’ve seen them on TV – dreadful pictures of burned schools and napalmed children, of the Gaza blockade, of check points, of night arrests. It is now exactly one year since the Jewish onslaught on Gaza, last year’s Christmas war which Israel began while the world was holidaying. Your president, Mr Gul, said a few days ago to our president, Mr Peres, that he will not visit Israel while the siege of Gaza continues, and that was a very good decision. Indeed, it is urgent to lift the Gaza siege, because no building materials are being allowed to enter Gaza for the repair of homes. Instead, the Israeli siege is being tightened with active help of Egypt. However beyond Gaza problem we must look for a bigger picture.

We are being told that the Gaza problem is that of Hamas intransigence, that it is Gaza’s own fault. If only Gaza wouldn’t embrace radical Islam, Israel would accommodate Gaza’s needs. Let us have a look outside of Gaza, at the West Bank’s jewel, el Bireh, the twin city of Ramallah, the seat of Israel-approved ruler Mahmud Abbas. This is a most prosperous city of wonderful villas with a lot of greenery and purring Mercedes cars, and a beautiful view. El Bireh decided to build a football stadium; they asked for money and they received funds from France, Germany and the World Football Association, FIFA. The football stadium was built within the city of el Bireh’s limits. Immediately, the Israeli court ruled: the stadium must be destroyed, because it is within the eyesight of a Jew.

Do you understand this? Mahmud Abbas is the most compliant Palestinian leader now or ever; he is doing everything that Israel asks. His police kindly retreat when Israeli security jeeps drive into his cities to arrest whomever they wish. He arrests every activist who speaks against Israeli excesses. He even fired the most senior Palestinian diplomat, Dr. Afif Safieh, the former ambassador to Washington, London, Vatican and Moscow because he spoke out against the Israeli war on Gaza. Every Islamist, every supporter of Islam in the West Bank is (or was) in Abbas’ jail. Abbas is an implacable enemy of radical Islam. You can’t be more conciliatory towards Israel than Mahmud Abbas. And still, he can’t even build a stadium for kids to kick ball in his own city, because the Jews will not allow it.

So, although Gaza is in a dreadful situation, the problem is not only Gaza. Islam or not Islam is not even a question we should be pondering. It makes no difference. Islamists are in Abbas’ jail, yet Abbas can’t even build a stadium. Stadium, not medreseh. Fatah member Marwan Barghuti and leftist PFLP leader Ahmed Sadat are in Israeli jails together with Hamas MPs.

The problem is the Jewish state. Not only does it besiege Gaza and destroy a football stadium in el Bireh. These are local problems, painful but local. The Jewish state focuses Jewish power all over the world into action. Without a Jewish state, this power would disperse; it would remain local, it would remain chaotic, probably it would be subdued by the forces of assimilation. Israel focuses these chaotic forces and concentrates them into action.

This action is against Islam. Not only against Islam, but Dar ul Islam (the Islamic world) is a prime target. In the US, the Jewish Neocons led their country into a crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan; now they are spearheading the push against Iran. They have formed a powerful front against President Obama and have turned him into a laughing stock after he uttered a few words of wisdom about Palestine. In Europe, if you inspect the coffers of anti-Muslim neo-Nazi groups, you’ll find that they thrive on Jewish support. In Russia, Jewish nationalists and Zionists try to rally the Russians against their Muslim brethren. Sometimes they do it under cover of the Russian Church, or of Russian nationalism. I wrote about this recently, as I had discovered that the most fervently anti-Muslim forces in Russia are organised by crypto-Zionists.

Even if a Palestinian state were to be established and recognised, it wouldn’t stop Israeli attempts to undermine its neighbours, to bomb Iran, to sow the seeds of discord from Russia to France, from Turkey to India. Israel’s too powerful intelligence services would keep meddling. Neither would it neutralise the armed forces of Israel, and you know as well as anybody that the generals do not give up their toys, their privileges or their influence easily. The Israeli military machine is so powerful that it would seek to exercise its might. Remember the Israel-Egypt peace treaty: when it was concluded, the first thing Israel did was invade Lebanon.

The bad influence of Zionism on Jews all over the world would not vanish in case of a “two states’ solution. In 1920, Winston Churchill published an article (Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, pg 5) titled: «Zionism or Bolshevism». (http://www.library.flawlesslogic.com/ish.htm ). There he noted that many Jews tend to embrace the cause of social equality (for him it was “impossible equality”), and the best way to stop by far too dynamic and powerful Jews from promoting equality is to infect them with Zionism. His project was supported by the might of the British Empire and by money of wealthy anti-equality Jews. Zionism won. Equality was defeated. If we defeat Zionism, equality will have another chance. And a two states’ solution will not defeat Zionism.

In short, even if Mahmud Abbas’s dream of limited independence were to be realised, it wouldn’t be good enough for the region, and it wouldn’t be good enough for the world: Israel in its form of Jewish-supremacist state can’t become a peaceful neighbour.

Supremacism leads to wars. Only a democratic state, the successor of Israel and the PNA, would be able to live in peace. Compare it to South Africa: as long as it was a white-supremacist state, it was the source of warfare and trouble all over Africa. After its supremacism was exorcized, it became peaceful. In the same vein, independent Palestine would be just another Bantustan of the type rightly rejected by South Africans.

But I do not think that even this very limited cause of limited independence for Palestine is likely to be achieved. We have been told – for sixteen years! – that there is a peace process that will lead to a “two states solution”. This is a fairy tale. If the Jews will not allow even the most loyal and obedient of el Bireh’s kids to play football, do you think they will allow them to have an independent state? Why would they?

The Jews write frequently of how they envisage Palestinian independence. (I refer here to the most enlightened left-wing Jewish politicians!) They speak of a Palestine broken into a few enclaves surrounded by a wall and barbed wire, its airspace and all of its borders controlled by Israel; its water to remain under Jewish control. And this is the best they can dream of.

If you want to have Two States, it can happen only if the Jews plead for it like they did in 1947. They did so then, and they will do so again only if they feel that the alternative, a single democratic state for all inhabitants of Palestine, is on the table. This is what they are afraid of: full democracy, full equality in the whole of the land. So even for practical reasons, we should call, not for independence of some partitioned bits and pieces, but for the whole lot: Let Palestine be united, let all of its inhabitants have equal rights, and afterwards they can discuss two states for ever and ever. The first thing is equality, the rest can wait.

Speaking frankly, this mythic Two State Solution can’t even be envisaged. Jews and Palestinians live all over Palestine, and they can’t be physically separated without a huge turmoil that would remind us of 1921 in Turkey and Greece, with Turks leaving Salonika and Greeks leaving Smyrna. This is not something one would like to see happen.

The West gave Nansen his Nobel Peace prize for the transfer of Greeks and Turks. In my view, this was a terrible calamity, never to be repeated. Partitions are awful; it is like sawing a living man into two parts. Nor is it necessary. Greeks and Turks could live together as they did for four hundred years; separation did nothing good for them. Separation of Israelis and Palestinians would be equally evil.

Now, Zionists often remind Turks of your so-called “Kurd problem”. This comparison is wrong, because every Kurd in Turkey has Turkish citizenship and has all the rights every Turkish citizen has; while Palestinians usually have no citizenship of the state of Israel and enjoy no rights. But in one sense this comparison is right: it is impossible to separate Kurds from Turkey, because people of Kurdish descent live everywhere from Diyarbakir to Istanbul. Likewise, it is impossible to separate Palestinians from the immigrant populations which are called “Jews”.

Indeed, the whole story of Palestine is a story of immigrants taking over a country. Such things happen: immigrants from Britain took over North America and Australia. This is a sad thing, but it happened. Now it is not realistic to hope that they will sail back to England – they won’t. It is wrong to try and create an “independent state” for the native Americans – such independent states are called “reservations”. The right answer is equality for native and immigrant alike. Some Jews would complain that they want a state of their own. We shall answer them: you have built on sand, and a house built on sand can’t stand forever. If you want a state of your own without anybody else, find yourself a lonely uninhabited island. Palestine was, and is, populated; the best you can wish is to be equal citizens in Palestine with everybody else.

I spoke about this solution in the year 2001, when our country was torn by intifada al Aksa. It was right then, and it is right now. At that time I said: there is no other solution but a one-state solution. People, and even good people, activists, friends of Palestine said: no, we are very close to the two states’ solution. I did not believe it then, I do not believe it now. There is only one good way out, and that is the way of equality and democracy, of deconstructing the Jewish state by forcing it to give full rights to all Palestinians under its rule.

So this is the goal we should strive for: full equality and integration of Palestine and Israel, South African style. Nothing less.

This does not mean that there is nothing to be done until that moment. Turkey can do a lot even now, even today, beyond expressions of solidarity. The Jewish state is a horrible example of injustice gone unpunished. For instance, an Israeli officer Captain R murdered a 13-year old girl, Iman al Hams. He shot her within eyesight of his soldiers and said that even a three-year-old Palestinian should be killed if she comes close to Jewish positions. The Jewish court absolved Captain R of all guilt; the Israeli Army promoted him to major and another court awarded him damages for the mere discussion of his crime. Last week, yet another Jewish judge gave another huge compensation to the same murderer.

Turkey, as the former ruler of Palestine, could fill in the void of justice by bringing this Captain R to trial. Sooner or later he will leave the sanctuary of the Jewish state and travel somewhere for a holiday. A Turkish warrant for his arrest should await him wherever he goes. And not only him, but the Jewish ‘judges’ who covered up his crime and became accessories after the murder should be tried too. This is not a job for amateurs, but for a state with all its tools. If present Turkish law does not allow for this, let the law be updated by taking a leaf from the Israeli book. According to Israeli law, if a Turk does wrong to a Jew in Turkey, he may be snatched, arrested, tried and punished in Israel. Turkey should introduce a symmetrical law, covering offences against Palestinians who otherwise are not protected by law.

Turkey could also take the initiative to stop the still looming Israeli-American aggression against Iran. If they do take Iran, Turkey will be encircled and cut off. The fate of Palestine also depends on the fate of Tehran.

My New Year’s wish to you: be yourself, be Turks, and live in harmony and friendship with your neighbours, with Russia, Iran, Syria, Greece and with all the successor states of the Ottoman Empire. You are needed for the world and for Palestine.

The American-Israeli War on Gaza

One year ago today, Israel launched “Operation Cast Lead”, a murderous full-scale military assault on the small, densely populated, and defenseless Gaza Strip. The operation resulted in the massacre of over 1,300 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians, including hundreds of children.

This includes only those killed directly by military attacks. The actual casualty figure from Israel’s policies towards Gaza, including the number of deaths attributable to its ongoing siege of the territory, is unknown.

The official pretext for the operation given by Israel and parroted unquestioningly in the Western media is that Israel had to respond with force as an act of self-defense against to an onslaught of rocket attacks against southern Israel from Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.

Even if this were true, nations acting in self-defense against armed attacks must respect international law designed to protect civilians in time of war. Israel flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties governing the use of force during the course of its operation, committing numerous war crimes.

But the stated pretext itself does not stand up to scrutiny. Six months prior to the assault on Gaza, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Under the terms of the truce agreement, Hamas would end its rocket attacks against Israel and Israel would similarly cease attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and lift its siege on the territory.

Hamas, for its part, lived up to its obligations under the truce. It fired no rockets into Israel and actively pressured other groups to similarly refrain from launching attacks.

Israel, on the other hand, never lived up to its obligations under the truce. From the beginning, Israel declared a “security zone” on Gaza’s side of the border and Israeli soldiers repeatedly violated the truce by firing at Palestinians, guilty of merely trying to access their own land.

Israel also never eased its siege of Gaza. Israel controlled (and continues to control) the borders of Gaza, its airspace, and its coast, and implementing a near total blockade, including preventing by force the delivery of humanitarian goods into the territory.

Rather than easing the siege, Israel continued to let in only minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies (a practice that also continues today), just enough to prevent a total humanitarian catastrophe, thus keeping the population of Gaza in a state of despair and on the verge of human limits, with untold consequences on the health and mental well-being of the Palestinians.

The complete breakdown of the truce agreement came on November 4, when Israel launched airstrikes and a ground incursion into Gaza, killing four Palestinians. This violation of the cease-fire resulted in its effective undoing.

Israel’s official reason for the attack was its claim that militants were digging a tunnel under the border. The more credible explanation, however, was that Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into launching rockets and thus to claim a pretext for the full-scale military assault that Israel had, at that time, by its own account, already been planning.

Indeed, from the beginning of the truce, it appeared Israel’s intent was to provoke a violent response in order claim a pretext for its military assault. While Hamas scrupulously observed the cease-fire, Israel took deliberate actions to undermine it. Besides those already noted, Israel also stepped up operations against Palestinians in the West Bank, such as the assassination of members of Islamic Jihad shortly after the announcement of the truce.

Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza responded to that incident by firing rockets into Israel, but Hamas criticized the attacks and pressured Islamic Jihad to cease, including with the threat of arrests, and the tenuous truce continued to hold, for a time.

A greater and more provocative action was necessary in order to completely undermine the truce, and Israel’s November 4 attack proved to be that action. From that day forward, the so-called “cease-fire” consisted of tit-for-tat attacks on a daily basis, with Israel launching repeated attacks on Gaza and Hamas and other militant groups launching rockets into Israel.

Israel had achieved the pretext it was looking for in order to gain the political cover necessary to wage its assault on the civilian population of Gaza.

And make no mistake; Operation Cast Lead was a war on a civilian population, an extremely murderous act of collective punishment.

The death toll itself stands as an undeniable testament to that, but the manner in which Israel waged its operation also leaves no doubt as to its true objective.

As already noted, Israel claims its operation was designed to end rocket attacks. In truth, it was Israel that deliberately violated and undermined the truce.

Israel also claims its operation was aimed at militants. As evidence of its respect for international law and extraordinary efforts to prevent the loss of innocent life, Israel notes the fact that it dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza prior to its operations warning civilians to flee the oncoming assault.

But the fact is this is not evidence of Israel’s respect for innocent life, but rather strong evidence that its killing of civilians was deliberate and intended. For starters, civilians, told to flee, had nowhere to go. No place in Gaza was safe from Israel’s attacks. Furthermore, in some cases civilians were told to go to city centers, and, after many had done so, those same locations were then purposefully bombed by Israel.

Israel’s claimed respect for innocent life is also belied by its means of indiscriminate warfare. Israel heavily bombarded civilian population centers. It deliberately and systematically targeted civilian locations with protected status under international law, including schools and hospitals.

Israel also used indiscriminate weaponry, including white phosphorus munitions. The use of white phosphorus is permitted under international law for illuminating the battlefield or creating smokescreens. However, its use as an incendiary weapon (it is also a chemical weapon, in that its incendiary effect is the result of a chemical reaction) is a violation of international law and a war crime, particularly when used indiscriminately against populated areas and civilian locations such as schools, as it was in Gaza.

Moreover, Israel, demonstrated extreme contempt for and defiance to the United Nations and the international community by deliberately targeting U.N. sites within Gaza. It targeted U.N. clinics, schools, and other compounds.

Israel attacked humanitarian convoys attempting to deliver much needed supplies to the desperate people of Gaza, and in other cases prevented medical teams, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from reaching victims of its assault, also a war crime.

Israel also deliberately targeted a U.N. warehouse where humanitarian supplies were being stored, attacking the site with white phosphorus munitions, resulting in the warehouse and goods inside catching fire and nearly burning to the ground.

All of these actions by Israel, all well documented and incontrovertible, constitute grave war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties of international law.

The U.S. Role

Israel’s contempt for innocent life, for the international community, and for international law is perhaps matched only by the U.S. willingness to support Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Simply stated, without U.S. support, none of this could go on.

The U.S. supports Israel financially. Aid to Israel is on the order of $3 billion a year. This money is given, unlike aid to other countries, with no strings attached, and with little to no oversight about how it is to be used.

Even if it is not used directly to finance Israeli policies and activities in violation of international law, such as its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, construction of settlements in the West Bank, construction of a its “separation barrier” within the West Bank, destruction of Palestinian homes and other property, killing of Palestinian civilians, etc., U.S. financial support allows Israel to free up other funding for these illegal activities. It effectively rewards Israel for criminal actions.

The U.S. supports Israel militarily. And military equipment provided by the U.S. is used by Israel for actions constituting war crimes under international law. The massacre in Gaza was carried out with the help of U.S.-provided Apache helicopter gunships, U.S.-provided F-16 fighter bombers, and U.S.-provided munitions, including white phosphorus and cluster munitions.

This military support to Israel is not only a violation of international law and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on member states not to provide material support for Israeli crimes, but it is also a violation of U.S. law. Besides international treaties such as the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions constituting “the supreme Law of the Land” under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law forbids the exporting of military equipment to countries that routinely violate international law and commit offenses against human rights. Yet U.S. military support for Israel continues unabated.

The U.S. supports Israel diplomatically. The principle means by which the U.S. does so is through the use of its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. While Israel was using U.S. military hardware to murder innocent Palestinians, the U.S. was actively trying to stall a cease-fire resolution to give Israel more time to carry out its assault. A watered-down version of the resolution was finally found acceptable to the U.S., which reportedly was ready to vote in favor, but after receiving a call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, while not going so far as to cast a veto, instead abstained rather than casting a vote for a resolution rightfully critical of Israel.

The Role of the U.S. Media

The U.S. mainstream corporate media also play a significant role in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and reporting on Operation Cast Lead provides a useful case study into the nature of its role. To describe U.S. media accounts of Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza as “biased” would be a sore understatement.

Take the reporting of the New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record” reporting “all the news that’s fit to print”. Arguably the most widely read and important newspaper in the world, what the Times reports is regularly picked up by other major media, with the newspaper effectively serving as a trend-setter for the news Americans consume. Its impact on the perceptions Americans have of conflicts such as Israel’s war on the civilian population of Gaza is enormous.

The New York Times’ reporting on Israel’s assault was reminiscent of its reporting on Iraq with respect to that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, prior to the initiation of the U.S. war of aggression against that country based on such lies and deceptions as then reported matter-of-factly by the Times.

Propaganda devices employed by the Times in this case, as in the case of Iraq, included the use of euphemisms and the selective reporting of facts.

For instance, although the Times did report initially on Israel’s November 4 violation of the truce, it exercised selective amnesia in its subsequent reporting and described only the “breakdown” of the cease-fire and thus failing to inform readers of the single identifiable causal factor for that “breakdown”.

Moreover, the Times accepted without scrutiny and parroted the official line from Israeli officials that its operation was launched in response to rocket attacks and the violation by Hamas of the truce, thus implicitly and falsely attributing the failure of the cease-fire to its violation by Hamas.

The Times repeatedly and consistently downplayed the true nature of Israel’s assault on Gaza. In one notable example, the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner wrote in an article that Palestinians had “claimed” that Israel was using white phosphorus munitions, employing this propaganda device to intentionally cast doubt in the mind of the reader as to the veracity of the so-called “claim”.

The truth is that Bronner knew perfectly well this was not a “claim”, but a known fact. He could just as well have written at that time that human rights organizations had criticized Israel for its known use of white phosphorus, rather than attributing it as mere a Palestinian “claim”.

By this time, although reporters were banned from entering Gaza, there was no question that Israel was doing so, including proof in photographs showing the unmistakable smoke trails and incendiary projectiles of white phosphorus being used over residential neighborhoods.

Remarkably, the same day Bronner’s article appeared, another article also appeared, written by his Palestinian colleague Taghreed El-Khodary, the Times’ only correspondent actually reporting from inside of Gaza, who reported on finding white phosphorus casings with markings showing that they were U.S.-made.

In El-Khodary’s reports from Gaza, one could find a more reliable account of what was actually happening on the ground, but even her articles were heavily edited and/or rewritten by the Times’ editorial staff, and it was the dishonest and propagandistic reporting of Bronner and his Jerusalem-based British-Israeli colleague Isabel Kershner that generally typified the nature of the Times’ reporting on the massacre.

Countless other examples abound, but it’s beyond the scope of this article and would be superfluous to continue to list them.

The Role of the American People

In short, Americans reading about the violence in U.S. newspapers or watching it on TV received a heavily distorted account of what was going down.

But this is no excuse for ignorance. The facts are known and available to every American with access to the internet. One may turn to the healthy alternative media in the U.S. One may turn to international media sources, including Israeli sources like the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, or Ynet (Yedioth Ahronoth online). One may turn to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, or the Israeli group B’tselem.

One may also turn to the report of the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry into the violence, headed up by the respected international jurist Richard Goldstone, who himself happens to be Jewish (a fact worthy of mention due to Israeli and U.S. charges that the report is biased; in another example of U.S. diplomatic support for Israeli crimes, the U.S. has actively sought to block implementation of its recommendations or any Security Council follow-up actions).

Goldstone himself has concluded that Israel’s actions were targeted at the civilian population of Gaza as an act of collective punishment, and his conclusion is well supported by his final report and the evidence it presents.

The facts are beyond dispute. The conclusions are obvious and incontrovertible. It is well past time that the American people wake up to the realities on the ground in the Palestinian territories. Many Americans already demonstrate the modicum of moral integrity required to speak out against their government’s support for Israeli crimes, but it is not enough.

Without massive public opposition to the U.S. policy of supporting Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, the crimes will continue. Israel will continue to act with impunity and continue to violate international law under U.S. cover.

The fact of the matter is that the American people have more power in their hands than any other body to bring about an end to the violence and to create the conditions for a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East.

Americans themselves may not realize this truth, but the international community well recognizes it. And the world is watching, and waiting.

Will the American people continue to turn their heads away and wash their collective hands of the affair, deceiving themselves into believing they have no responsibility for what goes on “over there” and that they have no influence to change things, anyway?

Or will the American people cast away ignorance and apathy and demonstrate intellectual honesty, moral integrity, compassion, and strength of will by standing up and acting to pressure their government to change its policies?

The answer to these questions remains to be seen. Only time will tell. In the meantime, the Palestinian people continue pay the price for the willingness of Americans to allow their government to pursue criminal policies contrary to their own interests and antithetical to the very principles of justice and humanity every American would like to think their country stands for.

To Schlep Them to Justice in Safety

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe (Bogi) Yaalon told Ynet yesterday that “when the Arabs realized they cannot defeat us with their armies, they turned to terrorism and rockets.” But they didn’t stop just there, “now they are realising that they cannot defeat us this way either, so they are taking the path of de-legitimization.” Yaalon, is a retired veteran IDF chief of staff. He knows pretty well that as things stand it is the IDF that didn’t win a single war since 1967. Yes it killed many, it starved millions but it didn’t win a single war. As if this is not enough, in 2006 the IDF was humiliated in Lebanon by a tiny para-military organisation namely the Hezbollah. In its last Gaza campaign, the IDF failed to achieve any of its military targets (destroying the Hamas leadership, dismantling its rocket launching capacity anf freeing a captive Israeli soldier). Considering the damage Operation Cast Lead inflicted on Israeli public relations, the IDF initiative better be seen as a total disaster.

Yaalon and his fellows retarded Hasbara campaigners better internalise the obvious fact: it is Israel’s actions that de-legitimize the Jewish state and the Zionist cause. It is the Israeli actions and Israel’s Jewish supportive lobbies that bring the level of Jew hatred to a new height. Israel is not that young anymore. It is 61 years old and it better starts to take responsibility for its actions.

Addressing the recent arrest warrant issued against former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in England, Yaalon said he warned former British Prime Minister Tony Blair more than two years ago about the “flawed policy in respect to arrest warrants against myself and other senior Israeli officials.”

Yaalon probably doesn’t realise how vulnerable Blair’s situation in Britain is at the moment. Blair is not exactly a name that buys legitimacy in this country at this point in time. In his interview Yaalon maintained “we need to tell the Brits that we’re in the same boat, as their commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly say.” Yaalon is partially correct. If to be precise, Blair, Ehud Barak, Olmert, Yaalon, and Livni are indeed pushed together in the same symbolic boat, the boat that may eventually dock in The Hague for a very long while.

However, Yaalon is totally mistaken thinking that Brits and Israelis are in the same boat or sharing the same fate. The truth of the matter is obvious: while 94% of the Israelis supported IDF brutality in Gaza, the Brits are extremely unhappy with the presence of their soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. This includes the general public, British military generals, politicians, cabinet ministers, intellectuals and artists. Tony Blair indeed launched an illegal war. He sent British soldiers to fight a Zionist war. At the time, his NO 1 fund-raiser was Lord Cashpoint Levy. Blair’s support in the media came from Hasbara Author David Aaronovitch and the enthusiastic interventionist Nick Cohen. Day by day we learn more about Tony Blair’s pretext for war. We read the revelations of aides coming forward at the Chilcot Inquiry.

I am not an expert in naval matters but looking at the mounting evidence against Blair, the Jewish Lobby and the Israeli leadership, I start to think that the boat may be just too overcrowded with so many rich Zionists, Israeli politicians and officers and one British PM. We may need a seriously big sea vessel, just to make sure we schlep them to justice in safety.

Walking about Jerusalem

[Review of Simon Goldhill’s book Jerusalem. City of Longing, published in a E. Michael Jones’ Catholic monthly Culture Wars]

Jerusalem is a wonderful city to walk about in, enjoying its perennial blue and high sky, its warm and pure mountain air, its cool and refreshing shade, its delicious water, – listening to the church bells and muezzin’s calls. I walk about in it almost every day, and the Old City shopkeepers and artisans call out to me: “Ahalan, Shamir!” They all know me because I am a guide, escorting discerning travellers about town. My lot is enviable: instead of shepherding an unruly busload of accidental tourists, I accompany families or single people who want to discover Jerusalem and find its hidden spiritual treasure. I am the first witness of their tears of joy as they leave the empty tomb of Christ. I comfort them in Gethsemane, and I share with them my excitement in the Noble Sanctuary. I walk the young through the narrow Siloam Tunnel, I sit with the mature in the Pasha Garden of the American Colony, and I drive all of them to the Mount of Olives.

We guides are quite a friendly lot, friendly to tourists and friendly to each other. It was my pleasure to review the guidebook Jerusalem: City of Longing written by Simon Goldhill, who for sure loves Jerusalem. This is his second book on the city; the first one dealt with the Jerusalem temple. I also wrote a book about the Holy Land, as many guides have done, so I am aware of the pitfalls. I do not know him personally, though his face looks rather familiar, with its nimbus of curly hair. He is a professor of Greek literature at Cambridge. And this is another feather in his cap in my eyes, for I happen to belong to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem and moreover, I had translated Homer’s Odyssey. His beautifully printed and impeccably designed book aims to explain Jerusalem to the not-very-religious visitor, and it provides quite pleasant reading material. It contains a wealth of interesting quotes and nice stories; the author is a man of learning who tries to be fair.

Regretably, the book is under-edited, often biased, and has too little religious feeling, or even understanding, of Christian sentiment towards Jerusalem. It is disappointing to find a physically perfect book so full of misleading misprints that even a superficial editing would have eliminated. The author writes: “Herod Agrippa extended the city walls in 414” – this should be in AD 41-44. Impossibly for a Professor of Greek, he misspells Pantakrator (should be Pantokrator). He is loose with references. He attributes to Golda Meir the battle-cry of the early Zionists “A land without a people for a people without a land”, which was actually coined some fifty years earlier by Israel Zangwill, if not by some earlier and more obscure personality.

The Holy Sepulchre

Goldhill’s description of the Holy Sepulchre is marred by his lack of religious feeling towards it. He brutally calls it “small, brown, and undistinguished as a duck.” (He finds the Wailing Wall, however, “an impressive edifice”). He quotes at length various 19^th century English Protestant visitors who disliked the church, a useful device for writers who do not dare to expose their own bigoted opinion. He finds it necessary to refer to the blessed saint and myrrh-bearer as “Mary Magdalene, the former prostitute”, language meant to offend. (Silly, too – there were no prostitutes before advent of capitalism, as a Cambridge professor should know.)

He is unfair to the beautiful and touching ceremony of the Holy Fire, celebrated on Easter Saturday according to the Julian calendar: “the reaction of the community is startling, even frightening”. I have participated in the ceremony many times, and have always found it uplifting and exciting, though frequently marred by the heavy-handedness of the Jewish police.

In the Holy Sepulchre, he notes that “one of the chants regularly heard in the 19th century was: Oh the Jews, your feast is the feast of devils [rather, ‘demons’ according to St John Chrysostom – ISH] and our feast is the feast of Christ”. Goldhill misses the point: in that century, the Christians and the Jews were two competing and quarrelling ancient minorities in a Muslim sea. Jews were as powerful, and often more powerful than the Christian communities, and the Jewish prayers (in the 19^th century as well as today) are at least equally offensive to Christians. For instance, the Jewish Paschal narrative includes a call for Divine vengeance to be poured on Christians and describes the Crucifix as an idol.

In the parvis of the Holy Sepulchre he asks the reader to remember “the fact that until 1967 no Jew was allowed even into the parvis.” A man of his – and our – time and place, Goldhill does not even understand that people may be serious about their religious feelings. A traditional believing Jew – and there were no other Jews until fairly recently – would never enter a church, including its parvis, or inner court. For a believing Jew, the prohibition Goldhill mentions is as painful as a prohibition to patronise a pork butcher. If a religious Jew should find himself in the parvis, his faith would require him to keep his hat on, to curse the place and spit in its direction. (Nowadays, Jewish fanatics often try to come near a Christian religious procession in order to spit at the Cross.) Goldhill does not remind his reader that today’s Jewish security guards would not let an Arab enter the Wailing Wall plaza, and they would demand from a Christian that he remove or hide his cross “in the interests of keeping peace”, as they demanded of the Pope.

The beautiful Crusader lintels of the Church were taken in 1929 to the Palestine Museum for repairs, and never returned. “The museum has constructed excellent replicas… but the Greek Orthodox patriarchate blocked the return (? – ISH) of the lintels” – writes Goldhill. I wonder whether he would accept “excellent replicas” instead of the real things if he were their owner. The introduction of fakes [replicas] cannot be described as “return of the lintels”. This is not an unusual turn of events – museums all over the world are reluctant to return art to its owners, if the owners are Christian churches. They do return everything to Jews in a jiffy, but with the churches they always find a reason to keep things.

The Wailing Wall

Dr Goldhill declares his intention to be fair; and he wants his reader to notice this effort. He stresses frequently that he does not want to embrace any of the competing narratives, nor does he wish to “slip into the aggressive and naïve stereotypes of identity politics: he is a Jew/Arab/Muslim/”; he would like the book “to stand out against such reductive and coercive postures”.

One could applaud his intentions, were they supported by his actions. However, declarations aside, he slips into “the aggressive and naïve stereotypes of identity politics” pretty soon. On p. 71 he improbably claims that “some recent Muslim writers deny that there ever was a Temple [of Solomon]… their claims are so obviously motivated by a desperate contemporary ideological need to disprove any connection between the Jews and the land of Israel and the Temple Mount in particular that it would be unnecessary to take them seriously, if such myth writing did not add to the entrenchment of violent extremism in the region”.

This is worse than stereotyping, this is ignorance. Who is “myth-writing” – scholars who interpret real finds on the ground or writers who just follow the Good Book? Practically all modern archaeologists – including mainstream Israeli Jewish ones – doubt that there ever was a Temple or a kingdom of Solomon; but leading doubters, nay, deniers, are not “Muslim writers” who tend to affirm this part of Biblical narrative for reasons of faith (Solomon is mentioned favourably in the Koran), but lay scientists, British and American, beginning with Copenhagen University Professor Thomas L. Thompson, “one of the world’s leading Biblical archaeologists”, who wrote: “There is no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period.” Other leading scholars of similar views are Niels Peter Lemche, Keith Whitelam, and Philip Davies, hardly Muslim names.

One does not have to agree with them; one may narrate the history of Jerusalem according to the Bible, disregarding archaeology, as Goldhill does. Many guides do so, and this makes sense: a guide in Camelot should not debunk the King Arthur stories. But his attribution of the archaeologists’ views to some “Muslim writers” smacks of prejudice, while the claim that “it would be unnecessary to take them seriously” implies deep ignorance, for the world does take them seriously indeed. While there is a law banning Holocaust denial, there is still no law forbidding denial of Solomon’s Temple. Though Goldhill’s mentor, Dr. Dever (“Plague”), an important Jewish American archaeologist of the elder generation, already has claimed that these deniers are antisemites, our Dr Goldhill goes him one better by implying that they are terrorist supporters.

Goldhill’s understanding of modern, as well as ancient history is somewhat insufficient. He thinks that the conflict between quarrelsome Catholics and the Orthodox in the Holy Sepulchre has been so severe, that in 1852 the Sultan was forced to establish the Status Quo agreement. The reader may wonder why it hadn’t happened in the preceding hundreds of years. The Status Quo was established because of the foreign powers’ meddling (with Russia supporting the Orthodox, France supporting the Catholics and England playing its imperial game) which brought forth the Crimean War and endangered Turkey. Local quarrels were not all that bad and they would never have forced the Sultan’s hand.

Sometimes, Goldhill’s elegant writing seem to be inspired by the IDF spokesmen’s terse prose. Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents “is blamed” on Herod, (by some antisemites, presumably, eager to blame a Jewish ruler). A là the present Israeli foreign minister Lieberman, he stresses that “the Mufti, the Arab religious leader of Jerusalem, became a close ally and supporter of Hitler”, but he avoids mentioning the Mufti’s Jewish contemporaries, such as Arlozorov, the Zionist Labour leader, who went to Berlin to embrace Hitler, to court Magda Goebbels, and to sign the first trade agreement with Nazi Germany on behalf of the Yeshuv (the Zionist Jewry of Palestine), or Yitzhak Shamir, a future prime minister of Israel, who wrote sycophantic letters to the Fuehrer. Many people supported Hitler in those days, or hoped to be supported by him – especially if they were dissatisfied with the British Empire’s way of running things.

During the 1929 riots, “135 Jews were murdered, 116 Arabs were killed”. This is so typical: Jews are always “murdered”, goyim are just “killed”. In accordance with the Jewish interpretation of the Decalogue, only a Jew can be ‘murdered’. Goldhill accepts the Zionist narrative. He refers to “Jewish worshippers [who] wanted to take some chairs for the elderly” as the reason for the riots. It is well established that the 1929 riots were instigated by Zionist wannabe-Maccabees, and a good contemporary description of it is given by an American journalist based in Jerusalem: Vincent Sheehan. It is quoted at length by the best single book on the subject, Guardian correspondent David Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch (Faber and Faber, 2003). This was also the conclusion of the official enquiry.

With callous disregard, Goldhill writes about the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter of the Old City in 1967: “[S]ome two hundred very poor [Palestinian] dwellings… were cleared away in order to open the plaza in front of the Wall for the thousands of new [Jewish] visitors”. No empathy for these poor – and not so poor people whose only crime was to possess something the Jews coveted. He does not tell us that so many dwellers were buried alive under the ruins of their houses by raging bulldozers. With equal disregard he tells of the destruction of a girls’ school for orphans that stood nearby. Goldhill does not notice that it undermines his own story: what began as “some chairs for the elderly” continued as the “slum clearance” of hundreds of houses, and it still awaits for the grand finale of the temple building on top of the mosque’s ruins.

With Bernard Lewis-style cheap sophistry, Goldhill evokes “14^th century Persian Islamic art which had no problem with representing the Prophet – despite the vitriolic (sic! – ISH) response to modern drawings of Muhammad by contemporary Muslim protesters”. By “modern drawings of Muhammad” he means the insulting cartoons published by the Danish Jewish Neocon editor, forsooth a fit comparison with 14^th century sacral art! Interestingly, the Jews had no problem with representation of the Holocaust in sculptures and paintings of the Holocaust Museum – and they gave quite a vitriolic response to modern drawings of Holocaust in the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition.

The Noble Sanctuary

Goldhill is an expert on the Jewish temple and he is predictably partial to it: he tells of Jewish dreams to have it rebuilt, of Pompey who walked into the Holy of Holies, “expecting to see a glorious statue”. Actually, Pompey and his contemporaries expected to find there a donkey’s head. The temple built by the bloody tyrant was outdated even as it was constructed: a Hindenburg Zeppelin, a last great dinosaur – for the long era of animal sacrifices, of slaughtered sheep and goats was over. The Jerusalem temple never was rebuilt because there were no Jews keen on going back into sacrifices – but Goldhill does not even understand that.

Speaking of the Herodian temple, Goldhill tells of “perhaps the most evocative new inscription to be found in Jerusalem, reading ‘to the trumpet-call building’”. In my view, the most evocative new inscription found there reads “No Gentile may enter beyond the dividing wall into the court around the Holy Place; whoever is caught will be to blame for his subsequent death.” One would think that Goldhill, who noticed that Jews were not let into the Church of Holy Sepulchre, should notice this inscription in the Greek that he knows.

If he fails the Christian holy sites through lack of feeling, he fails the Muslim sites due to lack of historical perspective. He writes: “the Dome of the Rock was built to express Muslim supremacy over the Jews by building on this site”. Wrong. In the glorious days of Umayyads, Muslims had no need to waste time and effort to express supremacy over the Jews, for the Jews were of very little importance. They were yesterday’s threat and yesterday’s people, small and nasty, rather inconsequential if anything. For a modern professor from Jewish-dominated acadème such a thought just could not occur, but Jews practically disappeared at that time. Some embraced Christianity, others embraced Islam, negligible numbers faded away in the steppes to the north of the Caucasus or in the fringes of Sahara. Seventh-century Caliphs would sooner have expressed their superiority over mice.

The Muslims, and the Christians, and the Jews did compete over the legacy of the Children of Israel, the semi-mythical people described in the Bible. All of them claimed they were the rightful heirs of Abraham, Moses and Solomon. By building on the Temple Mount, the Muslims proclaimed their theology of continuity and supercession. Islam did not position itself as a new faith, but as a return to the true faith of Abraham, Moses and Solomon, supposedly distorted by Jews and Christians.

By building the Noble Sanctuary in the place of Solomon’s Temple, the Muslims had “rebuilt the Temple”, fulfilling the dreams of the Jews – and that is why the vast majority of Jews had accepted Islam. Haram a-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary is the Temple Rebuilt. Until the 19^th century, this was the predominant thought. That is why the Crusaders called it Templum Solomonis, and so did the Jews. On the Eastern wall of an 18^th c. synagogue in Safed, the Temple is depicted: and it is the Dome of the Rock. A Columbus contemporary, Renaissance Jewish historian Abraham Zacuto (whose book I translated), also considered the Dome as the Temple rebuilt. Only in the 19^th century was there a paradigm shift, and Jews began to consider a new rebuilding.

“Muslims are instructed to make pilgrimage to the three holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem”, writes Goldhill. That would be nice! We’d have more tourists and pilgrims. Though one may find a Hadith transmitted by Abu Hurairah and included by Bukhari calling upon Muslims to visit Jerusalem in the name of the Prophet, it never became a commandment on a par with hajj to Mecca. In different times, Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusalem was more or less popular; rising to the top in Umayyad Caliphate, but since then, Jerusalem has not competed with Mecca, the only Hajj place.

Outside of Old City

Goldhill expresses progressive views; he is quite the reasonable liberal man of Obama and Blair’s days. Not a fanatic, not a Jewish Nationalist-Likudnik. The book was endorsed by a Palestinian professor, Sari Nusseibeh. The author sticks to the left-Zionist narrative, even if it means adhering to factual error:

* “Palestinians complain bitterly of what they term the ongoing ‘Judaisation’”, he says. However, the term is not theirs – ‘Judaisation’ (or ‘Yehud’ in Hebrew) is the official Zionist policy, freely used and espoused by Israeli Jews.

* Hamas would bar any Jew from owning any property in Palestine, he writes. He does not tell us that religious Jews would bar any non-Jew from owning any property in Palestine, as well.

* He calls the Deir Yassin murderers – “Israelis”. The correct term is “Jews”, as the massacre took place in April 1948, before the state of Israel was created.

* In the same sentence, he refers to Jewish “violent underground groups” and Arab “terrorist groups”, though the Jews did not mind having the name of ‘terrorist’ attached to them.

* In late 19^th century, the population of Jerusalem was predominantly Jewish, he writes. This is true, but the Jews were not citizens but foreigners. Likewise, during important holidays the population of Santiago de Compostela or Canterbury consists of foreigners.

* The last German settlers were deported by the British, he says. No, the last ones were murdered by Jews in a wave of ethnic cleansing.

Such small but annoyingly tendentious statements are plentiful. There are many places in Jerusalem which are “must-see” and he misses them. The Mount of Olives, Talbiye and the Monastery of the Cross are very relevant and important for the non-Jewish visitor, while a visiting American Jew usually is satisfied with seeing the Wailing Wall and the Holocaust Museum.

Let us conclude: it is a reasonably good book for a liberal British or American Jewish visitor to Jerusalem. The best for a Catholic reader or a pilgrim is the exhaustive, many times republished guide book by Fr. Eugene Hoade OFM.

Much ado about nothing?

What is there about the Iranian election of June 12 that has led to it being one of the leading stories in media around the world every day since? Elections whose results are seriously challenged have taken place in most countries at one time or another in recent decades. Countless Americans believe that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen by the Republicans, and not just inside the voting machines and in the counting process, but prior to the actual voting as well with numerous Republican Party dirty tricks designed to keep poor and black voters off voting lists or away from polling stations. The fact that large numbers of Americans did not take to the streets day after day in protest, as in Iran, is not something we can be proud of. Perhaps if the CIA, the Agency for International Development (AID), several US government-run radio stations, and various other organizations supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (which was created to serve as a front for the CIA, literally) had been active in the United States, as they have been for years in Iran, major street protests would have taken place in the United States.

The classic “outside agitators” can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh’s residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.¹ Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.² The New York Times reported: “An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).” ³

In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and “educating” Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnapping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnapping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran’s currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.⁴

“I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs,” said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. “Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd.”⁵

“Never believe anything until it’s officially denied,” British writer Claud Cockburn famously said.

In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that’s come along in quite a while.

So why the big international fuss over the Iranian election and street protests? There’s only one answer. The obvious one. The announced winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Washington ODE, an Officially Designated Enemy, for not sufficiently respecting the Empire and its Israeli partner-in-crime; indeed, Ahmadinejad is one of the most outspoken critics of US foreign policy in the world.

So ingrained is this ODE response built into Washington’s world view that it appears to matter not at all that Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s main opponent in the election and very much supported by the protesters, while prime minister 1981-89, bore large responsibility for the attacks on the US embassy and military barracks in Beirut in 1983, which took the lives of more than 200 Americans, and the 1988 truck bombing of a US Navy installation in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons. Remarkably, a search of US newspaper and broadcast sources shows no mention of this during the current protests.⁶ However, the Washington Post saw fit to run a story on June 27 that declared: “the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms.”

Can it be that no one in the Obama administration knows of Mousavi’s background? And do none of them know about the violent government repression on June 5 in Peru of the peaceful protests organized in response to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement? A massacre that took the lives of between 20 and 25 indigenous people in the Amazon and wounded another 100.⁷ The Obama administration was silent on the Peruvian massacre because the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, is not an ODE.

And neither is Mousavi, despite his anti-American terrorist deeds, because he’s opposed to Ahmadinejad, who competes with Hugo Chavez to be Washington’s Number One ODE. Time magazine calls Mousavi a “moderate”, and goes on to add: “It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged,” offering as much evidence as the Iranian protestors; i.e., none at all.⁸ It cannot of course be proven that the Iranian election was totally honest, but the arguments given to support the charge of fraud are not very impressive, such as the much-repeated fact that the results were announced very soon after the polls closed. For decades in various countries election results have been condemned for being withheld for many hours or days. Some kind of dishonesty must be going on behind the scenes during the long delay it was argued. So now we’re asked to believe that some kind of dishonesty must be going on because the results were released so quickly. It should be noted that the ballots listed only one electoral contest, with but four candidates.

Phil Wilayto, American peace activist and author of a book on Iran, has observed:

Ahmadinejad, himself born into rural poverty, clearly has the support of the poorer classes, especially in the countryside, where nearly half the population lives. Why? In part because he pays attention to them, makes sure they receive some benefits from the government and treats them and their religious views and traditions with respect. Mousavi, on the other hand, the son of an urban merchant, clearly appeals more to the urban middle classes, especially the college-educated youth. This being so, why would anyone be surprised that Ahmadinejad carried the vote by a clear majority? Are there now more yuppies in Iran than poor people?⁹

All of which is of course not to say that Iran is not a relatively repressive society on social and religious issues, and it’s this underlying reality which likely feeds much of the protest; indeed, many of the protesters may not even have strong views about the election per se, particularly since both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are members of the establishment, neither is any threat to the Islamic theocracy, and the election can be seen as the kind of power struggle you find in virtually every country. But that is not the issue I’m concerned with here. The issue is Washington’s long-standing goal of regime change. If the exact same electoral outcome had taken place in a country that is an ally of the United States, how much of all the accusatory news coverage and speeches would have taken place? In fact, the exact same thing did happen in a country that is an ally of the United States, three years ago when Felipe Calderon appeared to have stolen the presidential election in Mexico and there were daily large protests for more than two months; but the American and international condemnation was virtually non-existent compared to what we see today in regard to Iran.

Iranian leaders undertook a recount of a random ten per cent of ballots and recertified Ahmadinejad as the winner. How honest the recount was I have no idea, but it’s more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004.

By what standard shall we judge Barack Obama?

Many of my readers have been upset with me for my criticisms of President Obama’s policies. Following my last two reports, more than a dozen have asked to be removed from my mailing list. But if you share my view that the numerous atrocities US foreign policy is responsible for constitute the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and happiness, then I think you have to want leaders who are unambiguously opposed to America’s military adventures, because those interventions are unambiguously harmful. There’s nothing good to be said about dropping powerful bombs on crowds of innocent people, invading their land, overthrowing their government, occupying the country, breaking down the doors of the citizens, killing the father, raping the mother, traumatizing the children, torturing those opposed to all this … Barack Obama has no problem with this, if we judge him by his policies and not his rhetoric.

And neither does Al Franken, who’s about to become a Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The former Saturday Night Live comedian would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began, but he’s gone to Iraq four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers’ spirits. Why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? A happier soldier does his job better. And what’s the soldier’s job? All the charming things listed above. Doesn’t Franken know what these guys do? He criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.”¹⁰ What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation?

Franken has been lifting soldiers’ spirits for a long time. This past March he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you’ll want to see. He called his USO experience “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”¹¹ Franken has also spoken at West Point, encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Obama.

Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network:

Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken’s daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush’s version of the war, because that would undermine Air America’s laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry’s version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden’s proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. … Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks we have no choice but to … stay until we crush the insurgents. It’s a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it’s shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.¹²

I know, I know, I’m taking away all your heroes. But such people shouldn’t be your heroes. You can learn to see through the liberal, Democratic Party apologists for the empire. Only a week ago, documents released by the Nixon Library in California revealed that five days before US and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970 – which elicited widespread, angry protests in the US, resulting in the fatal shootings by the National Guard of students at Kent State University in Ohio – President Richard Nixon got approval for the invasion from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis told the president: “I will be with you. … I commend you for what you are doing.”¹³

Long live the Cold War

President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup June 28 because he was about to conduct a non-binding survey of the population, asking the question: “Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?” One of the issues that Zelaya hoped a new constitution would deal with is the limiting of the presidency to one four-year term. He also expressed the need for other constitutional changes to make it possible for him to carry out policies to improve the life of the poor; in countries like Honduras, the law is not generally crafted for that end.

At this writing it’s not clear how matters will turn out in Honduras, but the following should be noted: the United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military’s plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It’s difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with “a frown”. The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? The response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed. It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional “golpe” bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate.

Following the coup, National Public Radio (NPR) showed once again why progressives refer to it as National Pentagon Radio. The station’s leading news anchor, Robert Siegel, interviewed Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the conservative think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies:

Siegel: “There hasn’t been a coup in Latin America for quite a while.”

Forman: “I think the last one was in 1983″

Siegel did not correct her.¹⁴

This is ignorance of considerable degree. There was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, a coup in Haiti in 2004 that permanently overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a coup in Panama in 1989 that permanently overthrew Manuel Noriega. Is it because the US was closely involved in all three coups that they have been thrown down the Orwellian Memory Hole?

Notes

1. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 9 ^↩
2. Associated Press, June 16, 2009 ^↩
3. New York Times, June 21, 2009 ^↩
4. See Seymour Hersh, New Yorker magazine, June 29, 2008; ABC News, May 22, 2007; and Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch, June 19-21, 2009 for descriptions of some of these and other anti-Iran covert activities. ^↩
5. White House press conference, June 23, 2009 ^↩
6. The only mention is by Jeff Stein in “CQ Politics” [Congressional Quarterly], online, June 22, 2009, “according to former CIA and military officials”. ^↩
7. Center for International Policy (Washington, DC) report, June 16, 2009 ^↩
8. Time magazine, June 29, 2009, p.26 ^↩
9. AlterNet.org, June 14, 2009; Wilayto is the author of “In Defense of Iran: Notes from a U.S. Peace Delegation’s Journey through the Islamic Republic” ^↩
10. Washington Post, February 16, 2004 ^↩
11. Star Tribune (Minneapolis), March 26, 2009 ^↩
12. Huffington Post, sometime in June 2005, but it may no longer be there. ^↩
13. Washington Post, June 30, 2009 ^↩
14. NPR, All Things Considered, June 29, 2009 ^↩

Obeying The Zionist Line

ZIONIST JEWS HAVE WON THE DAY ONCE AGAIN on Zionist-occupied Capitol Hill. This total, abject domination of Washington was morbidly demonstrated in the American Israeli Affairs Committee Policy Conference (AIPAC) held in Washington DC, May 3-5, 2009. As always, many Zionist bought, bribed, and quietly threatened lowlife US politicians made their obligatory appearances to grovel and spew their Zionist-pleasing, lap dog, obsequious speeches.

Touting the usual Pro-Israel phrases ad nauseum, such as, “Our unbreakable commitment to Israel” or “Our shared values and deep ties” and certainly “A common commitment to democracy,” political hacks and Zionist whores and dupes such as Joe Biden, Sen John Kerry (D-MA), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA & Zionist Jew), all chimed in with their fawning, absolutely disgusting statements of obedience and ‘loyalty’…insuring for themselves continued campaign donations and perks from the Jewish AIPAC lobbyists and their malignant, malevolent engine of control and subjugation.

ALONG WITH THEIR PRO-ISRAEL STATEMENTS, all of the AIPAC-patsies listed above voiced the Zionist line of the “Iranian threat.” Biden warned of the “dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran who play a dangerous role in the region, supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas to exploit the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” (Applause!)

Not to be left out of the Anti-Iran rhetoric, Kerry expressed similar Zionist frothings: “When we say that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable, we mean it!” (Applause!)

Senator Kerry, who succeeded Biden as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, (of course Kerry was invited!), was informed along with Biden at the conference by Israeli President, Shimon Peres, that “Israel would not stop settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem from having natural growth, as existing families grow.”

So much for America’s “pressure” regarding settlement curtailment in Israel… View A List Of Zionist-Bought Lawmakers At AIPAC Conference 2009 Here.

COUNTLESS LAWMAKERS BEHOLDEN TO THE ZIONIST LOBBYISTS made their appearance at the AIPAC Conference, including the Zionist Jew, Representative Jane Harman (California), who chairs the Homeland Security panel’s intelligence subcommittee. Her boss is another Zionist Jew, Senator Joseph Lieberman, who is the Chairman of Homeland Security.

Harman. a former member of the House Intelligence Committee, was caught by the National Security Agency promising to help two former AIPAC employees, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, accused of disclosing US defense secrets to Israel.

FBI agents poured substantial resources into the case, and the decision on June 30, 2009, to dismiss all charges against the Zionist Jews, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, infuriated many within the law enforcement agency. But the Jewish lobbyists of AIPAC are more powerful than the FBI.

Only the day after the Zionist Jewish criminals got off scot-free, the law-abiding American citizen, John Demjanjuk, accused by Jews of being a Nazi camp guard, was denied a stay of deportation by a US Appeals Court.

Demjanjuk is wanted by blood-thirsty Zionist Jewish elites in Germany on war crimes charges. The ruling allows for the 89-year-old Ohio resident to be deported to face vicious Zionist Jews in Germany although Demjanjuk denies the charges. He claims he was captured by the Germans in his native Ukraine and kept as a prisoner of war.

But when it comes to justice for Gentiles, the Zionist-occupied courts show no mercy. Only to their own, like Rosen and Weissman, do the Zionist Jews twist the wheels of justice to aid their elitist fellow tribesmen.

THOUSANDS OF AIPAC LOBBYISTS FROM ALL 50 STATES descended on Capitol Hill on May 5, 2009, pressuring (bribery/blackmail) members of Congress in more than 500 lobbying meetings. These Jewish lobbyists insisted that $2.775 billion of US tax dollars be sent to the apartheid, racist, terrorist and rogue state of Israel as part of the fiscal year 2010 budget.

This demand reflects the second year of the 10-year U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding, signed in 2007, which called for a gradual increase of $30 billion in US military aid to Israel.

At the top of the agenda in these meetings with cowed members of Congress, was stopping Iran’s nuclear power development, which the Zionists falsely label: “Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability.”

AIPAC LOBBYISTS DEMANDED THAT CONGRESS MEMBERS vote for the pending Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), which was just introduced in the House and Senate.

The IRPSA Bill was led in the Senate by the Zionist Jew, Joseph Lieberman. And in the House, the Bill was introduced by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman, Zionist Jew, Howard Berman, and Ranking Member, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, also a Zionist Jew. (Congress now has a record number of Jews).

IRPSA targets global energy companies that do business in Iran, stating that in order to maintain the right to operate in the US, they must end their ties with Iran. View Entire Story Here.

http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=399

Return of the War Party

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“The American Conservative” — -“Real men go to Tehran!” brayed the neoconservatives after the success of their propaganda campaign to have America march on Baghdad and into an unnecessary war that has forfeited all the fruits of our Cold War victory.

Now they are back, in pursuit of what has always been their great goal: an American war on Iran. It would be a mistake to believe they and their collaborators cannot succeed a second time. Consider:

On being chosen by Israel’s President Shimon Peres to form the new regime, Likud’s “Bibi” Netanyahu declared, “Iran is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon and constitutes the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence.”

Echoing Netanyahu, headlines last week screamed of a startling new nuclear breakthrough by the mullahs. “Iran ready to build nuclear weapon, analysts say,” said CNN. “Iran has enough uranium to make a bomb,” said the Los Angeles Times. Armageddon appeared imminent.

Asked about Iran’s nukes in his confirmation testimony, CIA Director Leon Panetta blurted, “From all the information I’ve seen, I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”

Tuesday, Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a front spawned by the Israeli lobby AIPAC, was given the Iranian portfolio. AIPAC’s top agenda item? A U.S. collision with Iran.

In the neocon Weekly Standard, Elliot Abrams of the Bush White House parrots Netanyahu, urging Obama to put any land-for-peace deals with the Palestinians on a back burner. Why?

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now part of a broader struggle in the region over Iranian extremism and power. Israeli withdrawals now risk opening the door not only to Palestinian terrorists but to Iranian proxies.”

The campaign to conflate Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria as a new axis of evil, a terrorist cartel led by Iranian mullahs hell-bent on building a nuclear bomb and using it on Israel and America, has begun. The full-page ads and syndicated columns calling on Obama to eradicate this mortal peril before it destroys us all cannot be far off.

But before we let ourselves be stampeded into another unnecessary war, let us review a few facts that seem to contradict the war propaganda.

First, last week’s acknowledgement that Iran has enough enriched uranium for one atom bomb does not mean Iran is building an atom bomb.

To construct a nuclear device, the ton of low-enriched uranium at Natanz would have to be run through a second cascade of high-speed centrifuges to produce 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium (HUE).

There is no evidence Iran has either created the cascade of high-speed centrifuges necessary to produce HUE or that Iran has diverted any of the low-enriched uranium from Natanz.
And the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors retain full access to Natanz.

And rather than accelerating production of low-enriched uranium, only 4,000 of the Natanz centrifuges are operating. Some 1,000 are idle. Why?

Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the IAEA, believes this is a signal that Tehran wishes to negotiate with the United States, but without yielding any of its rights to enrich uranium and operate nuclear power plants.

For, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, none of which signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and all of which ran clandestine programs and built atom bombs, Iran signed the NPT and has abided by its Safeguards Agreement. What it refuses to accept are the broader demands of the U.N. Security Council because these go beyond the NPT and sanction Iran for doing what it has a legal right to do.

Moreover, Adm. Dennis Blair, who heads U.S. intelligence, has just restated the consensus of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not now possess and is not now pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Bottom line: Neither the United States nor the IAEA has conclusive evidence that Iran either has the fissile material for a bomb or an active program to build a bomb. It has never tested a nuclear device and has never demonstrated a capacity to weaponize a nuclear device, if it had one.

Why, then, the hype, the hysteria, the clamor for “Action This Day!”? It is to divert America from her true national interests and stampede her into embracing as her own the alien agenda of a renascent War Party.

None of this is to suggest the Iranians are saintly souls seeking only peace and progress. Like South Korea, Japan and other nations with nuclear power plants, they may well want the ability to break out of the NPT, should it be necessary to deter, defend against or defeat enemies.

But that is no threat to us to justify war. For decades, we lived under the threat that hundreds of Russian warheads could rain down upon us in hours, ending our national existence. If deterrence worked with Stalin and Mao, it can work with an Iran that has not launched an offensive war against any nation within the memory of any living American.

Can we Americans say the same?

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

Gaza – Out of the Ruins

Jeremy Bowen travels through a devastated Gaza to ask what the recent conflict means for the region’s future. Interviewing both victims and combatants, he pieces together rival claims about war crimes and the targeting of civilians, and follows extraordinary personal stories across the frontlines. Panorama asks whether the offensive has really weakened the Hamas movement or if the violence has simply sowed the seeds of further bloodshed.

BBC Panorama – Gaza: Out of the Ruins

Will Obama Continue The ‘Israeli Lie?’

“ONLY JEWS MAKE UP OBAMA’S NEW MIDDLE EAST TEAM,” reported an outspoken journalist for the New York Times, on January 11, 2009.

“The team,” reported Roger Cohen, “includes Dennis Ross (former Clinton Mid-East envoy); James Steinberg (as deputy Secretary of State); Dan Kurtzer (former US ambassador to Israel); and Dan Shapiro (a longtime Obama aide).

Cohen points out that there are no Arabs on Obama’s Middle East negotiating team. And in response to the adulatory articles on Ross’ appointment as “one who can effect major renewal of US policy,” Cohen asks the question: “I wonder about the capacity for “major renewal” of someone who has failed for so long.”

Recognizing the imbalance of only Jews being on the negotiating team, Obama announced the appointment of former Senator, George Mitchell, as his “Middle East envoy.” Obama will be sending Mitchell to meet with Israeli leaders & Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Obama mentions nothing about the Gaza invasion (and the slaughter of civilians by Israel), nor any negotiations with Hamas & Hezboullah, (the real players in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict). But rather, it’s the same old players involved in the “negotiating process” by which Israel always gets its way.

PERPETUATING THE LIE

JUST PRIOR TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE RACIST STATE OF ISRAEL IN 1948, Secretary of State, George C Marshall, warned President Harry Truman that “support for Israel would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.”

In a memo to Truman regarding the “political pressures” by Jewish strong-arming, Marshall argued:

“The political pressures to which America is now subjected will impel us toward an injurious position where we would shoulder major responsibility for the maintenance, and even the expansion, of a Jewish state in Palestine.

If we do not effect a radical reversal of our policy to date, we will end up being ourselves militarily responsible for the protection of the Jewish population in Palestine against the declared hostility of the Arab world.” View Entire Story Here & Here.

In the end, Truman, who needed Jewish votes & Jewish money for his upcoming re-election bid in November of 1948, caved under Jewish pressure, when he recognized the rogue state of Israel on May 14, 1948.

THE POWER OF THE JEWISH LOBBY

DESPITE THE FACT THAT JEWS make up less than 2% of the US population, the Jewish Lobby in America, represented primarily by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has managed to hijack the foreign policies of the US government.

In their best selling book, The Israel Lobby And US Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt demonstrate that aid for Israel is NOT in America’s best interest:

“The overall thrust of US policy in the Middle East is due almost entirely to the activities of the Israel Lobby. The Israel Lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy far from what American national interest would otherwise suggest.

Generous aid to Israel might be justified if America received substantial benefits in return. If Israel possessed vital natural resources such as oil or natural gas, or if it occupied a critical geographic location, then the US might want to provide support in order to maintain good relations and keep it out of unfriendly hands.

Israel’s strategic value to the United States would be further enhanced if backing it won America additional friends around the world and did not undermine US relations with other strategically important countries.” View Entire Story Here.

Along with underlining the global “Anti-Americanism” caused by US support for Israel, Mearsheimer & Walt question the argument that Israel is a true ally of America. For in 2004, the authors write, a key Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, a Zionist Jew, was arrested on charges of passing classified information regarding US policy toward Iran to an Israeli diplomat, with the assistance of two senior AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weisman.

Franklin accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to only twelve years in prison. But Rosen and Weisman, owing to AIPAC’s political & financial clout in Washington, remain free. View Background On The Story Here.

In a recent article by Stephen Walt, he states that although Israel could use some “honest advice” regarding its military ventures, the Israel Lobby has “handcuffed the democratic process” in America by pre-empting open discussion. “Israel’s supporters,” observes Walt, “make it impossible for Washington to do anything but reflexively back Israel’s actions, whether they make sense or not.”

Making “sense” out of Israel NOT being in America’s best interest can be boiled down to this: “pandering to the Israel Lobby equals votes.” All US politicians must conform to the Jewish agenda or their political careers are aborted by the all-powerful Jews. And this political reality, Obama knows only too well…

Lead Rains of Gaza

A war is coming – I was forewarned some weeks ago by a most unlikely expert on the subject, an old fisherman called “Charlie”. We sat at a small café by the Sea of Galilee and looked at the dry mud where the sweet waters of the lake used to rollick, at its waterline, which has now receded like Charlie’s hairline; we gazed at the old signs forbidding swimming that now stick out hundreds of yards away from the lake. Drought is always a harbinger of war, said Charlie (whose real name is Ghassan but he prefers this movie-inspired nickname). The last drought was in the year 2000, and the Intifada broke out; he continued. The worst drought in a century has now brought the lake to its lowest level since Christ walked on it, as if the land is trying to get rid of human pestilence by starving it off, while men pour out their blood to pacify its angry spirits.

Water is a synonym for compassion in our arid land, and we are perilously short of both. The wells are dry, and the springs in the mountains have all but perished. For no rain of water, rain of lead – molten or cast – will come. The old fisherman’s prediction proved to be right, and there was a war, the Childermas War, for it started on the commemoration day for the innocent children slain by Herod at Bethlehem.

In the course of eight hundred years, from William of Norwich to rise of Zionism, the Jews have been accused (and sometimes found guilty) of murdering just over a hundred children, and they vigorously denied every one of these accusations; they spent millions denying the murder of al-Durra. But during the past three weeks alone they have openly killed some four hundred babies and children, and many (including Caiaphas’ successor) still crave for more. I envisage a promo campaign with bright ads showing a Palestinian baby and logo: “For just $100 contributed to Israel at our synagogue you can have this future antisemite killed. All donations are tax-exempt”.

A professional child killer, Captain R, would make a career under Herod. He commanded a battalion in Gaza doing what he is good at: In 1994, he murdered a 13-year old Palestinian girl, Iman, by pulverising her little body with some 20 bullets as she lay on the ground. We should kill even three year old children, too, he said to his soldiers. A military court actually gave him some $20,000 as an encouragement bonus, and he was promoted to the rank of major. He enjoyed coming back to Gaza, he told Maariv newspaper.

Women were killed, too, by soldiers sent by their Israeli sister Tsipi Livni. The BBC reported they called out civilians to leave their houses, women first, white flags a-waving. When some simple-minded Arabs did so, the Jews gave a hearty laugh and shot the women carrying the white flags.

In Israeli media, it’s Jews who were the victims. If they had no wounded to parade, they will show the scared faces of their women, or pity themselves for having to kill Palestinian children. In a clever move, they banned media from entering Gaza, and hundreds of photographers and correspondents hanged around nearby Sderot. Out of this forced inaction, they described the Jewish “victims of shock”, photographed a ruined shed, and sent pieces called “Israel braces for Hamas revenge”. Victimhood becomes Israel – even while killing others, the Jews bewail their bitter fate.

“Do not call it “war”, this is massacre”, wrote Angie Tibbs; but it’s still a war, for the Gaza fighters prefer to see it this way. They are not fishing for anyone’s pity. The Gazans are short of weapons, they are no match for the most powerful army in the region, they are not even well-trained fighters like their brothers from South Lebanon, but they are stubborn.

I offered to help a Gazan friend obtain visa and residency in Europe. He refused: our parents, he wrote, ran away from Askalon in 1948, I grew up in Gaza; nothing will force me to leave Palestine. The Gazans have got to be stubborn for they have survived the worst conditions possible. They are a product of an inhuman Zionist lab: they have been bombed by Israel for some sixty years, with short breaks. They do not value their lives overmuch. Israel can’t frighten them anymore. If they don’t submit to Israel’s demands, Israel may bite its moustache and growl, like Hitler in Mel Brooks’ Producers: “No Mr. Nice Guy next time!” That’s about it. The Gazans have the proud spirit of Masada – after all, they ARE the descendants of those ancient Hebrews. Great fighters they are not, but their character is exceedingly strong. Jews make a mistake taking them for granted.

The Jews declared a ceasefire unilaterally, shying away from any agreement. Unilateralists to a boot, the Jews follow Ben Gurion’s slogan “Lo Hashuv Ma Yagidu HaGoyim” (“Who cares what the goyim say?”). Actually, Ben Gurion was only repeating Numbers 23:9 with its “Bagoyim lo yithashev”. The King James Bible translates it (correctly) as “they won’t be counted among the nations”, but every Israeli will translate this verse to you as “the Jews do not give a damn about goyim”. They unilaterally left Gaza and unilaterally entered Gaza, one-sidedly bombed and one-sidedly stopped bombing – too much hubris for one small country, even if its prime minister can make President Bush cry u-n-c-l-e. This unilateralism shows that they do not consider the other side as being fully human. As a reply to Olmert’s declaration of unilateral ceasefire Hamas sent an equally unilateral rocket to Beer Sheba.

Eventually the cease fire set in, after the Hamas government let fly a few rockets to show their remaining ability and gave the Jews one week to get out of Gaza and lift the blockade.

In Israel, there is a feeling that enough is enough. Even Ari Shavit, an ex-Leftie born-again-proud Jew and Ha’aretz columnist, who was clamoring for more war just a few days ago, has now had enough blood. He feels satisfied – the UN headquarters have been bombed, mosques collapsed on worshippers’ heads, university and schools have been ruined – the job is done, the boys can come home. The Zionist-left party Meretz also decided to come to the side of peace. The declared Israeli goal of unseating Hamas or eliminating its ability to shoot rockets has not been reached.

So, what was the reason for this mass murder? Pundits were divided into schools of high and low expectation: the high expected Israel to attack Iran, to bomb Lebanon, to exterminate the Gaza population or send tsunami waves of Gaza refugees into Egypt. The low saw in this operation a regular, if beefed up, bombardment of Gaza (something Israel has been doing routinely since 1955), attuned to Israeli elections and timed just before the US change of guard. It seems that the second reading is closer to reality. The Israeli leaders have no idea what to do – they have weapons, and they can kill, but beyond that, they are short of vision.

Certainly unintentionally, the high-expectation school actually helped Israel to do its black deeds. Iranians and Lebanese sat on their hands waiting for the storm to come; Palestinians were afraid of mass expulsions and massacres. There were real reasons for their lack of response, beyond spin. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) of Mahmud Abbas is fully collaborating with Israel. At midnight, PNA police leave the streets of Nablus and Ramallah to the Israeli Army and Shabak (the secret police of the Jewish state), which freely roam and arrest activists and militants – sometimes according to direct info provided by the PNA. Now people under the PNA are afraid to demonstrate, while even under the direct military rule of Israel they never were.

The Palestinian citizens of Israel also have not protested much – the shock of being massacred in October 2000 has not worn off. Moreover, Israeli police have been out in strength everywhere – in my Jaffa there was a police car at every crossing, and a platoon of crack troops on every street. The anger just accumulated, waiting to break out, but it never did. Iran and Hezbollah also did nothing as well, being scared by the American threat.

Thus, Israel had the situation totally under its control. The Egypt of Mubarak is a full partner of Israel, while the PNA of Abbas is an obedient servant; Iran, Syria and Lebanon are scared, Jordan is aloof. The US is as obedient as the PNA, even more so: a Palestinian parliament would never approve the declarations the US Congress did. Despite these wonderful starting conditions, Israel failed: politically the Gaza war has achieved nothing. The war was flop.

The Middle East is back to its impasse, and Israel is in a worse position than it was three weeks ago. The Gaza leadership took a daring if calculated risk when they refused to extend the lapsed ceasefire agreement unless the Jews lift the siege off the Strip. After the war and its casualties, it seems that Hamas has remained in power and at large in devastated Gaza. Moreover, Hamas will get what it wanted: the siege will be lifted. But Israel will get nothing it couldn’t have gotten without this massive killing. American promise to keep Gaza defenceless could have been obtained without a single shot, with one phone call.

The international reputation of Israel is now at its lowest ebb. Even traditional Jewish defence, screaming about ‘antisemites’, has lost its charm. The word ‘holocaust’ is now more frequently applied to Gaza than to Auschwitz. The Germans are guilty, people murmur, of not doing their job thoroughly enough. Joseph Massad drew the comparison between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto. Surely that is an antisemitic canard. How can you compare the two?! The Germans lost 16 soldiers during the Ghetto suppression, while the Jews have lost only 10 in the Gaza cleansing.

The war has solved nothing, not for Israel, neither for Palestinians. This is the time for a full U-turn in politics. Neither side can win, they can both only lose. Separation is impossible, so we have to live together, and we better enjoy it.

Actually life was better ten years ago, before the second intifada, I told Charlie.

Life was even better fifteen years ago, before the Oslo agreements, he answered.

Life was even better before the first intifada, said I – there were no check posts, and one could go freely from Gaza to Jaffa. One could go to any village and return the same day. The younger men looked at the older ones seeking confirmation: is it true? Could it be that the life in our country was ever so wonderful that one could travel freely? That a boy from Tul Karem could actually go for a swim in the sea? That a boy from Gaza could come and see a movie in Tel Aviv? Yes, confirmed Charlie for the benefit of the youth. Life was glorious in the late sixties, soon after the Israeli conquest, before the Jewish land grab, before the process of separation between Jews and Palestinians started its perilous run.

Now, in February, there is a conference for One State scheduled in Geneva. It is a small affair, but only because of lack of support. With your massive support we still can change things for the better, integrate Gaza, give every Palestinian full rights, including the right to vote for parliament–Knesset.

If it should happen, even the rains will come back and the dry riverbeds of Negev will run again full of water. As a sign of this promise, today, on this feast of the Baptism of Our Lord the priests of our church blessed the waters in River Jordan and in the sea of Jaffa. For this war did begin at Childermass and ended on the blessed Epiphany.

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