Roger Waters’ concert tour titled, “This is Not a Drill,” is a display of both fantastic music and enormous courage, generosity and urgency. He delivers a message that is clear and unapologetic. It calls for justice for Palestine, justice for all oppressed people, it is an anti-war, anti-gun, anti-nukes, pro-environment, pro human rights message. But above all, through his music, he delivers a message to young people that we must all speak up and raise our voices without fear.
Waters’ message is an answer to all those who tell young people that they must be silent; that speaking for justice, particularly regarding Palestine, may obstruct their careers or ruin their lives. And here, this larger than life mega-star, the beating heart of the legendary Pink Floyd, is saying it like it is and doing it in front of tens of thousands of people. This concert is a combination of genius, generosity and courage.
GENEROSITY
At one point, Waters talks about sitting around the bar. We are all invited to huddle together (all twenty thousand people in the arena) around the bar, where there is a piano, a few bottles of booze, and an atmosphere of closeness. This is an idea that Roger Waters talks about, “where everyone feels safe to express their thoughts, agree or disagree and still be welcome to stay.” He sits behind the piano surrounded by the band and he speaks to us, all of us who are there.
He creates the sense of intimacy successfully by speaking plainly into the microphone, unedited and unrehearsed and straight from the heart. About respecting one another, about caring for all people, about fearing for our future not as Americans, Britons or Africans, but as people who inhabit the Earth and have no other home to go to.
His political message is in sync with this human appeal, this invitation to gather around the piano. Banning guns that benefit only the greedy, dismantling walls that surround us and keep us apart, and standing for the rights of the oppressed. His message underlines the generosity of the mega rock star who, unlike so many others, cares.
SAY THEIR NAMES
Roger Waters is not like so many of the other still-performing mega-stars of his generation. While they –Elton John, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney etc. – are all talented, their concerts are largely a regurgitation of their old stuff. Not so with Waters. While he certainly plays some of the great old classics, it is revived and rejuvenated and filled with contemporary relevant political and social messaging.
The names of Shireen Abu-Akleh, George Floyd, Mahsa Amini, Rachel Corrie, and many other names of innocents murdered by oppressors who were armed and felt they had a right to kill are displayed on the massive screen during the concert. Roger Waters will not let the world forget these names and when he has the opportunity, in front of tens of thousands of fans, he says their names.
In a terribly reactionary, almost embarrassing, (to the magazine, not to Roger Waters) piece in Rolling Stone magazine, Waters is made to seem like some radical fool for stating the political beliefs that he holds so dear. In another interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish, he is asked about a message that is displayed on the giant screen right before the show. The message is, “If you’re one of those, ‘I love Pink Floyd but I can’t stand Roger’s politics,’ people, you might do well to fuck off to the bar right now. Thank you and please enjoy the show.”
Smerconish says that he can buy into some of Waters’ messages and others he cannot, so should he fuck off or stay. “I’ve only got one message,” Waters replies, and I wrote it in 1970.” That message is, “two people passing each other in the street, by chance their passing glances meet, and I am you and what I see is me.” It was on the album Meddle from 1970. “I recognize your humanity,” Waters continues, “but I also recognize that of the Russians and the Chinese and Ukrainians and the Yemenis and the Palestinians.”
A STAR WITH A BACKBONE
Waters is a brilliant musician who uses his art, fame and his massive success to bring an important political and social message to the world. He has the means at his disposal, and rather than hide behind his fame, he is accessible and generous. Whereas we may never know what Elton John really believes politically, though his tears at receiving a medal from Joe Biden do not exactly show him to be particularly principled. The same goes for other superstars. But with Waters, who listed Biden as a war criminal among other U.S. presidents, one can only imagine what his response might be if invited to the White House.
Waters’ tour is nothing short of epic. He is not only a genius, but he pulls out all the stops, making his show absolutely breathtaking. However, it is not just the music, it is the combination of cutting edge music, lyrics, ideas, political awareness and a sense of social justice. It is also the ingenious ability to put it all together in a way that is moving and unforgettable. One cannot come out of this show and not be moved by the powerful message conveyed through imagery, words and music.
THE RIGHT ANSWER
In response to his courageous political message, there are people who would say that a guy like him can afford to do this because he is so successful and wealthy, so has nothing to lose. The truth, however, is the opposite. There is no such thing as a person who has nothing to lose. Making bold political statements is never easy, and particularly in the political environment that exists in America today, it is a huge risk. It is not that he has nothing to lose, and so he can do this. He has everything to lose and still he dares to put it all on the line, calls us to join him at the bar, huddle around his piano, talk, fight together and stand up for those who need support.
Art and politics do not always go hand in hand well, but it does not mean that they shouldn’t; indeed, it means that they should. Art and those who call themselves artists, particularly the great and the famous ones, those who have everything to lose, can learn from a giant like Roger Waters; learn how to stand up and speak up.
Zionists taking it upon themselves to try to defend Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people frequently level the charge that its critics are attempting to “delegitimize” the self-described “Jewish state”. Israel, they counter, has a “right to exist”. But they are mistaken.
This is not to single out Israel. There is no such thing as a state’s “right to exist”, period. No such right is recognized under international law. Nor could there logically be any such right. The very concept is absurd. Individuals, not abstract political entities, have rights.
Individual rights may also be exercised collectively, but not with prejudice toward the rights of individuals. The relevant right in this context is rather the right to self-determination, which refers to the right of a people to collectively exercise their individual rights through political self-governance. The collective exercise of this right may not violate the individual exercise of it. The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect individual rights, and a government has no legitimacy without the consent of the governed. It is only in this sense that the right to self-determination may be exercised collectively, by a people choosing for themselves how they are to be governed and consenting to that governance.
The right to self-determination, unlike the absurd concept of a state’s “right to exist”, is recognized under international law. It is a right that is explicitly guaranteed, for example, under the Charter of the United Nations, to which the state of Israel is party.
The proper framework for discussion therefore is the right to self-determination, and it is precisely to obfuscate this truth that the propaganda claim that Israel has a “right to exist” is frequently made. It is necessary for Israel’s apologists to so shift the framework for discussion because, in the framework of the right to self-determination, it is obviously Israel that rejects the rights of the Palestinians and not vice versa.
And it is not only in the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory that Israel’s rejectionism is manifest. This rejection of Palestinians’ rights was also manifest in the very means by which Israel was established.
There is a popular belief that Israel was founded through some kind of legitimate political process. This is false. This myth is grounded in the idea that the famous “partition plan” resolution of the United Nations General Assembly—Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947—legally partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948.
Indeed, in that very declaration, Israel’s founding document, the Zionist leadership relied on Resolution 181 for their claim of legal authority. The truth is, however, that Resolution 181 did no such thing. The General Assembly had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants. Nor did it claim to. On the contrary, the Assembly merely recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, which would have to be agreed upon by both peoples to have any legal effect. The Assembly forwarded the matter to the Security Council, where the plan died with the explicit recognition that the UN had no authority to implement any such partition.
The Zionists’ unilateral declaration is frequently described as a “Declaration of Independence”. But it was no such thing. A declaration of independence assumes that the people declaring their independence are sovereign over the territory in which they wish to exercise their right to self-determination. But the Zionists were not sovereign over the land that became the territory of the state of Israel.
On the contrary, when they declared Israel’s existence, Jews owned less than 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district of Palestine. Arabs also constituted a numerical majority in Palestine. Despite mass immigration, Jews remained a minority comprising about a third of the population.
Even within the territory proposed by the UN for the Jewish state, when the Bedouin population was counted, Arabs constituted a majority. Even within that territory, Arabs owned more land than Jews.
Simply stated, the Zionist leadership had no legitimate claim to sovereignty over the territory they ultimately acquired through war.
Far from being established through any kind of legitimate political process, Israel was established through violence. The Zionists acquired most of the territory for their state through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population, more than 700,000 people, from their homes in Palestine. Hundreds of Arab villages were literally wiped off the map.
So when Zionists claim that Israel has a “right to exist”, what they are really saying is that the Zionists had a “right” to ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to establish their “Jewish state”.
Obviously, there is no such right. On the contrary, once again, under international law, ethnic cleansing is recognized as a crime against humanity.
Zionists charge that critics of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians seek to “delegitimize” the “Jewish state”, but it matters that the unilateral declaration by the Zionists on May 14, 1948, had no legitimacy. It matters that the crime of ethnic cleansing cannot be justified or legitimized.
When this charge is leveled at Israel’s critics, what is really happening is that it is Israel’s apologists who are attempting to delegitimize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, along with the internationally recognized right of refugees of war to return to their homeland.
Regardless of the illegitimacy of the means by which Israel was established, it exists. This is the present reality. However, the demand by the state of Israel that the Palestinians recognize its “right” not just to exist, but to exist “as a Jewish state” is simply a demand that the Palestinians surrender their rights and accede that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration and ethnic cleansing of Palestine were legitimate.
But what would be wrong with ending a fundamentally racist regime that perpetually violates international law and Palestinians’ human rights? What would be wrong with replacing it with a government that respects the equal rights of all the inhabitants of the territory over which it exercises political sovereignty and rules with the consent of the governed?
To anyone with any honesty and moral integrity, the clear answer to both questions is: nothing.
For all those who take an active role in pursing peace and justice, it is therefore to that end that we must focus our collective efforts. It starts with gaining a proper understanding of the true nature of the conflict and helping to open the eyes of all those who have integrity, but who have been deceived by the lies and propaganda that have perpetuated the violence and injustice for so long.
Last week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), under pressure from Palestine solidarity activists, began an audit of the Jewish National Fund.
The audit is significant. Beyond weakening the oldest Israel-focused charity in the country, it will put other Israeli charities in Canada on notice and reflects the growth of Palestine solidarity activism.
Fulfilling the time-consuming audit will be a bureaucratic headache for a group that has eleven offices across Canada and has raised $100 million over the past five years. Already, the credibility of the second most powerful Israel-oriented charity in Canada has taken a hit with the CBC exposé headlined “Canadian charity used donations to fund projects linked to Israeli military” and related stories. If the CRA revokes the JNF’s charitable status it would be devastating for fundraising and deter politicians/celebrities from attending their events.
Similar to the JNF, other registered charities support the Israeli military in direct contravention of CRA rules. Additionally, some of these organizations — like the JNF — fund projects supporting West Bank settlements, which Global Affairs Canada considers in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
At a broader level, critical attention on the JNF could lead to questioning of why Canadian taxpayers subsidize hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to a wealthy country. Despite a GDP per capita greater than Spain or Italy (and equal to Japan), hundreds of registered Canadian charities deliver hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Israel. How many Canadian charities funnel money to Spain or Japan?
If the CRA revoked JNF’s charitable status it would boost Stop the JNF campaigns elsewhere. In England they convinced former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to withdraw as patron of the JNF (Theresa May seems to have also stayed away), and 68 members of parliament endorsed a bill to revoke the organization’s charitable status because “the JNF’s constitution is explicitly discriminatory by stating that land and property will never be rented, leased or sold to non-Jews.”
The CRA audit of a charity that’s found favour with numerous Canadian prime ministers is long in the making and reflects the growth of Palestinian solidarity consciousness. Born in a West Bank village demolished to make way for the JNF’s Canada Park, Ismail Zayid has been complaining to the CRA about its charitable status for 40 years. Lebanese Canadian Ron Saba “has been indefatigable over the years in writing to various Canadian government departments and officials, corporations, and media to rescind tax exemption status and endorsement of” what he calls the “racist JNF tax fraud”. During the Liberal party convention in 2006 Saba was widely smeared for drawing attention to leadership candidate Bob Rae’s ties to the JNF. Saba has put in multiple Access to Information requests regarding the JNF, demonstrating government spying of its critics and long-standing knowledge of the organization’s dubious practices. Under the headline “Event you may want to monitor,” Foreign Affairs spokesperson Caitlin Workman sent the CRA a communication about a 2011 Independent Jewish Voices event in Ottawa stating: “author of the Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Yves Engler, will give a talk on Canada and the Jewish National Fund.”
Former Independent Jewish Voices coordinator Tyler Levitan was smeared for working diligently on the issue. In addition to important organizing, he discovered that the Ottawa Citizen sponsored JNF galas they covered and, suggesting a formal financial relationship, ran an ad for the JNF’s 2013 Ottawa Gala the day after the event.
At the Green Party convention in 2016 Corey Levine pushed a resolution to revoke the JNF’s charitable status because it practices “institutional discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.” The effort brought the issue into the mainstream though she, IJV and the entire Green Party were smeared as “hard core Jew haters” for even considering the resolution.
Fifteen months ago IJV and four individuals filed a detailed complaint to the CRA and Minister of National Revenue over the JNF. For a number of years IJV has run a “Stop the JNF” campaign and for more than a decade activists across the country have picketed local JNF fundraising galas. These efforts have benefited from many in Palestine/Israel, notably the work of Uri Davies and Adalah.
As I have written before, the campaign to revoke the JNF’s charitable status is important beyond winning the specific demand. It draws attention to the racism intrinsic to Zionism and highlights Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.
The CRA is undoubtedly facing significant behind-the-scenes pressure to let the JNF off with little more than a slap on the wrists. So, it’s important that people send their MP the CBC exposé and add their name to Independent Jewish Voices’ campaign to revoke the Jewish National Fund’s charitable status.
A general view of Jerusalem’s old city shows the Dome of the Rock in the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, October 25, 2015. (photo credit: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS)
The UN General Assembly in New York on Friday approved six anti-Israel resolutions including two that ignored Jewish ties to the Temple Mount.
The primary resolution on Jerusalem, that passed 148-11 with 14 abstentions, also disavowed Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.
Both that text and a second more global one on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which passed 156-8, with 12 abstentions, spoke of Judaism’s most holy site – The Temple Mount – solely by its Muslim name of al-Haram al-Sharif.
The votes comes as Israel is working to shore up international support for its sovereignty in Jerusalem.
The United States, Canada and Australia voted against all six resolutions, which are the first batch of some 20 resolutions that the UNGA annually passes against Israel.
“We live in a time of many crises, crises that are raging around the Middle East and around the world. It is a shame that rather than addressing these crises, the UN passes so many biased resolutions,” said Israeli Deputy Permanent Representative Noa Furman.
She said she was particularly concerned by the two resolutions that ignored Jewish and Christian ties to the Temple Mount.
“This omission was deliberate. It shows yet another instance of the Palestinian refusal to recognize the proven historical connection between Judaism, Christianity, the Temple Mount and Jerusalem as a whole.
“The international community must stop participating in such a blatant denial of history. You must not permit these blatant attempts to delegitimize Israel,” Furman said.
The European Union, which supported both texts, warned it could stop doing so unless more include language was used to reference holy sites in Jerusalem.
Speaking on behalf of the EU, the Austrian representative said the EU stresses “the need for language on the holy sites of Jerusalem to reflect the importance and historical significance of the holy sites for the three monotheistic religions.”
It added, “future choice of language may affect the EU’s collective support for the resolutions.”
PLO Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour thanked UN member states for their support of texts that reference a two-state resolution to the conflict based on the pre-1967 lines with east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
This “global consensus, which all of us have worked for, is still the cornerstone of finding a just and lasting peace to the conflict.”
US representative Leslie Ordeman, who is deputy political coordinator, also spoke out against the texts.
“We are disappointed that despite messages of support for reform, member states continue to single out Israel with these resolutions.
“As the United States has repeatedly made clear, this dynamic is unacceptable. Again, we see resolutions that are quick to condemn all manner of Israeli actions, but say almost nothing about Palestinian terrorist attacks against innocent civilians. This is particularly acute now, when the rocket attacks on November 12 saw more projectiles fired on a single day than on any day since 2014.”
Both Israel and the US took issue in particular with the two resolutions passed Friday that continued to support the work of the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” and the “Division for Palestinian Rights.”
“The Palestinians are the only actor in the UN system with a dedicated division within the UN Secretariat. The message that it sends is that the Palestinians never need to come back to the negotiating table – they can rely on flawed and biased mechanisms, such as these, to push their agenda,” he said.
One of the most used terms of the modern world is “Anti-Semitic.” Maybe, describing it as misused would be more precise. Abused also works when discussing the way this word has been increasingly utilized during the past few decades.
Innocent people have been branded as anti-Semitic all over the globe; people from all walks of life. To be accused of being anti-Semitic could get you terminated from a job or, at the very least, may cause you to be treated with extreme prejudice. Artists who share their opinions regarding “Israeli” war crimes are battled in Hollywood; others who refuse to perform in concerts on the Palestinian raped land lose future contracts almost instantly. Even American politicians who decline to sign a document pledging allegiance to the Zionist entity are automatically branded as anti-Semitic and are made to lose elections.
You know you are branded as an anti-Semitic, according to the Zionist dominated media, if you are one of the following:
– A German who thinks it unfair that he or she still needs to act apologetic for the acts of Nazis 80 years ago
– A Polish who believes his country holds the natural right to pass a legislation dealing with domestic issues
– An American who wants his government to stop giving ludicrous amounts of his or her tax money to “Israel” instead of investing it towards national education and health institutions
– A Lebanese who fights against constant “Israeli” infringements of his sovereign country’s border and airspace
– A Syrian demanding the withdrawal of “Israeli” occupying forces from his country
– An Iranian contesting “Israel’s”, almost daily, threats against his country
The above examples are but a small fraction of what could put you in the anti-Semitic category if you were to make your stance public regardless of what nationality you hold.
It is also known to nominate you for the title of ‘anti-Semitic’ if you consider investigating certain historical events or texts. Employing your natural human tendency to question statements is a thought crime according to those throwing anti-Semitism accusations left and right.
You are a horrible person if you try to look into whether Palestine is actually the biblical “promised land” when interpretations based on geographical indications in the holy book lead to think it should be further towards the middle of the Arabian Peninsula. You are a worse person if you do simple calculations of the number of Jews before World War II and after; you are simply not allowed to question why the change in number does not correspond to the general claim of six to eight million fatalities. You are also despicable should you want to understand why the main building for exterminating Jews at Auschwitz has had the roof restructured with new ducts for dropping Zyklon-B on victims after the war ended and its remaining occupants freed.
The Zionist media will stick so many defaming titles on anyone who tries to use the freedom of thought to tackle their stories. Some of these titles will get you imprisoned and fined.
Challenging Zionist statements is not the only way to be branded anti-Semitic, though. You may never mention “Israel” but still find yourself becoming a victim of slander and antisemitism charges by simply criticizing their allies and puppets.
For instance, if you question why the so-called Arab alliance is practicing ethnic cleansing against Yemenis, you are an anti-Semitic because what Saudi Arabia is actually leading is a termination of the inhabitants of a country that believes in the rights of Palestinians.
Try holding a conference that advocates the unity of the Arab people through cultural practices like arts and poetry. The “Israeli” media will report it as a conference of antisemitism although Arabs are, themselves, Semitic.
So, killing Semitic people is an act of antisemitism? In that case, “Israel” would be the winner of every prize that there is for that practice. The Zionists staging this farce are not so ignorant. They do, however, assume that the rest of the world doesn’t know about the ancient Aramaic language and its evolution process or the definition of the word SEMITE. Their low regard for the intelligence of others doesn’t come as surprising; after all, any person who does not belong to one of their tribes is a lesser human; if human at all to begin with.
At the moment, “Israel’s” and the Zionist movement’s loudest horn is a compulsive liar who is a war criminal by international standards and a corrupt politician by his own people’s standards. Benjamin Netanyahu, with all his dark record in every possible domain, tries to portray the Islamic Republic of Iran as an anti-Semitic state.
If, for argument’s sake, we were to limit the term Semitic to Jews only, then Iran is the only regional nation whose government has actually never treated its Jewish nationals with prejudice. And, if we were to take the word in its true definition, then Iran has been paying dearly in terms of sanctions over the past forty years for supporting none-Persians around the world – for upholding their rights to dignified lives.
Antisemitism allegations have become almost as boring as Netanyahu’s theatrics thanks to their excessive usage by Zionists against anyone who does not agree with the apartheid nature of their illegal ‘state’. Should standing up against genocide, for instance, the one committed daily against the Palestinian people, constitute a basis for labeling you as such, then the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Earth are anti-Semitic.
In this interview with Al Mayadeen’s Zeinab Al Saffar I elaborated on The Right of Return, the racism that is inherent to the Jewish State, the Jewish solidarity spin and the inevitable future – One Palestine from the river to the sea.
Six years ago 20 Palestinians called for my disavowal as I was touring America raising funds for The March to Jerusalem. At the time some Palestinians were happy to serve their ‘solidarity meisters.’ But recent events reveal how wrong they were. Their people are actually more determined than ever.
The Right of Return is the core of the Palestinian plight. It puts Gaza in context, it brings Israeli crude racism to light. It unites the Palestinians, it unites the rest of us behind them.
This interview was filmed in Maroun al Ras, Southern Lebanon
One day after the Zionist brutal massacre in Gaza, Palestinians are marking the 70th anniversary of Nakba Day [Catastrophe] when the occupation regime forced them out of their homeland and declared its existence on the occupied territory.
Meanwhile, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank are taking part in a general strike as they prepare for mass rallies later in the day to protest the creation of the “Israeli” occupation entity and renew the call for a return to their homeland.
Nakba Day is commemorated on May 15 every year, marking the day after the occupation regime declared its existence in 1948. That year also saw a war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states over the control of Palestine, during which some 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed.
The “Israeli” military remains on high alert in preparation for Tuesday’s protests, a day after its forces unleashed yet another brutal crackdown on Palestinian protesters in Gaza, martyring 58 people on the spot and wounding over 2,700 others.
The Monday protests in Gaza were part of the “March of Return,” which first began on March 30 with the aim of condemning Israel’s occupation and demanding their right to return.
Earlier on Tuesday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said that an eight-month-old baby identified as Leila al-Ghandour had died of teargas inhalation suffered on Monday.
Most of the fatalities, it added, were caused by “sniper fire.”
Another Palestinian also succumbed to the wounds he sustained during Monday’s rallies, bringing the death toll to 60.
TEHRAN (FNA)- Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Executive Committee member Wasel abu-Yousef said Wednesday that the Central Council decision to suspend recognition of Israel is effective.
Speaking to Quds Press, Abu-Yousef stressed that any decision taken by the PLO’s Central Council “is turned to the PLO’s Executive Committee to become effective,” Middle East Monitor reported.
“There are measures to be carried out to implement the suspension of recognising Israel,” he said, noting that Israel “does not recognise” the Palestinian state.
“As long as Israel does not recognise the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and takes measures that undermine doing this,” the PLO official stated, underlining that “we must retract recognising the occupation state [Israel].”
The senior PLO and Fatah leader reiterated that the United States “will not have any role in any future political process.”
“The Palestinian people will continue sticking to the resistance pathway, including the peaceful resistance, which has a national consensus,” Abu-Yousef stated.
On Monday, the Palestinian Central Council called on Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to suspend recognition of Israel in response to US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem al-Quds as the Tel Aviv regime’s capital.
“The Palestinian Central Council has decided to freeze the recognition of Israel by the [Palestinian] state until [Israel] recognizes Palestine as a state… Palestine will freeze the Oslo accords, the provisions of which are not implemented by Israel, including about the coordination in the sphere of security,” Nabil Shaath, the foreign affairs adviser of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Sputnik.
The announcement was made after Abbas said that Trump’s so-called Middle East peace efforts are the “slap of the century” after his al-Quds move.
US President announced early December 2017 that Washington would be recognizing Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s capital, stressing that the United States would relocate the embassy in the occupied lands from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem al-Quds.
The move was hailed by Israel but condemned by the rest of the international community as one which undermines the peace talks.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in a statement issued following an extraordinary summit in Turkey’s Istanbul, declared East Jerusalem the capital of Palestine “under occupation” and urged the US to withdraw from the peace process and back down from its Jerusalem decision.
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) overwhelmingly passed a non-binding resolution condemning Trump’s decision and called on states not to move their diplomatic missions to the sacred city. The UNGA vote followed the US veto of a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution.
In the photo above we see US Congressman Ed Royce of California discussing HR 11, a resolution he introduced condemning the UN Security Council for its recent action on Israeli settlements. You’ll also notice, to Royce’s right, Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen brushing her hair with a pink hairbrush.
The scene is from a debate in Congress which took place on January 5, 2017. Royce and a number of other congressional representatives (342 of them in all) became hot and bothered over the UN’s pointing out (correctly of course) that the settlements are illegal. The photo is a screen shot I took from a C-Span video. It’s a long video, more than eight hours, but if you advance it to about the 5:19:52 mark, you can watch the entire House debate on HR 11, which not surprisingly includes a lot of groveling to Israel (hat tip to Greg Bacon).
Just to refresh your memory, the Security Council, by a vote of 14-0 with 1 abstention, passed a resolution on December 23 “condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.” Voting in favor were Russia, China, Malaysia, Venezuela, New Zealand, Senegal, Spain, Uruguay, France, Angola, Egypt, Japan, UK, Ukraine; the lone abstention was by the US.
The Security Council action was welcomed by a good many people the world over, although Benjamin Netanyahu threw a temper tantrum, claiming to have “absolute” proof the Obama administration had been secretly behind it. Other critics accused the US of a “betrayal” of its longtime “ally,” and an enormous amount of controversy erupted over the issue in the waning days of 2016 and carrying over into the new year.
Of course, anytime a dispute emerges between the US and Israel, members of Congress can always be counted upon to side with the latter rather than with their own nation–and this time was no exception.
“Today we put Congress on record objecting to the recent UN Security Council resolution that hurt our ally, that hurt Israel, and I believe that puts an enduring peace further out of reach,” fretted Royce.
Let me call once again your attention to the image of Ros-Lehtinen brushing her hair, for throughout a good portion of Royce’s speech, the Florida congresswoman–apparently unaware she was on camera–seemed preoccupied with primping and applying makeup to herself, this presumably in an effort to make herself look “beautiful.”
In the first frame of the montage below we see her with the pink hairbrush, followed by a shot of her rummaging in her purse. In the third frame she pulls out what appears to be lipstick or eyeliner (I’m not an expert on women’s makeup), and lastly applying it with her right hand while still holding the container with her left hand.
In the following three frames we see a now cosmetically-adorned Ros-Lehtinen giving her speech before Congress and the C-Span cameras:
“Our closest friend and ally, the democratic, Jewish state of Israel, has been under constant attack by the United Nations,” she claimed.
The Security Council resolution that occasioned Ros-Lehtinen’s diatribe specifically is entitled UNSC Resolution 2334. I put up a post about it on December 24 that contains its full text. The measure expresses “grave concern” that settlements, including those in East Jerusalem, are “dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-State solution based on the 1967 lines.” It also:
1. Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace;
For Ros-Lehtinen, however, UNSC Resolution 2334 was nothing more than an execrable attempt to “delegitimize” Israel–and all the more reason why swift passage by Congress of HR 11 was needed to repudiate it!
This resolution, Mr. speaker, will not undo the damage that has been done at the Security Council, but it sends an important message to the world that the United States Congress resoundingly, and in a strong bipartisan manner, disapproves of the vote taken on resolution 2334, and it sends a warning to the nations that will gather in Paris next week to discuss the peace process that there will be repercussions if there is a move to introduce a parameters resolution before the 20th and in an effort to further isolate Israel. Our closest friend and ally, the democratic, Jewish state of Israel, has been under constant attack by the United Nations. Abu Mazen and the Palestinians have pushed a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state, to undermine the peace process, to achieve unilateral statehood recognition.
For some reason–I’m not quite sure why–the sight of Ros-Lehtinen primping and then fulminating at the podium brought to mind a picture I once saw of an economically-impoverished elderly woman kissing a bird.
I first came across this image several years ago in a poem posted by Nahida the exiled Palestinian, whose website, Poetry for Palestine, can be found here. Her poem is entitled “Beauty.” It is not a lengthy poem at all. In fact, it contains a mere five very short, but very powerful, lines:
Sometimes, beauty is mistakenly understood;
Assuming that
If someone is beautiful, they are always good,
When truth is
When someone is good, they are always beautiful.
The woman whose picture accompanies the poem is beautiful in a way that Ros-Lehtinen is not. In addition to berating the Security Council, the Florida congresswoman also attacked the UN Human Rights Council.
“We’ve seen it at the Human Rights Council where Israel is constantly demonized and falsely accused of human rights violations while the real abusers of human rights go unpunished because that body has utterly failed to uphold its mandate,” she insisted. “This is a body that allows the worst abusers of human rights–like Cuba, Venezuela, and China–to actually sit in judgement of human rights worldwide. What a pathetic joke!”
It’s interesting that Ros-Lehtinen would single out Cuba, Venezuela, and China as being among “the worst abusers of human rights,” while saying nothing–zip–zero–about Saudi Arabia, a country that executes people by beheading and which currently holds the chair of the Human Rights Council.
“Yet the only thing they can agree on is to attack Israel,” the congresswoman blubbered on, “the only democracy in the Middle East and the only place in the region where human rights are protected.”
Exceptions were taken to other UN deliberative bodies as well.
“We’ve seen this scheme to delegtimize Israel at the General Assembly where in its closing legislative session, the General Assembly passed twenty–twenty–anti-Israel resolutions and only four combined for the entire world!” Ros-Lehtinen bellowed.
“These institutions have no credibility, and now we have the unfortunate circumstance of the White House deciding to abstain from this anti-Israel, one-sided resolution at the Security Council,” she added. “Our ally was abandoned, and credibility and momentum were given to the Palestinians’ schemes to delegitimize the Jewish state, to undermine the peace process, and while the damage has been done, Mr. Speaker, by this act of cowardice at the Security Council, we will have an opportunity to reverse that damage.”
What exactly she meant by “we will have an opportunity to reverse that damage” is unclear. Possibly the Trump administration has some plan to introduce a new measure at the UN. In any event, Ros-Lehtinen clearly seems to be a person of both inner and outer ugliness–though of course she is not the only member of Congress with such attributes. Perhaps the most groveling speech of all those given in Congress on January 5 was that delivered by House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“The cornerstone of our special relationship with Israel has always been right here in Congress, this institution,” said Ryan. “The heart of our democracy has stood by the Jewish state through thick and thin. We were there for her when rockets rained down on Tel Aviv; we were there for her by passing historic legislation to combat the boycott divestment and sanctions movement; and we’ve been there for her by ensuring Israel has the tools to defend herself against those who seek her destruction.”
“I am stunned! I am stunned!” the House speaker continued, “at what happened last month! This government, our government, abandoned our ally Israel when she needed us the most! Do not be fooled. This UN Security Council resolution was not about settlements, and it certainly was not about peace. It was about one thing and one thing only. Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state. These types of one-sided efforts are designed to isolate and delegitimize Israel. They do not advance peace, they make it more elusive.”
If Ryan was the supreme groveler in the debate, Royce would probably have to rank a close second. One thing which seemed terribly to incense the California congressman about the Security Council resolution is that it doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to steal East Jerusalem.
“This dangerous resolution effectively states that the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, are in the words of the resolution ‘occupied territory.’ Why would we not veto that?” asked Royce.
“It also lends legitimacy to efforts by the Palestinian authority to put pressure on Israel through the UN rather than to go through the process of engaging in direct negotiations, and it puts wind in the sails of the shameful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement,” he added.
Royce also claimed that Israel, not Occupied Palestine, is suffering “bullying and harassment.” That may sound like the statement of someone living in a parallel universe, but it is a view shared by New York Congressman Eliot Engel, one of HR 11’s original cosponsors.
“Throughout its entire history the state of Israel has never gotten a fair shake from the United Nations,” insisted Engel. “Year after year after year member states manipulate the UN to bully our ally Israel, to pile on one-sided resolutions placing all the blame for the ongoing conflict on Israel.”
Even those representatives who spoke in opposition to HR 11, did so while expressing their support for Israel at the same time. One such member was Rep. David Price, a Democrat from North Carolina.
“The fact is, H Res 11 runs a real risk of undermining the US Congress as a proactive force working toward a two-state solution,” Price lamented. ” And in this period of great geopolitical turmoil and uncertainty, we must reaffirm those fundamental aspects of our foreign policy, including our strong and unwavering support for Israel, while also demonstrating to the world that we are committed to a diplomacy that defends human rights and promotes Israeli and Palestinian states that live side-by-side in peace and security, a formulation that has characterized our country’s diplomacy for decades.”
Another who voted against HR 11 was Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois who is also married to Robert Creamer, the Democrat Party operative who was seen in a Project Veritas video discussing plans to have protestors show up at Trump rallies during the campaign. Schakowsky feels that a little bit of criticism of Israel is allowable at times, and furthermore she holds to this belief as a “proud Jew,” as she stated to her colleagues.
“I stand here as a proud Jew and someone who throughout my entire life has been an advocate for the state of Israel, and I am standing here to oppose our H Res 11,” said the Illinois congresswoman. “And as a member of congress I have been committed to maintaining America’s unwavering support for Israel, which has lasted from the very first moments of Israel’s existence. The US-Israel bond is unbreakable, despite the fact that the United States administrations have not always agreed with the particular policies of an Israeli government.”
Yes, to be sure, our own government and Israel’s have not always seen eye-to-eye, but funny how that never seems to stop the billions in US tax dollars flowing into the Jewish state’s coffers each year. Schakowsky went on:
Presidents from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush have each vetoed, and sometimes voted for, a UN resolution contrary to the wishes of Israel’s government at the time, and only the Obama administration, until two weeks ago, never, ever cast a vote against what Israel wanted. But opposition to the building of settlements on land belonging to Palestinians before the 1967 war was, with the exception of the land, of course, that’s going to be swapped, agreed to by both parties, has been the official US policy for many decades, contrary, again, to the assertions of H Res 11. It has also been the policy of the United States to recognize that the only long term solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the violence, the loss of life, is to create two states, one for the Palestinians and one for Israel.
Exactly how a contiguous Palestinian state is going to be created in a West Bank splotched and dotted with all those settlements, is something Schakowsky left unaddressed. But having voiced a few mild criticisms of Israel, the congresswoman apparently felt an overwhelming need for balance–and so she tossed out a few criticisms of the Palestinians for good measure.
“A two-state solution is the only way Israel can continue as both a democratic and a Jewish state living in peace and security that has eluded her from the very beginning,” she said. “The building of settlements is an obstacle to achieving that goal–and of course settlements aren’t the only obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace. The US resolution reiterates the Palestinian Authority security forces must continue to counter terrorism and condemn all of the provocations.”
Provocations? It’s an interesting word when referring to a people who have been resisting land theft and occupation for more years than most of us have been alive. It also gives rise to a question: How is it possible to carry out “provocations” against a country or governmental entity that technically speaking is in all likelihood guilty of the crime of genocide? Of course it’s unlikely you’ll get an honest answer to that question from Schakowsky or any other member of Congress.
At any rate, HR 11–a resolution which not only impugns the Security Council but even criticizes the United States–passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 342-80, with 4 abstentions. You can go here to see the roll call on the vote.
It was Jeffrey Blankfortwho first coined the old saying about Washington being Israel’s “most important occupied territory.” I think it was sometime back in the late eighties or the nineties when Jeffrey made that comment, and if anything, over the years, it has become more profoundly true than ever.
In addition to writing to Trump, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also reportedly has written letters to the leaders of Russia, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Arab League asking them to do what they can to stop the newly-elected president of the the US from moving the embassy.
Secretary of State John Kerry has waded into the controversy as well, warning that if the embassy is moved, “you’d have an explosion–an absolute explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank and perhaps even Israel itself, but throughout the region.”
A typically un-hinged-from-reality comment on the matter has come from an Israeli official. Ron Dermer, the ambassador to the US, said the embassy “move would be a great step forward to peace,” and he claims also that it would work to undo the “delegitimization of Israel.”
There are also now reports of worries that moving the embassy could increase security threats to State Department personnel in other countries besides Israel–but apparently this doesn’t concern Florida Sen. (and devoted Zionist) Marco Rubio.
“Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish state of Israel, and that’s where America’s embassy belongs,” says Rubio. “It’s time for Congress and the president-elect to eliminate the loophole that has allowed presidents in both parties to ignore U.S. law and delay our embassy’s rightful relocation to Jerusalem for over two decades.”
Rubio is referring to the “Jerusalem Embassy Act,” approved by Congress in 1995, which calls for the moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem but which also allows for a presidential waiver if it is deemed the move would harm US security interests. Every president from the time the law was passed up until today has exercised the waiver.
The PLO response to the move–at least as stated in the above video–would be a withdrawal of its recognition of Israel. There is also a warning that the Palestinian Authority could dissolve itself, effectively rendering Israel responsible for administering what are now referred to as the “Palestinian territories.” This would leave the Jewish state with the choice of either annexing the territories and giving Palestinians living within them the right to vote in Israeli elections–or, alternately, Israel could openly rule over a subject people who have no rights as citizens. This would basically remove the fig leaf cover and expose Israel once and for all as an apartheid state. Should it choose this latter course of action, doubtless it would become grist for the mill for a conference set to take place in Ireland and which I posted an article about four days ago.
The three-day conference is to be entitled “International Law & the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism, and Responsibility,” and as I reported, one of the questions its participants will examine is whether Israel has a legal right to exist under international law.
If Dermer and other Israeli officials are worried about the “delegitimization” they are experiencing now, doubtless the fires of illicitness will get hotter if the Palestinian Authority “hands the keys to the territories” back to Israel. Whether the PA will actually go through with that remains to be seen, however. And my own personal view is that it is something they probably should have done a long time ago.
However, if today’s resignation of a Palestinian mayor inside of Israel is any indication, we could perhaps seem something like that come to pass.
As bad as the settlements are–and as the video above makes clear, they have in essence destroyed any chance of peace–maybe the time has come to stop having debates about the settlements per se. Maybe the time has come instead to approach the problem from an entirely different perspective–maybe, rather than deliberate and wrangle over settlements, the real issue humanity should take up now, after witnessing 50 years of illegal occupation and land grabs, is the question of whether Israel should even have a right to exist at all.
A three-day conference entitled “International Law & the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism, and Responsibility” is scheduled to take place this spring in Ireland. (H/T Rehmat) A visit to the conference website would suggest that this indeed is the question, or at least one of the questions, the conference will attempt to answer.
This is a conference that was initially supposed to have been held in 2015 at the University of Southampton in the UK, but which had to be postponed–and eventually cancelled altogether–due to Zionist pressure applied to the university administration.
It has since been moved to University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland, where Zionists are still trying their utmost to abort it from happening, although so far they have not succeeded.
A statement by the organizers has been posted on their website which reads in part:
This conference will be the first of its kind and constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine. It is unique because, while most attention today is directed at Israel’s actions in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the conference seeks to expand the debate surrounding the nature of the State of Israel and the legal and political reality within it.
The conference will raise questions that link the suffering in historic Palestine to the manner of Israel’s foundation and its nature. It aims to generate a debate on legitimacy, exceptionalism and responsibility under international law as provoked by the nature of the Israeli state. It will also examine how international law could be deployed, expanded, and even re-imagined, in order to achieve peace and reconciliation based on justice.
A “ground-breaking historical event” that will explore questions surrounding Israel’s “legitimacy” is something that is of course long overdue. Additionally the website states:
Legal scholarship on Palestine-Israel and international law, involving issues of self-determination, human rights and constitutional law, has largely focused on the Israeli occupation since 1967 of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and on the illegality of Israel’s settlements and apartheid colonization in these territories.
Alongside these debates, there has been a persistent, if marginalized, scholarship examining and analyzing problems associated with the creation and the nature of the Jewish state itself and the status of Jerusalem. This research has combined historical scholarship and legal analysis of the manner by which the State of Israel came into existence as well as what kind of state it is. The issues explored hitherto linked reflections on the scholarship between international law and: identity and injustice; violence and morality; nationality and citizenship; self-determination and legitimacy; exceptionalism; and responsibility.
Hopefully these debates–i.e. on Israel’s “foundation and its nature,” and, by turn, its ensuing “legitimacy” or lack thereof–will continue to be “marginalized” for not much longer. And a conference of this nature stands a good chance of helping to push the issue from the margins to the mainstream.
Perhaps this is why Zionists are working so feverishly to stop it. The Board of Deputies of British Jews reportedly was instrumental in killing off the conference in the UK, and according to a report here the Israeli Embassy in Ireland is now issuing condemnations of the organizers.
The conference is scheduled to take place March 31-April 2, 2017. The list of confirmed speakers includes academics from the US, the UK, and Israel:
Professor Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow of the Orfalea Centre of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara
Professor Ilan Pappe, Department of History, University of Exeter
Professor Ugo Mattei, Distinguished Professor of Law, and Alfred and Hanna Fromm Chair in International and Comparative Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law
Professor Cheryl Harris, School of Law, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Faculty of Law/Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Dr. Azmi Bishara General Director, Doha Institute of Graduate Studies, and former Member of the Knesset
Elias Khouri, Novelist, Beirut
Dr. Haitam Suleiman, Al-Quds University Jerusalem
Dr. Salman Abu-Sitta, Palestine Land Society
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, Media Communications Department, Webster University Vienna
Dr. Blake Alcott, Independent Researcher
Dr. Catriona Drew, School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Dr. Ghada Karmi, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
Dr. Hatem Bazian, Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at Berkeley University of California (UC Berkeley)
Dr. Jeff Handmaker, the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University (EUR)
Dr. John Reynolds, Law Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth
Dr. Marcelo Svirsky, School of Humanities & Social Inquiry LHA Faculty, University of Wollongong
Dr. Mazen Masri, City Law School, City University of London
Dr. Michael Kearney, School of Law, University of Sussex
Dr. Mutaz Qafisheh, College of Law, Hebron University
Dr. Ronit Lentin, Retired Associate Professor in Sociology, Trinity College Dublin
Dr. Ruba Salih, Centre for Gender Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Dr. Valentina Azarova, Centre for Global Public Law, Koç Üniversitesi
Dr. Victor Kattan, Law Faculty, National University of Singapore
Joni Assi, Community arts activist
Mr. Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, Co-Director of De-Colonizer and Founder of Zochrot
Ms. Lea Tsemel, Lawyer and human rights activist
Ms. Mia Tamarin, Law School, University of Kent
Ms. Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, Writer, journalist, and member of Jaffa One State Group.
Ms. Salma Karmi Ayyub, Barrister
Professor Alan Johnson, Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)
Professor Brad Roth, College of Liberal Arts & Science and School of Law, Wayne State University
Professor Geoffrey Alderman, Politics and Contemporary History, University of Buckingham
Professor George Bisharat, Hastings College of the Law University of California
Professor Haim Bresheeth, Centre for Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Professor Joel Kovel, Independent Researcher.
Professor John Strawson, School of Law, University of East London
Professor Kevin Jon Heller, School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Professor Nur Masalha, Centre for Religion and History, St. Mary’s University
Professor Oren Ben-Dor, Law School, University of Southampton, UK.
Professor Penny Green, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Professor Robert Wintemute, Law School, King’s College London
Professor Robert Home, Law School, Anglia Ruskin University
Professor Virginia Tiley, Professor of Political Science, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Professor Yakov Rabkin, Department of History, University of Montréal
Professor Yosefa Loshitzky, Centre for Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Adv. Yoella Har-Shefi, legal adviser for the Ani-Israeli Association and a human rights activist
You can find the Palestinian flag flying in a lot of places these days–some of them thousands of miles away from Occupied Palestine…
Buenos Aires
Last week, football fans in St. Etienne, France waved Palestinian flags as their team competed against Beitar Jerusalem, a club from Israel. The incident was widely reported, including by media in Israel. It is said that the Israeli players were confronted with Palestinian flags after their own fans had been prohibited from carrying Israeli flags into the stadium…
St. Etienne, France
This took place just a week after football fans in Scotland waved Palestinian flags during a match between their own club, the Celtics, and another Israeli team, the Hapoel Be’er Sheva. The Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, apparently got wind that something was up and issued a stern warning prior to the game–demanding that the Scottish fans refrain from displaying the flag. The fans defied the ban and waved it anyway…
Glasgow, Scotland
Elsewhere in the UK…
London
London
Elsewhere in France…
Lyon, France
The Palestinian flag is beloved by the young…
Buenos Aires
As well as the old…
USA
On Monday of this week, Nickolay Mladenov, a UN envoy to the Middle East,reported to the UN Security Council that Israel continues to ignore international calls to halt its settlement activity on Palestinian lands. Mladenov was referencing a report by the so-called Quartet on the Middle East–comprised of the UN, the US, Russia, and the EU–which was released earlier this year and which called upon Israel to halt its settlement activity and its demolition of Palestinian homes.
“It’s (the report’s) recommendations continue to be ignored, including by a surge in Israeli settlement-related announcements and continuing demolitions,” he said.
In his comments, Mladenov pointed out that rather than curtailing its settlement activity, Israel–in the two months since the report was released–has actually increased it, with the advancement of more than 1,000 new units in occupied East Jerusalem and 735 units in the West Bank, according to a report in Press TV.
“All of these plans would essentially create new illegal settlements, and I call on Israel to cease and reverse these decisions,” Mladenov said.
With the US veto as Israel’s ace in the hole, I doubt we’ll see the Security Council take action, at least any time soon.
But be that as it may, the Palestinian flag continues to fly…
In Australia…
Australia
In Germany…
Munich, Germany
At packed concerts in Catalonia…
In Los Angeles…
Los Angeles
In New York…
New York
And in India…
India
One place where the Palestinian flag is flown especially proudly is South Africa…but that’s not surprising given most people there remember their own history under apartheid rule…
We can also see the Palestinian flag flown in Chile…
Chile
In Barcelona…
Barcelona
And many other places as well.
What accounts for all this popularity of the Palestinian flag? Is it love for Palestine? Is it detestation of Israel? Is it a little of both perhaps? Perhaps the comments of these people in Italy might help shed some light on the matter…
“We will continue despite the power of the Zionist lobby in our country…”
“They think they can do anything because governments are backing them…”
Well, that says it fairly clearly, but if you’re still not clear on the answer, then ask yourself the following question: Does it help Israel’s cause, or hurt it, when some of the dirtiest, most corrupt politicians…in Italy…in the UK…in the US, and many other countries besides, go about constantly professing their eternal, undying, no-daylight-between-us support for Israel? The daily news provides an unappetizing display of this with each passing day.
Obviously support for Palestine is growing, and obviously the Palestinian flag has a special place in the hearts of a lot of people. I’m guessing the reasons for this have as much to do with the occupation that the Palestinians are suffering as with what people are experiencing in their own countries and the sense many have of feeling betrayed by their own leaders. Corruption is the order of the day, particularly in the West. This has resulted in unprecedented wealth inequalities, but just as tides change and the great fall, so do inequalities have a way of rectifying themselves. Palestine will one day be free, and so will the rest of us.
PRESS TV – UK Labour politician Rupa Asha Huq has suggested that Britain could apologize for helping to create Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories, a new report claims, further fueling an ongoing row over Israel that has seen senior Labour members suspended by the party.
Huq, a member of Parliament (MP) who represents the London borough of Ealing, made the remarks at a meeting with the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign last year, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.
In response to a question about whether London should make an apology, Huq said: “1948; that happened under a British government. To my mind, an apology – yes. You could do one. A Labour Government could probably get that through.”
However, she noted that an apology would be subject to criticism similar to those former Prime Minister Tony Blair faced for bringing up long-past historical events, including the Irish potato famine and slavery.
The revelation comes shortly after Huq was attacked for defending fellow Labour MP Naz Shah, who was forced to apologize for backing calls for Israel’s “relocation” to the United States.
The former mayor of London Ken Livingstone (pictured below) became the most prominent Labour figure to face the same fate as Shah after defending her and adding that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist.
“The creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong, because there had been a Palestinian community there for 2,000 years,” Livingstone recently told Arabic TV station al-Ghad al-Arabi.
The illegal Israeli regime was established in 1948, when it occupied Palestinian land along with expanses of other Arab territories during full-fledged military operations. The occupied lands also include Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms and Syria’s Golan Heights.
In 1967, it occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, including East al-Quds (Jerusalem), and the Gaza Strip. It later annexed the West Bank and East al-Quds in a move never recognized by the international community.
The Labour Party has suspended as many as 50 members over allegations of “anti-Semitism” and racism in the past two months.
Last month, Corbyn ordered an inquiry into the issue and said he would propose a new code of conduct banning any forms of racism in the party.
It has been a number of months since Israel passed that law making it legal for soldiers to shoot people for throwing rocks. I had kind of forgotten about that. How many civilized countries have a law like that on the books?
The Israelis seem to have a real knack for “delegitimizing” themselves. The counter-argument to that, though, is that Israelis live in a “rough neighborhood” and face challenges the rest of us don’t have to worry about. But is that really the case? I suppose it all depends on how you look at it.
“They started it!”
In the eyes of Joan Alexandra Molinsky, aka Joan Rivers, who floated joyfully out of this life a year and a half ago, the guilty parties in this conflict were clear–it’s those wearing the kaffiyehs rather than the kippahs. And no doubt that’s the prevailing view in Hollywood…
They started it!” Is Ms. Molinsky trying to say it was the Palestinians who stole the homes and land of the Jews back in 1948? That’s funny, I always thought it was the other way around. I guess we’ve had it backwards all these years.
Ed note–doubtless those on the left will swoon and shriek with barely contained glee over this, showcasing yet again another ‘good Jew’ who is ‘speaking with conscience’ about the utter barbarity that is every facet of ‘the Jewish state’.
The problem with such expositions however is that it’s akin to ringing the fire alarm after the house has burned down. Israel’s ugliness is nothing new. In 1948, as marauding Jews went from village to village murdering thousands of innocent men, women, and children, using guns, bombs, molotov coctails, and in some cases, literally cutting open the bellies of pregnant Palestinian women and ripping their unborn children out–the script for the rest of the screenplay had been written in stone.
The only reason for all of this ‘coming to Jesus’ theatricism on the part of ‘good Jews’ such as this is that the smarter elements within Jewry know what is coming and want it noted for the record that they ‘opposed’ this brutality when it comes time for hunting down these people and giving them the justice they richly deserve.
Remember, the motto of Israel’s Mossad ‘by way of deception, we shall make war’ can take on all sorts of interesting manifestations.
mondoweiss.net
Israel is “a failure,” the Zionist dream has curdled into Jewish selfishness, a major Jewish leader writes in an important article published yesterday. “After a life and career devoted to Jewish community and Israel, I conclude that in every important way Israel has failed to realize its promise for me,” David Gordis states.
Gordis is a former executive at the American Jewish Committee, a central organization of the Israel lobby, and former president of the Hebrew College and a former vice president of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He published his article yesterday at Tikkun under the title, “Major American Jewish Leader Changes His Mind About Israel.”
Gordis, who is in his late 70s (and the uncle of rightwing Zionist Daniel Gordis), writes that he completely believed in Israel when it was founded and through his adult life, but that the spiral of that society into occupation and Jewish particularism has caused him to change his mind. It’s a political, spiritual and religious failure: Israel is “distorted by a fanatic, obscurantist and fundamentalist religion which encourages the worst behaviors rather than the best.”
His indictment includes American Jews. “The establishment leadership in the American Jewish community is silent in the face of this dismal situation, and there are no recognizable trends that can move Israel out of this quagmire.” Peter Beinart said this about the establishment four years ago while Max Blumenthal laid out the problem in Israel’s political culture in comprehensive detail in Goliath three years ago and was promptly censored by every mainstream organ, from NPR to the New Yorker to the New York Times to the cables and public television– yes; “Frontline” features Dennis Ross and Ari Shavit as its spokespeople on Israel, to make the funders happy.
Read Gordis’s article in full. Here are some excerpts:
The Israel of today is very far from anything I dreamed of and worked for throughout my career….
Jews had returned to the stage of history after the devastation of the Holocaust. Israel was to be the great laboratory for the rebirth of an ancient tradition in a new land and in a country committed to being a model of democracy and freedom for the world.
What happened? We can debate the reasons but the bottom line for me is that it has gone terribly wrong. On the positive side, Israel’s accomplishments have been remarkable. Israel has created a thriving economy, and has been a refuge for hundreds of thousands of the displaced and the needy. Israel has generated a rich and diverse cultural life and its scientific and educational achievements have been exemplary. In spite of these achievements, however, Israel in my view has gone astray. And it in in the area for which Israel was created, as a Jewish state, embodying and enhancing Jewish values that I see this failure..
The political culture is rotten.
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is nearing a half century in duration. Netanyahu’s “facts on the ground” steps to make a two-state solution impossible are bearing fruit, and there still appears to be no significant opposition to these policies in Israel itself. A number of smaller organizations supporting a two-state solution have emerged, notably J-Street and Americans for Peace Now, but recent steps by the Israeli government to delegitimize these groups are proceeding. The bottom line as I see it: The right has triumphed; the left has been defeated.
The spiritual culture is rotten. The Jewish experience balanced particularism and universalism traditionally. Not in Israel. The emphasis below is Gordis’s.
Present day Israel has discarded the rational, the universal and the visionary. These values have been subordinated to a cruel and oppressive occupation, an emphatic materialism, severe inequalities rivaling the worst in the western world and distorted by a fanatic, obscurantist and fundamentalist religion which encourages the worst behaviors rather than the best.
And most depressing of all for me, is that I see no way out, no way forward which will reverse the current reality. Right wing control in Israel is stronger and more entrenched than ever. The establishment leadership in the American Jewish community is silent in the face of this dismal situation, and there are no recognizable trends that can move Israel out of this quagmire. So, sadly, after a life and career devoted to Jewish community and Israel, I conclude that in every important way Israel has failed to realize its promise for me. A noble experiment, but a failure.
This article is a huge blow. Michael Walzer has had similar misgivings lately published in a book; but he has not stated the matter as emphatically as this. But I predict apres Gordis, the deluge.
Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun says that he published the article as submitted by Gordis, who is today a senior scholar at SUNY Albany:
We publish it with the same sadness that Gordis expresses at the end of this article, because many of us at Tikkun magazine shared the same hopes he expresses below for an Israel that would make Jews proud by becoming an embodiment of what is best in Jewish tradition, history, and ethics, rather than a manifestation of all the psychological and spiritual damage that has been done to our people, which now acts as an oppressor to the Palestinian people.
One last point. From his American Jewish Committee days, Gordis reflects that that Israel lobbying organization had political tensions built in.
its lay leadership tending center-right and its professional staff clearly center left.
This is always the tension in these organizations. Right now I bet J Street staff is composed of people who understand the failure of Israel, while the leadership clings to HaTikvah Zionism so as to influence the Democratic Party an iota. Americans for Peace Now surely has young staff who believe in one state.
A distinct possibility, I would say. By the way, as the fourth and final blood moon of the tetrad approaches, chaos and pandemonium have broken out at the Al Aqsa Mosque. Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers have repeatedly stormed the mosque, while Palestinians have fought to hold them off.
This has been particularly intense of late with the Jewish fall holiday season upon us. Yesterday was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year; Yom Kippur is coming up starting on September 22, while the blood moon lunar eclipse will take place September 28, on Sukkot.
Much of these clashes we are now seeing appear to be motivated by a strong desire by certain Jewish organizations, such as the Temple Institute, to rebuild a Jewish temple at the site. You can click here to access a report posted today at the Electronic Intifada, or check out an article I wrote last year entitled The Abomination of Desolation and which covers much the same ground. The difference between then and now is that the movement to tear down the Al Aqsa Mosque and replace it with a “Third Temple” has gained steam. Quite a bit of it.
According to Ma’an News, the clashes have now expanded from the Al Aqsa Mosque compound all the way across East Jerusalem, and quite naturally in the course of all this, we are hearing about Israeli brutalities, including attacks against children. Here is one such report.
We seem to be seeing a major split in World Jewry over the policies of the state of Israel. A couple of recently-published articles are indicative of this.
One is a July 23 article that appeared in the Times of Israel about a new study that found, among other things, that diaspora Jews don’t feel the Israeli government is sincere about seeking a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians. Here is a brief excerpt.
World Jewry is finding it increasingly difficult to support Israel due to its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, leading many communities to shun discussing the Jewish state altogether, a new major study has found.
The trend is eroding the Diaspora’s support for the Jewish state, warns the report by the Jewish People Policy Institute think tank, to be formally published next week.
Diaspora Jews, the report goes on to mention, are asking for an increased say in how Israel conducts its affairs. “Stop it! You’re making us look bad!”–that, essentially, when you boil it down, is what the diaspora Jews who responded to the survey are saying to the Israeli Jews.
The other article indicative of the split is an op-ed piece in the New York Times, published coincidentally the same day as the Times of Israel article, written by a Palestinian resident of the village of Susiya.
Susiya is a West Bank village which, as I reported in a couple of recent posts (see here andhere), is presently under an Israeli demolition order, and an international campaign has been launched to try and save it.
The op-ed piece is headlined, “Israel, Don’t Level My Village.” The author, Nasser Nawaja, discusses his family’s cyclic history of being made homeless by Israel, once in 1948 and again in 1986, going on to comment that the looming threat of a third dispossession “has now become immediate.”
Hardly any wonder, then, that diaspora Jews are starting to question whether Israel is really “sincere” about achieving peace–although one would perhaps allow that it is rather astonishing it has taken them this long to reach that conclusion.
At any rate, the decision by the New York Times to publish the piece by Nawaja would suggest that the split between diaspora and Israeli Jews is real and growing. Israel has been building illegal settlements in the West Bank for years. When did the New York Times ever voice any objection to it? I’m not aware of it if they ever did. What has changed now?
Perhaps it is that financially and politically powerful Jews, by virtue of the fact that Israel’s behavior has grown so egregious, are beginning to see the Jewish state as a threat to themselves and the empires they have constructed in their countries of residence. This is the subject of an article by Ariadna Theokopoulos and recently published at The Ugly Truth.
While being a Jew means never having to say you are sorry or engaging in delayed gratification, JP [“Jewish power”-ed.] has global agendas that do not welcome the light in which Israel defiantly basks, and, by association, draws attention to Jewish misdeeds worldwide, including the hijacking of power in the western world. It wants Israel to be mindful of PR.
Theokopoulos goes on to comment:
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians whose land they took over has been beyond despicable from the very beginnings of the state, yet well-organized hasbara has managed to inculcate into the minds of the Western Goyim the dichotomy: Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims = terrorists vs Israeli Jews = peace-loving, long-suffering victims. Not so anymore. Israel is no longer seen as even a “legitimate” state but a rogue nuclear power, a racist, expansionist war criminal and war monger. Of more concern, in attracting scrutiny to its successful flouting of international laws, it has led to an examination of what exactly allows it to act with complete impunity. It has exposed the lines of power that move the governments of the major world powers, like puppets on a string, to act as its enablers, indeed as its agents. The lines are now seen by more people than ever before to lead to the Jewish lobbies, to the ZPC, which does not reside in Israel, but permeates the power centers of the US and the UK, and not only.
Jews have accrued enormous power in the US and other Western countries. That is a statement that will get you accused of anti-Semitism, but it is also an undeniable fact. And as Theokopoulos correctly points out, Israel’s actions, and its ability to violate international law with impunity, are drawing attention to that power.
Every time Israel tears down another Palestinian village or goes on a rampage and kills another four or five hundred children in Gaza, what do you suppose diaspora Jews feel?
My guess is a rising level of nervousness and discomfort.
On March 30th 2015 BDS Norway conducted a war-stunt in front of the Norwegian Parliament
BDS Norway calls upon the government and Norwegian arms manufacturers to end all military trade and cooperation with Israel.
BDS Norway has previously held actions against the Norwegian weaponry producers, Nammo at their headquarters in Raufoss, and Chemring Nobel in Hurum.
We know that Norwegian weapons have been used against thousands of civilians in Gaza.
An end-user declaration on weaponry is an easy way to prevent this from happening.
We as Norwegian citizens and stockowners of Nammo require that the necessary steps be taken to guarantee that we are not contributing to violations of international law in Palestine.
We also demand that Norway ends all military trade with Israel until it complies with international law.
BDS Norway plans to continue with similar actions until we see change in the current Norwegian practice.
For more info, contact us: bdsnorge@gmail.com or
visit our Facebook/Twitter accounts: BDS Norway
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 