Only non-Jews can save Israel, Israeli journalist Eldar says
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- Written by Philip Weiss Philip Weiss
- Published: 05 January 2013 05 January 2013
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The only thing that can save Israel is non-Jews. This was the message of Akiva Eldar, the veteran Israeli journalist, in a conference call on January 2 held by Americans For Peace Now.
These non-Jews could save Israel by acting in two ways: The Palestinian citizens of Israel must vote in three weeks, instead of staying home, and this will allow a Labor coalition to form a new government dedicated to making peace with Palestine (and guaranteeing Israel's existence), Eldar says.
Or, if as is almost certain, Netanyahu's coalition is reelected, the Europeans-- who unlike Obama are unbound by AIPAC-- will at last pressure Israel in ways that will force the Netanyahu government to dissolve before too long, Eldar says.
In short, if you are counting on Israeli Jews to change their society and end the occupation, forget about it. The "Masada syndrome"-- the belief that "the goyim" are against us-- has taken hold in the Israeli public, Eldar says, pushed by the only strong leader in Israeli society, Netanyahu, so that even secular liberals accept the idea that peace with the Palestinians is a theoretical possibility but not practical.
So you have a liberal Zionist, Eldar, 67, columnist for Haaretz and al-monitor.com, arguing that the only way to save the Jewish state is for non-Jews to take action. Though Eldar did not say so explicitly, his argument turns Zionism on its head: Jewish sovereignty is actually destructive.
You can listen to Eldar here. Key points of his analysis:
1. The Israeli Palestinians are the "game changer," if they would only vote.
"If Labor/Kadima what’s left of it, [Tzipi] Livini, if they will be able to convince the Arab Israeli constituency that if they win, things will change-- because the reason they don’t vote is they gave up hope that things will change--... I think the Arab or Israeli Palestinian electorate can be a game changer. But otherwise the common wisdom is, that Bibi Netanyahu is going to be the next prime minister."
If Israeli Palestinians voted, Labor Kadima could then form a 61-member coalition with the addition of Shas, the Ultra-Orthodox, who would be in the government because they always want to be in the ruling coalition, so as to be “close to the bank,” Eldar explains.
2. Israel is careening to the right, and the Europeans are the only ones who are going to stop Israel.
Netanyahu lost to the radical right twice, first when he combined the Likud party and the rightwing Yisraeli Beteinu party, a masterstroke/"mistake" brokered by American political consultant Arthur Finkelstein, which put the radicals inside his own party; then he has lost more recently with the rise of the charismatic Naftali Bennett and the Jewish Home Party on his right. Bennett, an Orthodox Jew, is for Bantustans on the West Bank, annexing Area C, and pushing Gaza into Egypt, Eldar says, but even the secular elite young like him because he made money in high-tech and his secular wife is a chef in a non-Kosher restaurant.
The Israeli Jewish public claims to be for a two-state solution but it will vote for Likud and Bennett because it has accepted Netanyahu’s propaganda that Palestinians don't want peace, they want Jerusalem; and so the international pressure on settlements is an effort to delegitimize Israel – in the pointed finger,"it's our fault, not the goyim's fault." Netanyahu also claims to be for a two-state solution but if he had to adopt his own Bar-Ilan speech of ’09 as his platform, his coalition would abandon him. Even Labor’s Shelly Yachimovitch has deferred to the radical right on the settlement policy, because she doesn’t know anything about the Palestinian issue. The Masada syndrome is reminiscent to Eldar of a song that Israelis sung after the 1967 war: “The whole world is against us. Sorry, we won.”
Of course, the Europeans and the Americans have been letting Israel get away with consuming the West Bank while claiming they are for the two state solution. The Americans briefly changed the program in '91 under Bush and in '99 under Clinton (note to reader: last year of their presidencies) and in each case Likud lost the prime ministership because the US pressure changed Israeli public opinion.
This time round Obama "doesn’t seem interested," but the Europeans are "getting fed up." The Israeli ambassadors’ revolt against their government's E1 settlement plans shows that they can’t sustain European support. The biggest crack is the Czechs. The Czechs were the only EU member to vote against Palestinian observer state status at the UN last November, but the Israeli ambassador says since then for the first time he has been getting "difficult" questions from the Czechs about E-1 and other settlement plans.
So when Netanyahu is sworn in again, on Day One his coalition will have a radical right line and the Europeans will start to confront him. On two potential fronts: Hey, we like the American visa system, and now when you want to have a bar mitzvah in Paris, you have to wait for weeks to get a visa; and we have noticed that even you Israelis are boycotting settlement goods, so we are going to do so too. Eldar spoke about the Israel lobby. During the statehood initiative at the UN, the US signaled to European countries, you can vote for enhanced status for the Palestinians, but we can't:
"I believe [the pressure] will not come from the Americans, it will come from the Europeans, because... the Europeans are getting fed up, and in the case of the Palestinian request to the UN, there was a message, you can go ahead with this, you don’t have to follow us and vote against the Palestinians. [It was a] subtle hint from the US to Europeans, you don’t have to worry about the European AIPAC, so take advantage of this."
Netanyahu will respond to the economic pressure, and his coalition will break. There will be new elections not long after he forms his coalition, Eldar indicated.
When asked by a Peace Now caller what could produce a meaningful two-state solution, Eldar basically admitted no one is Israel is thinking about this.
"People are thinking now of other solutions including a kind of one state solution which will allow Israel to maintain its Jewish nature and the Palestinians [not to have] borders and allow the settlers to stay where they are."
But this disturbs him:
"The majority of the Israelis, and the Palestinians don’t believe in a one-state solution. They don’t want to get married, they want a divorce. There is so much animosity and unfinished business between the two people. Look at the Balkans, look at Belgium, at Quebec, let alone here where you have different religions, different history, and so many years of occupation that left millions of Palestinians wounded. I don’t believe there is an other way."
I understand this argument but am not convinced by it. It is generational. How many of Peace Now's constituency even believe it? People are sick of a charade, the peace process, and Israeli expansion has forever changed the West Bank landscape. The two state solution would require repartition and return of colonists; and there’s no political will to impose it. As for "unfinished business" and the wounds of occupation, world opinion is beginning to valorize Palestinian grievances, from '48 to '67, and that is a good thing.
If you follow Eldar's logic that only non-Jews can save Israel from the dangers of Jewish sovereignty-- well, it is actually a democratic argument for everyone who is under the power of the Israeli government to have a vote. The extremism Eldar so disparages is the fruit of empowering only half the population, on an ethnic basis.
Likud members call for Israeli annexation of West Bank territories
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- Written by Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem, The Guardian Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem, The Guardian
- Published: 02 January 2013 02 January 2013
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Prominent members of ruling party urge annexation of 'Area C' as battle for rightwing votes intensifies before general election
Moshe Feiglin, who proposed that Israel should pay Palestinian families to leave the West Bank. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA
Prominent members of Israel's ruling Likud party have proposed the annexation of part of the West Bank as the battle for rightwing votes intensifies before the general election in less than three weeks.
Government minister Yuli Edelstein told a conference in Jerusalem that the lack of Israeli sovereignty over Area C – the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli military control in which all settlements are situated – "strengthens the international community's demand for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines".
Ze'ev Elkin, the chairman of the governing coalition, said Israel should adopt a "salami" approach to annexation: "We will try to apply sovereignty over as much as we can at any given moment."
A third Likud member, extreme rightwing settler Moshe Feiglin, proposed that the state of Israel should pay Palestinian families to leave the West Bank, using funds earmarked for security measures. "We can give every family in Judea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank] $500,000 [£300,000] to encourage [them] to emigrate … This is the perfect solution for us," he said.
Read more: Likud members call for Israeli annexation of West Bank territories
Palestinian truck torched in apparent ‘price tag’ attack
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- Written by JTA JTA
- Published: 02 January 2013 02 January 2013
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[This is just an example of what is happening to Palestinians daily at the hands of Israel's racist settlers]
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- A truck in a West Bank Palestinian village was torched in an apparent "price tag" attack.
The truck in the Beit Ummar village was completely burned, and graffiti spray-painted on a nearby wall read "Price tag," "A good Arab is a dead Arab," "Today in property, tomorrow lives," and "Revenge from Yitzhar," the French news agency AFP reported. The attack occurred overnight Monday and was discovered on Tuesday.
Yitzhar is a settlement in the northern West Bank that is home to many extremist settlers.
"Price tag" refers to the strategy that Jewish extremists have adopted to exact a price in attacks on Palestinians and Arabs in retribution for settlement freezes and demolitions, or for Palestinian attacks on Jews.
The attack came after a weekend in which settler youths and Israeli soldiers clashed over the evacuation of the Oz Zion outpost near the Beit El settlement.
Last week, three residents of Jewish West Bank settlements were indicted for carrying out a "price tag" attack near Hebron earlier this month.
Also Tuesday, Palestinians and settlers from the Esh Kodesh outpost clashed after Palestinians attempted to a plow land that both sides claim as their own. Israeli soldiers at the scene also were attacked with rocks, Israel Radio reported.
U.S. Complicity in Israel's Deadly Actions in Gaza
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- Written by Josh Ruebner Josh Ruebner
- Published: 27 December 2012 27 December 2012
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On November 18, an Israeli air force pilot flying a U.S.-made F-16 fighter jet fired a missile at the four-story home of the al-Dalu family in Gaza City, killing ten members of the family and two from the al-Muzannar family next door.
An on-site investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch concluded that the attack was a "clear violation of the laws of war" and demanded that those "responsible for deliberately or recklessly committing a serious violation of the laws of war should be prosecuted for war crimes."
Israel's bombing of the al-Dalu home was the single deadliest attack in an eight-day offensive last month against the blockaded and occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip that killed at least 160 Palestinians, of whom 105 were civilians and 34 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
Two weeks ago, on International Human Rights Day, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the United States works to advance "the universal freedoms enshrined" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the "right to life, liberty and security of person." "When governments seek to deny these liberties through repressive laws and blunt force," she intoned, "we stand against this oppression and with people around the world as they defend their rights."
Yet, when it comes to U.S. policy toward Palestinians, this rhetoric rings hollow. The United States arms Israel to the teeth, fails to uphold U.S. human rights laws when Israel uses U.S. weapons to commit abuses of Palestinians and, up to this point, has thrown around its diplomatic heft in international forums to shield Israel from the war crimes prosecutions advocated for by Human Rights Watch and others.
Israel's recent killing of members of the al-Dalu and al-Muzannar families is a tragic reminder of why 15 leading church figures sent Congress a letter in October arguing that "unconditional U.S. military assistance to Israel" plays a role in "sustaining the conflict and undermining the long-term security interests of both Israelis and Palestinians." These church leaders urged Congress to hold hearings into Israel's violations of the Arms Export Control Act, which limits the use of U.S. weapons to "internal security" and "legitimate self-defense," and to examine Israel's eligibility for any form of U.S. assistance, given that the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits U.S. aid to countries that engage in a consistent pattern of human rights violations.
Such a reevaluation of U.S. military aid to Israel, which is scheduled to amount to $30 billion from 2009 to 2018, is desperately needed. Israel is by far and away the largest recipient of U.S. taxpayer-funded military aid and it is patently obvious that these U.S. weapons are being used by Israel to commit systematic human rights abuses against Palestinians. For example, the fighter jet whose missile devastated the al-Dalu and al-Muzannar families very well may have been one of the 93 F-16D fighter jets, valued at $2.5 billion, which U.S. taxpayers financed and transferred to Israel in the previous decade.
However, far from examining Israel's misuse of U.S. weapons in its most recent attack on Gaza, much less holding it accountable, the Obama administration is moving forward with a proposed weapons deal that would replenish Israel's arsenal. While Clinton offered platitudes about standing against aggression on International Human Rights Day, the Pentagon was busy that same day notifying Congress that it hopes to ship to Israel 6,900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions tail kits, which "convert free-fall bombs into satellite-guided ordnance," and more than 10,000 bombs to accompany them.
On previous occasions when the international community attempted to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes -- most notably with the "Goldstone Report" issued after Israel's "Operation Cast Lead" killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in 2008 and 2009, and after Israel killed nine humanitarian activists in international waters who were attempting to deliver goods to Gaza in 2010 -- heavy-handed U.S. diplomatic pressure and its threatened Security Council veto prevented effective action being taken.
But now that the United Nations General Assembly has voted to make Palestine a "non-member observer state," potentially clearing the way for it to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), Israel may no longer be able to rely on U.S. protection. And as long as the United States refuses to hold Israel accountable for committing human rights abuses of Palestinians with U.S. weapons and keeps the spigot of weapons open, Palestinians should seek redress at the ICC for Israel's war crimes. Due to ongoing U.S. funding for Israel's oppression of Palestinians, it is the only route for families such as the al-Dalu and al-Muzanner to take to receive a modicum of justice.
HRW cites Israel for war crimes
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- Written by Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch
- Published: 25 December 2012 25 December 2012
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Israel/Gaza: Unlawful Israeli Attacks on Palestinian Media
Missiles Kill Two Media Workers, Toddler; 10 Wounded
December 20, 2012
(Gaza City) – Four Israeli attacks on journalists and media facilities in Gaza during the November 2012 fighting violated the laws of war by targeting civilians and civilian objects that were making no apparent contribution to Palestinian military operations.
The attacks killed two Palestinian cameramen, wounded at least 10 media workers, and badly damaged four media offices, as well as the offices of four private companies. One of the attacks killed a two-year-old boy who lived across the street from a targeted building.
The Israeli government asserted that each of the four attacks was on a legitimate military target but provided no specific information to support its claims. After examining the attack sites and interviewing witnesses, Human Rights Watch found no indications that these targets were valid military objectives.
“Just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Journalists who praise Hamas and TV stations that applaud attacks on Israel may be propagandists, but that does not make them legitimate targets under the laws of war.”