And now Israeli combat units and the Israeli military in general are gradually falling into the hands of Jewish Taliban. There was a time when it was the secular elites from the kibutz who dominated the combat units and senior levels of the military, but as Israel has changed from a socialist apartheid state to an extreme capitalist apartheid state the only people left willing to fight and die for Zionism will soon be extreme religious Jews. And Israeli society is getting more and more open in its racism against its native Palestinian population (Israeli Jews like to call them Israeli Arabs and pretend that they are not Palestinian too). So now you have an Israeli Jewish society that is increasingly extreme and overt in its hostility to the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Even the Druze of Israel, who were the most collaborationist, are gradually realizing that they will never be Jewish. So its great when they’re in the military and everybody’s a brother but once they try to rent an apartment in a Jewish area and they’re treated like a dirty Arab by Jews who are worried that their daughters will be contaminated by them then even the Druze must realize that they have no place in ZIonism.
It is Israel itself that is hastening its demise. Israeli society is going in one inevitable direction. They will try to expel (transfer is their preferred nomenclature) the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Its integral to the logic of Zionism. You have a state created by ethnic cleansing and maintained by ethnic cleansing (so that they can call themselves a Jewish democracy- cant have too many non-Jews). But now in historic Palestine you have about fifty percent Jews ruling the other fifty percent of non Jews who have different categories (citizens, occupied) but are all inferior in their status and basically without any guaranteed rights. But the non Jews are increasing. What do you do? You have to get rid of some of them. But what will the international community do? You cant just put the Arabs on trains and take them out, can you? Well the international community (which means powerful Western countries) didnt do anything when you flattened half of Lebanon and targeted civilians. They didnt do anything when you flattened half of Gaza and targeted civilians. They didnt do anything when you attacked unarmed and peaceful aid workers trying to help the people of Gaza and you executed them, so they wont do anything when you try to expel your non Jewish citizens except complain that it is unhelpful and not nice. And Israelis know they have to do it soon. They’re losing their friendly dictators one by one. They’re even losing the support of liberal Americans (slowly), including Jews, thanks to Netanyahu and Lieberman. And soon there will be too many non Jews in Israel for them to pretend they are a Jewish democracy. And this is happening when Palestinian citizens of Israel are increasingly angry and awakened. They are not their parents, they want equality, they feel connected to the rest of the Arab world, they love the speeches of Seyid Hassan Nasrallah, they are united with their brothers via al Jazeera. Make no mistake, the third intifada is coming and it will start in northern Palestine (inside what is now called Israel), it may start in Um al Fahm, or Baqa al Gharbiya, some other town, but its coming, sooner than ever thanks to the revolutionary people’s uprisings sweeping the old Middle East and it is Israel that will soon feel the birth pang’s of the new Middle East.
Adalah-NY and supporters creatively protest the performance of the “Brand Israel” Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on February 22. In the background, celebrated Irish composer and prominent activist for Palestinian rights, Raymond Deane, appreciates the innovative music of The Whitewash Apartheid Orchestra*.
Credit: Ellen Rachel DavidsonCredit: Ellen Rachel Davidson
“Tonight we sent a clear message to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Israeli government’s “Brand Israel” campaign that their music cannot drown out Palestinians’ calls for justice.” The US protests respond to the call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to boycott cultural institutions like the IPO that work to normalize Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and whitewash the oppression of Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and in exile.
Hundreds of well-dressed concert-goers paused on the edge of the sidewalk in front of Carnegie Hall, and looked across the street at the protesters’ signs, and listened to their chants and songs. Many were handed a mock IPO program that featured a cover photo of a past IPO performance in front of Israeli tanks for the Israeli army, and, on the inside, the PACBI’s call for an international boycott of the IPO.
Protesters held signs saying, “Israel Fiddles while Palestine Burns,” “Justice Presto not Lento,” “Without Justice There’s No Harmony,” and “Boycott the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra;” and they carried a banner with the words “Don’t Harmonize with Israeli Apartheid,” surrounded on each side by a violin with a rifle barrel as its neck. Protesters chanted, “We love Gustav, we love Mahler, but occupation makes us holler;” “For liberation take a stand, don’t let Is-ra-el rebrand;” and “Muslims, Jews, Atheists and Christians, stand for justice like Egyptians.”
In a street theater skit, a protester-turned-IPO conductor asked the crowd, “How can apartheid continue without us promoting the new, positive, aesthetically vibrant and civilized Israel? Don’t forget, there is “art” in “apartheid.” The conductor instructed three violinists to play progressively louder in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to drown out and cover up Israeli crimes against Palestinians that kept welling up behind the orchestra.
Support BDS in Marrickville – send a Marrickville Councillor a note of encouragement for their important stand for human rights. CJPP Carry Bags – An environmentally-friendly, Palestine-friendly, ecosilk shopping bag. Strong, light and compact, to fit in your handbag or pocket. A stylish alternative to plastic bags!
One village resident told Pajhwok Afghan News that foreign forces intercepted a vehicle taking the wounded father to hospital, halting it for two hours. “The troops beat us and tied our hands,” the man, Psarlay, said. “Meanwhile, Patang died because of excessive bleeding.”
Another resident, 26-year-old Ezatullah, told the Wall Street Journal: “The house was completely destroyed by the strike. Only two children [aged] four and six survived.” He added that “thousands of people attended the funeral of the slain family Monday and are planning a protest against coalition forces Tuesday”.
For the 2010 fiscal year, the president’s base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $533.8 billion. Adding spending on “overseas contingency operations” brings the sum to $663.8 billion.[1][2]
When the budget was signed into law on October 28, 2009, the final size of the Department of Defense’s budget was $680 billion, $16 billion more than President Obama had requested.[3] An additional $37 billion supplemental bill to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was expected to pass in the spring of 2010, but has been delayed by the House of Representatives after passing the Senate.[4][5] Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $319 billion and $654 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $1.01 and $1.35 trillion in fiscal year 2010.[6]
Above is video from Nabi Saleh, shot a couple of days after the night raids (discussed below). It was taken on a Tuesday morning after Israeli authorities had completed another house raid. As the army and police were leaving, one police van stops and two border police officers jump out. 11-year-old Kareem Tamimi comes running into the frame, running towards his mother. The camerawoman begins shouting “Child! Child!” in Hebrew to the border police officers to no avail.
Hillary Clinton is walking a tightrope. On the one hand she describes the ruling family of Bahrain as “a friend and ally”. On the other, she has “deep concerns” about the way the security forces broke up the demonstration at the Pearl Square overnight.
Clinton’s talk, which emphasized the need to protect basic freedoms, included her observation that “The rights of individuals to express their views freely… are universal.” But even as she condemned other governments for arresting protesters and inhibiting free expression, Clinton demonstrated her own hypocrisy and profound disregard for those rights by saying and doing nothing while the 71 year old protester was grabbed by campus police, pulled to the ground, and dragged out of the auditorium. McGovern remained silent until just before he was pulled through the auditorium doors; then, bloodied, bruised & arrested, he screamed, “This is America?”
The Boycott of Israeli goods is part of an international movement known as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. The movement was initiated in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organisations and has gained momentum internationally as the brutality of Israel has time and again been exposed to the world.
The main goals of the movement are to:
– Expose the true nature of Israel’s occupation and apartheid practices
-Give real value to human rights by making Israel accountable for its crimes
– Reveal and highlight the complicity of the international community in supporting Israeli crimes that relentlessly violate human rights and international law
– End international law support for Israeli occupation and apartheid with the understanding that apartheid cannot be sustained without external assistance.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
– Support the boycott of all Israeli companies
– Inform yourself about the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine
– Spread the word (share on facebook, myspace or any social sites, ‘like’ this video or add to favorites)
The US has signalled that it will be vetoing the resolution currently before the UN Security Council against Israeli settlement expansion, despite the resolution’s consistency with existing US policy and previous votes in the UN.
M J Rosenberg considers that this US veto “violates broader US interests”, is a function of US domestic policy and the power of the campaign finance from the ubiquitous Israel lobby is to blame:
This is from AFP’s report on what Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“We have made very clear that we do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues,” Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee.
“We have had some success, at least for the moment, in not having that arise there. And we will continue to employ the tools that we have to make sure that continues to not happen,” said Steinberg.
There is so much wrong with Steinberg’s statement that it is hard to know where to start.
First is the obvious. Opposition to Israeli settlements is perhaps the only issue on which the entire Arab and Muslim world is united. Iraqis and Afghanis, Syrians and Egyptians, Indonesians and Pakistanis don’t agree on much, but they do agree on that. They also agree that the US policy on settlements demonstrates flagrant disregard for human rights in the Muslim world (at least when Israel is the human rights violator).
Accordingly, a US decision to support the condemnation of settlements would send a clear message to the Arab and Muslim world that we understand what is happening in the Middle East and that we share at least some of its peoples’ concerns.
The settlement issue should be an easy one for the United States. Our official policy is the same as that of the Arab world. We oppose settlements. We consider them illegal. We have repeatedly demanded that the Israelis stop expanding them (although the Israeli government repeatedly ignores us). The administration feels so strongly about settlements that it recently offered Israel an extra $3.5bn in US aid to freeze settlements for 90 days.
It is impossible, then, for the United States to pretend that we do not agree with the resolution (especially when its language was carefully drafted to comport with the administration’s official position). So why will we veto a resolution that expresses our own views?
Steinberg says that “We do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues.”
Why not? It is the Security Council that passed all the major international resolutions (with US support) governing Israel’s role in the occupied territories since the first one, UN Resolution 242 in 1967.
He then adds, with clear pride that:
“We have had some success, at least for the moment, in not having that [the settlements issue] arise there.”
Very impressive. The United States has had no success whatsoever in getting the Netanyahu government to stop expanding settlements — to stop evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for ultra-Orthodox settlers — and no success in getting Israel to crack down on settler violence, but we have had “some success” in keeping the issue out of the United Nations.
The only way to resolve the settlements issue, according to Steinberg, “is through engagement through the parties, and that is our clear and consistent position”. Clear and consistent it may be. But it hasn’t worked. The bulldozers never stop.
Of course, it is not hard to explain the Obama administration’s decision to veto a resolution embodying positions that we support. It is the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is lobbying furiously for a US veto (actually not so furiously; AIPAC doesn’t waste energy when it knows that its congressional acolytes — and Dennis Ross in the White House itself — will do its work for them).
The power of the lobby is the only reason we will veto the resolution. Try to come up with another one. After all, voting for the resolution (or, at least, abstaining on it) serves US interests in the Middle East at a critical moment and is consistent with US policy.
But it would enrage the lobby and its friends who will threaten retribution in the 2012 election.
Simply put, our Middle East policy is all about domestic politics. And not even the incredible events of the past month will change that.
That is why US standing in the Middle East will continue to deteriorate. We simply cannot deliver. After all, there is always another election on the horizon and that means that it is donors, not diplomats, who determine US policy.
Yet the power of campaign finance and political pressure from the Israel lobby cannot be separated from the skewed system which facilitates corruption of imperial power. Other interests wilfully operate against people’s welfare within and without the empire besides the Israel lobby – big tobacco, big pharma, big banks, big chemicals, big oil and big defence are also empowered disproportionately by the US campaign finance and lobbying system.
A fundamental overhaul of the plutocratic US political system which presently permits the rich to rule courtesy of campaign bribery and extortionist lobbying would assist greatly the reassertion of balanced US foreign and domestic policy.
UPDATE
It seems the US is attempting to head off the UNSC settlements resolution by supplanting a mealy-mouthed statement.
The U.S. informed Arab governments Tuesday that it will support a U.N. Security Council statement reaffirming that the 15-nation body “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” a move aimed at avoiding the prospect of having to veto a stronger Palestinian resolution calling the settlements illegal.
But the Palestinians rejected the American offer following a meeting late Wednesday of Arab representatives and said it is planning to press for a vote on its resolution on Friday, according to officials familar with the issue. The decision to reject the American offer raised the prospect that the Obama adminstration will cast its first ever veto in the U.N. Security Council.
Still, the U.S. offer signaled a renewed willingness to seek a way out of the current impasse, even if it requires breaking with Israel and joining others in the council in sending a strong message to its key ally to stop its construction of new settlements. The Palestinian delegation, along with Lebanon, the Security Council’s only Arab member state, have asked the council’s president this evening to schedule a meeting for Friday. But it remained unclear whether the Palestinian move today to reject the U.S. offer is simply a negotiating tactic aimed at extracting a better deal from Washington.
Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, outlined the new U.S. offer in a closed door meeting on Tuesday with the Arab Group, a bloc of Arab countries from North Africa and the Middle East. In exchange for scuttling the Palestinian resolution, the United States would support the council statement, consider supporting a U.N. Security Council visit to the Middle East, the first since 1979, and commit to supporting strong language criticizing Israel’s settlement policies in a future statement by the Middle East Quartet.
. @PJCrowley for goodness sake, just support the UNSC resolution against Israeli settlements – mealy-mouthed statements aren’t sufficient! #
The guests: Rashid Khalidi, JPS editor and a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University; Clovis Maksoud, the director of the Center for the Global South; and Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and Seymour Hersh.
The interviewees are: Mehran Kamrava, the interim dean of Georgetown University, Qatar; and Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
While a radical regime in Egypt would threaten Israel directly but not America, a radical anti-Western regime in Saudi Arabia—which produces one of every four barrels of oil world-wide—clearly would endanger America as leader of the world economy.
‘Soon after the 9/11 attack, a long, typed anonymous letter was sent to Quantico Marine Base accusing the long-suffering Assaad, Zack’s victim in 1991, of plotting terrori…sm. This letter was received before the anthrax letters or disease were reported. The timing of the note makes its author a serious suspect in the anthrax attacks. The sender also displayed considerable knowledge of Dr. Assaad, his work, his personal life and a remarkable premonition of the upcoming bioterrorism attack.
After interviewing Assaad on Oct. 2, 2001, the FBI decided the letter was a hoax. While major newspapers noted that an anonymous letter had accused Dr. Assaad of bioterrorism, none followed up on it after his innocence was established. Zack’s name never surfaced again as one of the 30 suspects.
When the Washington Report asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, “Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.”
It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation.
When asked if Hatfill was part of the group that ganged up on Dr. Ayaad Assaad, Dr. Rosenberg answered, “Hatfill was NOT one of the persecutors of Assaad.”
She is convinced that the FBI knows who sent the anthrax letters but isn’t arresting him because he knows too much about U.S. secret biological weapons research and production. But she isn’t naming names. Neither is Dr. Assaad, who did not return calls from the Washington Report.’
Egypt will almost certainly return to its Arab base, liberate its foreign policy and restore its leadership role. That means a liberated Arab League and a constructive restoration of the Arab political structures that have deteriorated for the last four decades to the point of irrelevance.
The new Egypt will be a much-needed catalyst for change.
Alarming as it may sound for Israel and its Western backers (those who keep lecturing us about democracy but are the first to resist our struggle to achieve it), it actually is the right, peaceful and accurate course for stability and better relations of cooperation within and beyond the region.
Democracies in Tunisia and Egypt – and perhaps elsewhere – would be more likely to build relations with the US and the rest of the world on the basis of mutual respect and equality, not hegemony and exploitation in favour of Israel.
Israel would never choose to enter into serious negotiations with its Arab neighbours while they are weak, disunited and powerless. If we are at the beginning of a process that will reverse the situation that has existed until now, we have every reason to be optimistic about the region’s future.
In effect, the Obama administration was seeking to keep Mubarak in office as long as possible, and to keep his police state alive thereafter. For all the recent talk about supporting Egyptian democracy, what is ultimately vital to American policymakers is Egypt’s geopolitical alignment with the United States and its acquiescence in Israel’s regional hegemony — a policy Mubarak, and under him Suleiman, have long facilitated. These core interests could well be affected by a fully democratic Egypt that sought to play a role commensurate with its size and history in regional politics and that represented faithfully the wishes of its people (as the current democratic Turkish government does).
A democratic Egypt might challenge American support of Israel’s Middle Eastern nuclear monopoly, refuse to collude in Israel’s illegal and immoral siege of Gaza, actively back a genuine inter-Palestinian reconciliation, or otherwise assert its independence from American and Israeli policies. It might do so even while respecting the letter of the (highly unequal) peace treaty with Israel and existing accords with the U.S. Given the blinders worn by American policymakers, such an Egypt would be a policy headache in Washington on the level of that caused by all three major regional powers, Israel, Turkey and Iran.
