an op-ed in the new york times this week, which was only posted online (it was not printed in the newspaper itself), by roger cohen highlights some important hypocrisies in the u.s. media and in american foreign policy. particularly significant is the discussion of the zionist entity’s hypocrisy when it comes to its nuclear arsenal and the the obama administration continuing to turn a blind eye towards this as with all u.s. administrations before. what cohen shows, for one thing, is the fact that this new government in the zionist entity is little different from previous administrations there, too. here is cohen’s op ed (thanks tam tam):
Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.
You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.
Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil:
“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”
I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there.
The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu’s prescription that, the economy aside, Obama’s great mission is “preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” — an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as “months” away.
I’ll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview.
This “messianic apocalyptic cult” in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980’s, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That business — including sales of weapons and technology — was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah.
It’s also the same “messianic apocalyptic cult” that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.
I don’t buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.
Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?
On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.
Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course.
Netanyahu also makes the grotesque claim that the terrible loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war (started by Iraq) “didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness.” It did just that, which is why Iran’s younger generation seeks reform but not upheaval; and why the country as a whole prizes stability over military adventure.
Arab states, Netanyahu suggests, “fervently hope” that America will, if necessary, use “military power” to stop Iran going nuclear. My recent conversations, including with senior Saudi officials, suggest that’s wrong and the longstanding Israeli attempt to convince Arab states that Iran, not Israel, is their true enemy will fail again.
What’s going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.
A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.
What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time. The president should read Trita Parsi’s excellent “Treacherous Alliance” as preparation.
The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.
That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.
The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There’s time. Those “months” are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That’s a leap.
Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery. Passage to the Promised Land involves rethinking the Middle East, starting in Iran.
but it is not only this nuclear arms race to which the zionist entity is holding the world hostage in spite of most in the american media who remain silent about its nuclear weapons. it is also, of course, the larger issue of zionist colonialism and occupation of palestinian, syrian, and lebanese land. ira glunts reported in the palestine chronicle some statements made by benjamin netanyahu’s father in an israeli terrorist newspaper:
The elder Netanyahu is known for his outspokenness and extreme right-wing views–and he did nothing to contradict his reputation. He decreed that the only solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is the use of military force. He stated that he would not return the Golan Heights to Syria because “you do not return land.” He also explained that in his view it is impossible to compromise with Arabs. The Prime Minister’s father further opines that the Turks used brutal deadly force to suppress the Arab population and that should be an example to Israel in dealing with Arabs whose nature dictates that they live in a state of perpetual war.
right. they don’t return land. they merely continue to steal and conquer land. and homes and people. in counterpunch this week ellen cantrow reveals precisely how what many americans may perceive as giving up land is merely code for ethnic cleansing (“transfer” in zionist speak):
No one doubts that Avigdor Lieberman is a thug. His ultimata (“Those who think that through concessions they will gain respect and peace are wrong,” etc, New York Times Thursday, April 2, 2009) were designed to shock. On this site Neve Gordon’s revelations of Lieberman’s many corruptions, his beating of a 12-year-old child, his exhortation to bomb Gaza as the US bombed Hiroshima, supply further ugly evidence against the man, and fuel the flash-fires burning through the Internet in the wake of his appointment as Israel’s foreign minister.
So he should be denounced by all means, but it is certain that the problems attaching to his name are not going away. On the contrary — particularly given President Obama’s repudiation of Lieberman during the President’s speech in Ankara, Turkey, and his avowed loyalty to a ‘two-state solution’ – these problems will appear in a different form, specifically in regard to the nature of the “two states” under the guidance of Obama, Netanyahu & Co.
If the Lieberman appointment wasn’t specifically designed to have him play bad cop to everyone else’s good cop, it’s certainly turning out that way. A recent J Street petition urges me and thousands of on-line others to denounce Lieberman as a threat to “our community’s values,” and also to endorse J Street’s offer of “our best wishes and congratulations . . . pledging to help Benjamin Netanyahu’s government where possible, and push when necessary, to achieve the goal of real peace and security for Israel, the Palestinians, and the whole Middle East.”
This is truly a dangerous path. Three years ago, Lieberman proposed annexing to the northern West Bank parts of the Galilee with large Arab populations. At the heart of this region is Wadi Ara, described in a US media account a few years ago as “a seasonal riverbed adjacent to the West Bank.” With a majority Arab population, Wadi Ara has been Israel’s ever since Ben-Gurion wrenched an agreement from Jordan’s King Abdullah that he cede the land as part of the post-war armistice agreement.
The area’s story goes back farther. During a 2005 US trip, Shimon Peres suggested to American listeners that US “disengagement funds” (your tax dollars at work after the famed Gaza “pull-out”) should be employed to “develop” Wadi Ara – that is, to resettle the “dispossessed” Gaza settlers there. This echoed Irving Howe’s suggestion in The New York Times Book Review (May, 16,1982), that more Jews be sent to the “under-populated Galilee” – “under-populated,” that is, in the sense that New York was “under-populated” by whites until the gentrification projects of the housing “boom years.”
Lieberman set the Peres idea on its head with his “land-swap” notion but both proposals have in common their preoccupation with the “the demographic issue.” On this, just about all of Israel – and much of so called “liberal Jewish” America – is united, extreme-right through left, the devil being only in the details how to resolve it for good.
Lieberman’s suggestion was deemed “illegal” by Israeli scholars, but it has found sympathetic supporters ever since. As it stands now, it could easily trot forward as a “two-state solution” under US-Israeli aegis. This is what is ignored in the hysteria about Lieberman’s actual appointment: “transfer,” long an Israeli option, may actually take place in the near future. (Lieberman’s has been called “soft transfer”)
In the Washington Post February, 2006, Henry Kissinger enthusiastically endorsed the idea without mentioning Lieberman by name: “The most logical outcome would be to trade Israeli settlement blocs around Jerusalem . . . for some equivalent territories in present-day Israel with significant Arab populations. The rejection of such an approach . . . which would contribute greatly to stability and to demographic balance reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently open.”
Incendiary issues” no doubt include Wadi Ara Arabs’ bitter resistance to the “land swap” notion. “Stability” and “demographic balance” are code for the purity of the Jewish state, once it’s been relieved of its “demographic problem,” and once potentially fractious Arabs have come under the boot of the Palestinian Authority, the US-Israel regional puppet.
Around the same time Kissinger wrote his commentary, Israel National News reported that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of Kadima, “considered to be one of the people closest and most loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,” had proposed something similar to Lieberman’s “swap” idea. Schneller’s plan was “more gradual.” The annexed, former Israeli Arab citizens would still be of the Jewish state. Their land, however, would belong to the Palestinian Authority and they wouldn’t be allowed to resettle anywhere else in Israel.
i’m glad she mentions j street here as a part of the problem. because so many americans seem to be deluded into thinking that they are the anti-israeli lobby, when in fact they are invested in the zionist entity just as much. this group is not against zionist colonialism of palestinian land. part of the problem is that even though some u.s. lawmakers seem to be waking up a bit they characerize everything as if it is about a humanitarian crisis, as with gaza, but never as a political crisis, as in colonialism. see, for example these quotes by two congressmen in ben hubbard’s article in which hamas is still painted as “terrorist” and the context of palestinians is solely related to a “humanitarian” situation:
Lynch, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said the world must find a way to address a “legitimate humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.
“We need to act with some urgency here. There is a humanitarian crisis going on and we can’t dawdle,” Lynch told the Associated Press.
it is decidedly not “humanitarian.” it is political. and refusal to see this will keep the same cycles of land confiscation and negotiation in play indefinitely. which is just what israeli terrorists want. it gives them time to steal more land, create facts on the ground with americans looking the other way. it gives them more opportunities to murder with american weapons and then american congressmen can come back and say it’s a humanitarian crisis.
none of this will change until there is a just solution for palestinians: meaning their stolen land is returned and palestinian refugees return home. helena cobban shows us a different route, however, one that allows refugees their right of return and one that liberates all of palestine. her article historicizes how we got to this point, but here is her conclusion:
From 1982 – the year the PLO’s leaders and guerrilla forces were expelled from Lebanon – until recently, the main dynamo of Palestinian nationalism has been located in the Palestinian communities of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. But in recent years, those communities have been severely weakened. They are administratively atomised, politically divided, and live under a palpable sense of physical threat.
Many ‘occupied’ Palestinians are returning to the key defensive ideas of steadfastness and “just hanging on” to their land. But new energy for leadership is now emerging between two other key groups of Palestinians: those in the diaspora, and those who are citizens of Israel. The contribution those groups can make to nationwide organising has been considerably strengthened by new technologies – and crucially, neither of them has much interest in a two-state outcome.
Not surprisingly, therefore, discussions about the nature of a one-state outcome – and how to achieve it – have become more frequent, and much richer in intellectual content, in recent years.
Palestinian-Israeli professor Nadim Rouhanna, now teaching at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is a leader in the new thinking. “The challenge is how to achieve the liberation of both societies from being oppressed and being oppressors,” he told a recent conference in Washington, DC. “Palestinians have to… reassure the Israeli Jews that their culture and vitality will remain. We need to go further than seeing them only as ‘Jews-by- religion’ in a future Palestinian society.”
Like many advocates of the one-state outcome, Rouhanna referred enthusiastically to the exuberant multiculturalism and full political equality that have been embraced by post-apartheid South Africa.
Progressive Jewish Israelis like Ben Gurion University geographer Oren Yiftachel are also part of the new movement. Yiftachel’s most recent work has examined at the Israeli authorities’ decades-long campaign to expropriate the lands of the ethnically Palestinian Bedouin who live in southern Israel – and are citizens of Israel. “The expropriation continues – there and inside the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem,” Yiftachel said, explaining that he did not see the existence of “the Green Line” that supposedly separates Israel from the occupied territory as an analytically or politically relevant concept.
but how do we get to this place where the land is liberated and palestinians control the land that is rightfully theirs? paul grenville’s article in palestine think tank this week gives some clues as to how one might achieve this goal of liberating the land:
I admire Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s armed resistance against overwhelming force, but it should be by now clear after sixty one years that by itself armed resistance to Zionism will not lead to its overthrow. The most these organisations can do to Israel is harass, with as much impact as a wasp stinging a human being. This in itself is not negligible. The main effect of the missiles launched over Israel’s border is psychological terror, and occasional fatalities, against which the fourth most powerful military machine in the world is powerless. Psychological terror may discourage new Jewish immigrants from arriving in Israel, and that is to the good.
However such tactics do not even elicit a pause from Israel’s political leadership, Right and Left, in the ongoing war on the Palestinians, the Zionist project of clearing the land of Arabs, and the continued illegal settlement by Jews of the Palestine’s West Bank. Clearly Hamas and other resistance organizations are quite powerless by themselves to stop Zionism in its tracks. In a defensive struggle the Shi’ite organization Hezbollah did succeed in throwing the IDF out of Lebanon in the year 2000, and successfully frustrated Israel’s attempt to reoccupy the Southern Lebanon in 2006. Israeli expansionism was thus contained.
At no point in the last sixty-one years have Arab armies succeeded in crossing Israel’s 1967 borders, or even in invading the annexed West Bank. Israel’s wars, including that of 1948, have been fought on the territory of other countries. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, although a partial defeat for the Arabs, did eventually lead to the return of the Sinai to Egypt (under American pressure) during the Carter administration. The regional military balance has been shifting in Israel’s favour for the last sixty years (Ref. “Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel” by Arno J Mayer, Verso, 2008). Talk of Hamas’ “victory” in Gaza in 2009 (http://news.antiwar.com/2009/01/18/hamas-leader-declares-victory-in-gaza-war) is in my view self-deluding and misplaced. An unopposed massacre of over 1,400 civilians is not a victory.
I do not want to see the Palestinian resistance reduced to the equivalent of the Native American “ghost dances” of the 1880s, as the last resistance of the aboriginal inhabitants of Palestine is vanquished. I do not think for a moment that this will happen, because the Palestinian Diaspora now numbers more than 7 million, but the weakness of the opposition to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine within Israel is very concerning, and a helping hand from an international citizens’ boycott of Israeli goods and services is its chief, but not its only hope. Arab resistance and Arab demography are other reasons for hope.
Resistance as enshrined in the UN charter is legal; Israel is not, as the renowned Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin and future Israeli Prime Minister remarked the day after the UN vote on the partition of Palestine in November 1947: “The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized …. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.” In order to be accepted as a member state in the United Nations, in 1949, Israel was required to endorse General Assembly Resolution 194, which recognizes the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and commits itself to the return of all “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours” (700,000 in total at the time), to its sovereign territory. Israel accepted, was made a member state and immediately after announced it had no intention of implementing the UN resolution. Israel thus announced its illegitimacy as a member state of the UN. The Security Council, dominated by the imperialist states of the West, who helped to implant Israel in the Middle East in the first place, went along for the ride.
Israel’s key vulnerability lies in its being a trading state with a highly skilled workforce but few natural resources. The boycott of Israeli products, coupled with divestment in Israeli companies and a cultural embargo has to be a key way of supporting the Islamic and secular Palestinian resistance (PFLP), as well as a way of applying pressure to the Zionist establishment to moderate its penchant for atrocities, encouraging dissent within Israel and the deepening of existing fissures within Israeli society. If an international boycott can be linked to the issue of the Right of Return for the Palestinians and the cancellation of the Jewish Right of Return, an uncontroversial strategic goal in support of the Palestinians can be flagged up for the movement.
In January 2009 479 Israeli citizens signed a document called “A Call From Israeli Citizens” (at www.kibush.co.il) calling for the boycott of Israeli products, divestment from and sanctions against Israel as the only way forward to begin the Civil-ization (in both senses – demilitarisation as well – Occupied Palestine to become a civilian society once again rather than a garrison state) of the Zionist military machine and stop the ongoing war on the Palestinian population.
In the 1980s Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli writer and the ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem, ran the West Bank Data Project, which analyzed the interaction of the Israeli and Palestinian economies in the Occupation. The resulting study concluded that the West Bank had effectively been annexed by Israel, not merely occupied (Ref: Intimate Enemies, Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land, 1995). As pre-1967 Israel was also an annexation by military force, accompanied by some strong arming of Truman and the infant United Nations by Zionist elements in the American Jewish community, the term “Occupied Palestine” correctly refers to the whole of the land between the river Jordan and the sea. Any other designation fudges the evidence, which suggests that the military occupation of the West Bank will remain until the post-1948 colonial regime itself is either brought down or collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, to be replaced by a non-colonial political order and the re-establishment of political and economic equality between Arab and Jew.
Before 1967, Palestinian civilians of Israel also lived under a military occupation, and were in a similar position politically to those of the West Bank and Gaza now. The Palestinian American writer Rashid Khalidi uses the term “helot” (a term from the Greek of Ancient Greece to designate an indeterminate status between that of a slave and that of a citizen) to designate the position of Palestinian civilians who have neither civil rights nor any political opportunity to influence the behaviour of the state that dominates and controls their lives in endlessly demeaning and demoralising ways.
Those who do not like equality before the law and citizenship for all will leave, just as the Algerian French did together with some of the pieds noirs in 1962, helping to solve the problem of housing some of the Palestinian refugees from Occupied Palestine at a stroke. Frantz Fanon’s two most important books, Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth, have now been translated into Hebrew (2004). I am sure that they have been available in Arabic for a long time, but the political culture of the Hebrews is backward and inward looking, which is to be expected in a colonial state. Were the champion of the Algerian liberation struggle Fanon alive today (he would be 82 years old) he would certainly support the Palestinians. It is our privilege and duty as free citizens of the international community to do the same.
yes, economic resistance is one form we must use. and a recent news item on the bbc is a clear sign of what israeli terrorists–and their american corporate sponsors–will be up against after the fall of the zionist entity:
They argue that the firms supplied equipment used by the South African security forces to suppress dissent.
The companies affected have not yet responded to the judge’s ruling.
US District Judge Shira Scheindlin in New York dismissed complaints against several companies but said plaintiffs could proceed with lawsuits against IBM, Daimler, Ford, General Motors and Rheinmetall Group, the German parent of an armaments maker.
“Corporate defendants accused of merely doing business with the apartheid government of South Africa have been dismissed,” she said.
The plaintiffs argue that the car manufacturers knew their vehicles would be used by South African forces to suppress dissent. They also say that computer companies knew their products were being used to help strip black South Africans of their rights.
The judge disagreed with IBM’s argument that it was not the company’s place to tell clients how to use its products.
“That level of wilful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid,” she said.
More than 50 companies were initially sued, but after a court demanded more specific details, the plaintiffs decided to target fewer companies.
The US and South African governments supported the companies’ efforts to get the complaints dismissed.
They argue that the legal action is damaging to international relations and may threaten South Africa’s economic development.
resistance is the key: all forms of resistance. and as to the one state solution or binational state depending on which terminology you choose, it should be a palestinian state. what palestinians choose to do about the colonists who live on stolen land is for palestinians to decide. but anything short of liberating the land from the river to the sea is unworkable. unjust.
and just for a bit of inspiration the never before campaign has a new video:
body on the line 