Dissecting IDF propaganda

November 22, 2012, 5:48 pm

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The numbers behind the rocket attacks

by Phan Nguyen on November 17, 2012 86
In this brief study, I examine the many numbers cited by the Israeli military relating to Gaza rocket attacks into Israel.

To begin, Israeli spokespeople frequently remind the world that a million Israeli citizens are within range of Gaza rockets, twelve thousand of which have been fired into Israel in the last twelve years, inflicting thousands of injuries and several dead.

However, we are rarely told exactly how many people have been killed by these rocket attacks.

Counting the dead

Below is a list of all the fatalities of rocket and mortar attacks fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel in the entire history of these attacks. Throughout the years of rocket attacks into Israel, a total of 26 people have been killed altogether.

Fatalities from rocket and mortar attacks in Israel from the Gaza Strip

Total fatalities in the history of rocket and mortar attacks
from Gaza into Israel: 26
Operation Cast Lead: December 27, 2008–January 18, 2009
Operation Pillar of Cloud: November 14, 2012–

(Refer to the bottom of the page for notes and sources.)

The shaded rows in the table refer to fatalities sustained during Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008–January 18, 2009) and Operation Pillar of Cloud (November 14, 2012–).

Note that of the 26 fatalities from rocket and mortar attacks, more than one out of every four deaths occurred during these two operations, which were ostensibly designed to deter rocket attacks.

For the entire duration of the 2008 Hamas–Israel cease-fire—even after Israel had broken the cease-fire on Nov. 4—not a single person was killed by rocket or mortar fire into Israel. Yet approximately two hours after Israel’s commencement of Operation Cast Lead, one person in Israel was struck and killed by shrapnel from a Qassam rocket. Two days later, three more people were killed in Israel from Gaza rocket and mortar attacks.

And for an entire year before Operation Pillar of Cloud, not a single Israeli was killed by rocket or mortar. Yet approximately sixteen hours after Pillar of Cloud commenced, a rocket from Gaza killed three Israelis.

It was during both military operations that Israel endured the highest number of fatalities from Gaza rockets and mortars in the shortest time spans.

The data is too scant to a draw a more definite conclusion (and it is scant because fatalities are so rare), but one can suspect a pattern:

Rocket fatalities are more likely to happen during major Israel “anti-rocket” operations. Note that I say that fatalities are more likely to happen, rather than fatalities increase. Because fatalities are so rare, when they do happen in a burst, they appear more as instigations rather than incidental progressions.

This disputes the clichéd notion that rocket attacks are “designed to maximize civilian casualties.” Indeed, with such a low fatality rate and with the characteristic imprecision of the weapons, they cannot be expected to inflict a fatality most of the time.

At the same time, armed groups in Gaza are capable of increasing the likelihood of fatalities when prompted.

A verrry slow genocide

If we borrow the IDF’s claim that more than 12,000 rockets have been fired into Israel in the last twelve years (which I dispute later), we get a kill rate of less than 0.217%. Thus in order to secure a single kill, we should expect to fire about 500 rockets. However, if the goal is to specifically kill Jews rather than foreign workers and Palestinian laborers, then it gets harder. Only 21 Jews have been killed by this method, bringing the kill rate down to 0.175%.

If this sounds disturbing or even anti-Semitic, note that I am just testing the argument of the current Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who, during Operation Cast Lead, co-wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the Gaza rockets and mortars were “more than a crude attempt to kill and terrorize civilians—they were expressions of a genocidal intent.”

Yet the statistics demonstrate that it is much less than a “crude attempt to kill.” One can imagine easier ways to kill a random person than to manufacture and fire 500+ homemade rockets.

As for genocide, at the going kill rate, it would require 4,477,714,286 rockets and mortars, and 4,477,714 years to kill all the Jews in Israel. This is assuming that Israel’s Jewish population does not increase. And of course we would need to factor in the limited range of the projectiles, which would require Israel’s non-growing Jewish population to all congregate in the western Negev by the year 4479726 CE, give or take a few years.

But by then, all of Israel’s Jewish population will have already been exterminated by the country’s other violent killer, automotive accidents.

It makes more sense, then, to suppose that there are political rationales for the firing of rockets and mortars.

The IDF’s mysterious deaths

Now that we’ve established that a total of twenty-six people have been killed by high-trajectory weapons from Gaza into Israel, let’s look at some of the numbers that the Israeli military has been peddling.

In keeping up with its social media focus, IDF 2.0 has been distributing infographics through Facebook, Twitter, and an official blog, encouraging subscribers to share the images. One recent infographic makes the following claims about the number of Israeli casualties from rocket attacks:
IDF Hamas rocket threat 1

First, let’s compare the IDF’s fatalities numbers to the numbers that I’ve established:

Number of rocket/mortar fatalities by year, 2006–2011
      IDF claim     Established
2006     9     4
2007     10     2
2008     15     8
2009     2     0
2010     5     1
2011     3     2

For every year listed, the IDF’s rocket fatalities number is higher than what has been established. Could it be due to different interpretations of the figures? We can try to find out by examining the fatalities for each year:

2006
In 2006, at the tail end of the second intifada, there were several Israeli fatalities, including a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, another suicide bombing in the West Bank, several shootings of soldiers and settlers in the West Bank,  two soldiers killed by sniper fire in separate incidents in the Gaza Strip, and the capture of Gilad Shalit in a Hamas/PRC operation that left two other soldiers dead. However, there were only two people who were killed in Israel by rocket strikes. Another two, a Bedouin father and son, were killed while attempting to move an unexploded Qassam rocket for salvaging. Their deaths are not listed in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs page as deaths by Palestinian attacks. Nevertheless, I included them in my listing, making four deaths by rockets in 2006.

For 2006, it is unknown how the IDF transformed four rocket fatalities into nine.

2007
In 2007, two Qassam rockets killed two people in Sderot. There was one other incident in Israel that produced fatalities—a suicide bombing that killed three people in a bakery in Eilat. Beyond that, four soldiers were killed by gunfire in the West Bank, one settler was gunned down in a drive-by, another settler was stabbed to death by unknown assailants, and three soldiers were killed in separate gunfights in the Gaza Strip. Altogether, sixteen were killed, only two of whom were by rockets—not ten, as asserted by the IDF. The IDF’s claim is also contradicted by Shin Bet (the Israeli Security Agency), which reported that in 2007, “rocket fire killed two Israeli civilians.”

For 2007, it is unknown how the IDF transformed two fatalities into ten.

2008
In 2008, eight people were killed by rockets and mortars from Gaza. Four were killed in the first half of the year prior to the “tahdiya” ceasefire. As soon as Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, four more people were killed by Gaza rockets and mortars. Yet the IDF graphic claims 15 fatalities. Again, this claim is contradicted by the Shin Bet, which reported that in 2008,

    8 people (4 during the final days of December) were killed by high-trajectory fire (rockets and mortars) from the Gaza Strip.

For 2008, it is unknown how the IDF transformed eight fatalities into fifteen.

2009
In 2009, there was one conflict-related civilian death in Israel by Palestinians: A Jewish Israeli taxi driver was strangled to death by three Palestinians as revenge for the IDF killing of a relative. Outside of that, a 16-year old boy in the Bat Ayin settlement was killed by a lone Palestinian with an axe, two police officers were shot to death in the Jordan Valley, a settler near Nablus was shot in a drive-by, and a soldier was killed by an explosive detonation on the Gaza border. No one in Israel was killed by rocket or mortar from Gaza, even though the IDF claims two.

This is corroborated by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), which stated that

    In the two years since Operation Cast Lead there has been a significant decrease in the number of Israelis killed and wounded by terrorist organizations operating in the Gaza Strip. There have been five deaths, one civilian (a worker from Thailand) killed by a rocket attack [which was in 2010] and four IDF soldiers killed during counterterrorism activities.

At the start of 2009, during Cast Lead, nine IDF soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip, four of which were by friendly fire. Of the remaining five, one was killed by a mortar round while the other was killed by an anti-tank missile.

For 2009, there were no deaths in Israel from Gaza rockets or mortars.  The only way to claim two fatalities would be to include the deaths of two soldiers engaged in a military invasion inside the Gaza Strip, which would be misleading for the message being conveyed by the infographic.

2010
The IDF inexplicably attributes five deaths in 2010 to Hamas rockets and mortars. There were either nine or eleven Israeli fatalities relating to the Palestine/Israel conflict in that year, depending on the interpretation: the Shin Bet says there were nine fatalities relating to the conflict, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs records eleven. Of the eleven fatalities listed by the MFA, two were committed by a Palestinian criminal gang (one strangulation and one stabbing), one was a knifing of an IDF soldier in the West Bank, four settlers were killed by gunfire in their car on a segregated road near Hebron, two soldiers entered the Gaza Strip and were killed in a shootout with Palestinian gunmen, and one police officer was shot to death just south of Hebron. Only one fatality was due to a Qassam rocket.

For 2010, it is unknown how the IDF transformed one fatality into five.

2011
In 2011, there were only two rocket fatalities. The third fatality could be attributed to the April 7, 2011 killing of Daniel Vlific by an anti-tank missile. I explain in the note below why his death is generally not considered a high-trajectory rocket/mortar fatality. However, in this case, the IDF graphic does depict anti-tank missiles as part of the “Hamas Rocket Threat,” so the count of three fatalities can be considered correct. (Note, however, that in another IDF graphic, also entited “Hamas Rocket Threat,” anti-tank missiles are not included, as their limited ranges would undermine the intended message of a far-reaching threat.)

Thus, for 2011, the IDF number is correct if we include an anti-tank missile strike on April 7.

Conclusion

In the infographic, all of the IDF’s fatality numbers are exaggerated, with the exception of the fatality number for 2011.
Wounded by “shock”

The same IDF infographic lists the number of people injured by rocket/mortar attacks. Thus we learn, for example, that in 2008, 611 people were injured by rocket and mortar attacks:
IDF Hamas rocket threat 1b

For obvious reasons, counting the injured requires more subjective assessment than counting the dead. And when it comes to Gazan rockets and mortars, Israeli authorities push the limits of subjectivity.

Gaza rockets have produced so few casualties that in the absence of deaths and serious injuries, Israeli authorities have resorted to detailing how many people were “treated for shock,” which the press has duly noted over the years.

Thus we are treated to shocking reports such as this Nov. 12 Haaretz article, concerning a rocket that landed on the yard of a house in Netivot:

The hit on Netivot left no casualties, but 20 people were treated for shock after the incident. [My emphases here and below]

And here’s the Jerusalem Post on Nov. 15:

MDA [Israeli emergency medical responders] on Wednesday treated a total of 16 people for injury or shock after a bevy of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip struck Israeli territory.

Injury or shock? How many of the 16 were physically injured?

    According to MDA, two people were lightly injured in Beersheba, one from shattered glass and the other from falling down the stairs. Fourteen more were treated for shock as well, 12 in Beersheba and two in Sderot.

Though Haaretz may make a distinction between “casualties” and those treated for shock (which confirms that we are talking about acute stress response, rather than, say, hypovolemic or cardiogenic shock), not everybody does so.

The Shin Bet, for instance, claims that rocket attacks in 2007 “lightly injured more than 300 persons, most of whom suffered shock.”

The following year, the Shin Bet reported that out of the supposedly 630 Israelis wounded in “terror attacks” in 2008,

    The majority of the wounded in 2008 (about 400 people) were wounded by high-trajectory fire from the Gaza Strip. This data includes victims of shock as a result of high-trajectory fire.

Shin Bet numbers on injuries aren’t available for every year, so let’s just compare the 2007 and 2008 rocket injuries number with the IDF’s:

Number of injuries from Gaza rocket and mortar attacks into Israel
      IDF     Shin Bet
2007     578     more than 300 (most from shock)
2008     611     about 400 (including victims of shock)

How did the IDF come up with more than 200 injuries than the Shin Bet for each year? And are the Shin Bet figures subsets of the IDF figures (meaning the IDF also included hundreds of victims of “shock”), or are they different (meaning the IDF actually found much more than 200 additional injuries per year)?

Regardless, there seems to be some very loose playing with the numbers. Oh, but it gets looser...

Number of rockets and mortars fired into Israel from Gaza

For its latest invasion of Gaza, Israel unveiled a cool new feature that rivals all your iPad apps: the Rocket Counter widget. Now you never have to guess how many rockets have hit Israel. You only have to wonder why the numbers are so damn inconsistent:
IDF rocket counter
According to the IDF Rocket Counter widget, some time between Nov. 15, 2012 (left) and Nov. 16, 2012 (right), Gaza militant groups fired 24 rockets out of the year 2011.

The screenshot on the left shows the widget display on Thursday, November 15. The screenshot on the right shows the widget display a day later. On Thursday, the widget explained that there were 651 rockets that hit Israel in 2011. On Friday, the number changed to 627, despite the fact that the year 2011 is too recent to have made a comeback.

Moreover, supposedly 122 rockets had hit Israel between the time of the screenshots on Thursday and Friday (396–274=122). It would follow, then, that the full 2012 figure of 822 would also increase by 122, giving us a total of 944. Instead it jumped to 1,197, an increase of 375 (1197–822=375). What accounts for the 253-rocket surplus in 2012 and the 24-rocket deficit in 2011?
Part of the explanation may lie in another chart that the IDF has been peddling. The bar chart below, taken from the IDF blog, purports to show the number of rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

IDF bar graph

The Rocker Counter widget appeared on the same blog page, and on Thursday, it seemed peculiar that two IDF graphics on a single page gave contradictory reports on how many rockets were fired in 2011. Eventually the widget was perhaps adjusted to conform to the bar chart.

However, it still does not explain why the other widget numbers do not add up. Nor does it explain where the 651 figure came from.

To make matters even more complicated, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has long promoted the figures collected by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC).

Below is a comparison of the number of Gaza rocket and mortar attacks into Israel, accoording to both the IDF and the ITIC.

Number of rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza,
by year, as reported by the IDF and the ITIC
      IDF     ITIC
2001     510     249
2002     661     292
2003     848     420
2004     1528     1157
2005     488     417
2006     1123     968
2007     2427     1536
2008     3278     2471
2009     774     266
2010     231     156
2011     627      n/a
2012     1197+      n/a

Note the wide discrepency for almost every year, with the IDF numbers being significantly higher than the ITIC numbers. We can add to the embarrassment by referring to a page about “The Hamas Terror War Against Israel” on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which reproduces both the IDF bar chart and rocket numbers as reported by ITIC—contradictory information, presented together in a single page by the Israeli government, in order to explain “The Hamas Terror War Against Israel.”

And then consider a quote by the Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, in an interview conducted on November 14:

    This government has exhibited superhuman restraint: 2,500 rockets since 2009. Last month, 800 rockets. In the last week, 300 rockets. What government in the world wouldn’t have responded with war a long time ago?

No other Israeli agency claims that 800 rockets were fired in October 2012. Shin Bet claims 171 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza in October.

Conclusion

It can be argued that numbers ultimately don’t matter: One death is a death too many; one rocket is a rocket too many. But if that is the case, why do the IDF and related Israeli agencies need to inflate or fabricate numbers? Why has the numbers game been the cornerstone of Israeli rhetoric about rockets, as depicted in these other recent IDF graphics:

IDF zillion rockets

One of the most cynical uses of numbers is in this tweet by IDF spokesperson Maj. Peter Lerner:

IDF Lerner tweet

Perhaps inadvertently hinting at the causality (422 Gaza rockets fired since the start of Operation Pillar of Cloud), Lerner offers a circular argument, suggesting that the IDF military operation in Gaza is a justifiable response to the Gazan response to the operation itself. Operation Pillar of Cloud is necessary to prevent actions—which are a response to the operation—from ever happening. And the fact that it has since happened, justifies having made it happen, to prevent it from happening again.

The same reasoning applies to this new IDF graphic:
IDF three civilians

After a full year of no Israelis being killed by rocket fire from Gaza, Israel had to invade Gaza, prompting the new killing of three Israeli civilians, which provides retroactive justification for the prompting itself.

Still, this is part of the story. As much as the IDF loves to play with numbers, there are certain numbers that it avoids, such as the numbers behind the artillery fire leveled against Gaza, which rivals the number of rocket attacks from Gaza.

That will be treated in a future post.

Notes on the rocket and mortar fatalities table

Sources include, but are not limited to, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, the Israel Project, the Jerusaelm Post, B’Tselem, and numerous press articles. I made a point of referring to official Israeli and pro-Israeli sources, and then cross-checking them with one another. Some ages and spellings of names vary in press reports.

* Five of the 26 fatalities were non-Jewish: Salam Ziadin, Khalid Ziadin, and Hani al Mahdi were Bedouin; Lutfi Nasraladin was Druze; Manee Singueanphon was a Thai national.

† The only non-civilian fatality in Israel, Sgt.-Major Lutfi Nasraladin was killed in a mortar attack on an IDF military base.

‡ Salam and Khalid Ziadin were killed while handling an unexploded Qassam rocket for salvaging. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not include the Ziadins in its list of “Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism.”

This list does not include:

1. Palestinians killed by rocket or mortar misfire in the Gaza Strip.

2. People killed by Gaza rockets and mortars targeted inside the Gaza Strip. Prior to the so-called Gaza “disengagement,” illegal Israeli settlements within Gaza were targeted by rockets and mortars. They were not aimed inside Israel, and none of the rocket counts that I describe in this article include rockets and mortars that were aimed inside the Gaza Strip. They also do not form part of the rhetoric that rockets and mortars from Gaza constitute an “existential threat” to Israel.

In Gaza settlements and the Erez Industrial Zone, rocket and mortar attacks inflicted eight civilian fatalities: three Israeli Jews, three foreign laborers from Thailand and China, and two Palestinian laborers from Khan Younis.

Additionally there were two IDF fatalities in Gaza settlements, including a soldier killed while on his way to guard duty in Kfar Darom and a soldier killed at an IDF outpost in the Morag settlement.

All other rocket and mortar fatalities within Gaza were directed against IDF soldiers engaged in military operations outside of settlements.

3. One fatality in Israel by anti-tank missile. The rockets-and-mortars rhetoric refers to high-trajectory ordnances deployed with the following qualities: indirect fire, which coupled with a high inaccuracy rate results in nondiscriminatory targeting; a wide range that encompasses significant portions of southern Israel; and a high deployment frequency.

Anti-tank missiles are direct-fire ordnances with a more limited range and have been used infrequently against civilian targets by Gazan armed groups. There has been one civilian fatality from an anti-tank missile fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel (Daniel Viflic, age 16, killed on April 7, 2011, near Kibbutz Sa‘ad, by an anti-tank missile that struck the bus he was riding in). B’Tselem does not include this instance in its count of rocket and mortar fatalities.

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Owen Jones Breaks the Establishment Consensus Over Gaza

November 25, 2012, 5:56 am

≫ Next: Whistleblowing Triumph in Brighton

≪ Previous: Dissecting IDF propaganda

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For Once Question Time Allows in a Little Light

I didn’t watch Question Time but for once the establishment consensus was broken on Gaza as Owen Jones, the young journalist from the Independent, shattered the myth that Israel was ‘retaliating’ to Hamas rockets.

Charles Kennedy, the ex-Lib Dem leader who was forced to resign for being an alcoholic, was left scowling throughout and the ‘quiet man’ Ian Duncan Smith’s fury was only matched by his inability to say something – hence his nick name!

Charles Kennedy - the 'radical' anti-war ex-Lib Dem leader looks on glum

Kennedy looking stupified as Owen Jones has something to say other than the usual platitudes

What said it for me was the wild and enthusiastic reaction of the audience who don’t buy the lies of the establishment when the truth is so obvious to see.
Tony Greenstein

IDS - the most detestable main in Britain sits in silent fury

Crosspost from Mick Hall’s Outrage



It is not often I watch BBC TV Question Time, but on Thursday last I did, it was the normal list of guests, mainstream politicians the odd business person, all of whom sing from the same neo liberal song sheet. But this week it also included a young socialist Owen Jones, who writes a column for the independent newspaper. He spoke extremely well, it is not often one hears the likes of what he had to say about Israel on the mainstream media, let alone the BBC.

the usual panel of establishment worthies

But for me it was not so much what Owen said about Israel's latest murderous exploits in Gaza, which were spot on, but how the other members of the panel reacted when he was saying it. In the clip below he surgically cuts through the lies that have enabled Israel to conduct it's latest attack on Gaza, the likes of which we were spoon fed by the mainstream media over the last two weeks.

Owen Jones leaves Iain Duncan Smith smarting in his seat, unable to believe what he was hearing.

It was a joy to watch the most odious man in the UK, Iain Duncan Smith, smarting in his seat with silent rage, unable to quite believe what he was hearing. Charles Kennedy was little better, spluttering to himself in disbelief. He must have been thinking if only I had the balls to speak my mind, instead of defending a coalition government which is implimenting policies I have spent much of my political life opposing. As to the pathetic establishment toady David Dimbleby, all he could come up with was to act as if he were referring an argument amongst friends in a pub which had got out of hand, "Alright Owen, you’ve made your point," If he said it once, he must of said it three times.

Yet despite there obvious disquiet, on this issue, not one of these 'gentlemen' challenged a single point Owen made. Never mind all three had vigorously followed the line first initiated by Barak Obama, that Hamas were responsible for the bloodshed by first firing rockets into Israel, something which Owen had ridden a coach and horses through. When a chair was needed to ask them why they failed to challenge Jones facts, Dimbleby was struck dum, perhaps he was deep in thought, wondering who invited Owen Jones on to 'his show.' After all the whole point of Question Time is to imply it's a democratic forum, whilst ensuring it is not, by selecting guests who differ not a fig on the 'big issues' of the day.

Mick Hall.

Whistleblowing Triumph in Brighton

November 25, 2012, 8:49 am

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Argus Article - 5 November 2012 on the sacking of whistleblower

Group Foto - Cllr Smith, Carolyn Simmons, Cllrs. Mears and Wells, Tony G

Tribunal Judgement Finding that Caroly Simmons was automatically unfairly dismissed for making what is called a protected disclosure i.e. exposing theft and corruption

 

Worker Sacked for Exposing Fraud at Charity - Deans Youth Project

Green Council Does its Best to Help Those Who Covered Up the Fraud as New Labour keeps a Trappist Silence

In my other life, as well as being a political activist and a campaigner around Palestine, I am also one of the few people left who provide advice and representation to workers who have been unfairly treated or dismissed by their employers.

Earlier this year I became involved with Carolyn Simmons, an office worker who last July exposed the fraudulent submission of invoices by a fellow worker, at £250 a time, to the charity she worked for, Deans Youth Project in Brighton.  Carolyn was a UNISON member but I have long specialised in Whistleblowing cases [see Employment Appeal Tribunal Lucas v Chichester Diocesan Housing Association] [2005] UKEAT 0713_04_0702 1994

The Chair of Trustees to whom Carolyn disclosed both the fraud and the unilateral variation, without their knowledge, of 2 other workers' contracts, was Linda Newman, ex-New Labour President of the Universities and College Union, who works in the General Secretary, Sally Hunt’s office.  When faced with the fraudulent invoices Ms Newman had a simple way of 'clearing up the confusion' - she shredded copies of the invoices and is suspected of having arranged for the originals to be stolen and destroyed.

Group photo - left to right - Cllr. David Smith, Carolyn Simmons, Cllr. Mary Mears, Cllr Wells and TG

In March this year, with the help of another charity, the Trust for Developing Communities, Carolyn faced wholly bogus charges of having overpaid herself and was accused of theft and dishonsty.  The Trustees, consisting of Newman and a Tory Councillor Dee Simson, summarily dismissed her.
What was unique about the case was that other Conservative Councillors – including the ex-Leader of Brighton Council, Mary Mears, local councillors Geoff Wells and David Smith, as well as the former Cabinet member for Finance, Jan Young, who had been brought into investigate the DYP, gave evidence for the claimant!

In August a 3 days hearing at the Havant employment tribunal heard the case and unanimously ruled that Carolyn Simmon had been dismissed for making a protected disclosure.  Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the respondent’s case was the fact that they had dismissed her grievance at a Management Hearing on 13th February 2012 and then gone on to hold a disciplinary hearing on 2nd March!!  In fact the latter was nothing more than a disciplinary hearing fishing expedition designed to extract information under false pretences.  Unfortunately for the trustees, not trusting them as far as I could throw them, I took the precaution of secretly tape recording the meeting held by Dee Simson and the equally prejudiced CEO of the Trust for Developing Communities, Barry Hulyer.

Cllr. Geoffrey Wells, Tony Greenstein and Emily, a worker whose contact was altered without her knowledge depriving her of the right to take holidays out of school term

You might have then thought that Brighton, having a Green Administration, would have then stepped in, along with the Charity Commission, to freeze its grant pending the resignation of the existing trustees.  Not a bit of it.  They have backed those shows to have shamelessly lied and deceived and who tried to ruin the livelihood of a woman who exposed corruption.

Below is a letter I’ve sent to every single Green Councillor asking whether there are any principles they still stand for and whether they even understand the concept of whistleblowing – a radical piece of legislation brought in by New Labour – as a result of the terrible disasters such as Piper Alpha, Clapham, the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise and the mass murders or Harold Shipman.  Dame Janet Smith, latter of the Court of Appeal’s Shipman Report recommended making whistleblowing more easy.  In fact it will become much more difficult as the present Liberal-Tory coalition propose to charge anyone who whistleblows £450 to get a claim in and another £1,050 to get the case listed!

Below are a few photos from a celebration drink we held at the Black Horse in Rottingdean!  It is probably one of the few occasions that I’ve have ever been snapped sharing a pint with Conservatives, but it says something about politics today that the Green Party backs the guilty party and New Labour has said nothing!

Tony Greenstein

Saturday, 24 November 2012

Dear Green Party Councillor,

On 5th November I wrote to every single Green Party councillors informing them of the outcome of a whistleblowing case, in which I had represented a worker, Carolyn Simmons.  The case was precisely the kind for which the whistleblowing legislation (PIDA 1998) had been introduced.

As the Argus article of 5th November makes clear, Carolyn, had discovered that another worker, Gary Rolf, had been submitting, over a long period of time, fraudulent invoices for monies which he paid to himself.  Money incidentally which originated with Longhill School in Brighton but which was channelled via the Deans Youth Project.  The role of Longhill, although tangential, in turning a blind eye to what happened and continuing to deal with Mr Rolf is another story.

Instead of the trustees, Linda Newman and Cllr. Dee Simson, immediately suspending Mr Rolf, it was Carolyn Simmons who was accused of theft and dishonesty, dismissed and reported to the Police.  The employment tribunal found that these allegations were wholly untrue and were devised with the sole purpose of getting rid of someone who had exposed fraud.

Well before the tribunal hearing I went out of my way to keep the cabinet member, Sue Shanks informed. I held a meeting at King’s House with her, in order that she could be apprised of the situation.  She in turn assured me that no legal or other help was being extended to the trustees.

I was later to discover, when we obtained disclosure, that this was not true.  In the minutes of a Management Committee of 13th February 2012, I found the following:

‘LN has updated Kerry Clarke on the issues facing the project since June. Kerry confirmed she is happy that the project is being managed and the issues are being dealt with. Kerry also suggested that the LA may be able to offer legal assistance.’
It later transpired that the Council’s own employment solicitor, Ian Yonge, through a private arrangement, was and is acting as solicitor to the DYP trustees.  This was as clear a conflict of interest as it is hard to imagine.  It also indicates that the Green Party may be in office, but it is the Officers who continue to hold power since, as far as I’m aware, no action whatsoever has been taken to remedy the above.

Only last week I discovered that the post of Senior Youth Officer had been advertised.  The previous holder of the post, Helen Baxter, the partner of Mr Rolf had resigned.  Two other workers at the Project, Donna Wilson and Emily Packham had been made redundant from youth worker positions and not told about this or any other similar posts.  It was only after I threatened to bring two more actions at the employment tribunal that Linda Newman (see below, 15 November) withdrew the advertisement for the post.

Sue Shank’s last communication with me (19th November) was to let me know that she had had a long conversation with Dee Simson and that an offer would shortly be made.  It would seem that the cabinet member responsible now sees her role as little more than a post box for trustees who have become utterly discredited.  Quite why Sue Shanks is holding ‘long conversations’ with Ms Simson, given that her own evidence was comprehensively discredited, defies belief.

I have been forced to send to Linda Newman, two different schedules of loss.  One for about £7,000 if Carolyn Simmons is reinstated and another for about £33,000 if she is not reinstated.  If the current trustees, who repeatedly lied and dissembled on oath, and who conspired to manufacture a wholly bogus case of theft and dishonesty against an innocent employee, are allowed to remain in post, then reinstatement will clearly be impossible.  Yet the interests of the charity are clearly that there should be a new set of trustees.

Whilst the Council cannot directly impose new trustees it can, through the freezing of its grant and through liasing with the Charity Commission, exert a considerable influence.  Instead Sue Shanks, led by Kerry Clarke, seems content to continue with the existing trustees whereas their resignation should be a condition of any grant continuing.

I have already made a complaint to the Charity Commission against that body’s lethargy and they have now begun a new investigation.  If necessary I shall make a complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman concerning the Council’s own role.

I also have a few comments of my own.

The Green Party came to power promising a new broom.  It claimed to be a principled party standing up for the citizen yet, irony upon irony, it has been Conservative councillors and ex-councillors who were prepared to support Carolyn Simmons at Tribunal.  If ever there was an issue on which the Green Party should have made the running it should be on the question of whistleblowing.  PIDA was one of the few pieces of radical legislation that the last Labour government introduced.  Suffice to say that a combination of the Piper Alpha and Herald of Free Enterprise disasters plus Harold Shipman, convinced the establishment in this country that whistleblowing legislation was a necessity.  It was introduced with all-party support.

It therefore beggars belief that Britain’s first Green Party Council  seems to be led by a tame tabby cat and a group of erstwhile radicals who, instead of giving guidance to their officers, seem to lean on them for support.  I am therefore writing to you to demand, not ask, that you take decisive steps to ensure that youth provision in the Deans is maintained, that all measures are taken to rid the Deans Youth Project of existing trustees and that those who stuck their heads above the parapet, not only Carolyn Simmons, are not penalised for their honesty.

Is that too much to expect of a Green administration?

Tony Greenstein

>>From: Linda Newman 
To: 'tony greenstein'  & others
Sent: Thursday, 15 November 2012, 22:07
Subject: RE: Appointment of Senior Youth Officer - Detrimental Treatment of Emily Packham and Donna Wilson

Dear Mr Greenstein,
 
For the record, I posted a copy of the job pack to XXXX on the day before the advert went live on our website, a clear indication that she was invited to apply for it. A role of that level should properly be the subject of competition. XXX has the required level 3 qualification required by BHCC for the service provision contract that they have just awarded to the B&H Youth Collective (of which DYP is a member).  XXX does not have the required qualification.

When there were no suitable applications by the closing date, the Trustees reasonably assumed that Donna had decided not to apply.  Her recent postings on Facebook are confirmation of her feelings about working for the DYP.
 
The vacancy has been completely withdrawn.
 
Linda Newman

From: Sue Shanks
To: tony greenstein 
Sent: Monday, 19 November 2012, 19:24
Subject: RE: Tribunal Judgment - Without Prejudice save as to costs 
i had a long discussion with Dee last week and i understand they will be making you an offer shortly.
 
From: Kerry xxx
To: tony greenstein ; Sue Shanks
Sent: Wednesday, 14 November 2012, 17:50
Subject: protected: Deans Youth Project

Dear Tony,

I have seen that you have written to the Deans Youth Project and the response that I am receiving is that they are consulting with their legal adviser, whom I will be making them aware of their responsibilities to minimise loss, as well.

I too, hope this manages to get resolved as soon as possible and as I said in my email, I have asked the Youth Collective to ensure there is a back up plan to ensure youth provision is available to young people if required.

Kerry xxxx
Strategic Commissioner,
Children, Youth and Families.

XXX
email: kerry xxx@brighton-hove.gov.uk

From: tony greenstein 
Sent: 09 November 2012 17:47
To: Linda Newman
Subject: Re: Tribunal Judgment - Without Prejudice save as to costs
 
Dear Ms Newman,
 
I wrote to you on 26th October regarding the outcome of the tribunal.  The parties have been allocated 4 weeks before they should apply to the Tribunal to set a date for a remedy hearing.  I have not received a response.

I would prefer to have this matter wrapped up as soon as possible and to avoid, if possible, further delay and I would therefore be grateful if you would provide a response as soon as possible.

regards

Tony Greenstein
 
From: tony greenstein
To: Linda Newman
Sent: Friday, 26 October 2012, 22:16
Subject: Tribunal Judgment - Without Prejudice save as to costs

Dear Ms Newman,
 
I assume that you have now received the decision of the employment tribunal that the claimant, Carolyn Simmons, was automatically unfairly dismissed for having made a protected disclosure, as well as having found that she was wrongfully dismissed and therefore being owed holiday pay. 
 
Although you do, of course, have the right to appeal to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, I should imagine that your own counsel would advise against this since you would be appealing in essence against findings of facts and an appeal on the grounds of perversity has to surmount an extremely high threshold in accordance with Yeboah v Crofton.  It would be highly unlikely that an appeal would even get beyond the sift stage, so the real question is one of remedy.
 
I would hope that you agree that the best course of action would be for the the present trustee board to resign and set in train an emergency meeting of members of the company in order that new trustees could be elected.  The findings of the tribunal were pretty decisive on all the main issues.  It is extremely unfortunate that you chose to listen to the advice of Barry Hulyer and target Carolyn, since I offered at the meeting I had with him, a fair settlement, but one that involved the continuing employment of Carolyn.
 
It would clearly be impossible for Carolyn to be reinstated whilst the current trustees are in position but  if you are prepared to allow others to take over and thus enable Carolyn to be reinstated, then the amount of compensation would be limited to her losses since dismissal rather than future unquantifiable damages that could jeopardise the future of DYP.
 
I would therefore hope that you, as Chair of the Trustees, would put in place arrangements for the election of a new trustee board and thus enable a settlement to go ahead without the need for a remedy hearing.
 
In the event that we are forced to go to a remedy hearing, then we will be seeking, on behalf of the unemployed centre, substantial preparation time costs as I personally spent a very considerable time preparing this case, researching the law and perusing the documents and comparing them with one another.
 
Regards
 
Tony Greenstein
Claimant Representative
From: tony greenstein
To Green Party & other Councillors
Sent: Monday, 5 November 2012, 16:55
Subject: Whistleblowing - Deans Youth Project - Argus article 5.11.12
Dear Councillor,

If you read the Argus today (p.5) there is an article ‘Charity sacked worker for being whistle-blower’ subtitled ‘Manager had reported alleged fraud at Tory-run charity’.

The main headline is true, the sub-heading is not true, as charities cannot be run by a political party!  But the story underneath, with one or 2 minor exceptions, by Ben Parsons is accurate although by no means the whole story.

Back in July 2011 the office and finance worker for Deans Youth Project, Carolyn Simmons, reported to the Chair of the Management Committee & Trustees Linda Newman (not Centre manager as in the article) that she suspected another worker Gary Rolfe had been submitting false invoices at £250 every other week for fishing trips for youngsters from Longhill School.   Her suspicions proved correct.

There was another more minor disclosure, that 2 other workers’ personnel files had been accessed and the middle pages of their contracts removed and another page substituted, removing their right to take leave outside of school holidays.

However nothing was done about either disclosure and when pressure was put on to do something it ended up, as is often the case with the person blowing the whistle being dismissed on trumped-up charges of having overpaid herself.  Her dismissal letter accused her outright of theft and Carolyn was reported to the Police, who not unnaturally were not interested.

The worker guilty of fraud was, after pressure from members of the Management Committee finally dismissed, 5 months later only to be reinstated.  The advice to reinstate came from the CEO of another charity which had been involved with DYP, the Trust for Developing Communities.  The TDC, which was involved in helping the DYP become a limited company, had no expertise in employment law and the advice given, that the worker who had admitted fraud could take them to an employment tribunal and obtain £50,000, was the kind of advice you would receive from a drunk in a bar.  Any organisation giving advice should stick to its own area of expertise.

At the end of August there was a 3 day hearing at an employment tribunal in Havant where I represented the claimant.  The evidence against the 2 trustees running DYP - Linda Newman and Cllr. Dee Simson was damning.  Eg. a grievance complaint by the claimant was turned down in mid-February by the Trustees and yet 2 weeks later they held a grievance hearing!

Virtually all the facts in contention were decided in the claimant’s favour and the decision was that Carolyn Simmons was automatically unfairly dismissed for making a protected disclosure.
The Argus sub-heading is wrong because in fact most of the Conservative councillors (the DYP covers Woodingdean and Rottingdean/Saltdean) were eased out by Ms. Newman and Cllr. Simson.  3 current Conservative councillors (Mary Mears, Geoff Wells and David Smith) gave evidence for the claimant, as did one ex-Tory councillor Jan Young, as opposed to one Tory councillor who gave evidence for the respondent, Dee Simson.  It is much to the credit of Mary Mears, Geoff Wells and David Smith that they either resigned or refused to become trustees of what they considered to be a fraudulently run organisation.

We are calling on the Council, which has been very dilatory so far, to suspend their grant pending the election of new trustees and the reinstatement of Carolyn Simmons.  We would also like to see two other workers, who also suffered detrimental treatment, being reinstated.
Tony Greenstein

The Argus, Monday, November 5, 2012
Charity Sacked Worker for being whistle-blower
Manager had reported alleged fraud at Tory-run charity
by BEN PARSONS

A CHARITY run by Conservative councillors sacked a woman because she blew the whistle on a colleague's alleged fraud.

The Deans Youth Project was found to have wrongfully dismissed Carolyn Simmons in March, after she claimed to her boss that a worker, Gary Rolf, had falsified invoices worth more than £7,000.
An employment tribunal found that Councillor Dee Simson and centre manager Linda Newman sacked her because they were unhappy that the other worker had had to leave.

The charity, based at Woodingdean Youth Centre in Warren Road, Woodingdean, runs projects with "disengaged pupils" and others aged 13 to 19.

Mrs Simmons became office manager in December 1999, with duties including bookkeeping.
The tribunal heard that in July 2011, she told Mrs Newman, chairwoman of the charity's management committee, that Gary Rolf had been falsifying £250 invoices for fishing trips to Passie's Pond, at Church Farm, Coombes, Lancing.

Mrs Newman shredded the invoices but copies showed they totalled £7,650.
No action was taken until October that year. A panel made up of councillors Mary Mears, David Smith and Geoff Wells was set up to investigate the falsification of invoices. They raised concerns about the shredding.

Mr Rolf, who said he had falsified the invoices for ease of accounting, was sacked, then reinstated but then resigned and left in March this year.

In March, Mrs Simmons faced a disciplinary process accused of overpaying herself. She was sacked but took the charity to a tribunal claiming wrongful dismissal.

The tribunal, which sat at Havant in August this year, heard that Coun Wells was of the view that there was undue haste to progress allegations against the claimant and in his view this contrasted quite markedly with the treatment afforded to Mr Rolf.

Coun Mears told the tribunal she thought the allegations against Mrs Simmons were brought "to deflect away from the original investigation regarding the fraudulent invoices".

In its judgement, issued on October 25, the tribunal panel found that Mrs Simmons did not deliberately overpay herself or breach her contract. It found that she had been wrongfully dismissed because she had made a "protected disclosure" by blowing the whistle on the invoices.

It concluded: "Although Ms Newman and Ms Simson were ultimately concerned with the success of the youth project, in relation to the claimant's dismissal we nonetheless find that they were motivated by the claimant's protected disclosures.

"In particular, they were not happy that as a result of the claimant's endeavours Gary Rolf, in effect, had been forced to resign from his position because of the allegations made against him."
Tony Greenstein, who represented Mrs Simmons at the tribunal, has called for her to be reinstated and has complained to the Charity Commission about the case.

Sussex Police confirmed a 39-year old man was arrested on suspicion of fraud at the centre on December 23 last year.

They later released him with no further action against him.

Neither Coun Simson nor Mrs Newman were available to comment yesterday.

Conservative councillors Dee Simson, Mary Mears, David Smith and Geoff Wells were part of the charity's management committee until it was disbanded in December 2011.

Rest in Peace – Terry Liddle

November 25, 2012, 9:40 am

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Terry Liddle 1948 – 2012, Comrade

I first met Terry at an AGM of the Alliance for Green Socialism.  I didn’t know him very well but despite his disability he was full of vigour and anger at the system.  I would like to carry the commemoration below by someone who knew him better, Pete McClaren who was on the Socialist Alliance Executive Committee and now the Trade Union Socialist Coalition Steering Committee.

Tony Greenstein

Comrades,

I would like to make a brief tribute to Terry.

i knew Terry very well, as many of you on these lists did.  He was a friend and comrade, someone I had known since the early days of the Socialist Alliance in the 1990's when he was the Secretary of Greenwich SA.  He regularly attended national meetings once they started to take off around 1996, and was on the SA National Council and other national bodies.  I was always impressed by Terry's complete lack of sectarianism and his determination to build left unity.  He always spoke in a most positive way to move the socialist alliance project forward.  He was committed to his work in Greenwich, where he was  a tower of strength to those within his community that he helped empower.  He was a genuine libertarian, environmentalist socialist - but a socialist first and foremost.

Terry became part of the campaign to try and save the original SA from being closed down by the then leadership of the SWP in the early part of this century.  He remained a member after it was closed down, and when it was re-launched in 2005. He was Treasurer of the re-launched SA in its early years, and, until very recently, I still received stuff from the Electoral Commission in his name!   Indeed, he remained a member until now, being fully paid up for 2011 even though deteriorating health meant he could no longer attend meetings.  We would correspond regularly, by phone, and more recently by email.  He was a true friend and a committed socialist.

Terry was a tower of strength to the movement, and he will be sorely missed.  My thoughts are with his family and close friends at this very sad time

I would like to find out about the funeral arrangements as I would like, if at all possible, to pay my respects on behalf of the Socialist Alliance - and all socialists generally.  Please forward details once known

I will forward this to others who may have known Terry

In Unity

Pete

Terry Liddle 1948 – 2012, Comrade

Terry Liddle died on November the 16/17 November 2012 aged 64 , after suffering ill health for a long time.

Many people on the left will have memories of Terry. There are those much more familiar with him than myself. A full obituary will be difficult to write. But this is one tribute to his memory.

I first became acquainted with Terry around 1979-1980, when he was involved in setting up an explicitly socialist atheist group. With my house-mate John, a cockney anarchist and shop steward at Warwick University, I joined. But living in Leamington Spa we had only written contact.

This group, according to the secularist anarchist Nicolas Walter, was bound to run into difficulties, as non-belief in religion takes many, often clashing, forms on the left. Indeed the organisation did not last. But Terry continued to place atheism, along with left democratic socialism and republicanism, at the centre of his politics.

Terry was, as they say, involved in many left wing groupings. In the Labour Briefing pamphlet Why Socialists Should Stay in the Labour Party (1991-2) he wrote with self-depreciating humour, “After a decade as an intransigent ultra-left sectarian, joining the Labour Party wasn’t easy. Staying in it is harder still.” But like other contributors (including myself) he placed his hopes in building a Labour left that would “work as a unified coherent force”. This would challenge the Party’s rightward drift, and give body to the “hopes and dreams of our class.”

The “long hard slog” of refounding the left led Terry, like many of us (such as the writer of the pamphlet’s introduction, Mike Marqusee, then Editor of the Briefing) outside the Labour Party.

A full history of these attempts to form a fully socialist party, principally in England, around the Socialist Alliance (SA), has yet to be written. Its derisory votes in the General Election of 2001 counted less towards it dissolution than the bandwagon launched by George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) backed the Respect party.

The type of ‘vanguard’ Leninism offered by groups like the SWP never attracted Terry. Still less would he follow Galloway’s populist ‘anti-imperialism’, support for ‘Muslims’ and self-promotion, into Respect. His hostility, widely shared on the left, looks more than justified when we look at Respect’s present, sorry, state. Terry sought a different future for the left in democratic and robustly socialist groupings and networks.

Terry Liddle was anchored in the activist and intellectual traditions of the British left. His own family background included a grandfather who was a member of Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF). He had his forebear’s two volumes of Hyndman’s autobiography (Reminisces of an Adventurous Life, and Further Reminisces). An article on the heritage of  William Morris illustrates the depth not just of his reading, but equally his easy familiarity with the heart of the historic labour movement and the left. As he wrote, “Morris belongs neither to Marxists, Anarchists or Greens. He belongs to all of toiling humanity, for his is a message of hope for their freedom.”

Terry entered left-wing politics early. His experiences in the Young Communist League (YCL) in South London (he told me they felt that us young North London leftists considered ourselves a bit ‘above’ them), left him a committed anti-Stalinist.

Terry was a Marxist. But it was the kind of democratic Marxism, which many of us believe in, which crosses over with other types of socialism, left libertarian thought, and anarchism. As such Terry kept alive two strands from the pre-Great War left, secularism, and republicanism. He was open to new, and different, ideas, from feminism to ecology. He was also an advocate of animal rights, relating this to the writings of 19th century socialist, Henry Salt, on the issue (Extending the Circle of Compassion What Next. No 29.2004).

This openness was illustrated in some of his last writing. This year he reviewed a collection of Colin Ward’s writings, (Autonomy, Solidarity Possibility – a Colin Ward Reader). He stated, after a friendly overview of the Editor of Anarchy’s ideas on “autonomous direct action”, “Anarchists are all too often seen as crusties in ragged black clothing with mangy dogs on strings or mindless nihilistic trouble makers. But anarchism has always been a part of the movement for working class self-emancipation. It has a long history and some important thinkers.” (Chartist July/August 2012).

I feel glad that I was able to tell Terry how much I appreciated this piece.

Atheism remained, as well, very much part of Terry Liddle’s outlook. he set up the Freethought History Research Group. He was active in the Humanists. He was supported the main thrust of  French laïcité, particularly the ideas of the important left wing of French secularist thought and campaigning.

Terry wrote sympathetically on the ‘New Atheism’. He distinguished it from purists, like the National Secular Society, who are largely concerned with the separation of Church and State. Writers like Dawkins, Hitchens and Frank Harris were ‘science based’ and interested in arguing about the truth of faith. This was valuable, if with limits. While he was critical of Christopher Hitchen’s entrance into the “camp of imperialism” Terry had no time for those who have become “apologists for political Islam” (War on the Heavens. The Rise of ‘New Atheism and its Meaning for Socialists. New Interventions Vol. 13. No 4. 2011).

He commented, “While the New Atheism provides an arsenal of ammunition to hammer religion, to undermine the foundation of its mythology, it falls short in failing to describe or make an analysis of the ideological role played by religion in sustaining the alienated social relations of social relations of bourgeois society.” (Ibid) He cites FA Ridley, “Once a Communist order was fully established, the twin foundations of religion would be torn up by the roots.” (Ibid)

Terry’s contribution to the left was outstanding.

He was a great bloke.

He will be much missed.

Terry Liddle: farewell, Comrade

November 22, 2012 at 6:56 am (atheism, good people, libertarianism, secularism, socialism)

“Comrades when I’m dead and gone, no more than dust on the breeze
I beg you grant me one last wish, comrades do this for me please
Raise a glass of the blood red wine or a mug of the barley brew
Bid farewell to your comrade, one of the foolish few
Who thought we could rearrange the world, dreamed we could make all things new.”

Bruce reports:

Terry Liddle (above) died on November 17th aged 64. Comrades may remember Terry as active in the Socialist Alliance and its successor groups.

Terry’s political career started in the YCL (Young Communist League)  in the early 60s followed, I think, by a brief stint in the Healyites. When I first met him  in about 1968, he was involved in one of many attempts to take over the rump ILP (Independent Labour Party). He was a libertarian socialist who subsequently joined a variety of Council Communist groups.

He spent most of his activity in recent years on secularist / atheist activities, setting up the Freethought History Research Group.

He had been ill for a long time.

Nice tribute from Coatesy, here

Jim D adds: Terry wrote poetry and, in one of his poems (‘Death Song’, quoted from above) calls on his comrades to raise a glass of wine or ale to his memory when he dies and is no more than ”dust on the breeze.” I’m doing exactly as he instructed, right now.

Article 20

November 25, 2012, 9:41 am

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poster that says it all

Israel already Breaks Ceasefire With Shooting of Man Close to Gaza Border

November 25, 2012, 9:58 am

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Next Time the BBC Speaks About 'Retaliation' - remind them of this report

Israeli sniper prepares to fire in breach of ceasefire agreement

 

Israel believes it has right to declare a free-fire 300 yard zone from the Gaza fence - it doesn't of course apply to them

 Israel is not happy about having to agree to a ceasefire.  Netanyahu and Barak had no intention of agreeing to a ceasefire.  They would have preferred the exterminationist logic of Glad Sharon, to flatten Gaza.  But they were forced to do so by the USA.  This reflects a regional change in the balance of power, a direct outcome of the Arab spring.

Israel is not happy and will do its best to provoke a new war, which includes breaking the ceasefire.  Because you can’t expand it you are confined to ceasefires.  Meanwhile the Palestinians have one task.  To be rid of the quisling head of the American (Palestinian) Authority Mahmoud Abbas and his fellow traitors.   The Palestinians are hamstrung by the consequences of Oslo and the sooner they remove these traitors the better.

And then it has to be a combined revoluition against America’s puppets in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia with the struggle against Zionism.  There will be no victory in Palestine by itself.

Tony Greenstein

23 November 2012Last updated at 13:13

Gaza crisis: Palestinian 'shot dead near border'

A Palestinian man has been shot dead by Israeli soldiers close to the Gaza border, Palestinian officials say.

It is the first reported killing since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel came into force on Wednesday evening.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it fired warning shots at a group walking towards the border fence, then fired at their legs when they did not respond.

Earlier, Israel said it had arrested several people over a bus bomb in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

The blast, which injured 29 people, came hours before the ceasefire began and was the first such attack in Tel Aviv for more than six years.

The shooting on Friday, east of Khan Younis, reportedly happened around the no-go area surrounding the Gaza border fence.

A man in his 20s, named as Anwar Qdeih, was killed and at least 10 other people injured, said the health ministry in Gaza.

A relative of Mr Qdeih told Reuters news agency that he had been trying to place a Hamas flag on the fence. The army fired into the air three times before he was shot in the head, the relative said.
Continue reading the main story   
“Start Quote

History shows that a ceasefire that does not buy time for a political process to address the festering problems will not last”

image of Jeremy Bowen Jeremy Bowen BBC News, Gaza City

Truce but no durable peace

Israel said a group of about 300 people had approached the fence and that some had attempted to break through.

The soldiers shot at their legs after warning shots were ignored, the IDF said.

Following the incident, IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich tweeted: "Trying to breach Gaza fence in order to enter Israel is breaking ceasefire."

Hamas officials said the shooting was an Israeli violation of the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.

Hamas "will raise this violation with Egyptian mediators to make sure that it does not happen again", spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told AFP news agency.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki also said it was "a clear violation of the agreement and should not be repeated".

Delicate truce

Israel launched its offensive in Gaza - which it says was aimed at ending rocket fire from Palestinian militants - with the killing of a Hamas military leader last week.

Provisional UN figures say that 158 people were killed in the Gaza Strip during the violence.

Four Israeli civilians and two soldiers were killed - the second of the military casualties died of his wounds on Thursday.

Under the truce deal, Israel has agreed to end all hostilities and targeted killings of militants, while all Palestinian factions will have to stop firing rockets into Israel and staging border attacks.

Details regarding the border region, which is regularly patrolled by the Israeli military, have yet to be worked out.
 
Ceasefire deal

Israel to end all hostilities on Gaza Strip by sea, land and air, including incursions and the targeting of individuals
    All Palestinian factions in Gaza to stop all hostilities against Israel, including rocket and border attacks
    After 24 hours from start of ceasefire, talks to begin on opening crossings into Gaza and allowing free movement of people and goods
    Egypt to receive assurances from both sides that they will abide by the deal, and will follow up any reports its has been broken

    Breaking Mid-East's destructive cycle

The Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, has urged Gazans to respect the truce.

The BBC's Jon Donnison in Gaza says shootings near the border happen fairly often and do not always lead to an escalation of violence.

Israel has unilaterally declared a 300m-wide exclusion zone around the fence which it says is needed for security but which Palestinians say steals valuable farming land.

How far this latest clash goes will depend largely on how Hamas chooses to respond, our correspondent adds - it is a reminder, though, that the ceasefire is very fragile.

Earlier on Friday, Israel's security agency Shin Bet said in a statement that the arrests relating to the bus bomb had happened "a few hours after the attack", AFP news agency reported.

Israeli military spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said the suspect was "an Arab-Israeli from Taybe and a member of Hamas".

Officials said that a number of Palestinians affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank were also arrested, suspected of having recruited the man to carry out the bombing.

15,000 Gaza Demonstration in Pictures - Central London

November 25, 2012, 10:39 am

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Despite Ceasefire – Large Demonstration Shows How Israel’s Support has Vanished

It was both a march of anger and a march of triumph.  Despite having no weapons worthy of the name, facing the world's 4th strongest military power, the people of Gaza had triumphed.  Netanyahu, Liebermann and Barak had wanted to level Gaza back to the stone-age.  Gilad Sharon, the corrupt son of the corrupt mass murderer Ariel Sharon (8 years later still on a life support machine!) called for nuclear weapons to be used to level Gaza - in essence a call for Auschwitz methods, an example of the barbarity of today's Zionists - Israel was forced to pull back.  

Slowly but surely, as a result of the Arab Spring, Israel is finding that it can't do everything it wants.  As the balance of power in the region changes, Zionism and its bastard fruit is found wanting.

Israel wants to be the regional gendarme, but it is unable to prevent the deep social changes arising from below.

Murder of Journaliss - The ‘Only Democracy in the Middle East’ Deliberately Targeted Palestinian Journalists

November 27, 2012, 4:11 pm

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Mark Regev – the Goebbels of Israeli PR - justifies the murder of Palestinian journalists.  

Avital Leibovitch and Mark 'Goebbels' Regev.

Here is Mark Regev said, justifying Israel's bombing of Palestinian media buildings in Gaza:

“After a second Israeli attack on a media building in two days, this time killing two journalists, the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mark Regev explains to al-Jazeera English that because the journalists were Palestinian the Israel military considered them legitimate “targets.” Regev’s remarks were made just a few hours after the November 19, 2012 bombing of al-Shuruq Tower and another building used to house the offices of several media outlets, including both Palestinian and international networks.

Speaking to al-Jazeera, Regev said,

“We took out the target that we wanted to take out.” When pressed by al-Jazeera over the injuries of eight journalists the previous day, where one lost his leg, Regev continued:

    “Oh you’re talking about… oh first of all maybe we have a discussion about who is a journalist and if you’ll allow me I will elaborate on this. There is the al-Aqsa station, which is a station that is a Hamas command and control facility, just as in other totalitarian regimes; the media is used by the regime for command and control and also for security purposes. From our point of view that’s not a legitimate journalist.”

Palestinian journalists protest at Israeli military attacks

Al-Jazeera’s correspondent then followed-up by asking, “So what are you saying? That a local Arab journalist life is any less than an internationalist journalist?”Apparently for Regev, yes, in Gaza there are no legitimate Palestinian journalists, only targets.”

It is one of the best examples of the police state nature of Western ‘democracies’ today that their military and leaders need to physically prevent opinions they don’t like being broadcast.

It is no surprise therefore than its war on ‘Hamas’ (for which substitute the Palestinians of Gaza) Israel targeted and bombed buildings housing journalists in Gaza.  The justification of Israeli  PR ghoul, Mark Regev, is not surprising.

Israeli aircraft hit two Gaza media buildings on Sunday, wounding eight journalists

Hamas , for better or worse, is the elected government in Gaza.  It runs the administration.  To therefore say one targets Hamas is to say that one targets any form of Gazan administration. It is also of course a lie.  Hamas runs schools, roads, sewerage plants (presumably also harbouring terrorists since they are regularly bombed) and much else, besides organising resistance to Israeli attacks. 

The purpose of the bombing was to return Gaza to the stone age.  Indeed this was exactly what Israel’s racist Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai, of the religious medieval Shas Party said when he urged the Israeli military "to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages" and destroy its infrastructure.

Journalists aren’t part of the medieval society that Yishai aspires to.  He has presided over the sending back of asylum seekers to their torturers in Eritrea, established concentration camps for refugees in the Negev and admitted just one asylum seeker in the past year.

It is little wonder that Yishai has been praised by the holocaust denying British National Party, who can only gaze in wonder and appreciation that a ‘Jewish’ state has elected such a racist monster to high office. BNP praises Israel minister on foreigners.  Even the Zionist rag, the Jewish Chronicle has had to admit to that (see bnp praises israel minister foreigners) Martin Bright and Anshel Pfeffer, November 5, 2009

Of course there are good precedents.  George Bush bombed the Al Jazeera offices in Kabul during the invasion of Afghanistan and discussed bombing Al Jazeera’s HQ in Quatar with Tony Blair. David Keogh, a civil servant at the Cabinet Office, and Leo O'Connor, a research assistant to former Labour MP Tony Clarke, (who disgracefully handed back the memo of a conversation between the two to Downing Street) was jailed under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for 6 and 3 months respectively, but not before the Daily Mirror had published the memo.

Palestinian journalists protest against Israeli attack on Gaza medi

It is an example of the attitude of Western leaders and war-makers to any version of the truth but their own.  In the above case, the BBC justified the Blair-Bush conversation as a ‘joke’, though as Andreas Whittam-Smith ex-editor of the Independent wrote, note-takers rarely record jokes.  Likewise the US attacked journalists in its savage attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

Journalists demand UN probe into why Israel targeted them in Gaza

Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
The Electronic Intifada
Ramallah, 25 November 2012

Journalists in Hebron protest against deadly Israeli targeting of media in Gaza

(Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images)

RAMALLAH (IPS) - As people anxiously wait to see if the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will hold, local and international human rights groups are calling for investigations into Israeli human rights abuses committed during its eight-day assault on the Gaza Strip, including flagrant attacks on journalists.

“We want an international investigation into what happened in Gaza,” Abdal Nasser Najjar, chairman of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, said. “We want to put an end to this [Israeli] policy of killing and injuring journalists. There is no difference between a journalist: Israeli, Palestinian, or international. We want to do our jobs only, as journalists.”

In its most recent assault on the Gaza Strip, which Israel called Operation Pillar of Defense, 162 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,100 injured. Three Palestinian journalists were killed and more than a dozen injured in targeted Israeli air strikes.

According to MADA, the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms, the Israeli army has killed 18 journalists, including two foreign journalists, in the past decade.

“They have classified journalists as enemies. They don’t want the world to know what they’re doing in Gaza, what the crimes of the Israeli soldiers are. I think they didn’t want the information to go from Gaza to outside,” Najjar, who is managing editor of the daily newspaper Al-Ayyam, said.

On 20 November, two Palestinian cameramen from al-Aqsa TV were killed instantly when an Israeli missile hit their car, which was reportedly marked with the letters “TV” in neon letters. The two journalists — Hussam Mohammed Salama, 30, and Mahmoud Ali al-Koumi, 29 — were on their way to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City to document the admission of injured Palestinians.

The same day, a third journalist, Mohamed Abu Aisha, director of al-Quds Educational Radio, was killed when a missile hit his car.

“Deliberate”

Reporters Without Borders called the Israeli attacks “deliberate” and, in a statement released Wednesday, stated that “journalists are entitled to the same protection as civilians and should not be regarded as military targets.”

Almost a dozen reporters were also injured when Israeli air strikes hit buildings housing local and foreign media offices in Gaza City on three separate occasions. These buildings housed the offices of al-Arabiya, Agence France Presse, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an, and Russia Today, among others.

“We demand the United Nations set up a committee to carry out a full investigation into these attacks and take action against the Israeli government. Moreover, the international community must respond immediately to this heinous act,” Jim Boumelha, the president of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), said in a statement.

On 21 November, the Israeli military spokesperson’s office posted the following message on its official Twitter feed: “Warning to reporters in Gaza: stay away from Hamas operatives & facilities. Hamas, a terrorist group, will use you as human shields.”

The Israeli government also insinuated that since al-Aqsa TV — one of the media outlets targeted by the Israeli air strikes — is affiliated with Hamas, its employees are not real journalists.

“There is the al-Aqsa station, which is a station that is a Hamas command and control facility. Just as in other totalitarian regimes, the media is used by the regime for command and control and also for security purposes. From our point of view, that’s not a legitimate journalist,” said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev in a heated televised interview on Al Jazeera. “We don’t target journalists. We target Hamas,” Regev said.

“Just a pretext”

According to Issam Younes, director of the Gaza-based Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Israel’s questioning of Palestinian journalistic standards is only a pretext to justify its destructive attacks on the Gaza Strip.

“Imagine if Hamas said that those commentators on [Israeli news stations] Channel 2 and Channel 10 are [Israeli intelligence agency] Shabak people, then they are legitimate targets for Hamas to attack? It’s just a pretext,” Younes said.

Movement in and out of the Gaza Strip is almost entirely controlled by Israel; Egypt operates the southern Rafah border crossing. At the start of its latest military offensive, Israel allowed the entry of dozens of international journalists into Gaza.

This was a change from past Israeli policies. During its 2008-09 military operation in Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, Israel barred the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza, and declared the Israel-Gaza boundary, including a two-kilometer zone inside present-day Israel, and large areas inside Gaza as “closed military zones.”

It also used extreme violence against local journalists who were documenting the three-week Israeli assault from inside Gaza.

Al-Aqsa TV’s Gaza offices were completely destroyed during the offensive, resulting in a financial loss of approximately six million dollars, and the offices of the weekly newspaper al-Risala were also damaged.

“There aren’t any red lines anymore,” Younes said. “Everything might be a target, as long as there is this political cover and as long as [the Israelis] believe that they are immune, above the law, and can do whatever they want without being investigated.”

AFP Gaza office hit by Israeli strike, 3 Palestinian reporters killed in other attacks

One person was killed when Israel struck AFP’s Gaza bureau for the second time in two days. The IDF claimed the media buildings, which included the AFP bureau, were being used by Hamas to direct military operations, and were legitimate targets.

The IDF has targeted Gaza media buildings for three consecutive days as part of Israel’s ongoing ‘Pillar of Defense’ operation. On Tuesday, two Israeli strikes killed three Palestinian journalists. The building housing AFP was hit in another attack later, and no casualties were reported. A Wednesday attack on AFP’s building killed a two-year-old child.

"The child Abdul Rahman Majdi Naeem was martyred and another citizen was wounded in the targeting of the Naama building," Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra told AFP.

Mahmoud al-Koumi and Husam Salameh, camera operators for local TV station al-Aqsa, were killed in a car marked as a press vehicle near the al-Wihda towers in Gaza. Both journalists were 30 years old and had four children.

Two other al-Aqsa employees were wounded in the first strike. The second attack killed the director of al-Quds Educational Radio, Muhammad Abu Aisha, in his car.

A series of explosions followed by a widespread blackout were also reported near the Al Shorook building in Gaza, which houses several media outlets.

Later on, air strikes targeted two hotels in Gaza where reporters covering the Israeli assault were staying. No deaths were reported, but Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari was injured. Hugh Naylor of the National newspaper told Ma'an news agency said the blasts blew out windows in the Deira and Beach hotels.

Following Tuesday’s attacks, the IDF wrote on Twitter that its air forces “surgically targeted a Hamas operations center on the 7th floor of a media building in Gaza,” with a “direct hit confirmed.” The IDF also tweeted a warning to all journalists to stay away from Hamas facilities within Gaza territory, claiming that the group will use them as human shields.

The al-Qassam Brigades wrote back: “Warning to Israelis: Stay away from Israeli #IDF = #IOF, We just targeting Israeli soldiers, fighter jets, tanks and bases."

Israel's minister of incitement

Yishai has urged the IDF to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages, and destroy the enclave's infrastructure.

Haaretz Editorial    Nov.20, 2012       

The public debate on Operation Pillar of Defense has been slightly more restrained than during similar operations in the past, giving the impression that Israeli society has matured and moderated. Interior Minister Eli Yishai is the notorious exception. In the past few days he has missed no opportunity to rant, rave and rile people up.

Yishai has urged the Israel Defense Forces "to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages" and destroy the enclave's infrastructure. Yishai supports a sweeping ground offensive in the Strip.

Of all the ministers, the one whose party represents a dark, medieval culture is inciting us to send Gaza back to those very days. Many of his party's elected officials and voters don't serve in the IDF, yet their leader is exhorting the IDF to get entangled in Gaza, kill and be killed.

Yishai isn't the only one making radical proposals. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz and other politicians have said unacceptable things. But Yishai is the most prominent - he's a deputy prime minister.

Yishai makes these statements solely to curry favor with his voters. He has always done so, inciting and instigating, sowing hatred and fear against the migrants from Africa, gay people and other minorities. Society should have sent Yishai packing long ago. The prime minister also bears responsibility - he should have reprimanded his deputy. Yishai speaks for the government and the state.

Since 1948 Gaza has been a disaster area. Poverty, population density and misery ruin its residents' lives. Many of them are refugees - add to that the Israeli occupation, the severance from the West Bank and the blockade.

Destroying Gaza's already meager civil infrastructure isn't only inhuman and a war crime, it doesn't do Israel any good. Israel has tried it more than once. It has demolished roads and bridges, destroyed power stations and water supplies and turned the lives of Gaza's 1.5 million people into hell.

As a result, Hamas has only grown stronger, the people's suffering has worsened and with it the hatred for Israel. Israel should seek the complete opposite: Gaza's prosperity. So anyone who wants to "send Gaza back to the Middle Ages" is a despicable politician and a bad adviser.

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The Transition from Zionist to anti-Zionist

November 29, 2012, 4:58 pm

≫ Next: Article 15

≪ Previous: Murder of Journaliss - The ‘Only Democracy in the Middle East’ Deliberately Targeted Palestinian Journalists

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An interesting article from yesterday’s Independent. Although I don’t agree with all his comments, for example his assessment of Gilad Atzmon, the story of his transition from a Zionist to anti-Zionist is fascinating. It is one of an increasing genre, of Jews who having been brought up as Zionists have come to see that it wasn’t the city on a hill, the beacon of justice and a ‘light unto the nations’ that those like Judah Magnes imagined. Instead it is a racist, chauvinist, intolerant society that spawns thugs like Avigdor Lieberman as its representative. It reminds me, in some ways, of a book I’ve just reviewed, Antony Lerman’s ‘The Making & Unmaking of a Zionist’.

Tony Greenstein

Why I am no longer a Zionist - Wayne Myers

In this highly personal guest contribution, a British and Jewish blogger reflects on his youth membership of Zionist movements, the recent conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, and how his relationship with faith changes as he gets older

Wayne Myer

I'm a nice Jewish boy from North West London. I was brought up in a family that was never particularly religious – we belonged to a Reform synagogue, not an Orthodox one - but where my Jewish identity was considered extremely important, and where support for Israel was an absolute given. Not blanket, unquestioning support, but support nonetheless.

As a teenager I was heavily involved in RSY-Netzer, the Zionist Jewish youth movement affiliated with the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain. In 1987, at the age of 16, I spent a summer in Israel with RSY, and two years later took a gap-year there. Half that year was spent on Kibbutz Lotan, one of the two Reform Synagogue affiliated kibbutzim, and the other half was spent on a course known colloquially as 'Machon', at the Institute For Youth Leaders From Abroad in Jerusalem, run by an arm of the Israeli state known as the Jewish Agency.

'Hasbarah'

On Machon, along with dozens of other young Jews of my own age from a range of different Zionist youth movements, I received training in youth leadership skills, Jewish history, and what is known in Hebrew as 'hasbarah'. Hasbarah literally means 'explaining', but it has another meaning, which is essentially 'propaganda'.

RSY-Netzer was at that point one of the three most left-wing Zionist youth movements - the other two are the explicitly socialist Habonim-Dror and HaShomer HaTzair. We were encouraged – and at the age of 18 or 19 we needed no encouragement – to spend much time discussing and arguing the fine points of Zionist ideology and Israeli politics both among ourselves and with members of the other movements.

The left-wingers among us were highly critical of many of Israel's actions from the War in Lebanon to the whole of the Occupation, and we all argued strenuously that it was a fundamental necessity for Israel to behave ethically at all times; moreover we left-wingers argued that it was of prime importance that we as Zionists stood up and criticised Israel when it did not do so.

However, none of that criticism was ever allowed to cross the red line of rejecting the idea of the Jewish State itself. We did not go so far as to accept the idea that Zionism was racism or that Israel ought not exist – indeed we had special sessions on Machon where we were explicitly taught strategies for arguing against these ideas. The concept of a democratic secular one-state solution for all inhabitants of the Holy Land, under which Jews and Palestinians would be equal citizens in the eyes of the law, was not at any point on the table.

Unlike most of my colleagues on the Machon course, I made a particular point of learning Hebrew, and while in Jerusalem I met and fell in love with Ayelet, an Israeli girl my own age. She was not long out of basic Army training and had taken up a post as a remedial Hebrew teacher at an Israeli Army school. We spoke only in Hebrew and were for a while very much in love, though she thought I was a complete lunatic not just for being a Zionist – among Israelis the word 'Zionist' means something somewhat different to its meaning in the wider Jewish community – but also for being on the Machon course at all and for seriously considering moving to Israel permanently: her ambition at the time was to move to New York.

Sexual Zionism

I remember joking then that the most potent form of Zionism was not Religious Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Political Zionism, or Cultural Zionism, all of which we had been taught about in class at Machon, but was rather Sexual Zionism, which we had not been taught about even once. Looking back, I now understand why hardly anyone, Ayelet included, found my joke funny.

As a Jew, despite being born in London, I had and still have the right at any time to move to Israel and immediately take up Israeli citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return. The only reason that I did not do so straight away was that I had a place at Oxford for which, as a state-school applicant, I had worked very hard, and on which I had no intention of missing out. My plan at the time was to get my degree from Oxford and move to Israel afterwards.

Once back in the UK, my obsession with Zionism continued. At Oxford I changed my degree from Maths and Philosophy to Oriental Studies (Hebrew), a course comprising Hebrew literature and Jewish history; on the history side I made a special study of Zionism up to 1948. It astonished me at the time that my parents were implacably against the idea of me becoming an Israeli, but I was 19 and – like all 19 year olds – knew deeply that I was as right about everything as my parents were wrong about everything.

Life at university was something of a shock for two reasons. The first was that as a state-schooler at Oxford, surrounded by the products of public and private school educations, the trappings of extreme privilege to which most of my contemporaries were so effortlessly accustomed seemed enormously strange and discomforting to me. Despite this I largely fit in well at my college, Balliol, which had a reputation for being very left-wing. The second shock was that for the first time in my life I was meeting both Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists.

All my Hasbarah training came out.

I became involved with both the
Oxford Jewish Society and the Oxford Israel Society, and ended up spending a lot of time arguing with people about Israel on all sides. With those on my right, I was arguing that Israel was not and had not for some time been behaving ethically, and that it was the absolute duty of anyone who called themselves a Zionist or a supporter of Israel to stand up and call Israel out on these ethical transgressions. With those on my left I was arguing that while Israel might indeed be as ethically dubious a state as any other state on the planet, nothing that it did in any way impinged on its right to exist as a Jewish State.

Many of my left-wing friends at Balliol were utterly shocked to find that I was a Zionist, but I continued to argue passionately for a position on the extreme left of Zionism; I was critical of Israel's moral transgressions, critical of the Occupation, supportive of the putative Palestinian state, supportive of the idea that Jerusalem should be again partitioned de jure (as it already is de facto) so it could be both the capital of that Palestinian state as well as the capital of Israel, but at no point did I dare to cross the red line that questioned the legitimacy of the Jewish State itself.

Charming

While I was at Balliol, Ariel Sharon was invited to speak at the Oxford Union; this resulted in an extremely busy time for me. I was involved in organising the pro-Zionist counter-demonstration to the anti-Zionist demonstration outside the Union; as a Zionist critical of Israel, I was also involved in ensuring that strong criticisms of Israel in general and Sharon in particular were made during the debate. Later that evening, as a guest of the L'Chaim Society, an alternative Jewish student organisation then run by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, I ended up having dinner with Sharon, along with thirty or forty other people, and was astonished at how charming he seemed in person, for all that I strongly disagreed with all aspects of his politics.

I was also pleasantly shocked by Sharon's stories of how his closest friends were not other Israelis at all but were rather Palestinians living in the West Bank for whom – he explained - hospitality and personal relationships trumped any notion of tribal hostility.

By 1993, when I left Oxford, things in my personal life had changed. Ayelet, quite reasonably unwilling to spend three years of her early twenties in a long-distance relationship with a complete lunatic, had left me, and I was now romantically involved with Abigail, a rather posh Jewish girl from one of the old established Anglo-Jewish families from before the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century that had brought my own great-grandparents to London. Abigail was about as likely to move to Israel as she was to grow feathers and a beak, and I found myself strongly reconsidering my decision to move there myself.

My political position, however, did not change. As a Zionist I felt passionately that it was of prime importance that Israel's moral transgressions – especially those in the Lebanon war of 1982 and the ongoing indefensible occupation of the West Bank and Gaza - be censured. I felt that the Occupation had to end, and end now, and that the Two State Solution was the only way forward. Since the idea of the right of national self-determination was at the core of my support for Zionism, I found it hard to understand how any Zionist could be against the two state solution.

If the Jews should have self-determination in Israel, I argued, surely it is only logical that the Palestinians should also have self-determination in Palestine. I simply could not understand how those Zionists to my right – which was basically all of them – could not see this.

On Jerusalem, I also could not understand the mainstream Zionist position. Having lived there for some time, and being well aware that the city was effectively divided into Jewish West Jerusalem, where you could safely go, and Palestinian East Jerusalem, which was dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, I simply could not grasp any of the stuff about the 'unification' of Jerusalem that I had been taught.

It might have been unified legally as far as a Zionist was concerned but it certainly wasn't unified in any way in practice, and it seemed to me only right that a repartitioned East Jerusalem should be the capital of the forthcoming Palestinian state just as much as West Jerusalem should remain the capital of the Israeli state. I was sure that Palestinians felt just as passionately about Jerusalem as I did myself, and repartition seemed to me to be the just and reasonable answer to this question.

Drink

In 1994/5 I spent a further year in Jerusalem on the One Year Graduate Program at the Hebrew University. This was supposed to be my year to 'check out' whether or not I really wanted to go and live in Israel, before I made a final decision. Jerusalem is and was a miserable and tedious place for a young secular man in his early twenties; it soon became clear to me that I did not wish to live there after all, and I began drinking heavily.

Mostly this went on at a bar called 'Mike's Place' run by a burned out Canadian ex-photo-journalist called Mike, and populated almost exclusively by Israeli leftists and members of the international press corps who were old friends of Mike's. Abigail came to visit, and hated it all even more than I did. I began to make arrangements to go home early.

Before I left, however, I was befriended at Mike's Place by a member of the press corps, an American called Stefan Ellis, who considered his time in Jerusalem to be basically R&R away from the really hideous places in the world he had worked before, like Cambodia. Stefan was horrified by my youthful ideological support of Israel. Life as a photo-journalist specialising in war-zones had inoculated him against all forms of ideology. As far as he was concerned, all sides committing atrocities, everywhere, were all as bad as each other.

It was his job as a journalist to get close to those atrocities in order to document them so that the rest of the world could see. Of course they wouldn't – he was all too aware of this - but it was his job nonetheless.

I did not, at the time, remotely understand him.

Fast-forward to 2008.

I'd long split up with Abigail. I was still in London. I'd had two failed careers, first as a freelance journalist, and then as a computer programmer. Both had gone wrong as I'd also been trying to pursue music in a serious way; there are only so many hours in a day and as a result of pursuing multiple career goals I'd made myself seriously ill twice and (just) survived a complete nervous breakdown. I was at last pursuing music full-time and, as part of this, had finally received my London Underground busking licence. I'd finally recorded and released an album of original music, not that anyone had noticed. At least, I felt, I was now on the right path.

My position on Israel had not changed.

I had by this time met Daphna Baram, an Israeli journalist and Guardian contributor effectively in exile in London for her anti-Zionist views. Despite our differences of opinion over Israel we had become close friends, and spent many nights staying up late arguing in a mixture of English and Hebrew over the fine points of whether or not Achad Ha-am, the founder of Cultural Zionism, would have supported the actions of the current Israeli state, or whether the 1947 position of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer HaTzair, that
British Mandate Palestine should be formed into a bi-national state for both Jews and Palestinians, had any relevance today.

Daphna was the first to put to me directly the astonishing proposition that the best solution for the Israel-Palestine problem was a single genuinely democratic state in which all citizens were treated equally regardless of ethnic origin. Currently, that is not the case. While the state of Israel makes just as reasonable a claim to be a democracy as, say, Belarus or Russia, the fact is that Jewish and non-Jewish citizens are not treated equally.

Second-class

It is true that there are Israeli Arab Knesset members and that Israeli Arabs can vote, but it is also true that there are huge differences in the way that Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews are treated by the state, ranging from whether or not they are required to join the army at the age of 18 to whether or not their home town or village gets a reasonable annual budget to cover municipal requirements. It is painfully obvious from available statistics that Israeli Arab areas get substantially less support from the Israeli state than equivalent size Jewish settlements, and that in general, while Israeli Arabs may not offically be second-class citizens of Israel, that is certainly what they are in practice.

Then, in late 2008, Operation Cast Lead began. Having previously largely withdrawn from Gaza in 2005 (though still keeping it surrounded and effectively cut off from the West Bank), Israel began in December 2008 to bombard it indiscriminately, in the name of ending rocket fire into Israel from within the Strip. For the life of me, I could not see how this was supposed to work. I could not see any way of defending this action. As the number of Palestinian casualties grew – far out of proportion to the number of casualties on the Israeli side - it just got worse and worse.

For the first time in my adult life I began wondering whether the Jewish State was actually worth defending at all on any level if this was the price. I was watching a blatant and brutal massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, utterly disproportionate to the attacks that had provoked it, which had in turn been provoked by earlier Israeli incursions, in an endless back-and-forth cycle, in order to defend what?

An Israeli State that would allow me – born in London – to become a citizen at a moment's notice, while Palestinian friends of friends actually born in the Holy Land itself could never become citizens of anything anywhere? Exactly what convoluted justification would stand that up?

I couldn't do it any more. On Machon, I'd had training in how to argue against the proposition that Zionism was racism, but no training in how to argue in defence of the indiscriminate massacre of civilian children. That one hadn't come up.

I began to consider the possibility that I'd been misled.

It looked terribly plausible. It was horribly embarrassing and deeply painful, but it began to seem to me an awful lot as if Achad Ha-am, founder of Cultural Zionism, and a somewhat flawed but deeply ethical character, would have himself been implacably against anything calling itself a Jewish State that behaved like this.

Around the same time, I took up the saxophone, as part of an effort to give up smoking, and had a one-off lesson with the best local saxophonist I could find, who happened to be another Israeli exile by the name of Gilad Atzmon. This was an incredible stroke of luck, as without exaggeration I can promise you that Gilad is one of the best saxophonists alive anywhere in the world; he is also a lovely guy in person and a fantastic music teacher. Additionally, he is highly politically active as an anti-Zionist, and is considered so extreme that most other anti-Zionists consider him totally beyond the pale; he is widely accused by both anti-Zionists and Zionists alike of actual anti-semitism.

This is of course utter rubbish. It was clear to Gilad from the second he met me that I was Jewish – we even discussed the fact during my first pre-lesson meeting - and had he been a real anti-semite he would never have agreed to teach a Jew to play the saxophone.

His views are, nonetheless, extreme; for example he is against the concept of secular Jewish anti-Zionist organisations, and believes them all, along with any concept of secular Jewish identity, to be a stalking horse for Zionism itself. This stems from his deeply philosophical approach to the whole Israel-Palestine question, and his view that any secular expression of Jewish identity is inherently somehow supremacist; this has led him – as I understand it - to hold that any kind of Jewish identity itself is deeply flawed outside of the religious context.

Secular and positive

I do not agree with Gilad on that. I do believe that it is possible to be a secular Jew with a positive Jewish identity that does not in any way believe in Jewish supremacy. I do not even agree with his view that Zionism is inherently racist. For example, the pre-1948 position of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer HaTzair, which argued, as Zionists, for a secular binational state to be shared equally between Jews and Palestinians, puts paid to that.

In the 1920s Martin Buber, a humanist philosopher who had absolutely no truck with racism, developed a branch of Zionism centered politically around the concept of a binational state, and sadly, like Hashomer HaTzair, got nowhere. Today it is clear that the racist branches of Zionism have prevailed. But it does not take much more than a cursory view of the history to see that those were not the only branches.

Nevertheless, post 1948, it is very hard to argue that Zionism has not behaved, since Independence, in a de facto racist way. On that at least, Gilad, Daphna and I can all agree. Right now in 2012 we are watching aghast at yet another massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Yet again this comes just before the Israeli elections; this time we are hearing Israeli ministers such as Eli Yishai assert that "the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages."

Not only can I no longer defend any of this, I can no longer defend Zionism at all, not even in an abstract philosophical sense outside of any context involving the actions of the Israeli state. The Law of Return, under which I - an occasional tourist who just happens to be Jewish – can claim Israeli citizenship at a moment's notice, while a Palestinian actually born in, say, Haifa, but subsequently exiled cannot – that is a racist law. The notion of a Jewish state? That is – as far as it has been put into practice since 1948 - a racist notion.

Is Zionism racism? It didn't have to be. There were historical strands within Zionism that were not racist. Martin Buber – Zionist founder, in 1925, of the Brit Shalom organisation advocating a binational state, was not a racist, and nor were the pre-1948 Hashomer Hatzair.

But right now?

It's really very hard indeed to argue otherwise.

And it's such a blessed relief to feel that I am no longer obligated to attempt to do so.

That relief does not, however, in any way reduce the anger I feel at the current massacre of civilians in Gaza. 

This article originally appeared at conniptions.org

Article 15

November 29, 2012, 6:50 pm

≫ Next: The Bund – the Mass Jewish anti-Zionist Party in Poland

≪ Previous: The Transition from Zionist to anti-Zionist

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Palestinians in Gaza celebrate ceasefire

  A Strategic Asset in Danger of becoming a Strategic Liability?

A highly interesting article from Adam Shatz in the latest edition of London Review of Books. Why was the attack on Gaza relatively short-lived and why were the main aims of the attack, the military defeat of Hamas found a ground offensive, not met?

My own view, which coincides with Shatz’s is that as the Middle East slowly changes politically, Israel only has the one option it has ever considered – military force – backed up by a bombastic propaganda offensive that makes more enemies than it wins. As the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks let slip in an unguarded moment, this was primarily about Iran. But although he was right to say that it wasn’t about Gaza, he wasn’t necessarily right about the real target being Iran.
 

rockets take off for Israel and sky lit up beyond

Israel is finding it difficult these days because it has become a litmus test for the post-Arab Spring regimes, as well as Turkey. With concentration on change in Syria, which the West would love to see but which has not been as easy as was forecast, Gaza was a diversion. It was also a threat to Egypt, because the transparent aim of ‘encouraging’ Gazans to flee to Egypt – hence the talk about levelling the place and returning Gaza to the stone-age.

What has been secured is a ceasefire which Israel has no intention of sticking to. But despite its rhetoric about ‘rockets’ anyone with eyes to see can discern the difference between laser-guided missiles fired from American FI6s and a besieged people retaliating with what amounts to pop-guns. There can be no equivalance between the people in Sderot and those in Gaza. The BBC may not find this balance to their liking but to most people it is obvious.


children stick their heads through hole in wall of bombed school

But what the attacks has also disclosed is that Israel’s previous belief that it was the primary if not sole strategic asset in the region for the United States may be an overassumption. In certain circumstances, as David Petreus, former commander of the US’s Iraq Army and the CIA, hinted at, Israel might actually prove to be a unifying symbol for the disparate forces of Arab resistance.
Below Shatz’s article is a similar one by Norman Finkelstein, who when he abandons the batty idea that 2 States is good can still talk some sense.

There is no doubt  that with up to 70% of the Israeli population against the ceasefire that the popular mood in Israel understands, if not the reason for the ceasefire, its implications.

Tony Greenstein

Why Israel Didn’t Win

Adam Shatz

The ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas in Cairo after eight days of fighting is merely a pause in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It promises to ease movement at all border crossings with the Gaza Strip, but will not lift the blockade. It requires Israel to end its assault on the Strip, and Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets at southern Israel, but it leaves Gaza as miserable as ever: according to a recent UN report, the Strip will be ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. And this is to speak only of Gaza. How easily one is made to forget that Gaza is only a part – a very brutalised part – of the ‘future Palestinian state’ that once seemed inevitable, and which now seems to exist mainly in the lullabies of Western peace processors. None of the core issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict – the Occupation, borders, water rights, repatriation and compensation of refugees – is addressed by this agreement.
 

boy stands in rubble of house

The fighting will erupt again, because Hamas will come under continued pressure from its members and from other militant factions, and because Israel has never needed much pretext to go to war. In 1982, it broke its ceasefire with Arafat’s PLO and invaded Lebanon, citing the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London, even though the attack was the work of Arafat’s sworn enemy, the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal. In 1996, during a period of relative calm, it assassinated Hamas’s bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash, the ‘Engineer’, leading Hamas to strike back with a wave of suicide attacks in Israeli cities. When, a year later, Hamas proposed a thirty-year hudna, or truce, Binyamin Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to poison the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman; under pressure from Jordan and the US, Israel was forced to provide the antidote, and Meshaal is now the head of Hamas’s political bureau – and an ally of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi.
 

rubble of a destroyed house

Operation Pillar of Defence, Israel’s latest war, began just as Hamas was cobbling together an agreement for a long-term ceasefire. Its military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated only hours after he reviewed the draft proposal. Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, could have had a ceasefire – probably on more favourable terms – without the deaths of more than 160 Palestinians and five Israelis, but then they would have missed a chance to test their new missile defence shield, Iron Dome, whose performance was Israel’s main success in the war. They would also have missed a chance to remind the people of Gaza of their weakness in the face of Israeli military might. The destruction in Gaza was less extensive than it had been in Operation Cast Lead, but on this occasion too the aim, as Gilad Sharon, Ariel’s son, put it in the Jerusalem Post, was to send out ‘a Tarzan-like cry that lets the entire jungle know in no uncertain terms just who won, and just who was defeated’.

Victory in war is not measured solely in terms of body counts, however. And the ‘jungle’ – the Israeli word not just for the Palestinians but for the Arabs as a whole – may have the last laugh. Not only did Hamas put up a better fight than it had in the last war, it averted an Israeli ground offensive, won implicit recognition as a legitimate actor from the United States (which helped to broker the talks in Cairo), and achieved concrete gains, above all an end to targeted assassinations and the easing of restrictions on the movement of people and the transfer of goods at the crossings. There was no talk in Cairo, either, of the Quartet Principles requiring Hamas to renounce violence, recognise Israel and adhere to past agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: a symbolic victory for Hamas, but not a small one. And the Palestinians were not the only Arabs who could claim victory in Cairo. In diplomatic terms, the end of fighting under Egyptian mediation marked the dawn of a new Egypt, keen to reclaim the role that it lost when Sadat signed a separate peace with Israel. ‘Egypt is different from yesterday,’ Morsi warned Israel on the first day of the war. ‘We assure them that the price will be high for continued aggression.’ He underscored this point by sending his prime minister, Hesham Kandil, to Gaza the following day. While refraining from incendiary rhetoric, Morsi made it plain that Israel could not depend on Egyptian support for its attack on Gaza, as it had when Mubarak was in power, and would only have itself to blame if the peace treaty were jeopardised. After all, he has to answer to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organisation, and to the Egyptian people, who are overwhelmingly hostile to Israel. The Obama administration, keen to preserve relations with Egypt, got the message, and so apparently did Israel. Morsi proved that he could negotiate with Israel without ‘selling out the resistance’, in Meshaal’s words. Internationally, it was his finest hour, though Egyptians may remember it as the prelude to his move a day after the ceasefire to award himself far-reaching executive powers that place him above any law.
 

religious messianism - israeli soldiers pray to a god of destruction

That Netanyahu stopped short of a ground war, and gave in to key demands at the Cairo talks, is an indication not only of Egypt’s growing stature, but of Israel’s weakened position. Its relations with Turkey, once its closest ally in the region and the pillar of its ‘doctrine of the periphery’ (a strategy based on alliances with non-Arab states) have deteriorated with the rise of Erdogan and the AKP. The Jordanian monarchy, the second Arab government to sign a peace treaty with Israel, is facing increasingly radical protests. And though Israel may welcome the fall of Assad, an ally of Hizbullah and Iran, it is worried that a post-Assad government, dominated by the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brothers, may be no less hostile to the occupying power in the Golan: the occasional rocket fire from inside Syria in recent days has been a reminder for Israel of how quiet that border was under the Assad family. Israeli leaders lamented for years that theirs was the only democracy in the region. What this season of revolts has revealed is that Israel had a very deep investment in Arab authoritarianism. The unravelling of the old Arab order, when Israel could count on the quiet complicity of Arab big men who satisfied their subjects with flamboyant denunciations of Israeli misdeeds but did little to block them, has been painful for Israel, leaving it feeling lonelier than ever. It is this acute sense of vulnerability, even more than Netanyahu’s desire to bolster his martial credentials before the January elections, that led Israel into war.

Hamas, meanwhile, has been buoyed by the same regional shifts, particularly the triumph of Islamist movements in Tunisia and Egypt: Hamas, not Israel, has been ‘normalised’ by the Arab uprisings. Since the flotilla affair, it has developed a close relationship with Turkey, which is keen to use the Palestinian question to project its influence in the Arab world. It also took the risk of breaking with its patrons in Syria: earlier this year, Khaled Meshaal left Damascus for Doha, while his number two, Mousa Abu Marzook, set himself up in Cairo. Since then, Hamas has thrown in its lot with the Syrian uprising, distanced itself from Iran, and found new sources of financial and political support in Qatar, Egypt and Tunisia. It has circumvented the difficulties of the blockade by turning the tunnels into a lucrative source of revenue and worked, with erratic success, to impose discipline on Islamic Jihad and other militant factions in the Strip. The result has been growing regional prestige, and a procession of high-profile visitors, including the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who came to Gaza three weeks before the war and promised $400 million dollars to build housing and repair roads. The emir did not make a similar trip to Ramallah.

Hamas’s growing clout has not gone unnoticed in Tel Aviv: cutting Hamas down to size was surely one of its war aims. If Israel were truly interested in achieving a peaceful settlement on the basis of the 1967 borders – parameters which Hamas has accepted – it might have tried to strengthen Abbas by ending settlement activity, and by supporting, or at least not opposing, his bid for non-member observer status for Palestine at the UN. Instead it has done its utmost to sabotage his UN initiative (with the robust collaboration of the Obama administration), threatening to build more settlements if he persists: such, Hamas has been only too happy to point out, are the rewards for non-violent Palestinian resistance. Operation Pillar of Defence will further undermine Abbas’s already fragile standing in the West Bank, where support for Hamas has never been higher.

Hardly had the ceasefire come into effect than Israel raided the West Bank to round up more than fifty Hamas supporters, while Netanyahu warned that Israel ‘might be compelled to embark’ on ‘a much harsher military operation’. (Avigdor Lieberman, his foreign minister, is said to have pushed for a ground war.) After all, Israel has a right to defend itself. This is what the Israelis say and what the Israel lobby says, along with much of the Western press, including the New York Times. In an editorial headed ‘Hamas’s Illegitimacy’ – a curious phrase, since Hamas only seized power in Gaza after winning a majority in the 2006 parliamentary elections – the Times accused Hamas of attacking Israel because it is ‘consumed with hatred for Israel’. The Times didn’t mention that Hamas’s hatred might have been stoked by a punishing economic blockade. It didn’t mention that between the start of the year and the outbreak of this war, 78 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by Israeli fire, as against a single Israeli in all of Hamas’s notorious rocket fire. Or – until the war started – that this had been a relatively peaceful year for the miserable Strip, where nearly three thousand Palestinians have been killed by Israel since 2006, as against 47 Israelis by Palestinian fire.

Those who invoke Israel’s right to defend itself are not troubled by this disparity in casualties, because the unspoken corollary is that Palestinians do not have the same right. If they dare to exercise this non-right, they must be taught a lesson. ‘We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza,’ Gilad Sharon wrote in the Jerusalem Post. ‘Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki too.’ Israel shouldn’t worry about innocent civilians in Gaza, he said, because there are no innocent civilians in Gaza: ‘They elected Hamas … they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.’ Such language would be shocking were it not so familiar: in Israel the rhetoric of righteous victimhood has merged with the belligerent rhetoric – and the racism – of the conqueror. Sharon’s Tarzan allusion is merely a variation on Barak’s description of Israel as a villa in the jungle; his invocation of nuclear war reminds us that in 2008, the deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai proposed ‘a bigger holocaust’ if Gaza continued to resist.

But the price of war is higher for Israel than it was during Cast Lead, and its room for manoeuvre more limited, because the Jewish state’s only real ally, the American government, has to maintain good relations with Egypt and other democratically elected Islamist governments. During the eight days of Pillar of Defence, Israel put on an impressive and deadly fireworks show, as it always does, lighting up the skies of Gaza and putting out menacing tweets straight from The Sopranos. But the killing of entire families and the destruction of government buildings and police stations, far from encouraging Palestinians to submit, will only fortify their resistance, something Israel might have learned by consulting the pages of recent Jewish history. The Palestinians understand that they are no longer facing Israel on their own: Israel, not Hamas, is the region’s pariah. The Arab world is changing, but Israel is not. Instead, it has retreated further behind Jabotinsky’s ‘iron wall’, deepening its hold on the Occupied Territories, thumbing its nose at a region that is at last acquiring a taste of its own power, exploding in spasms of high-tech violence that fail to conceal its lack of a political strategy to end the conflict. Iron Dome may shield Israel from Qassam rockets, but it won’t shield it from the future.
23 November

Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza - What Really Happened

by Norman Finkelstein

The official storyline is that Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defence on 14 November, 2012 because, in President Barack Obama’s words, it had "every right to defend itself."

In this instance, Israel was allegedly defending itself against the 800 projectile attacks emanating from Gaza since January of this past year.

The facts, however, suggest otherwise.

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. The ruling power in Gaza, Hamas, was mostly committed to preventing attacks. Indeed, Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas leader whose assassination by Israel triggered the current round of fighting, was regarded by Israel as the chief enforcer of the periodic ceasefires, and was in the process of enforcing another such ceasefire just as he was liquidated.
Hamas occasionally turned a blind eye, or joined in to prevent an escalation, when Israeli provocations resulted in retaliatory strikes by Hamas’s more militant Islamist rivals. It recoiled at being cast as Israel’s collaborator in the image of the Palestinian Authority.

It has been speculated that Hamas was itching for a confrontation with Israel.

But this past year Hamas has been on a roll. Its ideological soulmate, the Muslim Brotherhood, ascended to power in Egypt. The emir of Qatar journeyed to Gaza carrying the promise of $400 million in aid, while Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to visit Gaza soon thereafter. In the West Bank many Palestinians envied (rightly or wrongly) that Gazans fared better economically. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Islamic University even managed to pull off an academic conference attended by renowned linguist Noam Chomsky.

Hamas’s star was slowly but surely rising, at the expense of the hapless Palestinian Authority. The very last thing it needed at that moment was an inevitably destructive confrontation with Israel that could jeopardise these hard-won, steadily accreting gains.


On the other side, many cynical Israelis speculated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the operation in order to boost his election prospects in January 2013.

As a general rule, however, Israeli leaders do not unleash major military operations for electoral gain where significant State interests are at stake. The fact that Defence Minister Ehud Barak dropped out of politics soon after the latest operation ended and his popular standing improved suggests that the forthcoming election was not a prime consideration for him.[1]  Why, then, did Israel attack? 
 
In one sense, Israel was straightforward about its motive. It kept saying, credibly, that it wanted to restore its "deterrence capacity"—i.e., the Arab/Muslim world’s fear of it.
The real question, however, is the nature of the threat it wanted to deter.

The latest assault on Gaza unfolded in the broader context of successive Israeli foreign policy failures.

Netanyahu sought to rally the international community for an attack on Iran, but ended up looking the fool as he held up an Iranian nuclear device "smuggled" into the United Nations. Hezbollah boasted that a drone launched by it had penetrated Israeli airspace, and then reserved the right to enter Israeli air space at its whim. Now, its "terrorist" twin upstart in Gaza was gaining respectability as the Arab/Muslim world thumbed its collective nose at Israel on its doorstep.

The natives were getting restless. It was time to take out the big club again and remind the locals who was in charge.

"At the heart of Operation Pillar of Defence," the respected Crisis Group observed, "lay an effort to demonstrate that Hamas’s newfound confidence was altogether premature and that, the Islamist awakening notwithstanding, changes in the Middle East would not change much at all."
Still, Israel needed a suitable pretext. So, just as it knew that breaking the ceasefire in November 2008 by killing six Hamas militants would evoke a massive response, so it must have known that killing Jaabari would evoke a comparable response.

The actual Israeli assault, however, differed significantly from Operation Cast Lead (OCL) in 2008-9: it was qualitatively less murderous and destructive. Many commentators have therefrom inferred that Israel used more precise weapons this time and, concomitantly, that Israel had "learnt the lessons" from OCL on how to avoid civilian casualties.

In fact, 99 percent of Israeli Air Force attacks during OCL hit targets accurately, while the goal of OCL was—in the words of the Goldstone Report, which was supported by scores of other human rights reports—to "punish, humiliate and terrorise" the Gazan civilian population.

If Israel’s latest rampage proved less lethal by comparison, it was because of unprecedented political constraints imposed on it:

• Turkey and Egypt made abundantly clear that they would not sit idly by if Israel launched a repeat performance of OCL. From early on, both drew a red line at an Israeli ground assault. Although now officially denied, it was reliably reported at the time that Obama, no doubt prodded by these key regional actors, counselled Israel not to invade.

• Israel had hanging over its head the Goldstone Report. It managed to elude, the first time around, prosecution at the International Criminal Court and the exercise by several countries of universal jurisdiction for its war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the second time it might not be so fortunate.

• Gaza was swarming with foreign reporters. Before OCL, Israel had sealed Gaza shut from the outside world with the cooperation of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. In the initial phase of the onslaught, Israel enjoyed a near-total monopoly on media coverage. But now, journalists could freely enter Gaza and credibly report Israeli atrocities in real-time.

On account of this trio of factors, Israel mostly targeted sites that could be deemed "legitimate." True, some 70 Palestinian civilians were killed, but that could be chalked up to "collateral damage."

The deaths and injuries of civilians during the Israeli assault, although far fewer than in previous rounds of the conflict, received in-depth and graphic news coverage. When Israel tested the limits of military legitimacy, trouble loomed. After it flattened civilian governmental structures in Gaza, the headline on the New York Times web site read, "Israel targets civilian buildings." A few hours later it metamorphosed into "government buildings" (no doubt after a call from the Israeli consulate). Still, the writing was on the wall: Israeli conduct was being closely scrutinised by outsiders, so it had better tread carefully.

The salient exceptions came during the final ceasefire negotiations when Israel resorted to its standard terrorist tactics in order to extract the best possible terms, and also targeted journalists in the event that the negotiations collapsed and it would have to, after all, launch the murderous ground invasion.

The armed resistance Hamas put up during the eight-day Israeli assault was largely symbolic. Although Israel acclaimed the success of Iron Dome, it almost certainly did not save many and perhaps not any lives. During OCL some 800 projectiles and mortar shells landing in Israel killed three Israeli civilians, while during the recent Israeli assault some 1,400 projectiles and mortar shells landing in Israel killed four Israeli civilians.

It is unlikely that, in the main and allowing for the occasional exception, Hamas used much more technically advanced weapons in the latest round. Through its army of informers and hi-tech aerial surveillance Israel would have been privy to large quantities of sophisticated Hamas weapons and would have destroyed these stashes before or during the first day of the attack. It is also improbable that Netanyahu would have risked an attack just on the eve of an election if Hamas possessed weapons capable of inflicting significant civilian casualties. A handful of Hamas projectiles reached deeper inside Israel than before but these lacked explosives; an Israeli official derisively described them as "pipes, basically."

If Israel ballyhooed Iron Dome, it was because its purported effectiveness was the only achievement to which Israel could point in the final reckoning.

The climax of Israel’s assault came when it was unable to break the spirit of the people of Gaza. On the one hand, it had exhausted all preplanned military targets and, on the other, it couldn’t target the civilian population. Hamas had successfully adapted Hezbollah’s strategy of continually firing its projectiles, the psychological upshot of which was that Israel couldn’t declare its deterrence capacity had been restored, and thereby forcing on it a ground invasion.

Israel could not launch such an invasion, however, without suffering significant combatant losses unless the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blasted everyone and everything in and out of sight as it cleared a path into Gaza. But, because of the novel circumstances—the regional realignment after the Arab Spring, and Turkey under Erdogan; the threat of a "mega-Goldstone," as a veteran Israeli commentator put it; the presence of a foreign press corps embedded not in the IDF but among the people of Gaza—Israel couldn’t launch an OCL-style ground invasion.

Israel was thus caught between a rock and a hard place. It couldn’t subdue Hamas without a ground invasion, but it couldn’t launch a ground invasion without incurring a politically unacceptable price in IDF casualties and global opprobrium.

It is possible to pinpoint the precise moment when the Israeli assault was over: Hamas leader Khalid Mishal’s taunt to Israel at a 19 November press conference, Go ahead, invade!

Netanyahu panicked. His bluff was called, and Israel stood exposed, naked, before the whole world. What happened next was a repeat of the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Unable to stop the Hezbollah rocket attacks but dreading the prospect of a ground invasion that meant tangling with the Party of God, Israel called in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to negotiate a ceasefire. This time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was summoned to bail Israel out. Not even the 21 November bus bombing in Tel Aviv—which, ceasefire or no ceasefire, would normally have elicited massive Israeli retaliation—shook Netanyahu from his determination to end the operation immediately, before Hamas resumed its taunting.
 The terms of the final agreement marked a stunning defeat for Israel. It called for a mutualceasefire, not one, as Israel demanded, unilaterally imposed on Hamas. It also included language that implied the siege of Gaza would be lifted. Notably, it did not include the condition that Hamas must cease its importation or production of weapons. The reason why is not hard to find. Under international law, peoples resisting foreign occupation have the right (or, as some international lawyers more cautiously phrase it, license) to use armed force. Egypt, which brokered the ceasefire, was not about to accept a stipulation that conceded Hamas’s legal right.  [2]
Israel no doubt hoped that the U.S. would use its political leverage to extract better ceasefire terms from Egypt. But the Obama administration, placing American interests first and consequently wanting to bring the new Egypt under its wing, was not willing (assuming it could) to lord it over Egypt on Israel’s behalf.

If any doubt remained about who won and who lost in the latest round, it was quickly dispelled. Israel launched the attack to restore Gaza’s fear of it. But after the ceasefire and its terms were announced, Palestinians flooded the streets of Gaza in a celebratory mood as if at a wedding party. In a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, Hamas’s Mishal cut the figure and exuded the confidence of a world leader. Meanwhile, at the Israeli press conference announcing the ceasefire, the ruling triumvirate—Netanyahu, Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—resembled grade-schoolers called down to the Principal’s Office, counting the seconds until the humiliation was over.
The ceasefire is likely to hold until and unless Israel can figure out how to militarily prevail given the new political environment. The days of Cast Lead are over, while a Pillar of Defence-type operation will not bear the fruits of victory.

It is unlikely, however, that Israel will fulfil the terms of the final agreement to lift the siege of Gaza. During deliberations on whether to accept the ceasefire, Barak had already cynically dismissed the fine print, saying "A day after the ceasefire, no one will remember what is written in that draft."
It is equally improbable that Egypt will pressure the U.S. to enforce the ceasefire terms on Israel. The respective interests of the new Egypt and Hamas mostly diverge, not converge. Egypt desperately needs American subventions, and is currently negotiating a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, where Washington’s vote is decisive. The popularity of President Mohammed Morsi’s government will ultimately hinge on what it delivers to Egyptians, not Gazans.

In the meantime, U.S. political elites are lauding Morsi to high heaven, stroking his ego, and speculating on the "special relationship" he has cultivated with Obama. Those familiar with the psychological manipulations of the U.S. when it comes to Arab leaders—in particular, contemptibly mediocre ones such as Anwar Sadat—will not be surprised by the current U.S. romancing of Morsi.
It is also unlikely that Turkey will exert itself on Hamas’s behalf. Right now it is smarting from Obama’s rebuff of designating Egypt as prime interlocutor in brokering the ceasefire. Turkey was reportedly disqualified because it labelled Israel a "terrorist state" during the assault, whereas Egypt "only" accused Israel of "acts of aggression, murder and bloodletting."

Still, aspiring to be the U.S.’s chief regional partner, and calculating that the road to Washington passes through Tel Aviv, Turkey has resumed negotiations with Israel to end the diplomatic impasse after Israel killed eight Turks aboard a humanitarian vessel headed for Gaza in 2010. On the other hand, its recent operation has brought home to Israel that alienating both its historic allies in the region, Egypt and Turkey, is not prudent policy, so a face-saving reconciliation between Ankara and Tel Aviv (the Turkish government is formally demanding an apology, monetary compensation, and an end to the Gaza siege) is probably in the offing.

The long and the short of it is that, even in the new era that has opened up, definite limits exist on how much regional support the Palestinians can realistically hope to garner.

It appears that many Palestinians have concluded from the resounding defeat inflicted on Israel that only armed resistance can and will end the Israeli occupation. In fact, however, Hamas’s armed resistance operated for the most part only at the level of perceptions—the projectiles heading towards Tel Aviv did unsettle the city’s residents—and it is unlikely that Palestinians can ever muster sufficient military might to compel an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

But Gaza’s steadfastness until the final hour of the Israeli assault did demonstrate the indomitablewill of the people of Palestine. If this potential force can be harnessed in a campaign of mass civil resistance, and if the supporters of Palestinian rights worldwide do their job of mobilizing public opinion and changing government policy, then Israel can be forced to withdraw, and with fewer Palestinian lives lost than in an armed resistance.

This article benefited from many conversations with Palestinian political analyst Mouin Rabbani and from Jamie Stern-Weiner playing the devil’s advocate.
 Norman Finkelstein is the author of many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, most recently,Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End, and is currently working on a book with Mouin Rabbani on how to resolve the conflict.

[1] It has also been speculated that the governing coalition had to do something to placate popular indignation at the Hamas attacks. But in fact, these attacks have barely registered on Israel’s political radar the past year, the focus being mostly on Iran and domestic issues.

[2] In a diplomatic side note to Netanyahu, Obama vaguely promised to "help Israel address its security needs, especially the issue of smuggling of weapons and explosives into Gaza."

The Bund – the Mass Jewish anti-Zionist Party in Poland

December 3, 2012, 5:58 pm

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As the Socialist Film Festival gears up to show Eran Torbiner’s film Bundayim next year and interest continues to grow in an organisation which, in Poland, massively outpolled the Zionists in the last Jewish Council elections, gaining 17 out of 20 seats in Warsaw to the Zionists’ one.   The Bund was a socialist and anti-Zionist party and its growth was a reflection of the fact that as the terrors of anti-Semitism grew, so Zionism offered no solution to the Jewish masses apart from the ‘dream’ of a Jewish State.  Hence when the Nazis invaded, the Zionist leaders – Begin, Hartglass, Gruenbaum all fled – whilst the Bund leaders stayed with their people.  Below is an article from the radical +972 Blog in Israel.
 
Tony Greenstein

Remember the Jewish Labor Bund?

The Bund was a Jewish socialist, revolutionary party in Eastern Europe dedicated to class struggle. It is all but forgotten in modern day Israel, but a few members are still around to tell the story.

Bundayim - Eran Torbiner's film of the Bund in Israel

By Alon Aviram

A piano played and a middle-aged woman stood in the middle of the room singing classical Yiddish songs to an attentive, seated audience of 30 or so old men and women. Every so often the music was interrupted by a hoarse laugh or some remark blurted out in Yiddish by a member of the audience. Heavy red velvet curtains blocked out the now largely gentrified old Tel Aviv neighborhood of Nahalat Binyamin. At a social gathering every fortnight, members of this Yiddish community center escape the realities of 21st century Israeli life and return to a largely bygone Yiddish-speaking era.

Yitzhak Luden stands in the Yiddish community center (photo: Alon Aviram) 14th November 2012

As the music finished and old friends said their goodbyes, journalist Yitzhak Luden, 90, one of the last surviving members of the Jewish Labor Bund in Israel, led me down a stairwell to a Yiddish library. “The others are here for just cultural and social reasons, they’re all too young to have been members of the Bund,” shrugged Yitzhak. As he pulled out tattered leather-bound books, he began to tell his story, and that of the Jewish Labor Bund. “One hundred and fifteen years ago, the Zionists held their first congress in a casino in Basel. The Bundists on the other hand, had their first meeting in the attic of a farm near Vilnius a month before. The Zionists were bourgeois from the start!” said Yitzhak.

The Bund was a Jewish socialist, revolutionary party, dedicated to class struggle and with an internationalist agenda. It played a significant role in the Russian revolutionary period. Similarly to Zionism, it was born in the wake of widespread anti-Semitism and pogroms across Europe. While the Zionist movement turned to emigration and the founding of a Jewish nation-state as a solution, Bundism argued that a Jewish state was a form of escapism which would only replicate existing class inequalities.

Yitzhak reconciled his position as an anti-Zionist living in Israel. “I came to Israel in 1948 not as a Zionist, but as someone fleeing war-torn Europe. Poland denied Bundists the right to organize, and the few Bundists who came made clear our political position in support of Palestinians, and for a one state solution.” The Bund in 1929 for example, defended the Palestinian riots as an anti-colonial uprising, rather than as anti-Semitic, as had been depicted by Zionists.

Even before the establishment of the Bund, a Yiddish article printed in Russia in 1887 wrote that those who think that “once the Jews have their own country they will be able freely to develop social ideas and cooperate with other peoples” forget that “the origin of nations is betrayal, robbery and murder”. The Bund would later echo this political position as an anti-Zionist organization with deep roots in the Jewish working class and intelligentsia across Eastern Europe.

“The religious Jews had traditionally organized Jewish communities. The Bund came out against both this and Zionism. It began to organize worker cooperatives and the social lives of many Jews. I was at first a member of the Bundist youth organization, SKIF. And some of my friends from SKIF who stayed in Warsaw later fought in the Ghetto resistance,” said Yitzhak.

Members of the Jewish Bund with bodies of their comrades killed in Odessa during the Russian revolution of 1905 (photo: Wikimedia Commons, PD-US)

The Bund repeatedly mobilized self-defense militias which managed to successfully thwart a number of pogroms, orchestrated general strikes, built a network of cultural organizations, and later became a considerable electoral force in Poland. As it turned to electoral politics in its later years, it obtained 40 percent of the Jewish vote in council elections across large cities in Poland in 1938. “That same year in Warsaw, the Bund took 17 out of 20 council seats won by Jewish parties in the Municipal elections” Yitzhak said proudly.

Decades earlier, Vladimir Medem, a Russian Jew, became one of the Bund’s most prominent theorists. He rejected the Zionist aspiration of establishing a Jewish nation-state. Medem did not however dismiss the value of national autonomy, but sought a version which was not territorially defined. Instead, the Bund called for the creation of a ‘state of nationalities’ rather than a nation-state.

The Jewish Labor Bund’s vision of national cultural autonomy was an early form of radical multiculturalism. It opposed both those who argued in favor of forced assimilation and those who called for nationalist separation. It envisaged a socialist society that would allow communities to freely conduct their own cultural affairs while ensuring that they remained connected economically and politically in one territory. Although the political conclusions outlined by the Bund were informed by life in late 19th and early 20th century-Russia, their commitment to essentially a one state model, of bi or multi-nationalism shares similarities with certain debates regarding the future of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories today.

Despite the Bund’s influential role in early 20th century Eastern European Jewish life, it seems that they are solely remembered by specialist historians or nostalgic left-wingers. “No one imagined that the Nazis would do what they did”, said Yitzhak as he spoke of the Holocaust. As a result of the Bund’s insistence that Jews should stay and fight for socialism rather than emigrate, many were murdered by the Nazis, and to a lesser extent also by the Stalinists. Decades later, it  appears that Zionism, the prevailing dominant ideology among Jewry, has played a part in forgetting, or at least in not remembering, the narrative of its pre World War II rival. Yitzhak, himself the survivor of a Russian gulag, said “we see this all around us. Before my wife met me, she had never heard of the Bund.”

Apartheid? This checkpoint is for the passage of Israelis (i.e. Jews) only

December 3, 2012, 6:09 pm

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 01, 2012 

Israeli Street Sign in West Bank

An Israeli street sign placed in the occupied West Bank (near Bethlehem) on Road 375 going from El-Khader Junction with road 60 (Tunnel Road) to Ela Valley. The sign is placed just before crossing from the West Bank to Israel near the illegal, Jewish-only colony/settlement of Betar Illit and the Palestinian villages of Husan, Batir and Wadi Fuqeen (Betar Checkpoint, which is not on the Green Line, but rather inside the West Bank). It says in Hebrew:

"Welcome to Betar Checkpoint'
 
This checkpoint is for the passage of Israelis only. It is forbidden to pass and/or drive a person through this checkpoint, who is not Israeli!!
 
"Israeli" - a resident of Israel, a person who lives in the area and is a citizen of Israel, or a person ENTITLED TO MAKE ALIYAH TO ISRAEL ACCORDING TO THE [JEWISH] LAW OF RETURN, 1950, AS VALID IN ISRAEL" (emphasis added) 

(PHOTO CREDIT: Dudy Tzfati via Roy, TRANSLATION CREDIT: Dudy Tzfati)

...and another such sign just sent to me by a friend:

Posted by Sam Bahour at 12:15 PM

Posted by Abraham Weizfield of the Jewish Peoples' Liberation Organisation - Note:  

The grammatical logic of this Zionist sign is illogical and self-contradictory, as well. To say that Israeli Palestinians are permitted into a so-called 'Jewish' area is contradictory, unless this law means to say that Palestinian Israelis are not Israeli. By deligitimizing the presence of Palestinians in Israel they have in effect, the delegitimization of their own presence in Palestine. If they do not tolerate any national minorities then how do they tolerate themselves!

This concept also invalidates the Jewish claim to be recognized as citizens in any other State in the World. This is an invitation to Antisemitism for 2/3rds of the Jewish People. This indifference to Antisemitism is chronic to Zionism.

 The Sign also defines Israel as the "area", a Land without borders operating at the whim of the self-determination of the Zionist State of Israel or any such portion, as well. By calling Palestine the name of Israel they also forfeit the greater part of the State of Israel, since it is constructed outside of the biblical boundaries of the ancient Kingdoms of Israel or Judea.

 This display of ignorance is only matched by the neurotic rejection of the original Covenant of Abraham, the patriarch whose legacy was to live in the Land of Kana'an as well as his descendants, forever. This was a promise to all the descendants of Abraham, including the Palestinians issued from Ishmael, the first-born. This is forgotten, and then forgetting the name of the Land - Kana'an, which had 7 Nations who lived side-by-side in the Land of promise and peace. In addition, the peace treaty with the Hittite Nation that was respected by Joshua on the return to the Land from Egypt, is also forgotten. The pretensions of the religious Zionists is beyond belief and credibility when one considers that the Jewish Law of Return if it applies, is granted to even if the person is not religious or perhaps of a similar compatible religion, like Islam for instance. And if so then many of the Palestinians qualify by virtue of their ancestors who are Jewish, among a large undetermined number of Palestinians.

 Such Judeophilia is as we say here in Kébèk, 'fatigant'.

Zionist McCarthyism in the University of California

December 3, 2012, 6:25 pm

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Are you now or have you (or your spouse) ever been......?

Berkely's next Chancellor Nicholas Dirk questioned as to whether it is proper that his wife held pro-boycott/anti-Israeli views

Be careful with who or what you affiliate with because your past afffiliations can follow you (and your spouse) around for some time to come:

Cross post from Jewssansfrontieres

By Public Affairs, UC Berkeley | November 27, 2012
Transcript of an excerpt of a video conversation between UC Berkeley’s next chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, and Dan Mogulof of Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs:
 

Dirks showing suitable contrition for once having signed (then denied signing) a pro-Boycott petition!

DAN MOGULOF: Floating around on the Internet is a claim that at some point in your past, you know, you signed a petition calling for Columbia to divest in all things Israel.  And there is a lot of information surrounding that, or misinformation surrounding that, and I want to give you an opportunity to  let us know exactly what happened there, what your role was and what your sort of philosophy is about sort of divestment type efforts insofar as the Middle East, or any other place in the world is concerned.
 
NICHOLAS DIRKS: Right. Well, when that particular petition was being circulated, I was chair of the department of anthropology and in fact, at some point, saw my name on a list and asked it to be removed. Truth is, I do not support divestment as a strategy for the university. I don’t support divestment with respect to Israel..........
    .......................................
DM: So before we move on, I want to drag you back to the divestment issue, if you will. There are also reports that at one time your wife signed a petition, a divestment petition calling on Columbia to divest in all things Israel. Do you think that’s an appropriate issue? Is that something that people should be concerned about, what your wife may or may not have done in the past?

ND: Well, first of all, let me say that my wife is a ferociously independent person. She has many views, some of which I share and some of which I don’t. We have a long history of being able to talk about things and have different perspectives and even different views. That being said, she did, back in 2002, sign one of the divestment petitions that was circulating around Columbia, before she had either thought very much about the issue or for that matter really had any sense at all of what putting her signature to that document might mean. And she has subsequently thought a great deal about this issue, and she has regretted signing this. She has changed her position completely on issues of divestment. And indeed, I think she feels that it was an unfortunate and ill-thought moment in her own life and participation in things at Columbia.

Being grilled on the 'wife' question

That being said, I need to emphasize again that she has her views. They are not germane to the kinds of things that I believe that are part of being the next chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. And I hope that she’ll be given the independence and the respect necessary for her to have her role on the faculty, as a member of the community and indeed as my partner as I move to Berkeley.

The video clip is here.

Community Security Trust's Dave Rich Accuses Child Refugee of Nazism of 'Antisemitism!'

December 3, 2012, 7:13 pm

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Mark Gardener, main spokesman of the CST, with fellow believer in tolerance, Richard Littlejohn

Robert Wistrich, Tel Aviv Professor and Ideologue for the Belief that Islam and a 'new anti-Semitism' are partners

 Weaponising the holocaust and anti-Semitism in the cause of Israel

In an excellent post by Tony Lerman 'Another faulty, pseudo-academic antisemitism initiative'Tony Lerman,  one of the key academics in Jewish and Zionist life in Britain, who broke from Zionism (see his book 'The Making & Unmaking of a Zionist' (which I've just reviewed!), he shows how unscrupulous 'academics', whose main concern is the wielding of 'anti-Semitism' at Israel's critics, are doing their best to shut down debate.  In a comment I posted, in response to various comments, I add the following - full article underneath:

Sharon Klaff asks, all innocent and wide-eyed 'what your gripe is. Take a breath and ask yourself why you are so angry that there are people who recognize the rise again of a call for genocide of the Jews.' 

Sharon has therefore answered her own question.  When people take the term 'anti-Semitisim' and 'genocide' against the Jews and use it to falsely lable those who are anti-Zionist, , then that is the concern, which Antony Lerman has expressed very well in his excellent post above.

Richard Kuper has dealt neatly with Harvey Garfield's absurd suggestion that the slogan 'from the river to the sea' is in any way anti-Semitic.  The call for a unitary, secular state is the  most democratic and anti-racist solution to the conflict between a settler state and the indigenous people there is.  And as Richard says, the Israeli state does not recognise the Green Line so why the Palestinians should is a mystery!

And since Dennis MacShane, who was quite content to siphon off thousands of pounds of public money whilst berating 'benefit thieves' if they should earn an extra fiver to feed the kids, is being honoured with an Award of Merit, the cover of which is headed by Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionists, then Harvey needs to learn some Zionist history.  Because:
i.  The slogan of the Revisionists was the West Bank is ours and so is the East Bank too!!  (Apparently the tribe of Benjamin and one other resided there at one time)

ii.  Jabotinsky, although not a fascist himself, led a movement whose paper Daor Hayom in Palestine was edited by Abba Achimeir, who ran a column 'Diary of a Fascist'.  Achimeir wrote of how 'Yes, we Revisionists have a great admiration for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany.  Otherwise it would have perished within four years. And if he had given up his
anti-Semitism we would go with him.'  This was expressed in the trial of Arlossoroff, the head of the Political Dept. of the Jewish Agency by the Revisionists who are widely considered to have assassinated him (for good anti-fascist reasons ironically)

In 1933 Jabotinsky wrote to Achimeir urging an end to this nonsense:  

'The articles and notices on Hitler and the Hitlerite movement appearing in Hazit Ha am are to me, and to all of us, like a knife thrust in our backs. I demand an unconditional stop to this outrage. To find in Hitlerism some feature of a  national liberation  movement is sheer ignorance. Moreover, under present circumstances, all this babbling is discrediting and paralysing my work ... I demand that the paper join, unconditionally and absolutely, not merely our campaign against Hitler Germany, but also our hunting down of Hitlerism, in the fullest sense of the term.'  Joseph Schectman, Fighter & Prophet, p.216.

Or there is the training of Jabotinsky's Beitar naval squadron at Civitavecchia in November 1934 when Mussolini was the darling of, not just the Revisionist Zionists.

It is no surprise that Mark Gardener and Dave Rich of the Community Security  Trust should throw their weight behind false accusations of 'anti-Semitism', since that is the real purpose of their organisation.  To create an image of anti-Semitism that doesn't exist and at the same time to use the 'old' anti-Semitism to frighten Jews into emigration.   One thing the CST has never done is to participate in any joint activity against anti-Semitic and racist groups like the NF/BNP/EDL.

Indeed they were quite content, as was Dave Rich, at the time of Cast Lead, for EDL members to participate in the glorification of the murders on the Mavi Marmara outside the Israeli Embassy.  Despite Rich's protestations at the time, no attempt was made to prevent EDL members attending that demonstration.  Indeed a mirror image of what occurred then happened at the pickets outside Ahava, with Zionist Federation and EDL members standing and chatting side by side.  The CST had nothing whatsoever to say.

The agenda is quite clear, as Prof. Klaff states.  Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, therefore it should be banned to protect Jewish students.  Ironically the Union of Jewish Students, which would quite like to do the same, OPPOSED no platform for fascists and racists when I was a student, in case it might be applied to them!

Brian Klug's definition, that anti-Semitism is a form of hatred and discrimination against Jews is pretty clear.  It is those who always saw anti-Semitism as a 'normal' reaction to the presence of Jewish strangers in their midst who can be considered as buying into anti-Semitism.  Yet that was the meaning of the Negation of the Diaspora.  Zionism accepted anti-Semitism as 'normal' with people like Israel's first Justice Minister Pinhas Rosenbluth going as far as to describe Palestine as an 'institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin' (Journal of Israel Studies 4, Autumn 1983).  But this is not the type of anti-Semitism Gardener and Rich are concerned about because theirs is a political campaign.

And if they ally with vehement anti-Islamic racists and fundamentalists who cares.  Manfred Gerstenfeld's article about 'anti-Semitism' in Norway is a good example.  Perhaps he would care to peruse the views of Andreis Breivich as to his attitudes to Muslims and Israel (though like the CST and the above symposia participants, he too detested Jewish 'traitors').
 
The problem for Wistrich, Klaff and the other Zionist McCarthyites, who brook no challenge to their theses or debates, is that all their efforts fall on stony ground.  Most people are quite capable of working out what anti-Semitism is and the question they ask is quite simple.  How come the Jews of all people, given their experience of racism, can indulge in the same.  It is our job to point out that Jews and Zionists are not one and the same and that in any event any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, can be victim or victimiser.
 
It says a lot about the CST's lack of anything resembling a considered thought pattern that Dave Rich can seize on the letter from Emeritus Professor Leslie Baruch Brent, which compared Israel's actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis in the bombing of Guernica.  Is Rich seriously suggesting that the Nazis were unique?  If it is right to compare US bombing in Vietnam with Nazi bombing of civilians, or that of the British in Iraq in 1920, why should Israel be given a free pass?  No one is suggesting that Israel is alone in this war crime.
 
It is somewhat ironic that Professor Brent, with whose letter I didn't totally agree, is himself a childhood survivor of the Nazis, a member of the Kindertransport.  I think he knows a little more about what it was like to flee the Nazi terror than a paid propagandist.

Tony Greenstein

Another faulty, pseudo-academic antisemitism initiative

Tony Lerman - dissident former Zionist

It was inevitable. Another Gaza offensive by Israel begins, ostensibly to stop Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel, and within a couple of days accusations of antisemitism were flying around.
 
Two particularly caught my attention. The first was the claim that Steve Bell, in his Guardian cartoon of 15 November, was ‘getting] away with using antisemitic imagery and tropes‘ because it showed Tony Blair and William Hague as puppets of Bibi Netanyahu.
 
The second was in a tweet about a letter to the Guardian from emeritus professor Leslie Baruch Brent who condemned the ‘disporportionate response of the Israeli government to the Hamas rocket attacks’ and concluded ‘Has the world learned nothing since Guernica?’  The text of the tweet read: ‘Hard to take @guardian opposition to #antisemitism seriously when they publish letter comparing #Israel to Nazis.’ 
I was especially interested in these accusations because the first was by Mark Gardner, the communications director of the Community Security Trust (CST), the private charity that acts as the defence organization of the UK Jewish community, and the second by Dave Rich, his deputy.
One of the things that is most worrying about what I believe were these false imputations of antisemitism (and I will explain my reasoning for this conclusion in my next blogpost) is that they come not simply from individuals expressing their own views, but from officials of a very influential, major registered charity, and in the case of the cartoon, writing in their capacity as officials of that organization. The view of the Community Security Trust is seen as, and is intended to be seen as, the view of the organized UK Jewish community. And yet that wider community has no means of calling the CST to account and therefore has to suffer the consequences of its officials’ doubtful and often damaging politically-motivated interventions in public debate.
 
The politicization of antisemitism research
 
The institutionalized politicization of antisemitism by bodies claiming to be non-political or academic is not new. And with regard to a charity like the CST, it is very troubling.

We saw this politicization in the now defunct Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), which was closed by the university authorities after it became clear that it was primarily an advocacy body and not a serious research institute. And it was also apparent in the now almost defunct European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA), established, it seems, with a mandate to grossly exaggerate the problem of antisemitism (the inaugural lecture given by the then Labour Europe minister Jim Murphy was entitled ‘Antisemitism: a hate that outlives all others’). There has been no activity on its website since June 2011, and that was an article by the now disgraced former Labour Party junior minister Denis MacShane, first published in the Jewish Chronicle and cross-posted on the EISCA blog.
 
While still thinking about the manipulation of antisemitism for political purposes, I received information about a symposium on antisemitism taking place on 2 December at the Wiener Library in London. Though clearly planned long before the latest Israeli offensive against Gaza, the holding of the symposium at this time is an extraordinary coincidence. And it was immediately obvious from the programme that it fell squarely into the category of an event dressed up in pseudo-academic clothes but which is, in reality, an exercise in political advocacy.
 
Although the symposium is taking place at the Wiener Library, a highly respected documentation, research and educational resource on the Holocaust and the Nazi era, it’s not mentioned anywhere on Wiener’s website. This is no doubt because the event itself is being organized exclusively under the auspices of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA), with the library’s prestigious central London premises simply hired for the occasion. Wiener’s director, Ben Barkow, is not speaking at the symposium.
 
The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism: a home for the ‘new antisemitism’ notion
 
The JSA is a privately funded periodical founded four years ago. It has no institutional base and is privately published. It describes itself as ‘ the peer-reviewed work of a select group of independent scholars’. Even a cursory glance at the journal’s list of Board Members reveals a great preponderance of neoconservatives, Islamophobes, advocates of the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, pedlars of the ‘self-hating Jew’ accusation against Jewish critics of Israeli policies and out-and-out political propagandists.
 
The individuals funding the event are Daniel Pipes, Mitch Knisbacher and Jeff and Evy Diamond. Pipes, the president of the right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), is widely described as an ‘Islamophobe’. In 2009 his MEF established a legal defence fund for the far-right, populist, Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Pipes reportedly claimed that President Obama is a former Muslim who ‘practised Islam’. Knisbach, who is the founder and owner of 800response (America’s leading provider of shared-use 800-number services), is active in the right-wing Israel lobby AIPAC and funds Tazpit News Agency, a service set up primarily to popularize a positive view of settlement activity in the West Bank. Jeff Diamond, who heads the Jeff Diamond Law Firm, which has six offices in New Mexico and Texas, was installed in January as chair of the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Board of Directors.
 
The journal’s editors — Neal E. Rosenberg, a criminal lawyer, and Stephen K. Baum, a clinical psychologist — and the journal itself were mired in controversy early in 2010 when they sacked Dr Clemens Heni, a Berlin-based academic, from the editorial board for criticizing the Berlin Technical University’s centre for research on antisemitism for what he regarded as its ‘neglect of Islamic anti-Semitism and Israel’s security’ — and this was in an article Heni wrote for the journal. Various members of the board resigned in protest. The editors say they were pressured by the Berlin centre, which, a Jerusalem Post article claims, threatened to engineer the resignation of seven German members of the Board and the withdrawal of cooperation with the journal by three German antisemitism research centres. The editors soon relented, reinstated Heni and asked some of the resigning Board members to return. Some did and some didn’t.
 
Heni vigorously attacked the decision to close YIISA. In the wake of its demise, and no doubt after his experience being sacked and then reinstated to the JSA editorial board, in 2011 he set up a new German antisemitism research body, the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), the main focus of which is ‘anti-Semitism in the 21st century, particularly hatred of Israel.’
 
The symposium: a one-sided affair
 
The curious thing about this incident is that it’s quite clear that the journal’s posture is very close to the line Heni took in his attack on the Berlin centre. The programme and speakers at the forthcoming symposium demonstrate this. (A note of caution: the programme sent to me looks like the last word on who is attending and speaking, but may not be. It differs from the version of the programme on the JSA website.) Titled ‘Contemporary antisemitism in the UK’, the symposium kicks off with a panel on ‘Defining the new antisemitism’, chaired by Kenneth Marcus. The panellists are Bat Ye’or, Richard Landes and Winston Pickett.

Marcus heads the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which was founded in late 2011 and took over where YIISA left off when it was closed down. YIISA’s director, Charles Small is on the advisory board, the honorary chairman of which is Professor Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister, who has probably done more than anyone else to promote the idea of the ‘new antisemitism’. Other like-minded board members, who were also YIISA supporters, include Professor Dina Porat, Professor Ruth Wisse and Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld.
 
The three panellists will find much to agree on. For decades Bat Ye’or has been banging the drum about the ‘Muslim hordes’ who were about to take over Europe. Rather generously referred to as a ‘self-taught Jewish intellectual’, she now believes that Europe is dead, and in its stead ‘Eurabia’ has risen. Richard Landes, director and co-founder of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, told the Herzliya IDC conference in 2007:
European democratic civilization can fall before the Islamic challenge. Do not say that this will never happen in Europe and that Islam will not be able to take control of Europe.
If Europe continues its current path, the fall will be sooner.
 
Winston Pickett was the director of the now non-functioning EISCA. He lavishes unreserved praise on Professor Robert Wistrich for his huge tome, Antisemitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad, a book that, as its title suggests, sets out to justify the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’.
 
Panel sessions 2 and 3 — ‘Mapping the rise of contemporary antisemitism’ and ‘Antisemitism on campus’ — present much the same picture. Both chairpersons, Manfred Gerstenfeld and Kenneth Lasson, see no real distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Gerstenfeld’s crude and wild assertions about antisemitism are legion. A recent online article about antisemitism in Norway is a good example of his continuing attempt to portray European countries as riddled with antisemitism, no matter what the data say. Lasson’s views are clearly laid out in an 80-page paper, ‘Antisemitism in the academic voice’, in which he writes that ‘Anti-Zionism . . . has evolved into antisemitism’ and reveals how ill-equipped he is to comment on this subject when he says: ‘The misnamed “occupation” allegedly began after Israel’s 1967 victory . . .’
 
In panel 2, Mark Gardner of the CST and Robert Wistrich, who heads the Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), should feel comfortable with each other’s role in justifying and promoting the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, though it would be only fair to acknowledge that Wistrich’s influence in this regard far outstrips that of Gardner’s. Wistrich restated the classic definition of the ‘new antisemitism’ in a talk at the Hebrew University Jerusalem in June 2011 entitled ‘From blood libel to boycott: changing faces of British antisemitism’. A Cif Watch post summarised his remarks: ‘efforts to boycott and delegitimize Israel (the Jewish collective) as a form of exclusion from the community of nations [are] not dissimilar from historical efforts to exclude the individual Jew from the communities where they resided.’ Gardner’s use of the ‘new antisemitism’ argument is clearly apparent in his and Dave Rich’s analysis of Caryl Churchill’s short playlet Seven Jewish Children. (My refutation of their analysis is here.) It is also unlikely that there will be much disagreement in panel 3 between Clemens Heni, Ronnie Fraser (fresh from the tribunal hearing his claim of ‘institutional antisemitism’ against the University and College Union), who runs the 
Academic Friends of Israel, and Dave Rich.
 
Some dissent at last?
 
Some serious diversity of views then appears possible when Lesley Klaff chairs a panel discussing ‘Addressing current approaches’. This would be unlikely, however, were Professor Klaff to proffer her own views. Linked to BICSA and the Brandeis Center, she has made her opinions on the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism perfectly clear. As she writes in the journal of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs:

University codes of conduct and UK law recognize that an important university goal is the promotion of equality of opportunity for minority students and their protection from discrimination, including harassment. Given the growing consensus that anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism in a new guise, this goal is flouted with respect to Jewish students every time that anti-Zionist expression takes place on a university campus.

 So, no anti-Zionist views allowed on campus then. Period. While Günther Jikeli, co-founder of the International Institute for Education and Research on Anti-Semitism in London and Berlin, is under the false impression that the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU endorses its predecessor’s ‘Working Definition’ of antisemitism, he, the PhD student Hagai van der Horst from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Professor David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London will hopefully be able to offer a stark contrast with what will have gone before. Feldman’s approach at the Pears Institute is a model of inclusiveness and variety; he creates a safe space for the expression of sharply different opinions.

Worrying about the left and boycott, and promoting the EUMC ‘Working Definition’
 
The speakers on the final panel, ‘Strategic interventions: what can be done?’, are not on record, as far as I could ascertain, as specifically subscribing to the JSA‘s line on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The barrister Julian Hunt is described in the programme as ‘having experience defending pro-Israel activists’, which, from his July 2012 post on the Commentator blog, seems to refer to Jewish students on campus. With a title like ‘Criminalising the boycott bullies’, it seems fair to assume that he has an uncompromising attitude to anti-Zionism. Philip Spencer, an expert on the Holocaust and genocide, is director of politics and international Relations at the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Kingston University, and has a special interest in what he sees as the left’s less than glorious history of standing up to antisemitism. Francisco Garrett, a lawyer from Portugal, appears to have no significant track record as an antisemitism expert.
 
But there is little ambiguity in the position of the chair of this panel, L. Ruth Klein. In her 2009 report on antisemitism in Canada presented to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA), the national director of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada refers to anti-Zionism as ‘that unholy hybrid of age-old and new-age bigotry’, calls for the criminalization of boycotts ‘against the Jewish state’ and for the adoption of the EUMC ‘Working Definition’ of antisemitism.
 
Giving the political game away
 
A spirit of free inquiry does not seems to govern these proceedings. And this view is strengthened further by the sessions of the symposium that are not panel discussions. The former chairman of EISCA, Denis MacShane MP, is given the platform to himself to speak on ‘The politics of fighting antisemitism’. I and others have drawn attention to his woeful lack of understanding of antisemitism, his propensity to exaggerate what it represents – ‘there is no greater intolerance today than neoantisemitism’ – and his readiness to vilify Muslims and pro-Palestinian activists. For a man fêted as such a friend of the Jews, his ignorance about Jews and Israel, as displayed in his book Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism, is deeply disturbing.

But having written a book with that title he will certainly be at home among the JSA‘s ’select group of independent scholars’ at Sunday’s symposium. So much so that he is being presented with ‘The Award of Merit: Righteous Persons Who Fight Antisemitism’. (Whether the organizers still think he is quite so righteous after being found guilty of fiddling his parliamentary expenses, we do not know.) At the head of the page in the programme detailing this award, and two others, is a photograph of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the right-wing, revisionist Zionist ideologue, whose ideas have inspired much of today’s ruling political elite in Israel and, so it clearly appears, the organizers of this symposium. Manfred Gerstenfeld receives the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ and Shimon T. Samuels scoops the jackpot with the ‘Jabotinsky Award’.
 
Samuels is the director for international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Paris and a long-standing promoter of the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’. In July 2011, after attending a UN meeting in Brussels titled ‘The role of Europe in advancing Palestinian statehood and achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians’, he wrote to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon saying that the experience was akin to a ‘gangbang’. On 2 August 2012 he told the Jerusalem Post that the action of the Swiss Migros supermarket chain to label Israeli products from the West Bank was a boycott measure and must be viewed as ‘a continuation of Nazism’.
 
It shows just how far the academic study of contemporary antisemitism has become corrupted in some circles that the organizers of this symposium did not seem to feel a moment’s shame in so blatantly politicizing it by identifying so completely with the political ideology of Jabotinsky. As if this wasn’t enough to damn as bogus what’s billed as an academic event, the screening of Gloria Greenfield’s ‘documentary’, Unmasked Judeophobia, can leave no one in any doubt. The New York Times‘ reviewer Nicole Herrington wrote:

the film loses ground toward the middle, when it calls out individuals (often just by showing their images) and organizations for their passiveness or criticism of Israeli policies without giving a full account of the facts. The roster is long: the United Nations, feminists, the European news media, Alice Walker, human rights groups and American academics.

In the end the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are conflated, weakening the filmmaker’s argument.

Less restrained, but equally reasonable, was this from James van Maanen’s film review blog:

I suspect there is some very good information in Gloria Greenfield’s new documentary, Unmasked Judeophobia: The Threat to Civilization (that sub-title alone should raise a red flag), but the repetitive, ham-handed manner in which it is presented is enough to make aware and thinking people — anyone, that is, who might find and be willing to admit as reprehensible some of the state of Israel’s current behavior toward its Palestinian residents — run for the exit.

This comment could equally be applied to the entire JSA symposium.
 
Anyone who disagrees with the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’ should always be prepared to discuss it with its promoters. And its promoters should always be willing to debate the notion with its critics. This is the only way that sense on antisemitism can be arrived at. By the nature and format of this symposium, the JSA has clearly shown that it has no interest whatsoever in such a dialogue, even if one or two brave souls may try to speak up for the values that underpin true academic exchange.
 
(Thanks to Ben White for drawing my attention to this symposium and for sharing information and sources.)
 
Even one of Zionism’s more vacant intellects, Deborah Lipstadt, primus inter pares among American holocaust historians, bemoaned in How To Study Anti-Semitism how Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism had been shut down because, in her words: ‘Too many students who take these classes find that they have entered a zone in which advocacy masquerades as scholarship.’  In other words, it’s not easy to marry propaganda and serious historical research and vigorous academic debate.  

See the Powerbase Article on the Community Security Trust


Needless to say this essay has set the cat amongst those who think of themselves as the more 'intellectual' Zionists e.g. Richard Millett, who questioned the fact that Dennis McShane was Islamaphobic as well of course as being a more general run of the mill reactionary!  See this      exchange:

1. I’m still waiting for proof from Tony Lerman that MacShane “vilifies Muslims”. Can you give a direct quote please?

• Antony Lerman
  02/12/2012 at 10:08 pm | #21

  Reply | Quote

  MacShane’s book Globalising Hatred:The New Antisemitism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2008) is a very confused book in which MacShane tries to portray himself as on the side of Muslims experiencing racism just as he is on the side of Jews experiencing antisemitism. Sadly, this is overwhelmed by the Islamophobia that suffuses the whole book. For quotes, read the book and take your pick. If you need help, try p. vii, the first page of the preface, lines 10 to 17. Or p. 163 where he writes: ‘An end to antisemitism is the beginning of a rebirth of the Arab peoples and their nations’ — tantamount to an accusation of collective guilt of all Arabs, which of course includes a very great part of the world’s Muslim population. Or read chapter 7, ‘Antisemitism or Antizionism’, which is an extended attack on one person, Tariq Ramadan, done in such a way as to vilify Muslims generally. Enough for you Richard?

Israel Targets Journalists

December 8, 2012, 3:35 pm

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 'The Only Democracy in the Middle East' doing its best to uphold freedom of expression

This report contains graphic scenes. Viewer discretion is advised.Watch full multipart The Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza 

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Kufr Kaddoum village in revolt forces retreat of Zionist soldiers

December 9, 2012, 2:58 pm

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A Gratifying Scene of Resistance to Israel's Occupation

Caroline Swords Acquitted of Attack on Zionist Goon Garfield

December 9, 2012, 7:03 pm

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Anti-Israel Activist Wins Appeal’

Imagine my surprise when I read in the Jewish Chronicle that ‘Anti-Israel Activist Wins Appeal’.
According to Marcus Dysch (6.12.12.)

Harvey Garfield Fails to Frame Palestinian Activist

Garfield on the left, hand on hip, looking satisfied as the EDL are all around

‘A veteran anti-Israel campaigner has been cleared of hitting a Jewish man during a boycott protest.
Carole Swords, former chair of Tower Hamlets Respect Party, successfully appealed against a public order offence conviction which followed the pair clashing in a Tesco Metro store.
Harvey Garfield told Southwark Crown Court he had been struck in the face by Ms Swords in London’s Covent Garden in August 2011.
Mr Garfield said he had been volunteering at the store to assist staff and security guards and had worked to “protect” Israeli products from potentially being vandalised by boycott protesters who had earlier demonstrated outside the Israeli cosmetics company Ahava.
The court viewed CCTV footage which showed Ms Swords, of Bow, east London, entering the Tesco store and speaking to Mr Garfield and a security guard.
She walked down an aisle and Mr Garfield walked behind her. He told the court that Ms Swords had turned to shout: “Don’t you f***ing follow me.”
“It happened very quickly,” he said. “I turned, but before I said anything she had struck me. My glasses came off at an angle and fell to the floor.”
Ms Swords’ defence team argued that Mr Garfield had harassed and intimidated her inside Tesco, alleging that he had called her a “Nazi”, a” fishwife” and a “terrorist”. Mr Garfield repeatedly denied the accusation.
Chairing the hearing last Friday, Recorder Mukul Chawla QC said the CCTV footage showed Mr Garfield following Ms Swords in such a way that he was “virtually glued to her”.
“We are of the clear view that the appellant was entitled to demand in emphatic terms that he not follow her,” he said. “It’s clear Ms Swords raised her arm with her hand carrying a number of leaflets. What’s not clear is whether the hand or arm ever came into contact with Mr Garfield’s face. How his glasses came off we cannot say. ” The evidence meant the court “could not reasonably convict” and he allowed the appeal.(hat tip – Michael Shanahan)

Now I have a slight knowledge of Harvey Garvey myself.  Not only was he pictured dancing down Monmouth Street with his twin image Jonathan Hoffman and the EDL’s Roberta Moore, but he is even more objectionable than his twin.  This particular specimen of Zionist low-life, having no arguments of his own to make, has even tried to criticise my own views on Israel, not by reference to their own merits, but because my dead father would not have agreed with me!  Only a thorough racist, Zionist or otherwise, would buy into this old ‘kith and kin’ argument that ‘blood is thicker than water’ therefore you should turn a blind eye to injustice carried out in your name by those whose religion/race you share.

I even have knowledge of the violence of what Michael Shanahan describes as a ‘rick-shaw puller’ who masquerades as a London cabby.  At the anti-Habimah protests last year, I was taking a quiet stroll in the theatre, having appreciated how a Zionist troupe probably brought a whole new understanding to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (in fact their’s was probably one of the worst interpretations imaginable – hackneyed and timeless) when I was set upon by a group of Zionist hoodlums, including the said Harvey.  As Garfield climbed onto my back, I heard a sudden thump on the floor where the schmuck landed.  Immediately he started squealing and the Police detained me.  However I then informed London’s finest that in that case  I wanted to press charges of assault against Harvey, and hey presto, I was released inside of 5 minutes as it dawned on even the most thick Met Inspector that little ol’ me was hardly likely to want to take on 3 Zionist thugs at the same time!

Tony Greenstein

Zionist Community Security Trust in Dilemma over Islamaphobic Conference

December 9, 2012, 7:08 pm

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When I criticised those Zionists who associated Jews with Israel's attack on Gaza (2008-9) Gardener of the CST was one of those who objected!

Gardener of the CST - Happy to associate withbigots like Richard Littlejohn

Should We Walk or Should We Stay?  Neither it would appear!!

As I have documented time and again, the primary agenda of the self-appointed, private charity headed by ultra-Zionist rightwinger, Gerald Ronson, is to paint anti-Zionist and support for the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’. 

Unsurprisingly the CST, which styles itself as the defence wing of the Jewish community and is honoured as such by the Metropolitan Police and people like Michael Gove MP, is no stranger to working with Islamaphobes and anti-Muslim racists.

In particular, over the summer, it devoted its time to supplying false and misleading information to the Home Office concerning Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Islamic League in Israel.  Sheikh Salah, whom the Israelis tried to murder on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, has been a thorn in the side of Israel’s leaders.  The CST’s misinformation led to the arrest and attempted deportation of Sheikh Salah before the Senior Immigration Appeal Tribunal, noting the false nature of the charges against him, ordered his release.

Community Security Trust Supplies False Information to Deport Sheikh Raed Salah
Immigration Appeal Tribunal's Racist Order to Deport Raed Salah
How the Zionist Community Security Trust and Theresa May Colluded at the Behest of Racists to Deport Raed Salah & Prevent Free Speech

Indeed it is impossible today to be a pro-Israel advocate and a Zionist without also being an Islamaphobe.  Support for Israel and anti-Arab racism are inseparable.  

It was only last week that I picked up on a tweet from Dave Rich, second-in command at the CST, who accused Professor Baruch Brent, a child refugee of nazism, of 'Antisemitism!' for daring to compare the Nazi bombing of Guernica with that of Gaza. 

What attracted Rich's attention was that I happened to mention that the CST had paid no regard to the fact that a demonstration that they had stewarded, in support of the killing of 9 activists on the Mavi Marmara, had also been supported by the EDL and some of their members.  Dave Rich wrote back furiously stating that

‘I personally (and my colleagues), have made our position on the EDL and similar Islamophobic groups very clear on the CST Blog, for example:…..
We have also done so to the wider Jewish community via the Jewish Chronicle:…..
Regarding CST's policies regarding securing demonstrations , we have stated publicly that we will not provide security for demonstrations where the EDL are present: http://blog.thecst.org.uk/?p=2556
Your allegation that CST was content for the EDL to join a pro-Israel demonstration in June 2010 is not true and is contradicted by the media reporting at the time:
http://jc-thn-ws3.thejc.com/news/uk-news/32425/hundreds-demonstrate-israel-london
…. CST has provided security advice to mosques that faced Islamophobic demonstrations and I personally act as an advisor to the Tell MAMA campaign that monitors anti-Muslim hate crime.
Regards
Dave Rich
CST

Mr Rich said it was untrue to say that they were not content for the EDL to join the pro-Israeli demonstration and that they don’t steward events where the EDL is present was contradicted at the time.  Even the overtly pro-Zionist Bob from Brockley in an article ‘The English Defence League and the Gaza Flotilla’ accepted that ‘A tiny number of English Defence League members turned up at a pro-Israel demonstration, some possibly from the semi-fictitious "Jewish Division" of the EDL (it also has a "LGBT Division" and of course prominent Sikh members).’

Dave Rich may indeed be an adviser to Tell Mama but by all accounts, this Government funded initiative is ‘Not Off to a Good Start!’  Since the government has been one of the main sources of the demonisation of Arabs and Muslims these are not particularly spectacular credentials.

But the CST demonstrated its real concerns with its campaign to deport Sheikh Salah.  It was a thoroughly racist campaign (or perhaps I have failed to notice the CST campaign to have Avigdor Liebermann deported – from memory I seem to recall that they helped guard his meetings!).

To get Raed Salah deported, the CST quoted uncritically from racist Hebrew University Professor Raphael Israeli (see e.g. The Community Security Trust cites the racist Hebrew University Professor Raphael Israeli to denounce the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Sheikh Raed Salah.

Professor Raphael Israeli makes the British National Party and National Front seem mild by comparison.  For example ‘When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass you have problems. That is a general rule, so if it applies everywhere it applies in Australia." and ‘Australia should cap Muslim immigration or risk being swamped by Indonesians.’

Sydney Morning Herald, 16.2.07. ‘Limit Muslim migration, Australia warned.  The CST's Professor Israeli was also quoted as saying that ‘Muslim immigrants had a reputation for manipulating the values of Western countries, taking advantage of their hospitality and tolerance.’ ‘"French people say they are strangers in their own country. This is a point of no return.’

It wasn’t no long ago that you could have substituted ‘Jewish’ for ‘Muslim’ to receive the approval of the owner of the Daily Express (today's owner Richard Desmond is a funder/supporter of the CST and his papers are equally defamatory and racist to Muslims as they once were to Jewish immigrants).  Yet when I phoned Mark Gardener about Professor Israeli, his only response was ‘no comment.’
The primary purpose of the CST has not been to defend the Jewish community against anti-Semitism in the normally accepted and understood sense of the term, but to categorise opposition to Israel’s actions as ‘anti-Semitic’.  There is no doubt that some people, taking Israel’s rhetoric at face value, do react to its behaviour in an anti-Semitic way.  Indeed it is an undoubted fact that the source of most anti-Semitism in the West today originates from the actions of Israel – the ‘Jewish’ state apparently set up to make them feel secure!  But irony is lost on the CST.  What matters is the anti-Semitism, not its causes.

Even worse, despite supporting the Zionist inspired European Union Monitoring Committee definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which states that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel’ is anti-Semitic, there is no recorded occasion when the CST has upbraided or even commented when leading Zionists and Jewish religious leaders expressed unanimous ‘Jewish’ support recently for the attack on Gaza. Unanimous UK Jewish communal organisations support for Israel over Gaza fighting

Symposium on ‘anti-Semitism’

It was therefore with some surprise that I read on Jewsansfrontieres that the CST had walked out of a symposia on ‘anti-Semitism’ at which some of the most dedicated anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots you could hope to find were speaking.  Proud to be ashamed to be associated with islamophobes or ashamed to be proud?

By chance I had recently done a post on this exact conference, cross-posting from Tony Lerman’s Another faulty, pseudo-academic antisemitism initiative  Lerman wrote about how

‘The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism: a home for the ‘new antisemitism’ notion.  The JSA is a privately funded periodical founded four years ago. It has no institutional base and is privately published. … Even a cursory glance at the journal’s list of Board Members reveals a great preponderance of neoconservatives, Islamophobes, advocates of the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, pedlars of the ‘self-hating Jew’ accusation against Jewish critics of Israeli policies and out-and-out political propagandists.  The individuals funding the event are Daniel Pipes, Mitch Knisbacher and Jeff and Evy Diamond.
The three panellists will find much to agree on. For decades Bat Ye’or has been banging the drum about the ‘Muslim hordes’ who were about to take over Europe. Rather generously referred to as a ‘self-taught Jewish intellectual’, she now believes that Europe is dead, and in its stead ‘Eurabia’ has risen. Richard Landes, director and co-founder of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, told the Herzliya IDC conference in 2007:
European democratic civilization can fall before the Islamic challenge. Do not say that this will never happen in Europe and that Islam will not be able to take control of Europe. If Europe continues its current path, the fall will be sooner.
Winston Pickett was the director of the now non-functioning EISCA. He lavishes unreserved praise on Professor Robert Wistrich for his huge tome, Antisemitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad, a book that, as its title suggests, sets out to justify the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’.
In panel 2, Mark Gardner of the CST and Robert Wistrich, who heads the Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), should feel comfortable with each other’s role in justifying and promoting the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, though it would be only fair to acknowledge that Wistrich’s influence in this regard far outstrips that of Gardner’s. Wistrich restated the classic definition of the ‘new antisemitism’ in a talk at the Hebrew University Jerusalem in June 2011 entitled ‘From blood libel to boycott: changing faces of British antisemitism’. … Gardner’s use of the ‘new antisemitism’ argument is clearly apparent in his and Dave Rich’s analysis of Caryl Churchill’s short playlet Seven Jewish Children. … http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/04/caryl-churchill-antisemitism-play

So the Jewish Chronicle article ‘Walk-outs over ‘Islamophobia’ at antisemitism symposium’ came as something of a surprise, especially as these 'walk-outs' were headed by the CST.  Maybe I had been unfair on Dave Rich after all.   According to the JC,

‘A seminar meant to highlight problems in dealing with antisemitism ran into trouble when audience members walked out — alleging Islamophobia on the part of some speakers. 
 

At the forefront were leaders of the Community Security Trust, who challenged remarks made by the Egyptian writer Bat Ye’or, and Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld, a founding member of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, which sponsored the seminar, held at London’s Wiener Library.
Bat Ye’or told the audience: “The source of antisemitism is the organisation of the Islamic corporation.”

But when Dave Rich, the CST’s deputy communications director, expressed concern that such a comment could be construed as Islamophobic, she responded: “Islam is denying the root of Judaism and Christianity with a profound belief in Jihad.”

David Hirsh, editor of anti-racist website Engage, left the room during Dr Gerstenfeld’s lecture.
He explained: “I was appalled by Gerstenfeld’s characterisation of Muslim culture as inferior. Nearly all the speakers on the day, including me, stressed that antisemitism must be understood and opposed within an anti-racist framework.

“I am as appalled by the Islamophobia which creeps into some opposition to antisemitism as I am by the way antisemitism also creeps into ostensibly anti-racist spaces.” 
But Dr Gerstenfeld said later: “I am touching upon the taboos that have to be broken, because a totally false narrative has been created in Europe.”
 
“The idea that all cultures are the same is absurd. If there is no hierarchy in culture, then Nazi culture is equivalent to democratic Western culture. There are Islamic groups which are equivalent in their language and ideology to Nazis. And I have no problem in saying that, because it is true.”
 
Mark Gardner, director of communications for CST, said after the seminar: “A minority of speakers said things about Britain, Europe and Muslims that we found to be incorrect, unacceptable and self-defeating. We made our concerns clear with a number of interventions and were correct to do so.”
 
David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute, and Philip Spencer, director of research in politics at Kingston University, also walked out in protest.
 
Mr Feldman said: “Unfortunately, the unfounded arguments of some speakers and expressions of religious prejudice from others did a disservice to Jews and others seeking to combat antisemitism.”
It was therefore appropriate that ‘At the end of the event, the former Labour MP, Denis MacShane, was given an award for his work in fighting antisemitism.’  Who better to reward this fallen pillar of Zionist hypocrisy than a bunch of anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racists?

But just consider some of these arguments. According to Dr Gerstenfeld there is a ‘hierarchy’ of cultures.  An interesting concept, one wonders how one can measure cultures?  He cites the ‘western democratic’ as opposed to the ‘Nazi’ culture.  But Nazism had no culture, unless the gentle art of book burning constitutes such – in which case Michael Ben Ari MK’s ripping up of the New Testament recently is a good example of Zionist culture.  Nazism hated culture and stood in opposition to it.  It was 'anti-cultural'.  But racism today is not primarily biological.  The campaign to repatriate Black people in Britain is recognised, even by most fascists, as a lost cause.

Racism in the biological sense has transmuted into a ‘battle of cultures’ in which Arabs and Third World refugees are seen as the bearers of ‘backward’ cultures.   That is why fascists who, 20 years ago, were engaging in 'gay bashing' now contrast the hostility of Islamic Orthodoxy to the 'backwardness' of Arabs/Muslims rather than seeing such hostility as an integral part of all orthodox religions.

When Dr Gerstenfeld says that ‘I am touching upon the taboos that have to be broken’ then he is doing no more than repeating the refrain of white racism through the ages – that there are ‘taboos’ that need to be broken, it needs to be ‘cool’ to be racist again.  It is a long-standing theme from the Daily Mail and its most virulent racist commentator, arch-Zionist Melanie Phillips.  Gert Wilders and a host of racist and chauvinistic European politicians dedicate their lives to breaking these ‘taboos’.  The hierarchy of ‘race; has been replaced by the hierarchy of ‘culture’.  Yet there is no ‘culture’ such as they speak of.

Lerman also notes that the funding sources for the symposia includes ‘Daniel Pipes, Mitch Knisbacher and Jeff and Evy Diamond. Pipes, the president of the right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), is widely described as an ‘Islamophobe’. In 2009 his MEF established a legal defence fund for the far-right, populist, Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Pipes reportedly claimed that President Obama is a former Muslim who ‘practised Islam’. Knisbach, who is the founder and owner of 800response (America’s leading provider of shared-use 800-number services), is active in the right-wing Israel lobby AIPAC and funds Tazpit News Agency, a service set up primarily to popularize a positive view of settlement activity in the West Bank. Jeff Diamond, who heads the Jeff Diamond Law Firm, which has six offices in New Mexico and Texas, was installed in January as chair of the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Board of Directors.’

As Mark Elf wrote on Jewssansfrontieres ‘And here's the bit I just don't get.  Mark Gardner, David Hirsh and Dave Rich must have known about the other speakers because they were listed in the information blurb for the event.  How offended can they really have been when they only heard what they must have expected to hear? Are they proud to be ashamed to be associated with a ragbag of zionist islamophobes?  Or they are ashamed to be proud of the association?’

Actually it’s far worse, because despite the bigotry and racism of the platform speakers, as Tony Lerman points out‘the CST officials didn’t walk out. They stayed. ‘We challenged the speeches we objected to’, they tweeted in a response to me. I then put this to them: ‘Surely u wouldn’t participate in a symposium with white racists. Why attend one with Jewish racists?’ Their response: ‘we behaved honourably and have nothing to answer to you for’.  I’m not so sure that’s such an easily defensible position.

Rich and Gardener are janus faced .  If someone had said that “The source of anti-German hatred is the organisation of the Jewish corporation.” as of course Nazis used to, then one would clearly recognise this as a staple part of the anti-Semitic diet.  The world Jewish conspiracy theory no less.  Yet when Bat Yeor says that “The source of antisemitism is the organisation of the Islamic corporation.” there is apparently a walk-out, or was it just a polite disagreement, from the session in question.  Would the CST walk out of a session at which David Duke elaborated on Jewish ‘crimes’ yet remained content to participate and even be guest speakers at other sessions of the Conference on Jewry?

According to the Jewish Chronicle David Hirsh, editor of anti-racist website Engage, left the room during Dr Gerstenfeld’s lecture.  What a noble gesture!  And what was he doing there in the first place is what those he has accused of anti-Semitism in UCU might like to know.

But if one looks at Rich and Gardener’s comments above, concerning Dr Gerstenfeld and Bat Yeor, then one notices just how lukewarm their criticism really was.

Dave Rich suggested that Bat Ye’or’s comment concerning the ‘Islamic Corporation’ ‘could be construed as Islamophobic’.  That is a strange way of putting it.  How about if someone started speaking of the ‘Jewish Corporation’ and how Jews control the world through it?  I suspect, given Rich and Gardener’s record in detecting the signs of ‘anti-Semitism’ in even pro-Jewish places like Carol Churchill’s play, that he would have been somewhat more forthright in his views.  It says a lot for the government's ‘Tell Mama’ that Dave Rich is an advisor.

Mark Gardner, director of CST communications was equally forthright:
“A minority of speakers said things about Britain, Europe and Muslims that we found to be incorrect, unacceptable and self-defeating.  We made our concerns clear with a number of interventions and were correct to do so.”

Clearly there was no walk-out, just a ‘number of interventions’.  And the virulently racist nonsense espoused?  Well this was ‘incorrect’.  So when anti-Semites (and Zionists) such as Glenn Beck go on about the Rothschilds being the source of the world’s economic crisis [see Is Glenn Beck an anti-Semite? Fox host slammed by Anti-Defmation League for attack on George Soros] he is presumably ‘incorrect’ or mistaken.

Self-Defeating

What is more telling is Gardener’s use of the term ‘self-defeating’.  What it demonstrates is that Gardener and the CST see themselves as part of one big tent, a Zionist tent, which inevitably includes the most virulent anti-Arab and Islamaphobic racists.  What they are doing is offering friendly criticism to those who share the same outlook but choose to express it differently.  It is a minor tactical difference of opinion amongst comrades.  The real game is defaming the opponents of Zionism through the use of wild allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Banning Arab Parties – A Demonstration of Zionist Democracy

December 12, 2012, 7:09 pm

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Arab Parties Who Don't Accept Israel as a Jewish AND a Democratic State will be banned from standing in the General Election

Like the fascist he is, David Rotam, of the overtly racist Yisrael Beteinu seeks to ban Arab Parties

In January there will be a general election in Israel.  It is predicted that this will signify a further move to the right amongst Zionist parties.  The Labour Party, under Shelly Yachimovich, has made it clear that as the government moves to the right, so it will follow.

In 1949, the Israeli Labour Party gained 46 out of 120 seats in the Knesset and Mapam, a ‘Marxist’ Zionist party held a further 19 seats, making an absolute majority for left-Zionist parties, though Ben-Gurion didn’t desire this and consciously sought an alliance with the National Religious Party.
At the last elections in 2009, the ILP gained precisely 13 seats.  Mapam, which has disappeared into Meretz, the civil rights list, gained another 3 seats.  In its 60 years of existence, ‘left’ Zionist parties declined from 65 to 16, whereas the right and far-right of the Zionist movement, together with the ultra-orthodox has become an absolute majority.  Indeed today the ILP holds just 8 seats as its former leader, Ehud Bara, went off to form his own ‘party’ Atzmut, with a few followers.  Meanwhile ex-ILP leader Amir Peretz has deserted to the ‘centre’ party Kadima.

Hanan Zoabi - Balad MK - who is a particular target for Israeli racists

The ILP’s position on most issues is, in any event, little different from that of Netanyahu.  It supported the recent attack on Gaza, as it did Cast Lead in 1998-9.  It has nothing to say about racism in Israeli society itself, unsurprisingly since all the labour Zionist institutions such as the kibbutz were Jewish-only.  Yachimovich has nothing to say about, indeed is quite warm about, the settlers in the West Bank.  And on social policy issues, the ILP is an equally free-market party as Likud.

Indeed virtually the only independent element in the Knesset, apart from the Communist Party’s 4 representatives, unchanged since 1949.  Balad, with 3 seats, and Ta’al (United Arab List) with 4 seats make up the ‘Arab’ parties (although Hadash always has a Jewish MK, very few Jews vote for it).
Following the precedent in 1965, when Al-Ard, an Arab nationalist party, was banned from standing in the general election, there have been successive attempts by the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ to ban nationalist parties.  Although this attempt by the Elections Commission was overturned narrowly by the Supreme Court in the past 2 elections, there has now been further legislation, such as making it virtually illegal to commemorate the Nakba (expulsion of Palestinians in 1947-9).  Coupled with a move to the racist right in Israeli society, not least in the Supreme Court itself, there must be a chance that either Balad or its Hanan Zoabi, a fiery secular Palestinian woman,  who participated in the Mavi Marmara flotilla and who has been physically attacked in the Knesset, will be banned.

But if, Israeli legislators and judges are so stupid as to ban those parties they don’t like, which don’t accept the hypocritical maxim that Israel is both a Jewish and a Democratic state, when it is clear that the latter always gives way to the former, then it will strip Israel of its last vestige to any claim to be a democracy.  Democracies don’t ban parties unless they threaten democracy itself.  And the only threats to democracy in Israel come from parties like Yisrael Beteinu and its Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose followers march to the chant of ‘Death to the Arabs’, the racist Eli Yishai’s Shas or Michael Ben Ari of the National Union Party, whose most recent contribution to tolerance and understanding was to rip up a copy of the New Testament and throw it in a trash can.
I suspect, however, that there will be no proposals to outlaw Jewish racist parties, otherwise there would none but Arab parties and Meretz to contest the elections!

Tony Greenstein

Distortion of 'defensive democracy'

Disqualifying parties that represent the Arab public would be a serious blow to democracy and broadcast a message of exclusion to this population.

Haaretz Editorial  Dec.12, 2012

It's a recurring pre-election ritual: The Central Elections Committee invalidates the candidacies of Arab parties and candidates, and the Supreme Court voids the disqualifications. Since 1965, not a single Arab party has been disqualified from running for the Knesset.

This time, the CEC is being asked to invalidate the Balad and the United Arab List-Ta'al parties, as well as to ban Balad MK Hanin Zuabi from running. It would behoove the CEC to resist disqualifying anyone and not force the High Court to intervene.

The right to elect and be elected is basic to democracy and it must be carefully preserved. Disqualifying parties that represent the Arab public would be a serious blow to democracy and broadcast a message of exclusion to this population.

In the past, the High Court allowed the Kach party to be disqualified, but that was justified because the list threatened the essence of the democratic regime, and because by preaching racism it contradicted basic democratic values.

The concept of "defensive democracy" is justified when a party wants to use the democratic process to threaten democracy itself. That's why many countries have restrictions on anti-democratic parties. But in the Israeli discourse, this concept has been distorted, and it is being used to invalidate parties that don't threaten democracy but are perceived as a threat to the Jewish nature of the state.
While the Basic Law on the Knesset includes a ban on the participation of parties that reject the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, the courts have justifiably ruled that this clause must be invoked with the greatest possible restraint. It would be worth amending the clause to allow the disqualification only of parties that reject the existence of the state and its democratic regime.

The Basic Law on the Knesset also contains a clause that forbids a list to stand for election if it supports the armed struggle against Israel. It's understood that a sovereign state cannot give legitimacy to those who wish to harm its citizens. With that, this clause should not be utilized to categorically disqualify Arab candidates who oppose the occupation. There's something wrong with parties that support continuing the occupation, which denies and neuters democracy, asking to disqualify lists and candidates because they oppose the occupation.

Right-wing parties seek to ban Arab parties from upcoming Israel elections

MKs cite support for the 2010 Gaza flotilla and the denial of Israel as a Jewish state.

By Jonathan Lis | Dec.10, 2012 | 12:57 AM |  2

Right-wing lawmakers have asked the Central Elections Committee to bar United Arab List-Ta'al and Arab party Balad from the January 22 vote - citing support for the 2010 Gaza flotilla and the denial of Israel as a Jewish state.

MK David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu ) - chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee - wants the Balad slate banned, and Michael Ben Ari (National Union ) and Aryeh Eldad (Otzma Leyisrael ) want both Balad and United Arab List-Ta'al banned.

MK Ofir Akunis (Likud ) wants to disqualify MK Hanin Zuabi (Balad ) as a candidate for the next Knesset.

The Basic Law on the Knesset lets the election committee disqualify candidates or slates whose platforms deny the existence of Israel as a democratic state, incite to racism or support armed struggle against Israel.

Eldad and Ben Ari mentioned comments they say prove that the parties should not be allowed to run for the Knesset. They note Zuabi's presence on the Mavi Marmara, a ship that tried to run Israel's blockade on Gaza in May 2010. They added that Zuabi told Al-Jazeera that her party sought to "come out against the Zionist enterprise, against the definition of the state as the Jewish state."

Eldad and Ben Ari also cited a May 2010 Channel 2 interview with United Arab List-Ta'al MK Ahmed Tibi, who said "the way you pressure prisoners in jail, we will pressure Gilad Shalit." Tibi said Sunday that this statement had been taken out of context.

According to Osama Sa'adi, secretary general of United Arab List-Ta'al, "As in every election, the extreme right tries to revoke MK Ahmed Tibi's and United Arab List-Ta'al's basic right to represent their voters." Sa'adi said Tibi supported nonviolent struggle and that his party would fight the attempt to ban it from the election.

BBC’s Terms of Reference are set by Israel

December 14, 2012, 5:30 pm

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Israel 'Reacts' to Palestinian Rocket Attacks & 

The Partisans 'Provoked' the German Panzer SS Division

Think how strange it would be if we considered France’s Nazi occupiers justified in carrying out ‘retaliations’ for attacks made on them by the Maquis.  Perhaps then we could rethink Oradour sur Glane, a village a few kilometres north of Limoges which was totally destroyed by the Nazi’s, 642 men, woman and children massacred by a German Panzer Division.  

The Government's 'independent' mouthpiece

After all, either the right of an occupied people to resist is a natural one, a human one, that no law can take away or it is a mere diplomatic convenience.  But such a right is not one recognised by the BBC when it comes to Israel/Palestine.  Despite occupying Gaza and the West Bank for 45 years, instead of barely more than 4 years, Israel is seen as on the defence, the victim, despite being the 4th most powerful state in the world militarily.

The pro-Zionist bias of the BBC is legendary, as many articles on this blog have detailed.  Its recent coverage of the attack on Gaza was no different from normal:

1. Israel’s attacks were in ‘retaliation’ for Hamas rocket strikes.
2. No mention was made of the fact that Ahmed al-Jabari had been assassinated after a ceasefire had been agreed and he had been the negotiator.  He apparently had ‘blood on his hands.’  Perhaps the Israeli General who doesn’t have blood on his hands would like to stand up.
3. No mention of the 7 Palestinians killed in Gaza prior to Israel’s attacks, or the fact that 5 of them were children.
4. No mention is made of the fact that the attacks are, as in 2008-9, close to an Israeli general election.
5. And to cap it off, an e-mail from a BBC Complaints official states that ‘Since the news of Israeli air strikes in Gaza our coverage has pointed out on numerous occasions that the attacks are in response to recent rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”  Yes that was precisely the point of the complaint!  

It’s called circular logic but the only ‘logic’ in the BBC response is to hug the United States and Israel.  The BBC is its present parlous state, especially post-Savile, is unlikely to want to ruffle any feathers in the government by taking anything other than a strictly pro-Israeli stance.

Part of the problem with complaints about the BBC is the belief that it is capable of any significant change.  The BBC has always been a poodle of the British establishment, whether over Palestine, colonialism or strikes at home.  In the Miners’ strike they reversed footage at Orgrieve to show Police attacks as responses to Miner’s attacks.  

Only this year the Supreme Court upheld the BBC’s decision to refuse to release the Balen Report on  bias, which although brought by a Zionist (the BBC isn’t biased enough!) is widely believed to criticise the BBC’s endemic anti-Palestinian bias.  See Reporting on Israel and the Palestinians 

There is still the naïve belief that the BBC represents something ‘good’ – its Auntie rather than the home of the mass sexual predator Jimmy Savile, his accomplices and an establishment, not least the unlamented recent Director General, Mark Thompson, who turned a blind eye to Savile’s actions.  There is no democratic control of the BBC, instead it is left in the hands of the good and great, like Lord Patten, a failed but influential Tory politician.

The Nazi ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane - a 'reprisal' action according to the Nazis (& BBC)

Trade unionists don’t make up any of the membership of the BBC Trust or the previous BBC Directors.  Political conflicts within the BBC have almost always reflected divisions within the British ruling class itself, albeit with a right-wing orientation.  This came to head with the timorous  opposition of some in the BBC like Andrew Gilligan, when he talked of ‘sexed up’ intelligence on an early morning Today programme.  In fact the intelligence was a work of fiction.  But sure enough a reactionary Northern Ireland member of the House of Lords Lord Hutton produced a Report which backed Blair and Alistair Campbell, his propagandist against any semblance of BBC independence.  Director-General Greg Dyke was forced to resign and Mark Thompson took over, determined to learn the lessons, viz. to cowtow to the government politically.

In many ways the BBC is far worse than its commercial rivals.  No thinking person believes Fox News, whereas people see in the BBC an ‘independence’ which masks a bias which is the more dangerous for being its disguise.

The only way to force a BBC that can spend £½ m in rewarding its latest DG George Entwistle for abject failure is not to pay the licence fee.

Below is an excellent article crossposted from Electronic Intifada by Amena Saleem.

Tony Greenstein

BBC admits pandering to Israeli propaganda

Amena Saleem, The Electronic Intifada, London 14 December 2012

Israel’s 10 November 2012 killing of 18-year-old Ahmad Dardasawi was not deemed newsworthy by the BBC. (Ashraf Amra / APA images)

One of the most consistent aspects of the BBC’s reporting of Gaza and Israel is the insistence of its journalists that any “outbreak of violence” is the fault of the Palestinians.

When Israel bombs or shells Gaza, this is unfailingly reported by the BBC as being in “response” or “retaliation” to rockets being fired from the blockaded territory. The unflinching regularity of this one-sided reporting by the UK’s state broadcaster is meticulously recorded in More Bad News from Israel, the book by Greg Philo and Mike Berry which contains research by the Glasgow Media Unit into the BBC’s reporting of the occupation.

The BBC’s coverage of Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza in November was no exception. An article published on the BBC’s website the day Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jabari was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City stated that the killing “follows a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from the territory” (“Israeli air strike kills Hamas military chief Jabari,” 14 November 2012).

The article went on to feature an Israeli army spokesperson’s claim that al-Jabari had “a lot of blood on his hands” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that a “clear message” had been sent to “Hamas and other terrorist organizations.” Netanyahu’s comments ended with the words: “We will continue to do everything to protect our citizens.”

All of Israel’s key propaganda messages were conveyed, while the reality was carefully hidden. There is, of course, the ongoing reality that Israel is an occupier and a serial violator of international law — facts which are buried under the credibility and authority the BBC accords to its politicians and spokespeople and what they say.

Ignoring reality

On an immediate level, another crucial reality was ignored. By assassinating al-Jabari — itself an illegal act of extrajudicial murder which the BBC failed to examine, even as it printed Netanyahu’s triumphal “clear message” — Israel had violated a ceasefire brokered three days earlier.

This information, so casually ditched by the BBC’s journalists — online, on television and on radio news — was absolutely crucial. It emboldened the lie, disseminated across the BBC’s media outlets, that al-Jabari’s killing and the eight-day onslaught that came next followed “a wave of rocket attacks” from Gaza.
It didn’t. Al-Jabari’s assassination and the ensuing attack on Gaza which killed more than 160 Palestinians, including more than 30 children, followed a ceasefire, which the Palestinian groups in Gaza had been observing and may well have carried on observing if Israel hadn’t broken it. Couple this with the fact that, in 2008, Israel broke another ceasefire to instigate a three-week massacre in Gaza, killing 1,400 Palestinians, including 352 children, and a picture builds of an aggressive Israeli state, regularly bombing and shelling a civilian population with no regard for agreed truce arrangements.

Uneasy pattern

Take into account that both attacks on Gaza, in 2008 and 2012, came just months before Israeli elections, and an uneasy pattern begins to emerge — one which responsible journalists would, presumably, want to question and investigate.

Moreover, al-Jabari was killed as he carried with him, in the car that was hit, a draft agreement for a permanent truce with Israel, raising yet another vital question: was Israel trying to sabotage a possible end to the violence?

Such facts and the questions they prompted appeared to be irrelevant to the BBC’s presenters. On 18 November, four days after al-Jabari was killed, Samira Ahmed hosted BBC One’s Sunday Morning Live program. This included a 15-minute debate entitled “Are Israeli military actions justified?” featuring Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and right-wing political commentator Charlie Wolf.
The justification for military action put forward by Ahmed to start the debate was “Hamas rocket attacks.” And this is where the debate stuck. Any attempt by Atwan to give depth or context to the discussion, by mentioning the blockade, the occupation, or Israel’s year-round attacks on Gaza, were batted away by Ahmed who unfailingly came back with the rejoinder: “But wouldn’t it all stop if Hamas stopped firing rockets?” The implication of course was that Hamas starts violence, and Israel responds because it has to protect its citizens.

That Palestinian rocket attacks might be a response to 45 years of ongoing occupation, combined since 2006 with a crippling blockade, is not a possibility the BBC is willing to discuss on its airwaves.
In just 15 minutes, the former Channel 4 News presenter revealed how completely she has attuned herself to the BBC’s commitment to the Israeli narrative by referring to “Hamas rocket attacks” 15 times, and never once to Israel’s ceasefire violations and the complicated questions these violations raise.

Blaming the victims

This fits in with what would appear to be her employer’s editorial policy on Israel and Gaza. In an email sent on 21 November to a member of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and seen by this writer, the BBC Complaints Department explains in some detail how the broadcaster had gone out of its way to lay the blame for the violence of the previous eight days on the Palestinians.

The email, signed off “BBC Complaints,” states: “Since the news of Israeli air strikes in Gaza our coverage has pointed out on numerous occasions that the attacks are in response to recent rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.”

It adds: “Our initial online report on 14 November pointed to how the attack on Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari and another Hamas official ‘follows a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from the territory’ and how ‘the United States said it supported Israel’s right to self-defense, and condemned militant rocket attacks on southern Israel.’”

Seemingly oblivious to or unfazed by the inaccuracy of its own reporting, the message goes on: “On the BBC’s News at Ten that same evening, the BBC’s Gaza and West Bank correspondent Jon Donnison’s report explained that ‘Israel says the strike followed a wave of rocket attacks from inside Gaza,’ before hearing directly from Israeli Army Spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich as she explained how ‘I can just elaborate that the target of the operation is to protect Israeli civilians. The same lives of Israelis that have been under constant rocket attack for the past year.’”

In a twist of almost comic absurdity, given eight days of reporting which squarely blamed Hamas for the violence and equated the fear caused by the 12-pound and 90-pound Palestinian rockets with the terror induced by Israel’s 500-pound to 2,000-pound bombs, the email ends with: “We will continue to report on developments from the region in a fair, accurate and impartial way.”

The email highlights the BBC’s willingness to ignore facts and important questions — for example, why did Israel really kill al-Jabari? — in favor of a narrative that, deliberately or not, echoes that of the Israeli government.

Child deaths unreported

Less than a week before al-Jabari’s execution, Israel had killed seven Palestinians in Gaza in the space of 48 hours. Of these, five were teenage boys (“New Israeli escalation against the Gaza Strip,” Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 11 November 2012).

The first to die, 13-year-old Ahmad Abu Daqqa, was shot in the abdomen by Israeli soldiers. Two days later, brothers 16-year-old Mohammed Harara and 17-year-old Ahmed Harara were killed playing football when Israeli forces fired shells at their playground. As people rushed to help, three more shells were fired, and an 18-year-old and 19-year-old were killed.

It is safe to assume that if five Israeli teenagers, including two brothers playing football and a 13-year-old, had been killed by Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, it would be headline news for the BBC.

The Israeli killing of the Palestinian youngsters was ignored on BBC television and prime-time radio news. Even when al-Jabari was killed, four days after the Harara brothers lost their lives, and some kind of premeditated build-up to the eight-day assault began to emerge, the BBC still refused to mention Israel’s two-day killing spree in Gaza a few days earlier.

Official line

All BBC journalists stuck to Israel’s official line that the assassination of 14 November, and what followed, was in retaliation to Palestinian rockets — and conveniently omitted from their reports the fact that Israel had been engaged in killing Palestinian children in the days immediately preceding al-Jabari’s execution.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign wrote to the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs program Today on 12 November to ask why it had not covered the killing of the five Palestinian teenagers on 8 and 10 November.

The program’s assistant editor, Dominic Groves, wrote back to say: “Even in the space of a three hour program it is not always possible to cover every development in a story — especially one as long running and complex as the one in the Middle East.”

And yet the killing of five young boys by Israel isn’t a “development in a story;” it is news in itself. When the Today program can give prominent coverage to a Palestinian rocket attack on a bus in April 2011, which killed a 16-year-old Israeli schoolboy, how can Groves claim the same program has no room to report on the slaughter of five Palestinian boys by the Israeli army? (“Israeli boy Daniel Viflic dies after rocket hits bus,” 18 April 2011).

Since the latest “ceasefire” came into effect on the evening of 21 November, Israel has been flying its F-16s over the skies of Gaza, 40 Gaza fishermen have been detained by Israeli forces, and a 20-year-old Palestinian has been shot and killed by Israeli fire, while 54 Palestinians, including six children have been injured (“Protection of civilians weekly report,” UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 28 November - 4 December 2012 [PDF]).

Like the everyday struggle of Palestinians in Gaza, currently dealing with power cuts lasting eight hours each day, this has gone unreported by the BBC and other mainstream media because no one, yet, is firing rockets back.
Amena Saleem is active with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK and keeps a close eye on the media’s coverage of Palestine as part of her brief. She has twice driven on convoys to Gaza for PSC. More information on PSC is available at www.palestinecampaign.org.