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Alan Hart and What It Takes to Struggle On – An Analysis

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

 

I – Who Is Alan Hart?

 

Alan Hart is an author and a journalist. He is the former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News and a former BBC Panorama presenter whose beat was the Middle East. He has written a number of books, including Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? (1984) and the three-volume  Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (2009-2010). He is also a longtime activist for various causes, particularly his three-decade struggle on behalf of justice for the Palestinian people.

 

II – Alan Hart Resigns

 

On April 25 Alan Hart, the activist for Palestine, literally turned in his resignation letter. In it he states, “I am withdrawing from the battlefield of the war for the truth of history as it relates to making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine.” Why did he do this? In Hart’s opinion, the struggle for justice in Palestine is “mission impossible.” The information/propaganda war between Zionists and those, such as himself, supporting the Palestinians (which, in any case, had always been “the most asymmetric of all information wars”) is lost. He notes that the Western media still follow a Zionist line and asserts that most of the Western populations remain either pro-Israel or indifferent to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

 

Hart blames this alleged Zionist victory in the propaganda war on a lack of financial support for those trying to write and speak out for Palestinian justice, and contrasts their plight to the situation of the Zionist writers and advocates, who enjoy almost unlimited funds. Hart feels it is mainly wealthy Palestinians and other Arabs who have failed to support pro-Palestinian activists. These wealthy Arabs  have failed to step forward because they either are afraid of Zionist retribution that would damage their businesses or careers, or are afraid of their own Arab governments, which do not want trouble with Israel because of assertive actions by pro-Palestinian wealthy citizens.

 

III – Mr. Hart’s Plight

 

With all due respect to Mr. Hart, who certainly does deserve our respect, I can’t help asking myself whether his assessment of this “war for the truth of history” is objectively true or an expression of personal disappointments. According to his own explanation, Alan Hart’s decision to leave the struggle is connected to the fact that Arab publishers and media failed to financially support and promote his recent book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. This was a great disappointment to him because the Arab media had serialized his prior work on Yasser Arafat and this had brought him “a significant income.” He had obviously made the assumption that the situation would repeat itself. So strong was that expectation that, as Mr. Hart tells us in his resignation statement, he made certain decisions, such as mortgaging his property in order to support the production of the Zionism study, which have now brought him into financial distress. Hart appears to see the failure of Arab money to come to his assistance as indicative of Arab failure to support the Palestinian cause.

 

 

IV – How accurate Is Alan Hart’s Assessment?

 

As disappointing as the Arab failure to promote Hart’s important work on Zionism may be, it is not accurate to conclude, as Hart does, that most wealthy Arabs “do not care about the occupied and oppressed Palestinians.” Before the first Iraq war, both public and private Arab money generously supported the PLO. Yasser Arafat’s unfortunate attempt to mediate that conflict and prevent a war against Iraq stopped most (but never all) of that support. Whether the wealthy Arabs could now do much more is another question. However, and this is an important point, this is not the same question as to whether Western supporters of the Palestinian cause should or should not give up.

 

Hart is correct that in the past thirty years supporters of Palestinian justice have not been able to create the necessary critical mass of public opinion to change the policies of national governments. However, that does not mean there has been no progress. It does not mean this is a lost cause.

 

I too have been a strong supporter of the Palestinians for decades, and I have seen a tremendous difference over time. Thirty years ago you could not critically raise the subject of Israel in public, and thus the Zionists had a monopoly on the entire history of this issue. That is emphatically not the case today. Despite Alan Hart’s unfortunate experience, the fact is that, at a popular level, the Zionists have lost control of the Palestine narrative. There are other real positive signs in this struggle that Hart fails to mention, including the progress of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the continuing maturation of counter-lobbies, particularly in the United States; and the growing worldwide recognition of Israeli criminality, which has slowly increased that country’s sense of isolation. In other words, there is more to this than the Arab failure to support Mr. Hart’s latest work.

 

V – How Do We Measure Success?

 

One has to also understand that success and failure come on many levels. On the macro level, progress is slow, but as pointed out above, it is far from nonexistent. Sometimes you just need to know where to look to see the ongoing activity. For instance, in the case of the United States, there are a growing number of organizations that are constantly busy getting out the message of Israeli crimes and the Palestinian demand for justice. There are the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (a coalition of almost 400 member groups and organizations), Jewish Voices for Peace, and the Council for the National Interest, to name just a few. The struggle against Israeli apartheid might well be, as it was in the case of South Africa, multigenerational. But among the many organizations waging this struggle there is no sign of slacking.

 

On the micro level, success comes when one is consistently true to one’s principles in a manner that is personally acceptable. No one is asking Western supporters of the Palestinian cause to go bankrupt or put themselves in physical danger, although in the latter case notably heroic individuals such as Rachel Corey and Tom Hurndall have chosen to do so, with tragic results. However, there are less dangerous routes. To do what you can in a steady, consistent way for a just cause in which you believe is already to have achieved success at the personal level. We struggle not only for the cause, but also because of who we are.

 

Alan Hart is an admirable man who has done admirable things, and we all owe him our thanks for his contributions to the Palestinian cause. But his decision to retire from the field should in no way be taken as a sign that that cause is lost. It is emphatically not lost. It has made significant progress over the past three decades and it is well positioned to make more progress in the future.

 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

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US watchdog turns blind eye to Israel’s religious rights violations

It’s hilarious.

 

I’m still rolling on the floor laughing my socks off at a report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

 

What’s the joke?  Well, it’s no joke really. The USCIRF has just released its 2013 Annual Report http://www.uscirf.gov/images/2013%20USCIRF%20Annual%20Report%20(2).pdf on the world’s worst violators of religious freedom. And… you simply won’t believe this… it doesn’t even mention the worst offender of all, Israel.

 

Truly. It’s like Israel doesn’t exist…  

 

I am regularly bombarded with reports of Israel’s religious persecution of Christians and their Muslim brothers and sisters in the Holy Land. This week included an account http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=592219 of how Israel continues to cause “countless difficulties” for Palestinian Christians and Muslims trying to reach their holy sites. “It is not only that Israel has isolated our occupied capital from the rest of our country — forcing our people to apply for special military permits to access their families and holy places for religious occasions — but even Palestinians from Jerusalem were beaten when trying to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” said Hanna Amireh, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and Head of the Presidential Committee on Church Affairs.

 

The Israeli forces turned a religious occasion into a battle camp scenario, she said. “What was witnessed in Jerusalem was an attempt to cancel a tradition of 700 years. The Israeli government is doing everything possible in order to achieve its goal of changing Jerusalem’s landscape, by building more settlements, demolishing more Palestinian homes, revoking more IDs and by attempting to prevent the normal celebration of Christian and Muslim religious events.”

 

This week also saw Jewish settlers storming the Aqsa mosque. The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation accused Israel of pursuing a systematic policy of aggression against holy places in occupied Jerusalem.

 

I have spent time with priests and members of their congregation in Occupied Palestine and it’s true that Israel is conducting a religious war. If you don’t believe me, go see for yourselves – but not by Israeli bus-tour, obviously.

 

Imagine the fuss if we road-blocked Jews from their synagogues in Golders Green, Hendon and Finchley.

 

The USCIRF report was sent to the President on 30 April with a covering letter hammering home the Commissioners’ recommendation that the Secretary of State re-designate eight countries as “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs, “for egregious violations of religious freedom”. These are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan.

 

The Commissioners also recommend that seven additional countries be designated as CPCs: Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam.

 

Israel is not even on the list of countries looked at, while the Commission’s press release

emphasises how US foreign policy recognizes the critical role religious freedom plays in nations and prioritizes accordingly. “Religious freedom is both a pivotal human right under international law and a key factor that helps determine whether a nation experiences stability or chaos.”

 

The letter is signed in all seriousness by USCIRF’s chairperson Katrina Lantos Swett. The report she presided over has allowed Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/05/07/report-finds-iran-worst-violator-religious-freedom/ to point the finger at Iran, not Israel, and to give poor old Ahmadinejad another verbal blasting. “Religious freedom,” says Fox, “is in short supply in the Middle East, according to the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has issued a report finding Iran chief among the nations where spiritual beliefs can bring prison sentences or worse.”

 

An article http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=124980 by Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett herself, called ‘US Promotion of International Religious Freedom’, explains that USCIRF was created in 1998 by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) to be “an independent watchdog of US government activity that identifies violations of religious freedom and develops policy solutions to advance religious freedom for everyone everywhere. USCIRF is separate and distinct from the State Department…

 

“Through our work, we have observed how governments engage in or allow at least three kinds of violations: state hostility toward religion, state sponsorship of extremist religious ideology, and state failure to prevent and punish religious freedom violations.

 

“Through state hostility, individuals or groups are persecuted on account of their beliefs. State sponsorship involves governments promoting including exporting violent and extremist religious ideas that include calls to violate the religious freedom and sometimes even the right to life of others. State failure refers to governments abandoning their duty to protect those whom others are targeting due to their beliefs, creating a climate of impunity in which religious dissenters are threatened, intimidated, or even murdered.

 

“In response to such violations, IRFA requires the President, who has delegated this authority to the Secretary of State, to designate as ‘countries of particular concern’, or CPCs, those governments that have engaged in or tolerated ‘particularly severe’ religious freedom violations.”

 

The IRFA defines “particularly severe” violations as ones that are “systematic, ongoing, and egregious”, including acts such as torture, prolonged detention without charges, disappearances, or “other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of persons”.  All these are an everyday fact of life to non-Jews living under the Zionist-Israeli jackboot in the Holy Land.

 

And after a country is designated a CPC, the President is required by law to take specific actions to encourage reform.

 

So now we begin to see why Israel is omitted. Mustn’t upset the Zionists’ racist programme steal and ethnically cleanse the Holy Land, must we? The irony seems totally lost on Lantos Swett and her colleagues.

 

Another reason is the appointment of Elliott Abrams, a Zionist hardliner, to the Commission. American readers will know all about Abrams, but for the benefit of fellow Brits and others these extracts fromhttp://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/nc-feith.html  may help…

 

“In 1992 Abrams helped form the Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which was actually a committee to ensure that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud Party in Israel. Other members included Perle, Feith, Gaffney, and John Lehman, among dozens of other neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks. The committee spoke out against what it perceived as a dangerous distancing between the Bush Senior administration and Israel seen in the administration’s pressure for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt its campaign to expand settlements in these zones.

 

“Abrams has long voiced his strong support for Likud positions on the Oslo peace process and ‘land for peace’ negotiations.

 

“As Abrams, who has argued against Jews dating or attending elementary schools with non-Jews, put it in his book Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America: ‘Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart—except in Israel—from the rest of the population’ (Free Press, 1997). Judaism, according to Abrams, demands ‘apartness’ — not in the sense of confining oneself to a physical ghetto, but all necessary measures should be taken to prevent ‘prolonged and intimate exposure to non-Jewish culture’. Abrams takes care to insist that his positions imply no ‘disloyalty’ to the United States, but at the same times insists that Jews must be loyal to Israel because they ‘are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies.’

 

That’s a frightening message for America and indeed Britain, where the Jewish influence continues apace.

 

The article continues: “Abrams was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony before Congress in 1987 about his role in illicitly raising money for the Nicaraguan Contras. He pleaded guilty to two lesser offences of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term.”

 

Nice chap to have aboard, then. Abrams’ fellow Commissioners are…

Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett (Chair)

Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon and Rev. William J. Shaw (vice-Chairs)

Hon. Sam Gejdenson

Dr. Robert P. George

Dr. Azizah Y. al-Hibri

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser

Ambassador Suzan D. Johnson Cook

 

Why haven’t they examined the problem in their own country before condemning others?

I’m talking, of course, about the scourge of Christian Zionism which is rife in the US and is allowed to permeate and bully Congress, influence US foreign policy and thus encourage and fund the Zionist thugs of the Jewish State in their project to oust Christians and Muslims from Palestine and annex their lands.

 

Doesn’t this fall under “exporting violent and extremist religious ideas”, which Lantos Swett talks about?

 

American journalist and fearless champion of the truth, Grace Halsell, explained Christian Zionism’s message: “Simply stated it is this: Every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us. Never mind what Israel does, say the Christian Zionists. God wants this to happen…”

 

The problem, she said, was their belief system. “They believe that what Israel wants is what God wants. Therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to give the green light to whatever it is Israel wants and then conceal this from the American people. Anything, including lies, theft, even murder, is justified as long as Israel wants it.”

 

The credit for much of the world’s misery must go to Cyrus Scofield, who was commissioned by the Oxford University Press to re-write the King James Bible by inserting Zionist-friendly notes with the aim of changing the Christian view of Zionism and creating a pro-Zionist sub-culture within Christianity. Between them they distorted the Biblical message and produced a propaganda classic, the Scofield Reference Bible, which has oozed its nonsense for 100 years.

 

I commend to Lantos Swett and her fellow Commissioners ‘The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism’, a statement by the Latin Patriarch and Local Heads of Churches in Jerusalemhttp://imeu.net/news/article003122.shtml.  They are in the front line. They know the score. Here are the key passages…

 

We categorically reject Christian Zionist doctrines as false teaching that corrupts the biblical message of love, justice and reconciliation.

We further reject the contemporary alliance of Christian Zionist leaders and organizations with elements in the governments of Israel and the United States that are presently imposing their unilateral pre-emptive borders and domination over Palestine. This inevitably leads to unending cycles of violence that undermine the security of all peoples of the Middle East and the rest of the world.

We reject the teachings of Christian Zionism that facilitate and support these policies as they advance racial exclusivity and perpetual war rather than the gospel of universal love, redemption and reconciliation taught by Jesus Christ. Rather than condemn the world to the doom of Armageddon we call upon everyone to liberate themselves from the ideologies of militarism and occupation. Instead, let them pursue the healing of the nations!

 

America, heal thyself first.

 

Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood is an industrial marketing specialist turned writer-photographer. In 2005 he was invited to write and shoot pictures for a book about the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. ‘Radio Free Palestine’ was published in 2007. For details please seehttp://www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk/.

  • The Author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. Find more Articles by Stuart Littlewood on RamallahOnline.

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The Donkey of the Messiah

Uri Avnery

“THE TWO-STATE solution is dead!” This mantra has been repeated so often lately, by so many authoritative commentators, that it must be true.

Well, it ain‘t.

It reminds one of Mark Twain’s oft quoted words: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

BY NOW this has become an intellectual fad. To advocate the two-state solution means that you are ancient, old-fashioned, stale, stodgy, a fossil from a bygone era. Hoisting the flag of the “one-state solution” means that you are young, forward-looking, “cool”.

Actually, this only shows how ideas move in circles. When we declared in early 1949, just after the end of the first Israeli-Arab war, that the only answer to the new situation was the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, the “one-state solution” was already old.

The idea of a “bi-national state” was in vogue in the 1930s. Its main advocates were well-meaning intellectuals, many of them luminaries of the new Hebrew University, like Judah Leon Magnes and Martin Buber. They were reinforced by the Hashomer Hatza’ir kibbutz movement, which later became the Mapam party.

It never gained any traction. The Arabs believed that it was a Jewish trick. Bi-nationalism was built on the principle of parity between the two populations in Palestine – 50% Jews, 50% Arabs. Since the Jews at that time were much less than half the population, Arab suspicions were reasonable.

On the Jewish side, the idea looked ridiculous. The very essence of Zionism was to have a state where Jews would be masters of their fate, preferably in all of Palestine.

At the time, no one called it the “one-state solution” because there was already one state – the State of Palestine, ruled by the British. The “solution” was called “the bi-national state” and died, unmourned, in the war of 1948.

WHAT HAS caused the miraculous resurrection of this idea?

Not the birth of a new love between the two peoples. Such a phenomenon would have been wonderful, even miraculous. If Israelis and Palestinians had discovered their common values, the common roots of their history and languages, their common love for this country – why, wouldn’t that have been absolutely splendid?

But, alas, the renewed “one-state solution” was not born of another immaculate conception. Its father is the occupation, its mother despair.

The occupation has already created a de facto One State – an evil state of oppression and brutality, in which half the population (or slightly less than half) deprives the other half of almost all rights – human rights, economic rights and political rights. The Jewish settlements proliferate, and every day brings new stories of woe.

Good people on both sides have lost hope. But hopelessness does not stir to action. It fosters resignation.

LET’S GO back to the starting point. “The two-state solution is dead”. How come? Who says? In accordance with what scientific criteria has death been certified?

Generally, the spread of the settlements is cited as the sign of death. In the 1980s the respected Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti pronounced that the situation had now become “irreversible”. At the time, there were hardly 100 thousand settlers in the occupied territories (apart from East Jerusalem, which by common consent is a separate issue). Now they claim to be 300 thousand, but who is counting? How many settlers mean irreversibility? 100, 300, 500, 800 thousand?

History is a hothouse of reversibility. Empires grow and collapse. Cultures flourish and wither. So do social and economic patterns. Only death is irreversible.

I can think of a dozen different ways to solve the settlement problem, from forcible removal to exchange of territories to Palestinian citizenship. Who believed that the settlements in North Sinai would be removed so easily? That the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements would become a national farce?

In the end, there will probably be a mixture of several ways, according to circumstances.

All the Herculean problems of the conflict can be resolved – if there is a will. It’s the will that is the real problem.

THE ONE-STATERS like to base themselves on the South African experience. For them, Israel is an apartheid state, like the former South Africa, and therefore the solution must be South African-like.

The situation in the occupied territories, and to some extent in Israel proper, does indeed strongly resemble the apartheid regime. The apartheid example may be justly cited in political debate. But in reality, there is very little deeper resemblance – if any – between the two countries.

David Ben-Gurion once gave the South African leaders a piece of advice: partition. Concentrate the white population in the south, in the Cape region, and cede the other parts of the country to the blacks. Both sides in South Africa rejected this idea furiously, because both sides believed in a single, united country.

They largely spoke the same languages, adhered to the same religion, were integrated in the same economy. The fight was about the master-slave relationship, with a small minority lording it over a massive majority.

Nothing of this is true in our country. Here we have two different nations, two populations of nearly equal size, two languages, two (or rather, three) religions, two cultures, two totally different economies.

A false proposition leads to false conclusions. One of them is that Israel, like Apartheid South Africa, can be brought to its knees by an international boycott. About South Africa, this is a patronizing imperialist illusion. The boycott, moral and important as it was, did not do the job. It was the Africans themselves, aided by some local white idealists, who did it by their courageous strikes and uprisings.

I am an optimist, and I do hope that eventually Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs will become sister nations, living side by side in harmony. But to come to that point, there must be a period of living peacefully in two adjoining states, hopefully with open borders.

THE PEOPLE who speak now of the “one-state solution” are idealists. But they do a lot of harm. And not only because they remove themselves and others from the struggle for the only solution that is realistic.

If we are going to live together in one state, it makes no sense to fight against the settlements. If Haifa and Ramallah will be in the same state, what is the difference between a settlement near Haifa and one near Ramallah? But the fight against the settlements is absolutely essential, it is the main battlefield in the struggle for peace.

Indeed, the one-state solution is the common aim of the extreme Zionist right and the extreme anti-Zionist left. And since the right is incomparably stronger, it is the left that is aiding the right, and not the other way round.

In theory, that is as it should be. Because the one-staters believe that the rightists are only preparing the ground for their future paradise. The right is uniting the country and putting an end to the possibility of creating an independent State of Palestine. They will subject the Palestinians to all the horrors of apartheid and much more, since the South African racists did not aim at displacing and replacing the blacks. But in due course – perhaps in a mere few decades, or half a century – the world will compel Greater Israel to grant the Palestinians full rights, and Israel will become Palestine.

According to this ultra-leftist theory, the right, which is now creating the racist one state, is in reality the Donkey of the Messiah, the legendary animal on which the Messiah will ride to triumph.

It’s a beautiful theory, but what is the assurance that this will actually happen? And before the final stage arrives, what will happen to the Palestinian people? Who will compel the rulers of Greater Israel to accept the diktat of world public opinion?

If Israel now refuses to bow to world opinion and enable the Palestinians to have their own state in 28% of historical Palestine, why would they bow to world opinion in the future and dismantle Israel altogether?

Speaking about a process that will surely last 50 years and more, who knows what will happen? What changes will take place in the world in the meantime? What wars and other catastrophes will take the world’s mind off the “Palestinian issue”?

Would one really gamble the fate of one’s nation on a far-fetched theory like this?

ASSUMING FOR a moment that the one-state solution would really come about, how would it function?

Will Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs serve in the same army, pay the same taxes, obey the same laws, work together in the same political parties? Will there be social intercourse between them? Or will the state sink into an interminable civil war?

Other peoples have found it impossible to live together in one state. Take the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia. Serbia. Czechoslovakia. Cyprus. Sudan. The Scots want to secede from the United Kingdom. So do the Basques and the Catalans from Spain. The French in Canada and the Flemish in Belgium are uneasy. As far as I know, nowhere in the entire world have two different peoples agreed to form a joint state for decades.

NO, THE two-state solution is not dead. It cannot die, because it is the only solution there is.

Despair may be convenient and tempting. But despair is no solution at all.

 

Uri Avnery

 

Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. Since 1948 he has advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1974, Uri Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with the PLO leadership. In 1982 he was the first Israeli ever to meet Yasser Arafat, after crossing the lines in besieged Beirut. He served three terms in the Israeli Knesset and is the founder ofGush Shalom (Peace Bloc). Visit his Web site.

 

More Articles on RamallahOnline by Uri Avnery or visit Gush-Shalom.org

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Truth-tellers and justice-seekers, don’t give up!

Stuart Littlewood

 

William Cook in his masterly way tells us not to give up http://mycatbirdseat.com/2013/05/38222-the-truth-tellers-lament-in-a-time-of-darkness/  even if “overwhelmed by darkness of the times”.

 

And he reminds us that “sixty-five years ago this May 14, the world body admitted to its membership the state of Israel even as that self-declared state was in the process of invading, destroying and leveling 418 towns and villages owned by the people of Palestine who suffered death or expulsion out of their homeland to live without human rights anywhere in the world.”

 

His eloquence is designed to stiffen the sinews. But some weary truth-tellers and justice-seekers simply don’t want their sinew stiffened any more. For years they’ve given the Palestine thing their best shot, their family life has suffered… and for what?

 

With the 14th of May comes the realisation that the crimes of the US-backed Israelis continue with impunity, encouraged and rewarded by those on high who should know better, while the suffering of the Palestinians knows no limit. This has been the longest and cruellest jackbooted torment of modern times yet the blood-spattered perpetrators are warmly welcomed into the drawing rooms of supposedly civilised Western rulers and promised undying support for ever. The British government has effectively disabled its Universal Jurisdiction laws to give these creatures a safe haven.

 

Of course, the problem is not just the Israelis. Sami Jamil Jadallah reports http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/05/02/palestine-fist-full-of-dollars/ how the Palestinian leadership has “failed at every thing it set out to do. It failed at liberation, it failed at ending the occupation, failed at building governing institutions, failed at disengaging Palestinian economy from the Israeli economy, failed at ending the continued expansion of Jewish settlements, failed at bringing down the Apartheid Wall (though it had a court ruling), failed at creating a transparent and clean government…”

 

Jadallah remarks that the Arab League “recently gave Israel added incentives allowing the trade off of prime Palestinian territories in exchange for toxic waste dump. With this present leadership there is no hope for ever ending the Jewish Occupation… More troubling is the commitment made with the approval of the Palestinian leadership that ‘Palestine’ will never file legal charges against Israel for past, present and future crimes.”

 

Hamas, naturally, are not best pleased.  Their Salah al-Khawaja told Quds Press that international law does not allow it, and any idea of land swaps gives legitimacy to the occupation to continue its settlement activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

 

The Jerusalem Post was reporting three years ago that the Palestinians and US-backed Israel had agreed on the principle of a land swap, but denied that the two sides had reached any further agreement. The issue was the ratio of land Israel would give to the Palestinians in exchange for keeping their illegal settlement blocs, with the Palestinians demanding 1:1 and the Israelis, being their usual greedy selves, offering less.

 

Now the same source reports that, while the Palestinian Authority leadership supported the land swap idea, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) condemned it. “The Palestinians don’t need anyone to make concessions on their behalf. No one authorized the Arab delegation to voluntarily give up Palestinian lands. We condemn this proposal as an attempt to legitimize settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in violation of international laws and the Geneva Fourth Convention.”

 

Another group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), also slammed the land swap idea and accused Qatar, which has been playing a leadership role in the Arab League, of seeking to liquidate the Palestinian issue. Mohamed Jadallah, a senior member of the DFLP, said that Qatar was seeking to take over the Arab League in order to serve US interests in the region. “Qatarhas bought the Arab countries with its money and stolen their political decision,” he said.

 

Jadallah claimed that Qatar was working toward by-passing the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative by offering to relinquish control over Palestinian territories.

 

Since US-backed Israel selected and stole prime locations for its settlements, knowing full well that it was committing a war crime, why should the Palestinians settle for 1:1? Why should they agree to land swaps at all? If the Jews living in these ‘squats’ wish to stay they can become Palestinian citizens.

 

All this simply adds fuel to the burning resentment felt by Palestinians and their sympathizers around the world towards the ‘enemy within’ who would sell their gandmothers for a fistful of dollars or shekels

 

 

In the long grass something stirs…

 

Meanwhile, here in England it looks like a major party ‘scum clearance’ may have begun, albeit in a modest way. In elections last Thursday in the 27 English county councils and 7 unitary authorities the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won over 140 seats and averaged 25% of the vote in the areas where it was standing. Agent Cameron’s  Conservatives lost control of 10 councils, but retained 18. Their coalition buddies, the Liberal Democrats, did badly too.

 

UKIP aims to haul us out of the EU cesspit and bolt the door against unwanted immigrants. As these concerns are uppermost in ordinary people’s minds, UKIP strikes a strong chord with British voters. The county election results show what can happen when political leaders continually ignore the electorate’s concerns and press ahead with their own private agenda when it is obviously not in the national interest.

 

The breakthrough by UKIP, however, is not entirely good news. The party claims “Israel has maintained an impeccable human rights record” and seeks to cement “true friendship” with its hoodlums. UKIP seems indifferent to the fact that Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads (and the means to deliver them), menaces the whole region (and Europe) and defies calls to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and place its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards. Yet UKIP believes a nuclear Iran would be unacceptable, and says it would support efforts to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons capability by “military means”.

 

UKIP is so bonkers about Israel that it rejects calls for the suspension of trade deals such as the EU-Israel Association Agreement, apparently seeing no need for the racist entity to show “respect for human rights and democratic principles” as set out in that Agreement.

 

Not surprisingly UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage has been described by the Jewish Chronicle as “a good friend of Israel”. And, naturally, UKIP has a Friends of Israel group which proclaims: “Despite constant assault from within and without, Israel has maintained an impeccable human rights record and remains the only country in the Middle East to extend full civil and political rights to all of its citizens, regardless of race or religion. Yet somehow it is cast as the oppressor, vilified as an ‘apartheid state’ and singled out for disproportionate criticism.

 

“Decades of malicious propaganda campaigns have seen to it that a one-sided historical narrative which portrays the Palestinians as blameless victims now successfully masquerades as reality…”

 

People who joined, then left UKIP say it’s corrupt and run on Stalinistic lines. So UKIP are not the loveliest people to have around… and certainly not the sort you’d want actually running your country. But for the timebeing these useful idiots may serve a purpose in helping to clear away the even more unlovely major party trash that’s funded by Zionists, owes allegiance to a foreign Zionist power and adores and supports the Zionist programme of land-theft, mayhem and murder directed even against fellow Christians.

 

Another cause for slight hope is the recent Eminent Persons letter http://ecfr.eu/blog/entry/time_is_running_out_for_a_two_state_solution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/on-the-middle-east/2013/may/03/israel-palestinians-eu-obama

in which Jeremy Greenstock, former UK Ambassador to the UN, and 18 other prominent Europeans have sent a strongly-worded message to EU High Representative Catherine Ashton calling for a new European approach and expressing “strong concern about the dying chances of a settlement based on two separate, sovereign and peaceful states of Israel and Palestine”.

 

They warn that “the Occupation is actually being entrenched by the present Western policy” and “the steady increase in the extent and population of Israeli settlements, including in East Jerusalem, and the entrenchment of Israeli control over the OT [Occupied Territories] in defiance of international law, indicate a permanent trend towards a complete dislocation of Palestinian territorial rights.”

 

The letter concludes that letting the situation lie unaddressed is highly dangerous when such an explosive issue sits in such a turbulent environment.

 

It adds that over the years the EU’s inactivity has been unprincipled and unwise.  “European leaders cannot wait for ever for action from the United States when the evidence accumulates of American failure to recognise and promote the equal status of Israelis and Palestinians… as accepted in United Nations resolutions.”

 

Why has it taken them so long to put pen to paper? It’s probably too late for a two-state solution, but what they say might lead to better things. Many more ‘eminent persons’ need to speak up for justice. Where are they? Why do they still skulk behind the woodwork?

 

Stuart Littlewood

 

Stuart Littlewood is an industrial marketing specialist turned writer-photographer. In 2005 he was invited to write and shoot pictures for a book about the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. ‘Radio Free Palestine’ was published in 2007. For details please seehttp://www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk/.

  • The Author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. Find more Articles by Stuart Littlewood on RamallahOnline.

5 May 2013

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Nakba and Palestinian Failings

Sami Jamil Jadallah

SAMI JAMIL JADALLAH

Every year at this time, the Palestinians remember the “Nakba” or catastrophe and mourn their failings, while Israel celebrates its independence and success as regional and world power. No one can doubt the power and influence Israel and the world Zionism play in shaping domestic and international policies of major world capital such as Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, New Delhi, even Peking.

A power and influence that put the Palestinians and behind them the 380 million Arabs at a disadvantage, however that should not be an excuses for the failings and incompetence of Palestinian leadership past Hajj Amin Hussaini, Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas and Khalid Mishal.

One can understand and appreciate the power Israel and its Fifth Column play within the United States of America with power and influence over every aspect of life emerging as clear and present danger to the domestic and international security of the country.

While Israel leadership always had a focused mission of total and unconditional commitment to the safety, security, existence and expansion of Israel by all means including blackmailing, false flags terrorists attacks and penetrating the inner circles of the highest level of national security of Western democracies, the Palestinian leadership past and present continued to be bogged down with its own self serving and perpetuation and have lost focus on Palestine, on the Rights of Return and Jerusalem long long time ago.

Too bad for the Palestinians under the continued Jewish Occupation and in the Diaspora. The Palestinian leadership certainly of the PLO have proved over time that it is incompetent to lead, unfit to manage, too corrupt to have any credibility and simply if not an agent of the Israeli Occupation at least manager of the Jewish Occupation, a criminal mafia at best.

While the British Mandate was meeting its mission of helping and facilitating the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine and was doing all it can through arrests, executions and suppressions of civil demonstration, the Palestinian leadership of the time was simply inept and hardly knew what was going on and with no vision or focused credible policies for resisting both the British Mandate and the emerging powerful Jewish terrorists groups.

No one can deny the sacrifice of the many who took up arms, who died and who were executed and imprisoned resisting both the Mandate, and the ever increasing Jewish Occupation, the Palestinians leadership like the present one was more concerned with perpetuating its powers and influence rather than meeting the challenge coming from Europe and the US. Simply the Palestinian leadership and the population of the time were no match to the Zionist leadership and the well educated and well trained Jewish immigrants with focused mission to set a Jewish state no matter what are the costs or consequences for the Palestinians.

The late Yasser Arafat was no match for Ben Gurion, not in vision or dedication to the cause, While the latter made good use of close inner circles of smart professional people to help him build a new state, securing financial, military, political and technical support for the new emerging state, Arafat on the other hand gathered around him a bunch of misfit, unfit, incompetent, corrupt, a mafia of self serving cadre of followers committed and loyal to his leadership and securing their private privileges that Arafat was master at dispensing using blackmail to make sure every one is in line and never challenge his leadership. The Palestine National Congress was nothing but a shameful body and a disgrace failing the Palestinians as the leadership of Arafat and his cronies.

That is why after so many years of same leadership, and with hundreds of thousands of dead and martyrs and tens of billions disappeared, wasted, looted and remain unaccounted for, Yasser Arafat and the PLO having failed at every thing (liberation and establishing a state) he and his failed corrupt and incompetent entourage came back to manage the Jewish Occupation as a way to save a failed leadership.

While Israeli leaders travel the world succeeding in suppressing complaint about continued expansion of Jewish settlements, expropriations of land for the Apartheid Wall and Jewish Roads only, and an ever expansions of so called security checkpoints, and constant violations of international law, Palestinian leadership is traveling the world earning traveling miles, enjoying the finest in hotel and dinning, without ever achieving any material change for the people under the Jewish Occupation, with a very speedy rate to disfranchise and ethnically cleansing Arab Palestinians from Jerusalem. Land swap, not the return of the refugees, not Jerusalem is the agenda for continued negotiations.

While the Israeli and Jewish leadership looks after its own around the world, discovering even inventing lost tribes, seeking and enticing such lost tribes to immigrate to Israel, the Palestinian leadership of Arafat and Abbas totally abandoned, gave up any credible efforts to look after and serve Diaspora Palestinians. As we have seen in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Kuwait, in Syria among other countries.

While the Jewish Agency was looking after Jewish communities around the world, the Palestine Liberation Organization as the claimed “representatives of the Palestinian people” overlooked even disregarded the needs of all Palestinians in the Diaspora, specially those under attacks in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

The Jewish Agency working together with international Zionist organizations like the American Jewish Congress organized and sought and succeeded in total recovery of Jewish properties in Europe, the PLO did not bother to organize an alliance of international organizations to document or build a data base and filing the necessary legal challenges and proceedings to recover All Palestinian properties confiscated by the newly arriving Jewish immigrants. In fact it stands in the way of such efforts because it seeks compensations to go its own coffer to dispense with it as it chooses with majority of recovered funds ending up in private bank accounts.

Now that the Palestinian leadership claimed a one time success of having Palestine recognized as an observer state at the UN, it promised in exchange for sitting down with the Israelis to negotiate and give away what is left of Palestine, it will not file any international legal charges against Israel for its criminal actions of the wars on Gaza, the building of the Apartheid Wall, the continued confiscations and expansions of Jewish settlements on stolen Palestinians lands, the policies of administrative arrests without trial or evidence that saw more than 700,000 Palestinians guests of Israeli jails. I guess to the Palestinian leadership there is a price for its continued existence and that price is Palestine and its people. If the past is a guide to the future I doubt if Palestinians will ever take charge of their own destiny and throw this failed leadership out once and for all, and give themselves an even chance.

 

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah is an international legal and business consultant and is the founder and director of Palestine Agency and Palestine Documentation Centerwww.palestineagency.com and founder and owner of several business in technology and services. Sami also runs an online website (Jefferson Corner). His articles are also featured on PalestineNote andVeterans Today.

Articles on RamallahOnline by Sami Jamil Jadallah

 

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The Samson complex

JONATHAN COOK

Washington’s reputation as an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in tatters after four years of indulging Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence. The Obama administration desperately needs to resurrect a credible peace process. 

Faced with a diplomatic impasse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, seized his chance last week. He extracted from the Arab League an agreement to dust off a decade-old regional plan, the Arab Peace Initiative, declaring the move “a very big step forward.”

Unveiled by Saudi Arabia in 2002, the plan promises Israel normal relations with the whole of the Arab world in return for its acceptance of a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders, or 22 percent of historic Palestine.

The new Arab overture, like its antecedent, has raised barely a flicker of interest from Israel. Tzipi Livni, Washington’s sole ally in Netanyahu’s cabinet, predictably lost no time in praising the plan. But the prime minister himself has studiously avoided mentioning it, leaving his aides to dismiss the initiative as a “trick” designed to ensnare Israel in injurious peace talks.

His oblique response serves as a rejoinder to one of the conflict’s most enduring myths. Even before Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967, it presented itself as eager for acceptance from the Arab states. This fiction, which continues to shape western perceptions, rests on two pillars.

 

 

The first assumes Israeli fervor to engage diplomatically with the Arab world. Or, as Israel’s then-defence minister Moshe Dayan famously told the BBC just days after the end of the Six Day War: “We are awaiting the Arabs’ phone call.”

The second, articulated most clearly by Abba Eban, when he was foreign minister in the early 1970s, castigates the Arabs for “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to make peace with Israel.

And yet the historical record suggests the exact opposite. After their humiliation in 1967, the Arab states quickly conceded — at least, privately — that Israel was here to stay and began considering ways to accommodate it.

As Shlomo Ben-Ami, an Israeli historian who was foreign minister during the 2000 Camp David peace talks, observed: when the Arab states called, “Israel’s line was busy, or there was no one on the Israeli side to pick up the phone.”

Such obduracy was confirmed in last month’s disclosure by WikiLeaks of classified US diplomatic cables from that period. In late 1973, a few weeks after the end of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab League quietly offered Israel a regional peace agreement that would recognize its pre-1967 borders. But the Arab states were rebuffed.

According to a cable from January 1975, US diplomats in the Middle East concluded that Israel’s leaders demonstrated “an extraordinary lack of understanding” of Arab intentions, preferring instead to gird “their loins for the fifth, sixth, seventh Israeli-Arab wars.” The cables describe Israel as hellbent on self-destruction; suffering, in the words of US officials, from a “Masada or Samson complex.”

This context should be borne in mind as Israel’s current opposition to peace talks is ascribed solely to the hawkishness of Netanyahu’s government. In truth, this is a pattern of behavior exhibited by Israel over many decades — or what former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad termed last week Israel’s “occupation gene.”

The Saudi peace initiative of 2002 arrived at a time early in the second intifada when Israelis were terrified by a wave of suicide bombings and the Israeli economy appeared close to collapse. Nonetheless, the then military chief of staff — today’s defense minister — Moshe Yaalon, advised that Israel’s highest priority was not negotiations but a military campaign to “sear defeat deep into the Palestinian consciousness.”

At least, the newly revived Arab peace initiative has the advantage that it appears — unlike its predecessor — to have the enthusiastic backing of the White House.

Another difference, doubtless due to pressure from Kerry, is a concession from the Arab states that an agreement on Palestinian statehood will not require Israel to return to the 1967 lines. Approval of “minor” and “comparable” territorial exchanges brings the Arab League into line with the diplomatic positions of Abbas, US President Barack Obama and, ostensibly at least, several previous Israeli prime ministers.

But Netanyahu seems to be opposed even to testing the sincerity of the Arab initiative. His main objection — beyond a general antipathy to any proposal for Palestinian statehood — is reportedly that “minor” land swaps will not be generous enough to ensure Israel keeps all of its settlements.

Netanyahu’s inflexibility is being advanced even as he insists that there must be no preconditions on talks and warns that, without a peace agreement, Israel faces a future as a bi-national state.

Kerry, meanwhile, has proffered his own warning: there is a two-year deadline to finding a solution to the conflict. Then the Obama administration’s lame-duck period begins.

What follows next is left unstated. But presumably once the US formally abandons the peace process, the current status quo intensifies: a single state ruled over apartheid-style by Israel, with a Palestinian Authority consigned to irrelevance or oblivion.

Whatever his protestations, none of this will overly worry Mr Netanyahu. After all, this is a government that last week found grounds for complaint in Google’s decision to confer the status of “Palestine” on a search engine designation.

The reality is that another round of failed peacemaking will do far more damage to the Palestinians and Washington’s reputation than to an Israel that never intended to pick up the phone in the first place.

 

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

 

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

  • The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline. More Articles by Jonathan Cook.

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In Praise of Richard Falk – An Analysis

IN PRAISE OF RICHARD FALK – AN ANALYSIS (6 MAY 2013) BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON

PART I – Richard Falk Tells the Truth

 

Shortly after the 15 April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories, published an analysis of the episode entitled “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders.”

 

In this analysis Falk pointed out that there are “serious deficiencies in how the U.S. sees itself in the world. We should be worried by the taboo  . . . imposed on any type of self-scrutiny  [of U.S. foreign policy] by either the political leadership or the mainstream media.” This taboo essentially blinds us to the reality of our situation. Falk continues, “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. . . . Especially if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations with others . . . starting with the Middle East.”

 

It seems obvious that if Washington wants to prevent future attacks, it is not enough to  pursue alleged terrorists and beef up “homeland security.” It seems logical that one needs to also perform a foreign policy review, preferably in a public manner, to determine if any American policies or behaviors are unnecessarily provoking animosity. For instance, will continued unqualified U.S. support of Israeli oppression of  Palestinians increase or decrease future violent anti-American episodes at home or abroad? Yet, this critical aspect of any response to terrorism has apparently never been performed. As regards the administration of George W. Bush, this comes as no surprise. Bush and his neoconservative supporters were (and still are) ideologically driven and so are incapable of the objectivity necessary for such a self-critical review. That is why Bush came up with a range of cockamamy reasons, including the famous “they hate our values,” for the 9/11 attacks. President Obama, on the other hand, seemed, at least at first, capable of corrective insight.  

 

Back in 2009 Obama went to Cairo and made a speech which suggested that a rethinking of American relations with the Muslim world and the Middle East in particular, was in order. Yet the theory represented in the speech was never turned into practice. Why not? 

 

Falk explains that “the strong push-back by Israel” caused Obama to backpedal. As a consequence the “politics of denial” continued. In Falk’s opinion, “As long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.” 

 

Part II – Attacking the Messenger

 

When it comes to policies that might provoke terrorist attack, U.S. complicity in Israeli belligerency, racism and colonial expansion is just the tip of the iceberg. Washington’s mistakes go further. The unprovoked invasion of Iraq following years of devastating economic sanctions, the 

ill-conceived stationing of troops on Arabian soil, the unnecessary occupation of Afghanistan, and the collateral-damage-prone-tactic of drone warfare now actively pursued in places like Yemen and Pakistan have all, unbeknownst to the American public, seriously alienated hundreds of millions of people around the globe. It has driven some of this number to violent actions which, from their perspective, represent counterattacks and revenge. 

 

Thus, looked at from outside of the self-justifying perspective of the United States government, everything Richard Falk says is accurate. However,  from the inside of the official government worldview, Falk is a heretic and his message dangerous verbal poison. Therefore, the reaction of those dedicated to customary policies and alliances has been shrill.  

 

For instance, Washington’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said that she was “outraged by Richard Falk’s highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.” Similar statements came from members of Congress who are collecting signatures on a letter demanding that President Obama “take action” against Falk. The British mission to the UN. released a statement to the effect that “this is the third time we have had cause to express our concerns about Mr. Falk’s anti-Semitic remarks.” This is an embarrassingly ignorant statement that confuses criticism of Israel with hostility to Jews in general. By the way, Richard Falk is Jewish. For its part, Israel has long barred Falk from even entering the Palestinian territories for which he has responsibility. Finally,  Zionists have accused Falk of being “an anti-American and pro-radical Islam activist.” This is another statement that is both factually incorrect and ignorant, because Falk is a deeply knowledgable American trying to talk some sense to politicians leading the nation toward a dangerous cliff, and because it confuses criticism of Israel with supporting “radical Islam.”

 

Part III – Conclusion

 

The ugly fact is that, most Americans have been kept dangerously ignorant of the wanton damage caused by their government’s foreign policies, and those who would prevent them from knowing the truth are, at the very least, indirectly responsible for terrorist attacks launched in reaction to those policies.  

 

Richard Falk’s crime is to be a person of note, an esteemed academic and a respected servant of the United Nations, who is trying to break through with the truth.  It is all the more frightening to the U.S. and its allies that, in this effort, Falk has access to an independent platform.  He regularly reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where he has the ear of many of the 47 nations that make up this body.  Unfortunately, the one group most in need of Falk’s wisdom, the American public, remains beyond the range of his voice. 

 

If it could get away with it, the U.S. government would probably cart Richard Falk off to some hellhole prison, or keep him confined to some foreign embassy (as it has done to Julian Assange).  However, despite disturbing signs to the contrary, Washington isn’t yet ready to take such actions against a man of Falk’s stature. However, do not mistake such forbearance for the mark of a mature and stable society. No. Such societies (just like mature and stable adults) are capable of self-criticism. At least at the level of leadership and media, the United States is not capable of such self-reflection and so its citizens are likely to be the last to know that much of the terrorism they fear is a product of their own government’s continuing barbarism. 

 

 

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

The author is a regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com.More articles can be found onRamallahOnline.com, Logos Journal, and Dr. Davidson also maintains an online blog, you can find it athttp://www.tothepointanalyses.com

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Rabbi: Religious Zionism is ‘like a powder keg’

By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
May 3, 2013

In a fascinating Vox Tablet podcast discussion of the seminal role of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and his son, Zvi Yehuda, in the history of religious Zionism and the Kooks’ influence on the so-called “settler” movement, Rabbi Shai Held speaks of the dangers of this increasingly influential theology in Israeli politics. Paraphrasing Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Rabbi Held, the co-founder and dean of an egalitarian yeshiva in New York, warns:

This is really dangerous stuff. This is dynamite that you’re playing with. The combination of messianism, a sense of the ontological difference and superiority of the Jews, a sense of the ontological uniqueness of the Land of Israel, the increasing embrace of militarism; all of this, combined, is like a powder keg.

http://thepassionateattachment.com/2013/05/03/rabbi-religious-zionism-is-like-a-powder-keg/

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Islam: The Danger Within

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

As if the war on Islam and Muslims declared by certain evil forces within the US and international Zionism is not enough, the so-called “ Takfiri/Jihadist” terrorists have also declared war on Islam and Muslims. Mohamed Imami Kashani, the Imam of the Friday Prayer Mosque in Tehran is correct when he recently labeled these “Takfiri/ Jihadists” as not Sunnis, not Shiites not even Muslims but true die hard Zionists.

The Reagan administration with intellectual and philosophical advocacy from NeoCons think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and in fulfillment of its objective to wage overt and covert war on Communism and with the support (certainly generous financial payments) to Arab and Muslim governments began to recruits all the misfits, radicals and lost generation to fights its war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

The “Mujahiddeen “ war in Afghanistan is and will remain the incubator of “Islamist’ terrorism and the radicalization of so many young Muslims who are now engaged in and are waging a war of terror against Muslims and Islam in countries like Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in India, Kashmir, Somalia, Iraq, and recently in Tunisia.

Assisting this international war on Islam are “radical” clergymen who are doing their best to emulate the Rabbis of Christ time and are doing their best to take over the “Temple’ and every thing in it and are working very hard for the “Talmudization” of Islam and trying to shape Islam and Islamic Civilization’s in their own image of ignorance, and intolerance. Promoting and sad to say “winning” the “sectarian wars” in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in Syria.

They have been waging verbal and armed war in mosques all over the Muslim world anointing themselves as leaders of the “Ummah” when in fact they lack all the intellectual and religious credentials to lead such “Ummah”, let alone a mosque.

Any one these days with a shaved head and a long beard can claim to be an “ Islamist leader” gathering around themselves unemployed failed misfits who have been left out and marginalized by society. These so called “Emir” truly think of themselves as “Prince’s of Believers” moving around in motorcades with armed guards, and processions fits for a Mafiosi’s and acting like criminal gang leaders of Los Angeles and Chicago.

If America ‘s war on Islam in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iraq has caused the direct death of hundreds of thousand, then the “Takfiri/Jihadist” war on Islam and Muslims has caused a number far exceed these modest figures. Always directing their acts of terror toward poor neighborhoods and innocent bystanders.

No one should discount the monstrous evil produced by the “madras’s” in Pakistan and in Afghanistan on the radicalization of young generations with no hope for decent life or future. If these young people have a stake in society, with good education, good jobs and good future for themselves and their families they will not go out and blow themselves not for Allah certainly not for Mohamed (PBUH), but will rebuild their societies not destroy it.

In this day and age, ignorant ill educated clergymen have anointed themselves as guardians of the faithful handing “fatwa’s” left and right determining who is a Muslim of good standing and who is not going dangerously further handing down “death” sentences against those who do no see them as the personification of pure Islam, with a “Sharia” that does not go beyond “sex and booze”.

These “Jihadists and Takfiri” leaders and groups are indeed the hidden armies of the likes of Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Pam Gellar and “false flag terrorism” who have made a career out of promoting and advocating “Islamophobia” and war on terror.

In Syria, the presence of Islamist recruits (Jabhat Al-Nusra) related to or associated with Alqaeda has undermined the Syrian people’s uprising and winning the war against the criminal regime of Bashar Assad.

All Arab criminal regimes past and present have supported US waging war on Communism and now these veterans of the Mujahideen war came back to undermine these regimes and to recruit, poor, unemployed, ignorant and illiterates to its ranks using drugs and smuggling with covert support from Western intelligence sources in support of its international war on terror (Islam).

The Takfiri /Jihadists never contributed to life but waged wars of death and destruction against innocent and poor people and never build a clinic, or a school, or social service centers, training centers for women, believing these services as undermining the purity of Islam and an emulation of decadent Western civilization.

If such people existed in early Islam I am sure Islam would have died in its infancy and would have never gone beyond Medina. May Allah save Islam, Muslims and the world from these evil, criminal and terrorists who are the biggest threats to Islam and Muslims? The great Islamic Civilization spanning the glob was not build by “Takfiri/Jihadists” but built by intellectuals, scientists, mathematicians, architects, artists, philosophers, religious scholars, not Shiites not Sunnis, but Muslims of all colors, race and nationalities. Islam was and is enriched by such diversity and cross-cultures.

 

Sami Jamil Jadallah is an international legal and business consultant and is the founder and director of Palestine Agency and Palestine Documentation Centerwww.palestineagency.com and founder and owner of several business in technology and services. Sami also runs an online website (Jefferson Corner). His articles are also featured on PalestineNote andVeterans Today.

Articles on RamallahOnline by Sami Jamil Jadallah

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Palestine – Fist Full of Dollars

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami Jamil Jadallah

The meeting that took place in Nablus on Sunday the 4th of November 2012 between Palestinian Oligarchs and officials from the office of Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli investors and businessmen, mainly those heavily invested in Jewish Settlements, was not out of the blue. It set the pace for Secretary John Kerry of “economic initiative” in lieu of ending the Jewish Occupation.

Contrary to public claims, the Palestinian leadership past (Arafat) and present (Abbas) was never interested in liberation, let alone ending the Jewish Occupation. Oslo and subsequent actions since then can only confirm this. It is all about business and the windfall the continued Jewish Occupations brings to the Palestinian leadership, leaders and cadre of “Fasa’el” and of course to the Palestinian Oligarchs.

The Palestinian leadership never put in place a popular plan (civil disobedience and popular civil uprising) that will help bring about the end of the longest occupation in modern history. Rather the Palestinian leadership is working hard to perpetuate its existence even if more and more land is taken over for Jewish settlements and security areas.

While the likes of Dr. Mohmoud Ishtayeh, Fatah leader in Nablus denounce such meeting with the likes of Rami Levy, the owner of the largest supermarkets in Jewish Settlements, his boss Mahmoud Abbas dispatch his top economic aid to attend such meeting, a meeting that also saw the attendance of Amr Mousa of Egypt and Abdesalam Almajali the former Jordanian foreign minister and Robert Serry the UN coordinator.

The meeting that took place in the home of Palestinian billionaire Munib Almasri was dubbed” breaking the freeze”, with the idea of creating a” coalition of Arab and Israeli ‘Notables’ working together to move forward the Arab Peace process.

Last April 25, 2013 Secretary of State John Kerry announced such plans after receiving the green light from Bibi Netanyahu. The “economic initiatives” is to induce big international corporations to invest in projects in the “occupied territories” in infrastructures, high technology and transportation in addition to telecommunications.

Not so sure how this plan will work when Israel have over 550 different security check points almost every few kilometers where Palestinians are horded like Texas cattle’s as they are processed through metal revolving gates and where many women died while waiting to go to a clinic on the other side and where Palestinians have to wait hours if not days to pass through.

Israel not only hinder Palestinians access to their homes and farms it does not allow a G3 applications and signs pointing this issue went up during President Barack Obama brief visit to Ramallah.

When Arafat and the PLO leadership came back to Ramallah to manage the Jewish Occupation, Arafat unlike drunken Yeltsin, a sober Arafat gave the Palestinian Oligarchs the run on all key economies and went further by giving certain security officials a monopoly on certain energy sectors resulting in the milking of hundreds of millions of dollars from poor consumers. Arafat corrupted the entire economy of the Occupied Territories.

More troubling is the lack of any credible plans by the Palestinians leadership to disengage from the Israeli economy. Dr. Nabil Sha’ath who negotiated the Paris Agreement did not do such a good job perpetuating the overwhelming control of Israel of all economic aspects in the Occupied Territories.

Over the years and since Oslo and with a lack of both a political let alone economic plans, the Palestinian leadership and authority made the rich richer and the poor much much poorer.

The biggest beneficiary of the budget goes to the Palestinian Security forces (35%) much more than the combined budget for health, education, transportation and social services. Keep in mind that such security forces could not and dare not protect Palestinian villages from the daily attacks by armed Jewish settler terrorists. Who come as they wish vandalize mosques and churches, destroy farms, uproot century old olive trees and poisoning water well, all under the closed eyes of the Palestinian security forces established to protect the Occupation and the Ramallah regime.

Prior to the Second Intifada, Israel became the largest single employer of Palestinian labors and the Palestinian leadership was only too happy for being the largest and key labor suppliers of unskilled labor to Israel and never thought of an alternative plans.

The Palestinian leadership failed at every thing it set out to do. It failed at liberation, it failed at ending the occupation, failed at building governing institutions, failed at disengaging Palestinian economy from the Israeli economy, failed at ending the continued expansion of Jewish settlements, failed at bringing down the Apartheid Wall (though it had a court ruling), failed at creating a transparent and clean government with corruption, “connections and nepotism” and fleecing of citizens at the different key agency continue to be the rule.

The only beneficiaries of such “breaking the freeze” or “economic initiatives” are the Palestinian Oligarchs who already have chocking hold on key economies while hundreds of thousands of people remain below poverty lines and with hundreds of thousand remain hostage to the monthly salary and the monthly mortgage and consumers loans.

Not so sure what would be the economic benefits to the people when Coca-Cola commits to investing a billion dollars and who but the owners of the franchise are the beneficiaries.

Already the Arab League is behind such an “economic initiatives” and recently gave Israel added incentives allowing the trade off of prime Palestinian territories in exchange for toxic waste dump. With this present leadership there is no hope forever ending the Jewish Occupation.

The leadership, its allies in the business community and in the NGO networks are the prime beneficiaries of the continued Jewish Occupation and the “economic initiative” is an added reward to a Palestinian leadership that failed at every thing.

More troubling is the commitment made with the approval of the Palestinian leadership that “Palestine” will never file legal charges against Israel for past, present and future crimes.

 

Sami Jamil Jadallah is an international legal and business consultant and is the founder and director of Palestine Agency and Palestine Documentation Centerwww.palestineagency.com and founder and owner of several business in technology and services. Sami also runs an online website (Jefferson Corner). His articles are also featured on PalestineNote andVeterans Today.

Articles on RamallahOnline by Sami Jamil Jadallah