Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Only truth will set "Palestine" free

From The Australian, May 15, 2010 by Rebecca Weisser:

THE Palestinian diaspora in Australia is facing an unexpected catastrophe. Normally, May 15, Israel's Independence Day, is the most important day of their year for celebrating their victimhood: the catastrophe, as they see it, of the founding of Israel.

But, this year, visiting fresh from the streets of Gaza, Ramallah and Jerusalem is Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab Muslim journalist, who declares: "I'd rather be a second-class citizen in Israel than a first-class citizen in any Arab country."

And some in the diaspora are not happy about his visit. Ali Kazak, a former ambassador for the Palestine Liberation Organisation, circulated an email this week accusing Abu Toameh of being an "Israeli propagandist" on the "Israeli payroll" and warning people not to be misled by him.

Kazak told The Australian: "Khaled Abu Toameh is a traitor." These are dangerous words in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Kazak admits that many Palestinians are murdered in the West Bank and Gaza for being traitors.

He says he doesn't agree with it but: "Traitors were also murdered by the French Resistance, in Europe; this happens everywhere."

Asked why he calls Abu Toameh a traitor, Kazak says: "Palestinians are the victims. He shouldn't write about them, he should write about the crimes of the Israelis."

Kazak admits there is corruption and violence in the West Bank and Gaza. "Of course, Palestinian society isn't perfect. I myself have criticised it," he says. But Kazak objects to Abu Toameh writing about it.

Toameh responds: "It is absurd that this gentleman is calling me a traitor while the PLO whom he claims to represent is conducting security co-ordination with Israel and helping Israel crack down on Hamas and is even imprisoning Palestinians without trial in the West Bank.

"When I write about corruption and bad government in Palestine it's because I care about the people and not because I support the occupation.

"I'm more pro-Palestinian than Mr Kazak because I'm demanding reform and democracy and good government for my people while he is sitting here in the comfort of Australia, preaching to us what's good and what's bad and spewing hatred.

"I don't receive threats from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I receive threats from people like Mr Kazak. When he calls me a traitor he is actually sending a message to extremists that they need to kill me simply because I am demanding reform and democracy.

"Hamas, Fatah, they know I am writing the truth. They just say to me, 'Why do you have to air the dirty linen in public?' "

But he refuses to be silent, saying he does more for Palestinian human rights and freedom of speech than Kazak, and that Palestinians in the diaspora who live cut off from the reality of life in the West Bank and Gaza do nothing to help Palestinians.

"They live in a parallel universe of leftist, radical ideology. They are much more hostile towards me than Palestinians living in Gaza or Ramallah."

While Kazak's email was intended to discredit him, Toameh says he has never been refused an interview by anyone in Fatah or Hamas. On the contrary, he broke a big story about corruption in the PA earlier this year because people within the PA came to him.

He also has written about the way Palestinians spy on each other in the West Bank, comparing it with the former East Germany. Toameh denounces the intimidation of Palestinian journalists who work in the West Bank and Gaza in an atmosphere that moves beyond fear to outright danger.

"About 2000 Palestinians have been killed in the power struggle that has been raging between Hamas and Fatah since 2007," he says, claiming it got very little coverage.

"People in the West don't get an accurate picture of what is going on.

"Both Hamas and Fatah have no respect for freedom of the media and both are cracking down on Palestinian journalists."

But Toameh says this is only part of the problem.

He says some international journalists are ignorant. "They don't speak Arabic or Hebrew, they don't know the history and they are often very biased. They don't want to report the corruption and violence within Palestinian society because it doesn't fit their narrative of good Palestinians and bad Israelis."

Toameh started his career in journalism at the Palestinian newspaper Al Fajr, but he left because it was not about journalism but propaganda.

He says, "It's ironic that people like me have to go and work in the Israeli media to be able to practice genuine journalism."

While the Australian media has given scant coverage to Abu Toameh, he has been invited to speak across the world, including spending a hour with Barack Obama.

While he thinks Obama is well-intentioned, he fears the US President's impatience to restart peace talks will be counterproductive. "After Operation Cast Lead, Hamas has stopped firing rockets from Gaza into Israel. We have a de facto ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that is holding and in the West Bank things are improving," he says.

"Now comes the peace talks [which] threaten this calm and prosperity. Why? Because core issues like Jerusalem, refugees, borders and settlements are being placed on the table once again, triggering tensions. It would have been better if Obama had waited until better times.

"If Palestinians are allowed to get on with their lives, things will continue to slowly get better. But if people are forced into peace negotiations, there are explosive issues that can't be resolved and it could end with a third intifada."

Whatever transpires, Abu Toameh, unlike his critics in the diaspora, will be there to report what is happening to the Palestinian people.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Anti-Semitic authors as "Therapists to the Jews"

From ICJS Rsearch, Wednesday May 20, 2009, by Shalom Lappin, King's College, London:

In the past few years an interesting mode of discourse has gained currency among some critics of Israel. It consists in characterizing most Israelis, and the Jews who are concerned about Israel's continued existence, as suffering from a deep collective psycho-pathology that conditions them to commit or to endorse systematic brutalization of the Palestinians. It takes Israel and its supporters to be acting out the effects of a long term historical trauma that reached its climax in the Holocaust. They are deflecting the intense anger, helplessness and shame accumulated over centuries of persecution in Europe on to innocent Arab victims in Israel/Palestine. These victims are surrogates for the real but no longer accessible oppressors of the Jews. The analogy driving this discourse is that of the abused child who grows into an abusive adult, imposing his childhood experiences of violence on members of his family and his adult environment.

Three clear examples of this psychologized view of the Israel-Palestine conflict are
  • Jacqueline Rose's book The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press, 2005),
  • Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, recently staged at the Royal Court Theatre, and
  • Anthony Lerman's article 'Must Jews always see themselves as victims' (The Independent, March 7, 2009).
Rose argues that Zionism, and the country that it created, derive from the the same psychological disorder that generated the false messianism of Shabbtai Zvi and his followers. She regards it as a form of mass hysteria generated by the inability of Jews to respond rationally to prolonged suffering.

Churchill adapts this diagnosis of Zionism to Israel's recent offensive in Gaza. She portrays Jewish children as obsessively raised with the collective memory of historical trauma as the pervasive background against which Israeli acts of murder and expulsion are justified or denied.

Lerman invokes the work of Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar Tal to claim that the inability of Israelis and Jews to deal adequately with the experience of the Holocaust has given rise to a persecution complex that is responsible for Israel's perverse behaviour towards the Palestinians, as well as the willingness of Jews abroad to support this behaviour.

There are at least five features of the psychologizing discourse worth noting.

First, it provides an ostensibly scientific basis for attributing negative properties to an ethnic group. Inter alia, most (but not all) Israelis, and many of their Diaspora Jewish supporters suffer from a blood lust. They are insensitive to the suffering of innocent Palestinians. They are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own people. They engage in illicit lobbying and hysterical political campaigning to promote a narrow and destructive group agenda. They refuse to acknowledge the normal constraints of universal human rights and morality. These are, of course, versions of longstanding anti-Jewish bigotries that infect European and Middle Eastern history. They are, however, rendered opaque and acceptable through translation into the psychological symptoms of a disturbed group. The painstaking clinical studies required to support serious psychological diagnoses are singularly absent from the psychologizing discourse. It is, in fact, a vintage case of pseudo-science in the service of prejudice. It does, however, serve an important political and cultural role. It renders acceptable attitudes and assumptions that would be inadmissible if expressed in traditional terms.

Second, the practitioners of psychologizing discourse do not, in general, present themselves as adversaries of Israel and the Jews. On the contrary, they are therapists moved by the highest motives of public responsibility. They seek to cure the patients of their collective disease by getting them to see the full extent of their malady and to recognize its roots in a historically disordered collective spirit. They do not see Israel and the Jews as evil, but as deeply pathological and in need of proper care. That they may, in many cases, prescribe a therapy that requires the patients (in the case of Israel) to cede their own collective existence is not an expression of hostility. It is a desire to free the patients from the agony that they are inflicting upon themselves and the rest of the world.

Third, this discourse is a particularly effective method for shutting down serious political discussion and controlling reaction. If members of the deranged group dissent from this account, their comments are summarily dismissed as the delusional resistance of patients to the benign efforts of the therapist to treat their illness. Moreover, events like Israel's operation in Gaza are not construed as the destructive and misguided actions of an unpleasant government, phenomena common enough in other parts of the world. They are taken to be direct expressions of a perverse national psychology working itself out with the grim inexorability of a medical condition. They require not the sort of criticism appropriate for normal people and countries, but a complete quarantine of the patients for their own good, as well as that of everyone else. Jews and Israelis do not act from the same motives that determine the behaviour, good or bad, of balanced people. Their conduct is the result of a diseased nature that requires radical revision to restore them to health.

Fourth, the psychologizing discourse contrasts with 'root cause' explanations applied to terrorist violence and extremism from oppressed groups. These explanations use past persecution to exculpate the agents of violence from responsibility for their choices. The actions that they commit are ultimately reduced to the oppression that they or their people have experienced. The therapists to the Jews do not treat Jewish suffering as a basis for mitigating Jewish or Israeli misbehaviour. Instead, it is used to highlight the depth of the pathology that generates it, and to focus on the need for drastic corrective measures, where these frequently require that Israel be politically eliminated as the best way of eradicating the disease.

Finally [fifth], the use of the psychologizing discourse for the Israel-Palestine conflict is sui generis. If anyone were to construe other conflicts in analogous terms, they would be quickly dismissed as racists or neo-colonialists. Imagine, for example, how progressive opinion would receive the suggestion that Africans were disposed to mass murder and civil war because they had been traumatized by centuries of colonial rule and so had internalized the treatment and mores to which Europeans had subjected them. Similarly, it seems unlikely that any attempt to analyze the contemporary Muslim world as suffering from a collective psychosis brought on by the trauma of European violence over the centuries will meet with much enthusiasm among people who regard themselves as politically enlightened. But it is precisely the fashionably 'progressive' who accept as the height of wisdom the psychologizing discourse about Jews and Israel.

Using group psychological profiling to attribute to Jews an unnatural and diseased nature is not new. In 1901 Otto Weininger published Sex and Character in Vienna ...distinguish[ing] between 'Aryan' and Jewish characters... Weininger wrote in turn of the century Vienna, when pseudo-scientific theories of race and sex were invoked to support racist anthropological views and misogynist attitudes towards women. These cultural themes defined the context in which Weininger formulated his ideas. They also provided the basis for Nazi policies in the following decades.

...[In] the psychologizing discourse that has emerged in recent years ...traditional anti-Jewish prejudices are effectively legitimized through a pseudo-scientific exercise in collective psychological portraiture ...[offering] an exit from group stigma through recognition of the pathology that provokes it, and the adoption of an alternative set of cultural commitments. For the Jews among the therapists, this is a route out of quarantine into the mainstream of civilized opinion. No wonder, then, that it should prove to be attractive in the face of a hostile social environment.

Most therapists to the Jews  ...have apparently failed to examine the defining assumptions of their enterprise. Should they do so, they may well be surprised to discover the deeply racist nature of some of these assumptions.

Western-Campus so-called "Pro-Palestinians" - Dangerous Idiots

From Hudson New York, March 24, 2009, by Khaled Abu Toameh, a veteran Arab Muslim, award-winning journalist who has been covering Palestinian affairs for nearly three decades:

During a recent visit to several university campuses in the U.S., I discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah.

Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber.

I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s “apartheid system” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda” and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals and universities.

The good news is that these remarks were made only by a minority of people on the campuses who describe themselves as “pro-Palestinian,” although the overwhelming majority of them are not Palestinians or even Arabs or Muslims.

The bad news is that these groups of hard-line activists/thugs are trying to intimidate anyone who dares to say something that they don’t like to hear.

When the self-designated “pro-Palestinian” lobbyists are unable to challenge the facts presented by a speaker, they resort to verbal abuse.

On one campus, for example, I was condemned as an “idiot” because I said that a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas in the January 2006 election because they were fed up with financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

On another campus, I was dubbed as a “mouthpiece for the Zionists” because I said that Israel has a free media. There was another campus where someone told me that I was a ‘liar” because I said that Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms because of his role in terrorism.

And then there was the campus (in Chicago) where I was “greeted” with swastikas that were painted over posters promoting my talk. The perpetrators, of course, never showed up at my event because they would not be able to challenge someone who has been working in the field for nearly 30 years.

What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to “resist the occupation” even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much more understanding and even welcomed my “even-handed analysis” of the Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.

The so-called pro-Palestinian “junta” on the campuses has nothing to offer other than hatred and de-legitimization of Israel. If these folks really cared about the Palestinians, they would be campaigning for good government and for the promotion of values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years.

The majority of these activists openly admit that they have never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories. They don’t know -and don’t want to know - that Jews and Arabs here are still doing business together and studying together and meeting with each other on a daily basis because they are destined to live together in this part of the world. They don’t want to hear that despite all the problems life continues and that ordinary Arab and Jewish parents who wake up in the morning just want to send their children to school and go to work before returning home safely and happily.

What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.

Many of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas officials I talk to in the context of my work as a journalist sound much more pragmatic than most of the anti-Israel, “pro-Palestinian” folks on the campuses.

Over the past 15 years, much has been written and said about the fact that Palestinian school textbooks don’t promote peace and coexistence and that the Palestinian media often publishes anti-Israel material.

While this may be true, there is no ignoring the fact that the anti-Israel campaign on U.S. campuses is not less dangerous. What is happening on these campuses is not in the frame of freedom of speech. Instead, it is the freedom to disseminate hatred and violence. As such, we should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S.

Massive wall in eastern Lebanon threatens one of Israel's primary water sources

From a DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 15, 2010:

Hizballah and Syria are building a massive fortified wall, running from Rashaya Al-Wadi on the western, Lebanese slopes of Mt. Hermon (85 kilometers southeast of Beirut) in the south, to the Lebanese Beqaa Valley town of Aita el-Foukhar, in the north...

The structure, 22 kilometers long in parallel to the Lebanese-Syrian border promises to be one of the biggest fortified structures in the Middle East. It is designed as an obstacle against any Israeli tank forces heading through Lebanon toward the Syrian capital, Damascus. When it is finished, the barrier will isolate a key Lebanese border region - 14 kilometers wide and 22 kilometers long - from the rest of the country and place it under Hizballah-Syrian military control.

This region is inhabited most by Druzes and Christians.

The project became possible in the last year, after Lebanon's Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, turned away from his pro-Western allegiance and threw in his lot with the pro-Syrian camp, lining up with Syrian president Bashar Assad and Hizballah's secretary Hassan Nasrallah and buying into the military alliance headed by Iran.

Behind the rising wall, Hizballah and Syria can freely smuggle weapons across concealed from outside surveillance, while deepening Syria's footprint in Lebanon. ...Syria intends to keep that region off-limits to Lebanese military access -except for Hizballah. Syrian troops, officers and arms stores are to be based there and maintained in a state of war readiness.

Syria stands to gain another prime strategic asset with its control of Rashaya Al-Wadi, at the southernmost point of the new wall: This scenic village commands the Taim valley, whence flow a number of water courses that feed the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee; for the first time in many years, Damascus will be placing a hand on one of Israel's primary water sources.

...the project is so immense and the work so intensive, that shops in Damascus have run out of cement, forcing many other construction works in Syria to a standstill.

Divide Jerusalem? A people that does not defend its holy places ...is not free...

Further to this recent post about Jerusalem Day:

[QUOTE]...

The dispute over the Wailing Wall and the Old City is probably a reflection of the whole struggle for the ownership of Eretz Yisrael.

It must be said to the credit of the British authorities that they understood very well the political value of traditional symbols. It was in English, not in Hebrew, that Disraeli wrote that people are led by force or by tradition.

British policy therefore directed its shafts at the heart of Jewish tradition. As elsewhere it used Arabs or Moslems. ...they wrote [in 1929] with superb impertinence[,] that the Moslems had the sole right of ownership and possession of the Wailing Wall ...and "Jews are forbidden to blow the shofar at the Wailing Wall." ...that of course was the law against which there could be no appeal.

Sacred tradition? Living testimony  to a glorious past? A charter of rights hewn into ancient stone?

Precisely for these reasons must the stones of the wall be taken from the Jews.

And how helpful it was for this purpose that among the Jews themselves there were unexpected allies who, in snobbish pretence of "progress," argued that a few pedigree cows were worth more than all these stones.

But the ancient stones themselves refute the nonsense of these pathetic "progressives" ...They whisper. They speak softly of the house that once stood here, kings who knelt here once in prayer, of prophets and seers who here declaimed their messge, of heroes who fell here dying; and of how the great flame ...was here kindled. ...The testimony of these stones, sending out their light across the generations.

...That  night [Yom Kippur, 1943] ...we said to eachother: "This is the real slavery. What the Roman proconsuls did not dare to do, British Commissionners are doing. What our ancestors refused to tolerate from their ancient opressors, even at the cost of their lives and freedom - is tolerated by [a] generation of Jews...

A people that does not defend its holy places ...is not free...

...[UNQUOTE]

Menachim Begin, "The Revolt" 1952