Rumours floating

Rumours are surfacing of plans for another ‘massive Israeli attack’ on Lebanon – leaked first a few days ago by a French military source after a meeting in France between top Israeli, French and US military brass. Hizbullah has been busy lately reinforcing its positions, and talked about spring 2010 as the projected date (owing to the soil being too soft in winter for the Merkava tanks to drive on). Now the rumour has been restated by Nahar’s Washington correspondent: ‘Khalil Flaihan said international military authorities have warned Lebanon that Israel plans to launch a massive attack targeting Hizbullah positions. It said Israel is also likely to “widen its aggression to include large areas of Lebanon” under the pretext that Hizbullah continues to receive “heavy and sophisticated weapons” via Syria. Diplomatic sources in Beirut did not rule out the possibility that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could raise the issue of the seized ship alledgedly carrying weapons for Hizbullah and the explosions that took place in Khirbit Selim and Teir Felsay as well as the Katyusha firing from the southern town of Houla. The sources pointed out that Natanyahu would exploit these incidents to accuse Hizbullah of breaching Resolution 1701 “posing a real threat to Israel’s security and that its armed forces are ready for any emergency.”‘ But hey, not to worry: ‘They said the U.S. and French presidents, however, are unlikely to approve any new Israeli offensive against Lebanon.’ Meanwhile Lebanese civilians continue to get injured and killed by the cluster bombs left behind after the last Israeli massacre.

Meanwhile, the unexpected has happened – a tentative Lebanese government has been formed – although already there is a possibility that some ministers, unhappy with the less than prestigious and/or lucrative portfolio assigned to them, will not show up for the official first picture opportunity…

QED

“You are leading the forces in the field,” the army chief told cadets. “The IDF permanently stands in one of two situations: war or preparation for war. We must continue to prepare for war; otherwise there is no justification for the existence of the IDF.”

The coming invasion… of Israel

I have been arguing for a while now (although not on the blog) that the next logical step for Hizbullah, in case of a new Israeli attack, would be to invade the north of Israel. This would mean the end of the Anglo-American colonial project in Palestine. The psychological effect on the Israelis of  actually losing land,  for the first time since 1948, would be devastating enough to induce an already demoralised settler population to flee in droves on the first plane, boat or bicycle available. All the Hizb would need to do is take a strip of 10 kilometers or so in the north and resettle the (armed) Palestinian refugees of Lebanon there, in addition to the Palestinians still living there. Now it seems the Israeli military are for the first time publicly recognising this option too – and decrying their utter lack of preparedness for this scenario. Al-Akhbar reports: ‘وبناءً على ذلك يشدّد الضابط على أن «الحرب المقبلة ستكون على شاكلة هجوم متشابك على الحدود، في داخل إسرائيل ومن الجو».

ودرس الضابط التهديدات الصادرة عن الأمين العام لحزب الله، حسن نصر الله، وتوصّل إلى أن «العدو سيجتاح في الحرب المقبلة شمال إسرائيل، وتحديداً منطقة الجليل، بواسطة الآلاف من المجموعات التي تتكوّن كلّ منها من أربعة إلى خمسة مقاتلين، مدرّبين جيداً ويحملون أسلحة رشّاشة متوسطة، وصواريخ مضادة للدروع، إضافةً إلى قنّاصات وأسلحة خفيفة»، مشيراً إلى أنه «فور دخول هذه المجموعات إلى إسرائيل، سيحظون بمساعدة من البنية التحتية التي سيوفّرها السكان العرب»، في إشارة إلى فلسطينيي أراضي عام 1948.’
ويؤكد الضابط الإسرائيلي أنه «ليس لدى الجيش الإسرائيلي ردّ على سيناريو مشابه، حتى الآن، وليس قادراً على منع هذه المجموعات من دخول إسرائيل.. بل إن تفوق سلاح الجو لم يعد قاطعاً، وعدد المطارات قليل، وتقع جميعها اليوم في مدى الصواريخ»، مشدّداً على أن «سلاح الجو الجبار محبوس في جسد قزم».’

Let me translate that for you: ‘Elaborating on this subject, the [Israeli] officer stresses that: “the coming war will take the form of an interwoven attack on the border, on the interior of Israel and from the air”. The officer has studied the threats made by Hizbullah’s secretary general Hasan Nasrallah and concludes that “in the coming war, the enemy will sweep the north of Israel, threatening the Galilee using thousands of groups consisting each of four to five well-trained fighters carrying medium-size assault rifles, anti-tank missiles, sniper rifles and light weapons”. He points out that inside Israel these groups will benefit from the support of the [existing Israeli] infrastructure handed over to them by the Arab population, ass he refers to the Palestinians in the land of 1948. The Israeli officer affirms that the IDF has at present no response to such a scenario and would be unable to prevent these groups from entering Israel… Moreover, the superiority of the IAF will not be decisive, as the number of airports is limited and all of them have now come within the range of [Hizbullah's] missiles”. He refers to the IAF as “a giant trapped in the body of a dwarf”.’

Why Israel is bad for jews pt.7

I have just read the excellent study ‘Non-jewish Zionism: its roots in western history’ by Regina S. Sharif (Zed Press, London 1983), in which she traces the origins of zionism to a bunch of rather anti-semitic English and American protestant puritans in the 18th and 19th centuries. Remember how protestantism was all about reading the bible for yourself, in your own language, instead of relying on corrupt authoritarian catholic clergymen babbling in latin? Unfortunately, when protestants talk about the bible, they refer mainly to the old testament. They also tend to literal interpretations of the text (not unlike salafi sunnis). Some saw the fulfillment of the prophecy in the bible which has the jews returning to Israel – and converting to christianity, incidentally – just before the last judgment, as a felicitous approach to solving the ‘problem’ of the jews in their own countries (i.e. they wanted them out).It was essentially a non-jewish idea and it is only after Hitler’s holocaust that zionism really found support on a large scale among the jews themselves. Or did it? But why take the word of mere goyim like Regina and me for it, read for yourself why many of the jews themselves dislike and oppose Israel (and remember, the majority of global jewry has never gone to live there even when it still looked like it had a future). The following is found on the website of Neturei Karta, a vocal orthodox jewish anti-zionist organisation in the US:
‘The Zionists claim that they are the saviors of Israel, but this is refuted by twelve things:
FIRST — If one contemplates the two thousand years of our exile, take any hundred years even the hardest, one will not find as much suffering, bloodshed, and catastrophes for the People of Israel [as] in the period of the Zionists, and it is known that most of the suffering of this century was caused by the Zionists, as our Rabbis warned us would be the case.
SECOND — It is openly stated in books written by the founders of Zionism that the means by which they planned to establish a state was by instigating anti-Semitism, and undermining the security of the Jews in all the lands of the world, until they would be forced to flee to their state. And thus they did – They intentionally infuriated the German people and fanned the flames of Nazi hatred, and they helped the Nazis, with trickery and deceit, to take whole Jewish communities off to the concentration camps, and the Zionists themselves admit this. (See the books ‘Perfidy’, ‘Min Hameitzor’, etc.). The Zionists continue to practice this strategy today. They incite anti-Semitism and then they present themselves as the “saviors”. Here are two replies given by Leaders of the Zionists during World War II, when they were asked for money to help ransom Jews from the Nazis. Greenbaum said “One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland.” (G-d forbid). Weitzman said, “The most important part of the Jewish people is already in the land (of Israel) and those who are left, are unimportant” (May we be spared).
THIRD — We see that most of world Jewry lives in security and under good physical conditions, and have no desire to go live in the Zionist State. Whereas many people have left the Zionist State to live under better conditions in other lands.
FOURTH — The Zionists make a great deal of propaganda to induce people to immigrate to their state. If their state is so beneficial why do they have to make so much propaganda.
FIFTH — Because nobody wants the Zionists to “save” them. The only way they can get immigrants is by promising poor people material benefits, and even then very few people respond.

Why Israel is bad for jews pt. 5

You may see Bostrom’s article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on the IDF ‘harvesting’ Palestinian organs  as a golden present for Israel to cry ‘blood libel’ and ‘antisemitism’ over, or alternatively you could consider Israel’s strenuous and wholescale denial of the article as a proof that there must be at least some truth to it. Regardless, it has generated a healthy debate aboout an issue which has consistently gone unreported and hence uninvestigated. This is what the ever clearheaded and well-informed Jonathan Cook has to say about it: ‘(…), when Israeli politicians are able to cry “blood libel” or “anti-semitism” when they are criticised, damaging the reputations of those they accuse, what incentive do they have to initiate inquiries that may harm them or the institutions they oversee? What reason do they have to be honest when they can bludgeon a critic into silence, at no cost to themselves? This is the meaning of the phrase “Power corrupts”, and Israeli politicians and soldiers, as well as at least one pathologist, demonstrably have far too much power — most especially over Palestinians under occupation.’

Alison Weir cites the way even Israeli citizens get treated in Israel’s hospitals: ‘Israel’s very first, historic heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent or consulting his family. In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (…) died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.” After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke. When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing. During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers. The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three cabinet ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used. The hospital explained that it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without the family’s consent. (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its definition of human exploitation.) Indications that the removal of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed. (…) “Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).”’

Perceptions and realities

‘How ironic that many Lebanese gay men, including myself, actually feel more comfortable in places like Damascus or Amman and go there often in order to escape the Beiruti agitation. There might be no Kylie Minogue nights there, but on the other hand there is a lot less snobbery and less fuss about homosexuality. My friend Ali recently went to Jordan to be wedded to his boyfriend by a Muslim cleric and then spent his honeymoon in Damascus. The advantage of such trips also comes in finding an anonymity one is denied at home.But even Amman seems to have its “globalised” gay crowd. Watching Ugly Betty and wearing D&G is what gay culture is about, these people seem to say, along with the NYT article and many gay men across the global village. I can still remember how discovering Steven, the gay character in Dynasty, during my childhood in the 1980s, opened a whole new perspective for me. It is another matter altogether to equate this mass consumption with gay culture, or even with gay rights advocacy. Just as Beirut’s old neighbourhoods are being gentrified, its “superb architecture” (sic) being torn down to make way for soulless, surveillance-camera-equipped skyscrapers, its local gay culture is facing the challenge of McDonaldisation. How long before writers start describing Beirut as a new Bangkok – rather than a Provincetown? Will sex tourism advance its population’s gay rights or social wellbeing? In the meantime, Beirut is certainly turning back into the playground of multinational companies, regional interests and greedy entrepreneurs.’

This, by the way, is only the second reference I ever heard to Sunni sheikhs performing gay marriages – the other case reportedly occurred some years ago in Kuwait, where a sheikh married two women – but only because one of them was actually born as a man and had undergone a sex change: as his birth certificate asserted he was a man, however, the sheikh saw no legal problem there.

As-Safir, a Lebanese nespaper, publishes an opinion poll (links to article in Arabic) by al-Sharika ad-Duwaliyya li-l-Mu3allamat which dismisses the usual dominant view that pictures Lebanon as a country divided between an anti-Syrian/Iranian (and thus pro-US/Israeli) ‘majority’ and a pro-Syrian/Iranian (and ergo anti-US/Israeli) ‘opposition’. In fact, the results show that a solid 93.9% of the Lebanese continue to see Israel as enemy nr. 1 (ranging from 89% of the Maronite christians to 98% of the Druze), followed by the US at 64.8%. Asked about friendly and protective countries, Syria (72.3%) and Iran (68.6%) were only surpassed by Qatar (86.8%) – a marked change from the same company’s poll of june 2008, in which Syria and Iran only scored 46.5% and 40% respectively. The US, on the other hand, slid in popularity from 37.3% to 26.5%, and Saudi Arabia (despite virtually single-handedly holding up the Lebanese sex tourism industry) from 60.6% to 53%. As for the biggest current threat to Lebanon’s security, Hizbullah’s weapons were considered so by a smashing 5.5%, while Israel is seen thus by 48.2% of the Lebanese. Which leaves us with the burning question: if 6.1% of the Lebanese do not see Israel as a threat to their country, but only 5.5% (presumably covering the same respondents) see Hizbullah as a threat to Lebanon, than what on earth is going on in the minds of the 0.6% that is left? And who are they? The cannabis exporters? The Israeli spy network? The error margin? So many questions…

Why Israel is bad for jews pt. 4

Stephen Lendman writes in al-Ahram: ‘Rabbi Dov Lior, chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council: “There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them… A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.” Rabbi David Batsri called Arabs “a blight, a devil, a disaster… donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn’t create them to walk on all fours. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean.” Extremist zealots want them for no other purpose in Jewish society.
In 2007, Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, called for the Israeli army to mass murder Palestinians. In fanatical language he said: “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1,000. And if they don’t stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”
In March 2009, Safed’s chief rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu called for “state-sponsored revenge” to restore “Israel’s deterrence… It’s time to call the child by its name: revenge, revenge, revenge. We mustn’t forget. We have to take horrible revenge for the terrorist attack at Mercaz Harav yeshiva,” referring to an earlier incident in which eight students died. “I am not talking about individual people in particular. I’m talking about the state. (It) has to pain them where they scream ‘Enough,’ to the point where they fall flat on their face and scream ‘help!’”
In June 2009, US Hasidic Rabbi Manis Friedman voiced a similar sentiment in calling on Israel to kill Palestinian “men, women and children”. “I don’t believe in Western morality, ie don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during the holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, and don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”
Views like these aren’t exceptions. Though a minority, they proliferate throughout Israeli society, and are common enough to incite violence against Palestinians, even when they rightfully defend themselves as international law allows. (…) The earlier influence of fundamentalist Rabbi Abraham Kook (1865-1935), or Kuk, was significant. He preached Jewish supremacy and said: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” His teachings helped create the settler movement, and his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, founded the extremist Gush Emunim (GE) under the slogan: “The Land of Israel, for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel.” Like the elder Kook, GE sees state power as a way forward to a new messianic era. It believes that God created the world for Jews. Others are lesser beings. Greater Israel belongs to Jews alone, and holy wars are acceptable to attain it.
Kook was Israel’s first chief rabbi. In his honour, and to continue his teachings, the extremist Merkaz Harav (the Rabbi’s Centre) was founded in 1924 as a yeshiva or fundamentalist religious college. It teaches that, “non-Jews living under Jewish law in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) must either be enslaved as water carriers and wood hewers, or banished, or exterminated.”‘

Why Israel is bad for jews pt.3

This must be the most imaginative conspiracy theory since the ‘North Korea supplies Syria with nuclear technology’-hype: ‘The book describes the alleged visit of Hezbollah officials to Auschwitz, led by the Vatican: “We came to the camps. We saw the trains, the platforms, the piles of eyeglasses and clothes … We came to learn … Our escort spoke as he was taught. We quickly explained to him: Every real Arab, deep inside, is kind of a fan of the Nazis.”‘ Sounds like a real-life conversation to you? ‘Our escort spoke as he was taught’? Excuse me? And there’s us thinking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was the most ridiculously ‘how to make up a conspiracy in 12 easy lessons’-thing you could possibly come up with… Take a lesson from the masters of paranoia: ‘The booklet was published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, in cooperation with the chief rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliahu, and has been distributed for the past few months. The booklet, titled “On Either Side of the Border,” purports to be the testimony of “a Hezbollah officer who spied for Israel.”  “The book is distributed regularly [in the IDF] and everyone reads it and believes it,” said one soldier. “It’s filled with made-up details but is presented as a true story. A whole company of soldiers, adults, told me: ‘Read this and you’ll understand who the Arabs are.’” Bets on the survival of a colonising power that places its trust in this kind of crap, anyone? No one? Yeah well…

Elections, democracy et al

Noam Chomsky sums up the various (non-)electoral and (un)democratic events of the past month (June 2009) in Lebanon, Iran and Honduras, painting the broader picture and drawing the obvious comparisons with Palestine 2006 and the US 2008: ‘One can argue that Iranian “guided democracy” has structural analogues in the US, where elections are largely bought, and candidates and programs are effectively “vetted” by concentrations of capital. A striking illustration is being played out right now. It is hardly controversial that the disastrous US health system is a high priority for the public, which, for a long time, has favored national health care, an option that has been kept off the agenda by private power. In a limited shift towards the public will, Congress is now debating whether to allow a public option to compete with insurers, a proposal with overwhelming popular support. The opposition, who regard themselves as free market advocates, charge that the proposal would be unfair to the private sector, which will be unable to compete with a more efficient public system. Though a bit odd, the argument is plausible. As economist Dean Baker points out, “We know that private insurers can’t compete because we already had this experiment with the Medicare program. When private insurers had to compete on a level playing field with the traditional government-run plan they were almost driven from the market.” Savings from a government program would be even greater if, as in other countries, the government were permitted to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical corporations, an option supported by 85% of the population but also not on the agenda. “Unless Congress creates a serious public plan,” Baker writes, Americans “can expect to be hit with the largest tax increase in the history of the world — all of it going into the pockets of the health care industry.” That is a likely outcome, once again, in the American form of “guided democracy.” And it is hardly the only example.’

Why Israel is bad for jews pt.2

“I believed that if we crave life in this Mideast arena, we have to sometimes just ‘go crazy’. The government’s decision to launch the campaign was right and expressed an understanding of reality.” Dan Halutz, a wanted war criminal, talks about the July 2006 war of aggression he led on Lebanon. Translation of this childish attempt at doublespeak: “For us Israelis to live in the Middle East, we have to continually aggress, terrorise and massacre the people who have lived here for millennia before we came and stole their lands and started to ethnically cleanse them.”

And now for the duh-moment: this counts as informed opinion and sharp insight in the apartheid country: ‘The sad Israeli experience teaches us that this is in fact one long war, which started in 1948 (and there are those who say it started even earlier) and which merely keeps on changing its name.’ Well, yes, dude, that’s what colonies are. That’s what they were and always will be – one long continuous war of occupation. Don’t like it? Go back home. You will be forced to in the end anyway, so why not go now and save yourselves and all of us the misery and violence and wars that are yet to come? Nobody will miss you around here…