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.”‘

Back home…

After a few busy weeks work-honeymoon-reunion-holiday in Belgium, I made it back to this country, which has managed to not have a government yet in the time Belgium got five of them together. Meanwhile, Irael is upping the threats of another war, which is being taken seriously by nobody but the most paranod (on the grounds that barking dogs don’t bite, and on the grounds that it will mean the virtual end of ‘Israel’).

Some titbits that did happen and characterise this of this wonderful country full of contradictions in a superb way: ‘On a nice Sunday afternoon, one Mercedes ML350, a big black SUV, is heading towards Faqra. On board are two couples planning to have lunch in a restaurant in the area. The car has black dimmed glass all over– remember that this type of glass has been ruled illegal on civilian vehicles. Passenger #1: “Cool ride dude.” Sami (a Typical Lebanese): “Thanks man. It’s my dad’s you know, but all of the extras are the handy work of yours truly.” Passenger #1: “What extras?”And on it roared.For no more than $100, Sami had managed to buy himself the most outrageous, and illegal, of gadgets. He had in his car a police siren device complete with a public address system and a sound amplifier. Is there a need to mention that such a device should belong exclusively to Internal Security police cars? Sami pushed the siren button which instantly started to wail in the most atrocious of ways. He held the microphone to his lips and mimicked the line usually repeated by internal security forces (ISF) when “someone important” is blessing the commoners with his presence among them on the streets. “Silver Toyota move to the right!” And the poor woman driving the Toyota actually moved to the right side of the street. The incident had a surrealist quality: Typical Lebanese– Sami had actually perfected the aggressive tone of ISF officers who always sound like caffeine addicts deprived of their daily dose of the drug. He was maniacally speeding down the sloping hills of Rayfoun, pushing the siren on and on again (the image of a laughing Joker from Batman movies comes to mind), and cars around were obediently moving away from this important-looking death machine.’

Ben Gilbert, in Executive Magazine, writes a comprehensive article on the state of prostitution, which strangely enough turns out to be legal in this country, albeit in typical Lebanese fashion: ‘Siranossian calls the super nightclubs
a “fantastic” solution to the problem of prostitution, because it allows the government to regulate and oversee the industry, somewhat akin to the way escort services operate in the US or Europe. Charbel verifies this, noting that
police usually stop in three or four times a week. “They’re checking to see if the woman is in the club, and hasn’t
gone out with a customer,” he said. Even then, it appears that circumventing the law is relatively easy. Policecorruption in Lebanon is nothing new, and several people acquainted with the industry said that in the past, law enforcement has often looked the other way if enough money is offered. “The law was permitting us,” he said. “When the police come, we’d pay a lot of money, and they’d forget everything for one week, two weeks,” he said.’ (pdf of the article via Qifa Nabki, here).

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…

Cabinet negotiations and arms cache explosions

The eminently relevant and deliciously ironic Elias Mutannah (known in the blogosphere as Qifa Nabki) has a comprehensive overview of the complications involved in the formation of Lebanon’s new government: ‘Consider the various matrices that Hariri is operating with. In most parliamentary democracies, the goal of the ruling party is typically to form a government with the smallest possible coalition that can gain the confidence of the legislative chamber. In Lebanon’s case, the goal is to form a government with the largest possible coalition without completely crippling the executive branch through perpetual veto-enforced gridlock. It’s not pretty, but this is the solution that everyone is committed to this time around. Add to this opening principle a variety of other distributional conventions and you have  a recipe for a very complicated process indeed. For example, the cabinet is typically supposed to be split equally between Christians and Muslims. Furthermore, Maronites, Sunnis, and Shiites are usually given the same share each. In a thirty-member cabinet, this would mean that there would have to be 15 Christians (e.g., 6 Maronites and 9 non-Maronites) and 15 Muslims (e.g., 6 Sunnis, 6 Shiites, and 3 Druzes). Before you can go about parceling out seats, however, you need to know how many each coalition is going to get. Here we run into the old veto issue. Hariri is negotiating different opposition demands, ranging from Aoun and Frangieh’s request for full proportional representation (which would amount to 45% of the cabinet or 13 ministers), to a simple veto share (11 seats), to Hizbullah and Amal’s constructive ambiguity (which is presumably open to a 10 seat share along with certain “guarantees” in the cabinet declaration.) Finally, there is the issue of foreign interests. Syria would like its allies to have a veto share and would like it even better if Hariri came to Damascus before announcing the cabinet (highly unlikely indeed). The Saudis would like to reserve as much power for M14, but there have been rumblings about a possible opening to Damascus as a means of drawing it back into the Arab fold. Given the number of square pegs awaiting insertion into round holes, where does a novice PM-designate even begin?  The formula most talked about is the so-called 15-10-5 split (for M14, M8, and the President, respectively), which has a certain elegance about it. For legislation on ordinary issues, M14 would not be able to push through its agenda without help from the President’s ministers, a fact that would seem to strengthen the President’s role as a true consensual figure, and not just a symbolic one. At the same time, the opposition would not be able to block legislation on the “issues of national importance” that require a cabinet supermajority, without the help of the president as well. His ministers would represent the crucial swing vote.’

In other news, the Israeli government gives us yet another proof of its astonishing hypocrisy – if not sheer mental confusion – in claiming that the purported explosion yesterday of ‘a ‘Hizbullah weapons cache’ in Khirbet Silim is proof that ‘iran and Syria’ are not abiding by UNSC resolution 1701. Uhm, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t UNSC resolution 1701 (or at least the part of it that Israel selectively likes to focus on) call for the disarming of Hizbullah? And what is the explosion of a weapons cache if not the destruction of arms, i.e. a step on the road to disarmament? So shouldn’t the zionist occupation government be applauding this new tendency? Really, there’s just no pleasing these shlomos…

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…

Of hashish and potatoes – and illiteracy

Mitch Prothero in the National, here: ‘Mr Jafaar repeats a refrain commonly heard during more than a dozen meetings The National held with current and former drug traffickers in the Beqaa Valley and Beirut. “I assure you that government officials bring in the cocaine and take out the hashish. The growers are the poorest people involved.” With a series of successful legitimate businesses, Mr Jafaar said he no longer needs to grow and sell drugs. However, the obstacles to making an honest living for farmers in north Beqaa, he said, are insurmountable for most and so drugs remained the only viable option.“I am a potato grower, but I only grow them because I can afford to grow them. It takes almost a million dollars to prepare 1,000 dunums [one dunum is equal to about 1,000 square metres] of land for potatoes. It costs less than US$1,000 (Dh3,670) to prepare the same amount for hashish and the dealers will lend the farmer the money. What does the government do but steal the aid money meant for farmers and allow Syrian farmers to enter our market with cheaper products. It’s impossible,” Mr Jafaar said.’

Illustrating the claim of the government structurally neglecting the Beqaa valley (as well as the south of Lebanon) for as long as anyone cares to remember is the UN’s newly released national human development report for Lebanon, which states among other things that: ‘adult literacy (measured among those above 15 years of age) is highest in Beirut, where only 6.1 percent of the population cannot read by adulthood. In Nabetieh, by contrast, the illiteracy rate reaches 16.7 percent. The rate rises even higher in the Bekaa, reaching 16.8 percent.’ (This links to he Daily Star – for the full NHDR see  – well, nowhere really, because although the UNDP has taken the time and effort to report on the festive launch of the report in the prestigious Phoenicia hotel in Beirut  – in the presence of many of the politicians who are responsible for this systematic neglect of half of the country in the first place – it apparently hasn’t taken the time and effort yet to actually put the report itself online… which says a whole lot about the UN and its priorities).

Why Israel is bad for jews pt. 1

In response to discussions I often have with people in Beirut and elsewhere, I am starting a series of posts which will link to articles and news items mentioning the reasons why Israel as an exclusively jewish ‘nation’ state (‘nation’ because the jews are a religious community and not a people or a nation in any genetic or even cultural sense) and as a Euro-American imperialist project (where Arab, African and Asian jews are treated as second-class citizens, only barely above the third-class citizen level of the native non-jewish Arabs) is walking on its last legs. When people ask me why I came to live in this region, I often tell them ‘I came to witness the death of Israel’. Incredulous looks and sarcastic answers such as ‘well, you’ll be around for a long time then’ typically follow. But I am sincerely convinced that the end of one of the world’s last overtly colonial projects is very near. Global public opinion is reaching the levels of critical mass that forced the South African apartheid regime out of existence. The slow but sure economic and imperial demise of the US (caused in no small measure by Israel’s virtual takeover of the US political establishment) is another factor. So is the fact of the IDF’s reversed military fortunes at the hands of Hizbullah in 2000 and again in 2006. This ‘army’ is now forced to slaughter defenceless civilians in Gaza in order to ‘restore its self-confidence and power of ‘deterrence’. But the most important contribution is made by the Israeli political and military establishment’s combination of ridiculous hubris and self-complacent blindness to what is happening around them – Israel as it is now will simply suicide by itself. And that moment is near, although very few people are able to see it now. If you have read any history, you will be aware that empires have always collapsed at the exact moment when they seemed strongest and most invulnerable, and very few observers ever see the collapse coming. None of this, by the way, should be construed as ‘anti-semitism’: a lot of zionists and pro-Israel fanatics are not jews, and conversely  most jews are not zionists or even particularly pro-Israel. Neither is it a matter of ‘driving the jews into the sea’ or such nonsense – white South Africans are still living in post-apartheid South Africa, and they still dominate that country economically – I foresee something similar happening to the jews of Israel after their regime has collapsed and some kind of modus vivendi is established with the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle Eastern population in a new state (and no, the ‘two-state solution’ doesn’t stand a prayer’s chance in hell – it is way too late for that).

The tell-tale signs of Israel’s imminent demise include a continuing negative immigration record (Israel has never succeeded in attracting more than a minority of the world’s jews, despite the mossad’s vicious anti-semitic terroroist campaigns in Arab countries and elsewhere), the presence of anti-semitic skinheads imported from Russia in Israel and even in the IDF, the increasingly desperate legal attempts to oppress even the freedom of expression of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, the loss of allegiance of the Israeli druze, the increasing difficulty of the Israeli propaganda machine to convince public opinion worldwide of their ‘moral superiority’ and ‘purity of arms’, and there are many others. Here’s an article by Jonathan Cook detailing one of the ways in which zionists are the jews’ worst enemies, as well as one of the ways in which Israel is increasingly squandering any moral capital and goodwill they may have left in the eyes of both jews and others around the world: ‘A quarter of a million Holocaust survivors are reported to be in Israel, with one-third of them living in poverty, according to welfare organisations.
Shraga Elam, an Israeli investigative financial journalist based in Zurich, said after the war many Israelis showed little sympathy for the European Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel. “David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] notoriously called them ‘human dust’, and I remember as children we referred to them as sabonim, the Hebrew word for soap,” he said, in reference to the rumoured Nazi practice of making soap from Jewish corpses. “In fact, I can’t think of any place in the world where [Holocaust] survivors are as badly treated as they are in Israel,” Mr Elam said. He said Bank Leumi’s “lost” accounts were only a small fraction of Holocaust assets held by Israeli companies and the Israeli state that should have been returned. The total could be as much as $20bn.’

Peru not Iran

I absolutely agree with Johann Hari that the current uprising in Peru is far more significant on a global scale than the over-exposed protests in Iran (not to mention the long overdue death of a walking plastic-surgery-warning annex has-been-superstar): ‘While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine. In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.’ Which is infinitely more inspiring and interesting than the undecided outcome between two feuding rapacious, corrupt and fundamentalist elite figures, even if the tensions in Iran’s society have now risen to the point where frustrated youth without a future will use any excuse to riot. To a background of the US and the UK desperately trying to pull off another 1953 and start the cycle all over again: ‘After all was said and done, Prime Minister Mossadegh had been deposed and a military coup returned the monarchy to Iran by installing the pro-western Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the Peacock throne. The Shah’s brutal, tyrannical dictatorship – established, supported, and funded by the United States – lasted 26 years. In 1979, the Iranian people returned the favor.’

Oh, and what I presumed earlier tonight (while packing stuff to move house) was more celebatory gunfire and some wedding involving fireworks, was actually a fight between Amal and Mustaqbal militias involving guns and RPGs which killed – surprise, surprise – an innocent passer-by and none of the courageous heroes involved on either side… – in a minor replay of the Iranian feud between two etc etc. And note how naharnet keeps referring to the May 2008 clashes as ’sectarian’, whereas they were purely and obviously political.

Oh bis, Netanyahu has announced that a government involving seven Hezbollah ministers will be held responsible for etc etc bla bla bla… How Haaretz (or Reuters?) knows that there will be seven Hezbollah ministers in the yet-to-be-negotiated new government is worth wondering about in the first place (Hezbollah and Amal together had only five ministers in the last government and they are furthermore supposed to have ‘lost’ these elections), but seriously – don’t these shlomos ever get it? Yes, Israel, you will still get the blame when you go off on your next ethnic massacre, whatever you say. Because it’s what you do that matters, not what you say.  And then we will be another step closer to the end of the ongoing suicidal saga that is Israel, its own worst enemy now as before. A saga that will reach its catharsis much sooner than generally expected. Critical mass is accumulating...

Debunking the Friedman myths

Deen Sharp at his Lebanese Elections blog writes a useful and concise piece debunking the main myths spun by Friedman and other opinion makers in the Western press about the recent elections – and which make very little sense to anybody following the situation on the ground:

‘1. A solid majority of Lebanese Christians voted against the list of Michel Aoun (as stated by Friedman in his candy floss covered article). The FPM itself has 10 MPs, which is the same as the LF and Kataeb combined so the FPM is still the largest Christian party. While, the Change and Reform bloc consists of 27 MPs only beaten by the March 14 bloc itself. A solid majority of Christians did not vote against Aoun.
2. A solid majority of all Lebanese — Muslims, Christians and Druse — voted for the March 14 coalition led by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri (again Friedman). The popular vote went 800,000 for March 8 (and FPM) and 700,000 for March 14. A solid majority of all Lebanese did not vote for the March 14 coalition. This was still a confessional electoral system and the vote was split along confessional lines, except in the Christian areas, thus “all Lebanese” did not vote for March 14.
3.Obama’s speech won the elections for March 14 and that the visits by Biden and Clinton persuaded Christian voters to vote for March 14 (Simon Tisdall of the Guardian and many other international commentators): While, of course this is not very tangible and is a simple matter of opinion I challenge this comment on the basis of where the elections were won: Zahle that went 7-0 to March 14 a result even the most ardent March 14 supporters were not expecting. The primary reason for this win is the 70% turnout of the Sunni population that occurred because of extensive persuasion by Saad Hariri. I have been told by someone working at the Kataeb offices on election day that Hariri made a call to coax Sunni voters to go out and vote, at around 3pm they came in bus loads. The idea that this exceptional Sunni turnout was becuase they were inspired by the Obama/Biden/Clinton (OBC) brigade to go out and vote in such force is highly suspect. I would even doubt many in Zahle even know who Biden and Clinton are and am suspicious as to how much the Sunnis of Zahle like Obama regardless of how many Quranic verses he quotes! In Beirut One, the other vital district, it may be more believable that the OBC brigade had some sort of effect. Personally, I feel it is much more likely that May 7th of last year when Hezbollah took over much of Beirut and the Aoun-Hezbollah agreement over 2006 cost the FPM the five seats in this district. In both districts and nationally Patriarch Sfeir’s last minute intervention on the side of March 14 is seen as having a significant effect in persuading Christian voters to go vote for March 14. But of course for most western commentators this does not fit into the secular-democratic-Obama-miracle that is March 14 against Iran narrative they are constructing.‘ The emphasis is mine: this is an important point, which is also reflected in the Western mass media largely ignoring decidedly undemocratic and unsecular Saudi Arabia supporting the 14th of March with large wads of money, reportedly spending more on Hariri’s re-election than the entire campaign budget of Barack Obama himself – this in a country with barely 4 million inhabitants and an electorate of roughly a million and a half. It also ignores the presence in Hariri’s bloc of important factions of both sunni and christian fundamentalists, and the extent to which March 14th has played on sectarian fears and explicit racism and ‘shiaphobia’ during their entire campaign – and of which Sfeir’s remark is only one example.)