Zionist McCarthyism Rides High in US Colleges - but not High Enough!!

I was in the middle of posting an article about yet another example of McCarthyism in American colleges, this time by City University of New York when I came across an article in Ha'aretz of 7.5.11. stating that having withdrawn an offer of an honorary degree, CUNY had now withdrawn the withdrawal!!

This is a good victory over the Zionist right and one Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld who is a naked racist on CUNY's board. Let's hope CUNY gets rid of the KKK element that it is incubating.

Now there would have been a very good argument for barring Ed Koch, a former New York Mayor, anti-Arab racist and someone who counts as a friend John Hagee President of the Southern Baptists and a man who has described Hitler as god's messenger.

Tony Greenstein

City University of New York Prevents Award of Honorary Degree to Tony Kushner

I was in the middle of writing this article about another example of Zionist McCarthyism in the USA when I came across a Haaretz article

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s Israel views presumably behind rare move.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011, Doug Chandler

In what is believed to be a rare move, the City University of New York has turned down a request by one of its colleges to honor Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner at its commencement ceremony this spring, The Jewish Week has learned.

The action was taken presumably because of the author's critical comments concerning the State of Israel.

The move took place at a meeting of CUNY's board of trustees Monday night after one of its members, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, raised objections to plans to honor Kushner by John Jay College, one of the system's schools.

The outcome may have been the first time in CUNY's history that its board of trustees vetoed an honorary-degree candidate proposed by one of its schools, according to a source with knowledge of the university.

Each college within CUNY chooses its own honorary-degree candidates and sends those names to the CUNY board, which then normally approves the entire list of candidates, from all the system's schools, as a package.

This year, that list included former Mayor Edward Koch and Bernard Spitzer, the father of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, both of whom will receive Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from the City College of New York; Joel Klein, the city's former schools chancellor, who will receive the same honorary degree from CUNY; and Judith S. Kaye, the state's former chief judge and John Jay College's other honorary-degree candidate.

But Wiesenfeld, a board member of several Jewish organizations and an activist in conservative circles, spoke out against plans to honor Kushner, who, like others receiving honorary degrees, may have spoken at the graduation ceremony.

Wiesenfeld cited what he believed were some of Kushner's anti-Israel statements, all of which he said he found on the website of Norman Finkelstein, another figure known for his vehemently anti-Israel views.

When people identify themselves with "these types of viewpoints," Wiesenfeld told his fellow trustees, "it's up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things," especially when Israel sits in such a hostile neighborhood. "There's a lot of disingenuousness and non-intellectual activity directed against the State of Israel on campuses across the country," he said, adding that CUNY has had its share of such activity, although it's far better than most universities.

Following Wiesenfeld's comments, a majority of CUNY board members voted to remove Kushner's name from the list of this year's honorees, and then voted unanimously to table, or put off, the honor to the playwright, according to CUNY spokesman Michael Arena. The move, though, effectively kills the honor, because the next scheduled board meeting is at the end of June, after John Jay's June 3 commencement ceremony.

Kushner, who won the Pulitzer for his epic play about AIDS, "Angels in America," has written that Israel was "founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing." He has also said that "it would have been better" had the State of Israel never been created and that Israel is involved in the "deliberate destruction" of Palestinian culture and identity."

He has also been active with organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, that have endorsed the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

Kushner told The Jewish Week Wednesday, "There's never been a moment in my entire life when I haven't expressed complete and full support of the State of Israel."

In a 2007 interview with The Jewish Independent, a Canadian newspaper serving British Columbia, he is quoted as saying, "I want the State of Israel to continue to exist. I have always said that. I've never said anything else. My positions have been lied about and misrepresented in so many ways. People claim that I'm for a one-state solution, which is not true." In the same interview he said, "In terms of the Palestinian situation, as I've always said, I'm in favor of a two-state solution."

Kushner also attacked Wiesenfeld as a right-wing extremist.

Brandeis University granted Kushner an honorary degree in 2006, over opposition from the Jewish right.

Contacted by The Jewish Week Tuesday night, Wiesenfeld said the board's action demonstrates that those who don't necessarily "go with the flow" can make a difference. "Boycotters can also be boycotted."

Earlier this year, Wiesenfeld and Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind tried to force Brooklyn College to fire an adjunct professor they believed held strongly anti-Israel views. The university initially fired the professor, Kristopher Peterson-Overton, but soon rehired him, saying it believed the criticism by Wiesenfeld and Hikind was politically motivated.

CUNY trustees dishonor academic freedom in Tony Kushner snub

Fresh off a failed attempt to fire a Brooklyn college professor for not properly toeing the line on Israel, CUNY Board of Trustees member Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld chose a much higher-profile target: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. Wiesenfeld, who is a repeat abuser of his power as a CUNY Trustee, succeeded in getting CUNY to table Kushner’s honorary degree for what is believed to be the first time ever. Kushner’s crimes? Criticizing Israel, and serving on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Here’s Kushner’s searing rebuke:

Letter to CUNY Trustees 05-04-11

[Ed. note: Jewish Voice for Peace engages in campaigns that promote boycott and divestment from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation, not Israel as a whole.)

Wiesenfield cited the “disingenuousness and non-intellectual activity” on US campuses as a reason for barring Kushner, though barring a figure of Kushner’s brilliance seems like a funny way to combat that problem. Unless of course your real goal is ideological control.

Here’s a comparison of the views of Tony Kushner with those of former New York City mayor Ed Koch, who unlike Kushner, received unanimous support for getting an honorary degree from CUNY this year :

• Tony Kushner wrote a play called Homebody/Kabul which details the “cruel and beautiful history of Afganistan.”

• Ed Koch declared “Afghanistan, it’s a not a country” and called for its bombing by drones.

• Kushner wrote the script for the movie “Munich” which tried to depict the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “something tragic and human, recognizable.” He also called for an open debate on Israel even among families saying “arguing is good for the digestion.”

• * Koch wrote that Obama was “throwing Israel under the bus” for his since-abandoned attempt to stop the construction of new Israeli settlements and tried to silence debate by comparing Obama to the Allies who negotiated with Hitler: “There is a foul whiff of Munich and appeasement in the air.”
  

• Kushner warns about the dangers of religious fundamentalism in plays like “Angels in America.”

• Koch talks about being proud that he “aroused the Christian, pro-Israel community.” which includes many fundamentalists like John Hagee, who Koch has defended.

As for Wiesenfeld, he knows something about shady proceedings, being appointed by then-governor George Pataki in a last minute session after concerns were raised about his calling blacks “savages” and Jews “thieves.” He also led the Stop the Madrassa coalition to block Debbie Almontaser from opening an Arabic language and culture school in New York City. Kushner and Almontaser, both are winners of the “Risk Taker Awards” from Jews For Racial and Economic Justice. Koch also defended Glenn Beck from charges of anti-semitism.

Who would you rather honor?
-Jesse Bacon

CUNY to rescind decision withholding honor from Kushner over anti-Israel views

Following backlash, executive committee of CUNY board will nix earlier decision and grant honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, the New York Times reports.

By Haaretz Service 7th May 2011

On Friday, the board of trustees of the City University of New York moved to reverse its earlier decision to not grant an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner over his views on Israel, the New York Times reported.

The New York Time report quoted CUNY board chairman Benno C. Schmidt Jr. as saying that he believed that the board had "made a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy" in the decision to withhold the degree.

According to the report, a meeting of the board's executive committee, which has the power to change board decisions, has been scheduled for Monday.

“Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name,” Schmidt was quoted as saying. “But it is not right for the board to consider politics in connection with the award of honorary degrees except in extreme cases not presented by the facts here.”

Kushner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has condemned Israel's policies against Palestinians, accusing Israel of engaging in ethnic cleansing. The playwright was also quoted saying that it would be better if Israel did not exist.

The New York Times report said that the CUNY board had faced a wave of backlash following the decision to withhold the degree from Kushner.

Left-wing Israel advocacy group J Street had condemned the board of trustees' decision in a statement, saying it was an infringement upon Kushner's right to free speech, calling it a "political witch-hunt".

The Middle East's 'only democracy' fears democracy

An interesting article on Israeli perceptions of the movement for democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. It is by Uri Avneri, one of the few left-Zionists left, who unlike most of his compatriots has always been a genuine seeker after peace. Despite many criticisms of Avneir, the article below is worth reading, not least for how the Arab revolutions are perceived in Israel.

A Villa in the Jungle?

WE ARE in the middle of a geological event. An earthquake of epoch-making dimensions is changing the landscape of our region. Mountains turn into valleys, islands emerge from the sea, volcanoes cover the land with lava.

People are afraid of change. When it happens, they tend to deny, ignore, pretend that nothing really important is happening.

Israelis are no exception. While in neighboring Egypt earth-shattering events were taking place, Israel was absorbed with a scandal in the army high command. The Minister of Defense abhors the incumbent Chief of Staff and makes no secret of it. The presumptive new chief was exposed as a liar and his appointment canceled. These were the headlines.

But what is happening now in Egypt will change our lives.

AS USUAL, nobody foresaw it. The much-feted Mossad was taken by surprise, as was the CIA and all the other celebrated services of this kind.

Yet there should have been no surprise at all - except about the incredible force of the eruption. In the last few years, we have mentioned many times in this column that all over the Arab world, multitudes of young people are growing up with a profound contempt for their leaders, and that sooner or later this will lead to an uprising. These were not prophesies, but rather a sober analysis of probabilities.

The turmoil in Egypt was caused by economic factors: the rising cost of living, the poverty, the unemployment, the hopelessness of the educated young. But let there be no mistake: the underlying causes are far more profound. They can be summed up in one word: Palestine.

In Arab culture, nothing is more important than honor. People can suffer deprivation, but they will not stand humiliation.

Yet what every young Arab from Morocco to Oman saw daily was his leaders humiliating themselves, forsaking their Palestinian brothers in order to gain favor and money from America, collaborating with the Israeli occupation, cringing before the new colonizers. This was deeply humiliating for young people brought up on the achievements of Arab culture in times gone by and the glories of the early Caliphs.

Nowhere was this loss of honor more obvious than in Egypt, which openly collaborated with the Israeli leadership in imposing the shameful blockade on the Gaza Strip, condemning 1.5 million Arabs to malnutrition and worse. It was never just an Israeli blockade, but an Israeli-Egyptian one, lubricated by 1.5 billion US dollars every year.

I have reflected many times – out loud – how I would feel if I were a 15 year-old boy in Alexandria, Amman or Aleppo, seeing my leaders behave like abject slaves of the Americans and the Israelis, while oppressing and despoiling their own subjects. At that age, I myself joined a terrorist organization. Why would an Arab boy be different?

A dictator may be tolerated when he reflects national dignity. But a dictator who expresses national shame is a tree without roots – any strong wind can blow him over.

For me, the only question was where in the Arab world it would start. Egypt – like Tunisia – was low on my list. Yet here it is – the great Arab revolution taking place in Egypt.

THIS IS a wonder in itself. If Tunisia was a small wonder, this is a huge one.

I love the Egyptian people. True, one cannot really like 88 million individuals, but one can certainly like one people more than another. In this respect, one is allowed generalize.

The Egyptians you meet in the streets, in the homes of the intellectual elite and in the alleys of the poorest of the poor, are an incredibly patient lot. They are endowed with an irrepressible sense of humor. They are also immensely proud of the country and its 8000 years of history.

For an Israeli, used to his aggressive compatriots, the almost complete lack of aggressiveness of the Egyptians is astonishing. I vividly remember one particular scene: I was in a taxi in Cairo when it collided with another. Both drivers leapt out and started to curse each other in blood-curling terms. And then quite suddenly, both of them stopped shouting and burst into laughter.

A Westerner coming to Egypt either loves it or hates it. The moment you set your foot on Egyptian soil, time loses its tyranny. Everything becomes less urgent, everything is muddled, yet in a miraculous way things sort themselves out. Patience seems boundless. This may mislead a dictator. Because patience can end suddenly.

It’s like a faulty dam on a river. The water rises behind the dam, imperceptibly slowly and silently – but if it reaches a critical level, the dam will burst, sweeping everything before it.

MY OWN first meeting with Egypt was intoxicating. After Anwar Sadat’s unprecedented visit to Jerusalem, I rushed to Cairo. I had no visa. I shall never forget the moment I presented my Israeli passport to the stout official at the airport. He leafed through it, becoming more and more bewildered – and then he raised his head with a wide smile and said “marhaba”, welcome. At the time we were the only three Israelis in the huge city, and we were feted like kings, almost expecting at any moment to be lifted onto people’s shoulders. Peace was in the air, and the masses of Egypt loved it.

It took no more than a few months for this to change profoundly. Sadat hoped – sincerely, I believe – that he was also bringing deliverance to the Palestinians. Under intense pressure from Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter, he agreed to a vague wording. Soon enough he learned that Begin did not dream of fulfilling this obligation. For Begin, the peace agreement with Egypt was a separate peace to enable him to intensify the war against the Palestinians.

The Egyptians – starting with the cultural elite and filtering down to the masses – never forgave this. They felt deceived. There may not be much love for the Palestinians – but betraying a poor relative is shameful in Arab tradition. Seeing Hosni Mubarak collaborating with this betrayal led many Egyptians to despise him. This contempt lies beneath everything that happened this week. Consciously or unconsciously, the millions who are shouting “Mubarak Go Away” echo this contempt.

IN EVERY revolution there is the “Yeltsin Moment”. The columns of tanks are sent into the capital to reinstate the dictatorship. At the critical moment, the masses confront the soldiers. If the soldiers refuse to shoot, the game is over. Yeltsin climbed on the tank, ElBaradei addressed the masses in al Tahrir Square. That is the moment a prudent dictator flees abroad, as did the Shah and now the Tunisian boss.

Then there is the “Berlin Moment”, when a regime crumbles and nobody in power knows what to do, and only the anonymous masses seem to know exactly what they want: they wanted the Wall to fall.

And there is the “Ceausescu moment”. The dictator stands on the balcony addressing the crowd, when suddenly from below a chorus of “Down With The Tyrant!” swells up. For a moment, the dictator is speechless, moving his lips noiselessly, then he disappears. This, in a way, happened to Mubarak, making a ridiculous speech and trying in vain to stem the tide.

IF MUBARAK is cut off from reality, Binyamin Netanyahu is no less. He and his colleagues seem unable to grasp the fateful meaning of these events for Israel.

When Egypt moves, the Arab world follows. Whatever transpires in the immediate future in Egypt – democracy or an army dictatorship - It is only a matter of (a short) time before the dictators fall all over the Arab world, and the masses will shape a new reality, without the generals.

Everything the Israeli leadership has done in the last 44 years of occupation or 63 years of its existence is becoming obsolete. We are facing a new reality. We can ignore it – insisting that we are “a villa in the jungle”, as Ehud Barak famously put it – or find our proper place in the new reality.

Peace with the Palestinians is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity. Peace now, peace quickly. Peace with the Palestinians, and then peace with the democratic masses all over the Arab world, peace with the reasonable Islamic forces (like Hamas and the Muslim Brothers, who are quite different from al Qaeda), peace with the leaders who are about to emerge in Egypt and everywhere.

A Day Out at Abbots Wood in Sussex

Protecting the Countryside of Sussex from Farmers and the Agro-Business

One of the delights living in Brighton is the easy access to the newly created South Downs National Park. One of the goals of Brighton Unemployed Centre is to provide access to recreational activities for the unwaged/unemployed and working class.

One of a series of walks from spring to autumn this year was from Abbotswood, near Alfriston, to Polegate nr Eastbourne.

As the pictures show a group of about 30 of us had a wonderful day out as we defied the rain. I went with my boy, Daniel, on what was a lovely 6 mile hike.

Led by Chris Smith, a veteran rambler from Lewes and author of the Angry Claimant, we were led along blocked and hidden rights of way and footpaths, tearing down one dangerous style and walking in single file over a field of maze, where the footpath had been ploughed up. It looks like a picture out of Hardy’s Wessex. I didn’t see any deer but we did spot a fox as well as a herd of shetland ponies.

Below are some pictures of the working class at play!
See also

Tony Greenstein

Osama Bin Laden – No Tears – No Regrets

The murder of Osama Bin Laden by US navy seals is a matter of supreme indifference. That the man and all he and Al Queda represented were repugnant beyond words hardly needs emphasising (except to the 100 Al Muhajaroun idiots and Ahmed Chaudry demonstrating outside the London US embassy yesterday.

Al Quaeda itself could best be considered Islamic Anarchists. The belief in the all importance of the deed. The substitution of their own rage and frustration for the masses. But unlike anarchists they were religious murderers and sectarians to the last.

Osama Bin Laden was, contrary to the earlier American lies, shot in cold blood, when he was unarmed. Clearly he posed no physical threat, so why was he killed instead of being tried and executed? Surely the Americans wanted to put him in a court of law and have to account for his murderous deeds? But that is the point.

The very last thing that Obama wanted was for Bin Laden to be put on trial. Because then he might find himself explaining small matters like the role of the CIA in his transfer from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. The role of the CIA and US and Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, in creating Al Queda. Just as Saddam Hussein was hanged for killing 150 odd people when his greatest crime, the gassing of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja was not the subject of a trial (because he might have revealed who supplied his mass weapons of destruction) so Bin Laden was killed in case he said anything too inconvenient for the mostly moronic American public.

But Al Queda is a despicable, murderous network (it is hardly an organisation) regardless of its role in 9/11. 9/11 was of course wrong but it was understandable that the World Trade Centre and its twin towers were considered a symbol of US barbarism, in much the same way as the Pentagon was. Millions of people have died as a result of the rampages of US imperialism.

Over a million Vietnamese, two million Cambodians (Pol Pot would never have come to power if the US hadn’t all but destroyed the Cambodian state in Nixon and Kissinger’s secret war), the hundred thousand or so Guatemalan Indians who died at the hands of an American junta and the death of probably another hundred thousand in the wars the US was involved in in Central & South America. When one adds the Congo and Palestine to the list then it is clear that the US has probably murdered as many people as the Nazis killed Jews.

But Al Quaeda had and has no political philosophy, still less a social one. Instead it maintains a barbarous interpretation of the Quoran. In Iraq alone, Al Queda is responsibility for the death of maybe 50,000 Shi’ites as a result of the sectarian carnage it indulged in. Shi’ites are ‘infidels’ and man, woman or child, deserve the most horrific of deaths. This in turn sparked the sectarian carnage that engulfed Iraq.

That their activities served US interests by dividing the opposition is undeniable. This is why Al Queda is politically insignificant in the Arab world, despite the attempts of the USA to bolster its credentials. Just as a loose affiliate of Al Quaeda is believed to be responsible for the murder of Italian ISM member, Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza 2 weeks, ago because he was an outsider, a foreigner. It is a great pity that Bin Laden could not have been tried alongside George Bush and Anthony Blair and that all 3 could not be hanged side by side.

Below is an excellent analysis from the MERIP Report.

Tony Greenstein

The Fateful Choice

The Middle East Report and Information Project
by The Editors | published May 6, 2011

When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the United States faced a strategic dilemma that was unique in magnitude, but not in kind. Terrorists had killed numerous civilians before, in the US and elsewhere, with and without state sponsorship. Al-Qaeda was not the first non-state actor to present no coherent demands alongside its propaganda of the deed or to have no single fixed address. Nor were Americans the first victims of unprovoked terrorist assault to set aside political differences, at least for a time, in search of a unified self-defense.

What separated the spectacular horrors of September 11 from past episodes was scale and symbolism: In the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the four hijacked airliners, 2,752 people died, employees at work or on their way, passengers in transit, paramedics treating the wounded, firefighters trying to save others from an inferno fueled by the full tanks of two Boeing 767s. The intent to commit mass murder was unmistakable, as was the meaning of the targets, the tallest buildings in the financial capital of the world and the military headquarters of the world’s sole superpower. Al-Qaeda designed the attacks to cast doubt on the American state’s ability to protect not only its citizenry but also itself.

There was no one, in the smoky, anguished aftermath of the attacks, who did not want justice. This feeling was, in fact, shared across the world, where the attacks were commonly regarded as abhorrent crimes against humanity; the expressions of schadenfreude in some locales, though reported ad nauseam by some outlets, were scattered and unrepresentative.

The choice faced by the administration of President George W. Bush was not whether to seek justice but how. Acts of terrorism, perpetrated by state and non-state actors, had sometimes been treated as crimes, to be investigated patiently, adjudicated properly and then punished. Such an approach, directed only at those who were complicit, was itself a repudiation of the original acts, its narrowness and judiciousness intentionally contrasting with the wholesale mayhem of terrorism. In the case of the September 11 attacks, the political advantages of this tack were even greater than usual, as the US was regarded warily by Arabs and Muslims who had long felt collectively demonized for the violence of a few. On this occasion, its severity notwithstanding, the US would not overreact. The US would join its allies and even erstwhile adversaries in marshaling a uniform rule of law and universal moral sense to corral a handful of nihilistic, literal-minded dunces at the outermost orbits of Islam.

There is no evidence that the Bush administration considered this option, for from the beginning it framed the September 11 attacks as the opening salvo in a war. It was to be “a new kind of war,” moreover, one in which the US would exempt itself from existing rules and create its own as the battle proceeded. The instinctive good will of the world sloughed away. As for Arabs and Muslims, they may accept or reject the repeated assurances that the post-September 11 war “is not a war against Islam,” but they cannot help but notice that they are always in the crossfire. Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader, predicted that he would die at the hands of the US, and that many more innocent people would die as well, as the US flexed its muscles in Afghanistan and then Iraq. “The Americans in both countries are between two fires,” he said in a September 2004 audiotape. “If they continue they bleed to death and if they withdraw they lose everything.” The American media scoffed at bin Laden’s pronouncements as the schoolyard taunts that they were, but rarely paused to consider that they seemed to be succeeding in provoking the White House into further and further extension of the war.

Ironically, and not terribly surprisingly, the Navy SEAL operation that eventually snared bin Laden on May 1, 2011, not quite ten years into the war, was not dissimilar from what might have happened had the international justice approach been chosen. The raid came about through years of examination of data and surveillance of suspects, not exploitation of a battlefield breakthrough; it carefully targeted bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; it was aimed only at bin Laden’s capture or, more likely, killing. And yet the “moral victory” that many Americans are claiming is illusory, in the sense that few but Americans feel it. President Barack Obama’s administration will neither reap political advantage in the Islamic world nor renew Americans’ claim on global sympathies. Nor will bin Laden’s demise reduce the likelihood or perceived legitimacy of future terrorist attacks, not because of the questions swirling around the official accounts of the raid and disposal of remains, but because of the havoc wrought by the US-led war on terrorism.

A further and closely related irony is that all phases of the war, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are likely to have postponed bin Laden’s reckoning. First was the Bush administration’s rapid decision to widen the war aims beyond apprehension of the aiders and abettors of the September 11 attacks to “terrorists and those that harbor them,” a vague formulation that would expand to encompass several states, quasi-states and organizations, but which at the time primarily referred to the Taliban. The Pashtun Islamist militia might not have been serious in its early (and unexplored) offer to turn over the al-Qaeda head if shown evidence of his involvement in the September 11 atrocities, but now there was no chance to find out. The war had morphed into a project of regime change in Afghanistan; thus existentially threatened, the Taliban (and their paymasters in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency) henceforth did everything they could to thwart the seizure of bin Laden and his lieutenants. The al-Qaeda chieftain vanished in the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani borderlands, a lanky six-footer with history’s most circulated mug shot, an Arabic speaker in an ocean of Pashtu, Dari and Baluchi, a walking $25 million bounty in one of the poorest regions on earth.

For all the talk of “a new kind of war,” the US had launched a large conventional war to “liberate” territory, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the task at hand. As Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives wrote in his January 2002 assessment of the Afghanistan venture, Strange Victory, “The essential importance of Afghanistan to the extra-regional goals and activities of al-Qaeda was not that it provided a sanctuary and training site for terrorists. Instead, Afghanistan served the organization’s global activities principally as a recruiting ground for future cadre.” The recruits came from among the young strivers who had arrived to fight the godless Soviet occupiers or, later, to combat the Afghan militias excommunicated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, their attention was turned from these “near enemies” to the “far enemy” in the West. By moving into Afghanistan, the US had not robbed al-Qaeda of safe haven -- their numbers were small enough and their finances healthy enough to find that nearly anywhere -- but it had strengthened al-Qaeda’s case for the innate belligerence of “Zionists and Crusaders” and enhanced the attractiveness of southern Central Asia as a theater of jihad. The Bush administration would repeat this error on a grander scale with the invasion of Iraq.

More damaging still, the conduct of the war was anything but discriminating. The CIA squads who infiltrated Afghanistan to assist the Taliban’s domestic foes, the so-called Northern Alliance, were followed into action by soldiers, Marines and B-52s, which hit the country with purposely indiscriminate ordnance like “daisy cutters” and cluster bombs, as well as the ballyhooed precision munitions. The bombardment, supplemented later by Hellfire missiles fired from the CIA’s prized Predator drones, smashed the Taliban’s defensive lines and ushered the Northern Alliance’s warlords into Kabul. The Taliban, bloodied but unbeaten, resorted to guerrilla tactics; they and their brethren across the Pakistani border saw the US intervention as another infidel occupation of Muslim lands. Their ISI advisers, having abandoned the militia to fate under the US barrage, were pleased to facilitate its reestablishment. Many of the smaller bands of Afghan fighters that had battled the Taliban on the CIA payroll in 2001-2002 were now happy to switch sides. Some Taliban affiliates took US money to guard by day the supply routes they mined by night. Worst of all, in both moral and strategic terms, the old kind of war in Afghanistan killed civilians by the thousands. According to UN and Human Rights Watch numbers, the civilian death toll in 2007-2010 alone has been 9,759, with 2,723 of these deaths coming at the hands of “pro-government forces,” meaning the US, its NATO allies and the fledgling army of President Hamid Karzai.

With the Afghan Taliban crossing back and forth into Pakistan, and eponymous Islamist militias sprouting among Pashtuns there, Pakistan was increasingly dragged into the conflagration. That country’s powerful army and spy services strove harder at the double game they had been playing since soon after the September 11 attacks: Desirous of both Pentagon boodle and a client in Afghanistan, they hunted the Taliban and al-Qaeda with one eye while supervising the Taliban’s reconstitution with the other. Hated by many Pakistanis for enlisting in the war on terror and by others for spurring the “Islamization” of Pakistani society, they denounced the drone strikes out of one side of their mouths while ordering incursions into Pashtun tribal regions out of the other. The generals felt confident in this gambit, risky as it seemed. For all the criticism that streamed their way from Washington, the US had no alternative partner, and when the White House eventually tired of the war, the ISI would still have its “strategic depth” in the 65-year conflict with India.

And, just as the US presence inflamed Afghans who were otherwise lukewarm toward the Taliban, so Washington’s recurrent scolding of Pakistan won the generals points in public opinion. After bin Laden’s shooting, according to a New York Times reporter watching Pakistan’s Geo TV, the well-known commentator Ansar Abbasi averred that “behind closed doors,” the ISI and army “admit that the US is an enemy of Pakistan and Muslims, but face to face we cannot communicate this to the Americans.” The source of the much quoted number of Pakistanis killed in the war on terror, 30,000, is Inter-Services Public Relations, the media outreach arm of the Pakistani military.

Against this backdrop, few were truly shocked when Osama bin Laden was tracked down in Abbottabad, the scenic submontane burg where the Pakistani army maintains its military academy. It is darkly comical to hear the ISI plead “shortcomings” in intelligence gathering that precluded them from seeing the most wanted man in the world right under their noses. Only a week before the May 1 raid, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief of staff, had paid a visit to the Abbottabad school. White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan and CIA head Leon Panetta have confirmed that Pakistan was not informed of the raid until the Navy helicopters bearing bin Laden’s corpse had exited Pakistani air space. The marriage of militaries that Washington and Islamabad worked so hard to consummate, and that cost both so much in political and material capital, counted for nothing at the moment of truth. But the generals, thus far, have won their bet: Despite the clamor in Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced on May 5 that the US-Pakistani partnership would perdure. “It is not always an easy relationship, you know that,” she told journalists. “But, on the other hand, it is a productive one for both our countries.”

Why did it take so long for the US to locate bin Laden, who had apparently been holed up in his Abbottabad chateau since 2006? Doubtless, Pakistani military skullduggery played a role, as did the alienation of countless ordinary Afghans and Pakistanis from US prerogatives by the escalating civilian casualties. But there is a third culprit -- the systematic torture practiced by the CIA and private contractors as part of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized by the Bush administration.

There is nothing new about torture in warfare, even as waged by democracies. What is new (at least in the modern era) is the brazenness with which torture’s proponents have asserted its compatibility with democracy and the rule of law. The Bush administration’s tangle of poor legal argumentation in support of its torture policy need not be rehearsed; the Obama administration was right to rubbish the lot. It has been disgusting, therefore, to see Bush officials emerge from the woodwork to suggest that finding bin Laden came about through torture. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, told FOX News that “anyone who suggests that the enhanced techniques, let’s be blunt, waterboarding, did not produce an enormous amount of valuable intelligence, just isn’t facing the truth.” His fellow Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York, went one step further: “Osama bin Laden would not have been captured and killed if it were not for the initial information we got from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he was waterboarded.”

A former top military interrogator in Iraq, who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, has corrected the record by insisting that torturing detainees produces “limited information, false information or no information.” As Alexander and others note, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the September 11 attacks (who, incidentally, was captured at home in a commando raid, not on a battlefield, with a nudge from another $25 million bounty), blurted out nothing of value despite being waterboarded 183 times. He was confronted with the nom de guerre of a courier -- the one whose trail eventually led to bin Laden -- and claimed he had “retired” from al-Qaeda. The nom de guerre and all subsequent actionable leads were obtained from other sources through old-fashioned detective work. These facts have led Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to contradict Rumsfeld and King, saying: “So far, I know of no information that was obtained, that would have been useful, by ‘advanced interrogation.’” And when the CIA tortured Abu Faraj al-Libbi, another al-Qaeda courier who would have known others, he proffered a fake name that sent the manhunt on a wild goose chase. Torture is thus likely to have delayed the apprehension of al-Qaeda’s master terrorist.

The utility of torture is beside the point, in any case; torture is repellent and degrading of those who practice it as well as those subjected to it. It is also manifestly illegal, under both US and international law. As anyone who pays attention knows, the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere swept away what remained of the post-September 11 wars’ moral credibility in the eyes of the world. Along with the Bush administration’s deceptions, arrogant doctrines of US dominance and disdainful asides to the effect that “we don’t do body counts,” torture poisoned all of the wars’ fruits, even turning bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the ugliest caricatures of Arab anti-imperialism, into heroes to some.

With Osama bin Laden eliminated, the Obama administration has a golden opportunity to discontinue the Bush administrations’ wars. It is time for the US to leave both Afghanistan and Pakistan, neither of which countries supplied a September 11 hijacker, to sort out their internal messes undisturbed. But President Obama made clear, in the same speech that proclaimed bin Laden’s death, that these wars will not end.

When the rhetoric is stripped away, the reasons return to the fateful decision to treat the September 11 attacks as an act of war, rather than a monstrous crime. That choice, though it will probably forever be portrayed as an unavoidable bow to the righteous fury of American citizens, emanated at least equally from raison d’état. Not only had 19 men with box cutters destroyed iconic buildings and sown panic in the two most strategic US cities, they had breached the walls of the mightiest military power the world has ever known, catching its watchmen unawares. The hijackers hailed, moreover, from the region of the globe where US interests most require the projection of invincibility. To secure its guardianship of Persian Gulf oil reserves, such a crucial component of its superpower status, the US felt compelled to stage as dramatic a show of force as it could muster. It so happened that the Bush administration was staffed with men and women who had been waiting for the occasion to make sure the world knew who was boss. The Obama administration, having inherited the aggressive forward deployments, is loath to rein them in without first demonstrating US dominion conclusively. Osama bin Laden surely knew what was he was doing in picking his targets, but the US national security state has chosen to fulfill his foul prophecy.

The Arab Revolutions - a New Sense of Hope Except to Israel

Tamimi is an Islamist but this is nonetheless an important article and shows the dilemmas of Hamas, which relies on its Syrian sanctuary but cannot afford to support the people of Syria. In microcosm this was always the dilemma of the PLO and they resolved it in such a way as to hand back their independence to such rulers.

Hamas, as a petit-bourgeois movement, whose belief in ‘Sharia law’ is a code for support for capitalism and medieval social relics, is thus unable to break from the politics of the Arab regimes.

That is why it sought to prevent demonstrations against Mubarak at first because they had no confidence in the Egyptian masses and feared the wrath of Mubarak, since his regime allowed the tunnels and the tunnel mafia they spawned.

And of course the Syrian regime is widely believed to allow shipments of weapons to Hizbollah in Lebanon, a key ally. This dependence on Arab regimes, complicated by the non-Arab Iranian regime and its alliances, with Syria and Hizbollah, have forced Hamas into uncomfortable dilemmas which Tammimi only touches upon.

As he shows the region's 'only democracy' has not at all been enthusiastic about what has been happening. It is difficult to imagine why this could be the case!

But the analysis in the article is well worth reading.

Tony Greenstein

Our freedom is now closer

The popular revolutions across the Arab world have given Palestinians a new sense of hope

Azzam Tamimi
The Guardian, Monday 2 May 2011

When, at the start of this year, Palestinians around the world marked the anniversary of the 2008-09 Israeli war on Gaza, few could see any hope. The Gaza Strip was still under siege, Palestinian reconciliation seemed out of reach, the Arabs were useless and the US unable, or unwilling, to broker a resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine National
Authority (PNA).

Then came the Arab popular revolutions, and the mood among Palestinians switched from desperation to euphoria. Soon after the fall of Hosni Mubarak I visited my old friend, the Hamas leader Khalid Mish'al, in Damascus. He told me he was sure the change in Egypt, which he expected would be followed by similar changes in other Arab countries, meant that it would not be too long before Palestine was free.

My friends in Gaza would tell me the same thing, and so would my relatives in Hebron and the diaspora. They all believed that the Mubarak regime was an impediment to the Palestinian struggle for freedom; once the Egyptian people were free, a genuine democracy in Egypt would support the Palestinians.

At the very least, in the short term, Palestinians believed that post-Mubarak Egypt would not take part in the siege of Gaza, which would all but collapse if Egypt were to open the Rafah crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, last Friday Egyptian foreign minister Nabil al-Arabi told al-Jazeera that, within seven to 10 days, steps will be taken to alleviate the "blockade and suffering of the Palestinian nation".

Palestinians monitored the Israeli reaction to the collapse of the Mubarak regime. It did not surprise them to see Israel immensely worried. Mubarak was an ally who contributed to Israel's security in a very hostile Middle East. The neutralisation of Egypt, and the minimisation of its role in the Palestinian cause since President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, constituted Zionism's greatest success since Israel was created 30 years earlier. Rather than spearhead the struggle to liberate Palestine, Mubarak's Egypt led the so-called Arab moderate camp, an alliance of pro-Israel and pro-US Arab states that included Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, the PNA and the United Arab Emirates.

Palestinians began to imagine what would happen if a popular revolution in Jordan were to bring about a similar change; then one in Saudi Arabia; and perhaps Morocco. Israel would have lost its most important allies in the region and the PNA would be isolated, having been fatally wounded by revelations in al-Jazeera and the Guardian about the concessions its negotiating teams offered in secret to the Israelis.

But although the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions did inspire Arabs to demand political reform or regime change, it was not Jordan, Morocco or Saudi Arabia that saw this the most. There were a few demonstrations, but demands were generally for political reform rather than a change of regime. Instead it was Yemen, Libya and Syria that witnessed the more dramatic
protests, which soon escalated into armed struggle in Libya and calls for regime change in Yemen and Syria.

When I saw Khalid Mish'al in February, he did not expect a popular uprising in Syria. He believed the regime was less vulnerable because of its support for resistance in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as its anti-imperialist stance. But solidarity with the Palestinian or Lebanese resistance was not enough to protect any autocratic regime. This worried some Palestinians, and
they rushed to express support for Bashar al-Assad's regime; but Hamas remained silent, to the regime's displeasure.

While the euphoria created by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions has been dampened by the Libyan experience, seen by many in the Arab region as a revolution gone drastically wrong as a result of armament and western intervention, most Palestinians still believe a new era is coming. The more Arab dictatorships that are replaced by genuine democracies, the closer Palestine will be to liberation. Democracies representing the will of the Arab peoples can only be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.

One immediate fruit of Mubarak's removal and the uprising in Syria has been the revival of Palestinian reconciliation efforts. Responding to grassroots pressure, both Hamas and Fatah met in Cairo and decided to work for the formation of a unity government and the resolution of disputes over security and elections. Fatah is anxious that it may lose favour with Egypt, while
Hamas is anxious it may soon lose Syria as a safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Israel threatened to take action against the PNA if Fatah went through with the deal with Hamas.

For many years Israel claimed to be the only democracy in the region. And yet Israeli politicians appealed to the US to intervene in Egypt to prevent Mubarak's fall, and campaigned for him to remain in power. Israel clearly believes it can count on Arab dictators who are more interested in power and personal wealth than in serving their nations, let alone serving the Palestinian cause.

Despite its claims of superiority, Israel appears to suffer from the same symptoms that plague Arab dictators; the failure to learn that they need to change before it is too late. It's been too late for Mubarak, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh. Israel
has oppressed the Palestinians for so long, and has incurred the wrath of the Arab masses whose revolutions are bringing hope to Palestinians.

Whichever way one looks at it, the Arab revolutions are the best news the Palestinians have had for decades.

Gideon Spiro on Israel's Abuse of the Holocaust

This excellent talk, delivered by Israeli journalist Gideon Spiro hardly needs any elaboration. It details the cynical way that Israel uses the holocaust for the purpose of repression. The only complaint being that Germany targetted Jews, not the nature of the regime itself.

Spiro shows how Israel was quite happy to deal with the South African Apartheid State with its Nazi style laws of racial separation without any problem. Indeed the primary holocaust propaganda institute, Yad Vashem, played host to South African prime minister John Vorster, interned during the war because of his Nazi sympathies and the Foreign Minister Pik Botha.

The most ironical comment and a sad reflection on Israel’s abuse of the holocaust is the fact that it felt consternation when Willy Brandt, became social –democratic Chancellor of West Germany. Unlike his predecessors he had resisted the Nazis. Israel’s leaders felt far happier with a former Nazi whom they could guilt trip!

Tony Greenstein

We were slaves – and we still are

By: Gideon Spiro
21 April 2011 (English translation 28 April 2011)

This is the 44th year I have not celebrated the usual Israeli Passover, because the State of Israel has castrated and distorted the meaning of the passage from slavery to freedom.

The Haggadah, in substantial parts, is not an inspiring document in my view.

In the Haggadah it is written, “in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.” Those words are anachronistic when read today. First, it was not in every generation, and certainly not in the past 60 years – a period during which we have accumulated hundreds of nuclear bombs as well as biological and chemical weapons and we have gone from being destroyed to destroyers. And when they did try to destroy us, and certainly during the period of the Holocaust, the Holy One blessed be He did not save us from their hand. It was the Red Army and the armies of the USA and Britain that saved the surviving remnants.

The Haggadah commands us to rejoice that we came out of slavery to freedom and entered the Land of Israel, but the Haggadah skips over the destruction of peoples that the conquest of the Land involved, as written in the Book of Joshua. The destruction of the Other casts a dark shadow over any freedom thereby attained. And the Ten Plagues of Egypt, which in modern translation included biological war and other war crimes, like killing every first-born child in Egyptian families (Death of the Firstborn) do not fill my heart with song and joy either. In today’s terms they are war crimes. It is all consistent with the line in the Haggadah that says, “Pour out Your wrath upon the nations [Heb. goyim] that do not acknowledge You”. Hatred of the Other. It could all be seen as a harmless legend if this were a peace-loving state that lives in harmony with its surroundings. But in a state in which hatred of the Goy is a guideline for a substantial part of the population and their leaders, for whom those texts constitute a manual for action, it is dangerous.

The text of the Haggadah needs to be changed and updated to make it consistent with human rights and love of humanity.

Instead of celebrating freedom we have become deniers of it – not only in those days but also at this time. [1] Since June 1967 it has been denied to the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, and in recent years, also to migrant workers and asylum-seekers.

We have become slaves – slaves to the army of Occupation, slaves to the settlers, and slaves to the Israel Security Agency (ISA). [2]

We have bred many pharoahs in the last 44 years. Every Occupation soldier is a little pharaoh, and like the higher they rise in rank the bigger pharaohs they become, and it is the same with the ISA, in coordination with the army. All the way up to the Chief of Staff, the Minister of Defence, the head of the ISA and the head of the Mossad, all of them under the canopy of the Prime Minister. Every one of them is a high and mighty Pharoah who strikes terror in the tormented occupied population. They are all slaves of the Occupation.

Our enslavement is expressed not only in the areas of the army and security. We are also slaves of the tycoons, the cellphone companies, the banks and consumerist brainwashing. In short – slaves of capitalist society in its swinish form.

When will we be free in our land? When we are freed from the bonds of enslavement, militarily and economically, and become a society of solidarity and equality that respects the Other.

A Jewish Zionist dream

The ceremony to of the changing of the commanders of the Paratroopers Brigade in the Israeli Occupation Army took place recently. Colonel Aharon Haliva is the outgoing commander of the brigade and is about to become be promoted to the rank of Brigadier General.

In the ceremony of transferring command, Haliva said that “to be a paratrooper is the fulfillment of my Jewish and Zionist dream.” (Yediot Aharonot 15 April 2011).

Aharon Haliva was born into the Occupation in 1967. He joined the army in 1985 and since then his entire life has been spent in the army. A substantial part of his military service was carried out in the Occupied Territories. He is a creation of the Occupation and its faithful servant. His adult life in the army can be divided into two parts: in the first part he learned how to kill, in the second part, after he had become a commander, he taught how to kill. He does not recognize any reality other than the use of the army as an instrument of control over civilians – to kill them, to wound them, to tyrannize over them.

I am dwelling on Haliva because he is thought of in the army as an exemplary figure. He is one of the officers who are sent to high schools to increase motivation to join the army. One of his articles of faith is expressed in the statement that “whoever is suited to be an officer and refuses to take the Officers’ Course is a criminal.” That is what he said in a conversation with high-schoolers before their military service.

Havila is today an embodiment of the Jewish and Zionist dream shared by most members of the Knesset and the government. He embodies the militarization of Zionism and Judaism. He constitutes just the kind of educator figure that the Education Ministry wants to present to students. That is a Zionist and Jewish dream that those who embrace human rights must strive to undermine.

Villainy

The Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni was murdered in Gaza by Muslim extremists from the organization “al-Tawhid wal-Jihad”. Vittorio went to Gaza as a member of an international delegation that opposed the siege of Gaza and the collective punishment that it constitutes. He was abducted by the extremist organization after the Hamas government in Gaza arrested one of the organization’s leaders. The kidnappers conditioned Vittorio’s release on the release of their leader.

Since it went from being a movement to a government, Hamas has been afflicted by all the flaws and ills of government. Instead of conducting negotiations with the organization in order to save Vittorio’s life, the Hamas government acted like Rabin’s government did after the abduction of the soldier Nachshon Wachsman. How ironic – the governments of Israel and Hamas share the slogan “No negotiations with terrorists”, and the hostages pay with their lives.

The murder of Vittorio is not only a crime and an act of villainy in its own right, but also an illustration of how extremist cults bite the hands that feed them. It reminds me of the behaviour of the settler cults who rage and curse the whole world, even their benefactors like the army, the government and President Obama, without whom they could not exist.

We have here a kind of “Chad Gadya”. [3] The government of the settlers is a terrorist organization in the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, the latter is considered a terrorist organization by the settlers, the government of Israel is a terrorist organization in Hamas’ eyes, the Hamas government is a terrorist organization in the eyes of the government of Israel, and the Jihad organizations are terrorist organizations in the eyes of the governments of Hamas and Israel. As long as the terrorists don’t sit down and talk with each other, beloved people like Vittorio Arrigoni will pay with their lives.

Fifty years after the Eichmann trial

About two weeks ago an evening was held in Solokov House to mark the passage of 50 years since the Eichmann trial. The evening was organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Among the speakers were the historians Professor Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Professor Hava Yablonka of Ben-Gurion University, Yechiam Weitz of Haifa University, Prof essor Hajo Funke from the Free University in Berlin, Dr. Angelica Tim, director of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Israel, and your faithful servant, the writer of these lines.

The hall was packed, and the words of the speakers, which were insightful in my opinion, were listened to attentively. The participants were recorded and I assume that the Foundation will publish the proceedings.

What follows was my contribution, which was read from a written text and intended to be part of my column:

“A few words on my personal biography: I was born in Berlin in September 1935. I was born into the Nazi regime. My father, Dr. Shmuel Spiro, later the director of the medical service of the Youth Aliyah under the leadership of Henrietta Szold (for me Henrietta Szold is not the name of a street, but a flesh-and-blood person on whose lap I sat as a child), immigrated in 1938 to Jerusalem, then part of British Palestine, after the licences of Jewish doctors were withdrawn. My mother, Greta Spiro, a photographer, remained with me and my brother in an attempt to save what she could. We got through the Krystallnacht pogrom in Berlin without physical harm thanks to my mother’s ingenuity. We immigrated to Palestine in March 1939. From this you will understand that I am a refugee who survived the Krystallnacht pogrom. I assume that if not for the Nazi regime, my family, which had been in Germany for generations, would have stayed in Germany, and I can raise many scenarios about what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Germany. From this you will understand that I am interested in the subject not only from the point of view of an engaged person and political journalist, but also from the thoroughly personal perspective of a German Jew.

The Eichmann trial is a good point of departure for the thesis that I submit, which is that Israel has not learned the appropriate lessons from the Holocaust period, the main ones of which are democracy, human rights, the struggle against racism, respect for the rights of minorities, support for refugees and international solidarity with the forces that are struggling to eliminate racism and tyranny.

Already at the Eichmann trial, the tendency, which has intensified over the subsequent years, to press the Holocaust into service for the current requirements of Israeli policy, was manifest. Hanna Arendt observed it in her report on the Eichmann trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem by pointing to the question that the prosecutor Gideon Hausner flung at more than one of the witnesses: ‘Why did you not resist?’ As if there was such an option for civilians, including women, children, old people faced with an armed military force in the valley of death. Hausner continued to ask the question, even though it had clearly been no different among other nations. But that question had a clear Zionist message: in the Holocaust you did not resist, but here in the State of Israel with the Jewish army, it will not happen again.

That was confirmed this week with the publication of the protocols from the cabinet meetings after the abduction of Eichmann, according to which the main priority of then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was to exploit the trial for Israeli hasbara. [4]

There is a straight line from the Eichmann trial to the youth delegations the Ministry of Education sends to the death camp at Auschwitz.

The visits by young people to Auschwitz before their military service are infused with Israeli Jewish nationalism, and are intended to increase their motivation to join the army. In these visits there is no mention of the universal human aspect of the Holocaust period outside the Jewish experience. Eichmann was in fact convicted of crimes against humanity, but that was given very little expression in the trial. Those who planned the trial were not interested in non-Jewish humanity. And it is also thus in the visits of Israeli youth to Auschwitz. Indeed, a researcher from Tel Aviv University has found that there was a higher rate of willingness to join combat units among the youths who visited Auschwitz. Mission accomplished.

And the program of sending IDF officers to visit Auschwitz, which has involved thousands of officers so far, is also an expression of contempt for the Holocaust. Officers are taken from their duties of Occupation and violation of human rights in the Occupied Territories straight to Auschwitz, whence they return full of motivation to continue their duties, seeing no contradiction between the visit and their activities in the framework of an army of occupation. This is the militarization of the Holocaust, if you will.

A creature from outer space who landed in Israel and studied the official Israeli approach to the Holocaust would get the impression that to the Israelis, the Nazis were not an enemy of humanity, but only the enemy of the Jewish people. On one of my visits to Germany, a German told me in a personal conversation that in his opinion the Nazis made a terrible mistake with the Jews. Instead of destroying them they should have enlisted the Jewish genius in the service of the Nazi regime. If they had done that, he added, everything would have been different. Germany would have won the war.

I sometimes hear an echo of that same viewpoint in Israel too. That could explain the friendly and intimate relations between Israel and the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, with its Nazi laws. As long as the Apartheid laws did not affect Jews, but only Blacks, Israel was an ally of that regime.

That attitude was expressed by the invitation to Israel of South African Prime Minister John Vorster as the guest of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. After the Likud’s rise to power, known as the revolution of 1977, South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha visited Israel as the guest of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan. There was no difference between the Labour Party and the Likud when it came to friendship with the regime with Nazi laws. Ironically, both leaders from racist South Africa visited Yad Vashem, [5] and nobody saw that as contempt for or desecration of the Holocaust. It was the same with the fascist dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, to which Israel exported arms. The policy of exporting arms to dictatorial regimes continues to this day.

Since the Reparations Agreement was signed by David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer, Israel has exhibited a great deal of flexibility in its relations with Germany in everything related to the service of Nazis in its governmental, judicial and military apparati. As long as the money and political support flowed, Israel lived in peace with people who had been members of the Nazi Party. That is how it was with Hans Globke, Adenauer’s secretary and advisor, who participated in drafting the Nuremberg Laws, and that is how it was with Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger, who had been a member of the Nazi Party.

When in 1971 Gerhard Schrצder, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag, visited Israel as the guest of the Foreign Minister Abba Eban, I filed an appeal at the Supreme Court to have him put on trial under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, because he had been a member of the Nazi Party and the SA! The appeal was rejected. I was a student at the time and Yoel Zussman, the acting president of the Supreme Court (and later its president), suggested that I concentrate on my studies and not concern myself with politics. A very democratic suggestion.

When Willy Brandt of the Social Democratic Party replaced Kiesinger, concern was expressed in Israel that because Brandt had fought the Nazis in exile, maybe his anti-Nazi past would liberate him from feelings of guilt and he would be less friendly towards Israel.

That was not the case regarding East Germany, with the pretensious name of the DDR (German Democratic Republic). There, there were indeed fewer former Nazis in governmental positions, but the DDR’s membership in the Communist bloc and its refusal to pay reparations prompted Israel to preach hypocrisy-laden morality to it, from which West Germany was spared.

The Holocaust also served as an effective instrument for justifying Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The State of Israel has become a Garden of Eden for the production of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, biological and chemical. Hence the absurdity, that in the name of the last Holocaust, Israel is exposed to a new holocaust, a nuclear holocaust – at its own hands.

The government of Israel uses the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as a weapon to suppress criticism of its politics. It has proven to be a useful tool whenever Germany is concerned, but not only Germany. Even in the German left-wing party they tread very lightly whenever it comes to criticizing Israel over the Occupation.

That and more: the government of unified Germany, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schrצder (not the one from the appeal) and his deputy, Green Party leader and Foreign Minister Yoschka Fischer, provided Israel with submarines (as a gift) that can carry nuclear-tipped missiles.

The Green Party was founded as a movement against nuclear arms. When I asked Yoschka Fischer (who before he became Foreign Minister signed a petition in support of Moredechai Vanunu) to condition the transfer of the submarines on their not being nuclear-armed, I received no reply. And thus was created another absurdity, that Germany is donating the next holocaust to us as compensation for the previous Holocaust.

The Yad Vashem institute is well integrated into the picture that has been described here, maybe because for most of its existence it has been headed by retired generals. It is a fact that during all 44 years of the Occupation Yad Vashem has not seen fit to come out against the violations of human rights and the apartheid regime that exist in the Occupied Territories.

The late philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Liebowitz coined the term ‘Judaeo-Nazi’, which caused a lot of controversy. It was his somewhat provocative way of challenging the political establishment and its followers. If I understood Liebowitz correctly, he wanted to say that the Nazis are not specific to any one people, but a dangerous political phenomenon that can exist in any nation, and the Jews are no exception. And that is my opinion as well. When I interviewed him for the Jewish German monthly called Semit, he gave a concrete example of what he meant. A female Palestinian prisoner about to give birth. She was taken to a hospital in Israel, and there, on the orders of the ISA or the police, she was chained to a bed, where she gave birth. ‘That is Nazism’, stormed Liebowitz in his familiar voice, and the willingness to obey such a barbaric order is the essence of Eichmannism – hiding behind the excuse that ‘I was only following orders.’

The willingness to carry out any order is one of the characteristics of Israeli military society today. The lessons have not been learned.

The life of Rosa Luxemburg, who was the inspiration for this conference, and her essential outlook, are for me the model of a different Germany but also for a different Israel.”

Translator’s notes

1. Allusion to a Hannukah prayer, which says, “Blessed are You, LORD, our God, King of the universe, Who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this time.”

2. Also known as the Shin Bet, the Hebrew letters that stand for its name in Hebrew (“Sherut ha-Bitahon” – “Security Service”)

3. Allusion to a song, “Chad Gadya” (“one little goat”, in Aramaic), traditionally sung at Passover. It is cumulative: father buys a goat, which is eaten by a cat, which is bitten by a dog, which is beaten by a stick, which is burnt by a fire … etc., all the way to the Angel of Death, who is struck down by God in the song’s triumphant climax.

4. Hasbara: literally, “explanation”. The term is widely-used in Israel to refer to Israeli government public relations efforts, public diplomacy, advocacy or propaganda.

5. Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, museum and research institute. Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent

Holocaust Survivors Kept in Poverty - Their Funds Used to Finance Zionist Projects

This is one of many stories, some of which I’ve covered before. Israel’s leaders and Zionist apologists never fail to use the Holocaust as a weapon against anti-Zionists and Palestinians, but when it comes to the holocaust survivors themselves it’s different. They are denied the compensation the Israeli government was paid but which it used for Zionist goals – education and ‘redemption’ (i.e. theft of Palestinian land).

This is the reality of Israel’s Racist Creed – a creed no different in principle from Nazi Germany. What matters is not the people individually but the collective ‘nation’ or ‘race’. Holocaust survivors are irrelevant as individuals but as a collective group are important for the use to which they can be put.

As is shown in the article below the Israeli State has constructed a complex bureaucracy that needs lawyers and experts to untangle in order to keep the compensation for holocaust survivors from the survivors.

Surviving the Shoah – and beating Israeli bureaucracy

Jerusalem Post Friday, April 29, 2011

By RUTH EGLASH
Many Holocaust survivors live in severe poverty, unaware of the benefits owed them, and must fight the system to realize their rights.

David Silberman, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Aviv Lenitzolei Hashoah (Spring for Holocaust Survivors), does not mince words when he proclaims that roughly NIS 250 million in funds meant to assist Holocaust survivors living in Israel remains unclaimed each year.

“It’s a very complicated process, and that’s exactly why we started Aviv,” states Silberman, who created the organization four years ago together with his wife Aviva, a legal expert in Holocaust survivors’ rights.

Speaking ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which will be marked nationwide on Monday, he adds,

“She has been working in this field for more than 17 years and already knew all about the complexities of this topic. What she did not know, however, was exactly how many survivors are entitled to additional benefits but are not claiming them because the information is unclear and they are simply not aware.”

According to Silberman, “we thought this would only be a shortterm thing and that we would just pass on some information that would help all those involved in allocating resources to reach the actual survivors.”

In the four years since helping to start the NGO, he has become an expert on the ins and outs of the various compensation funds and additional benefit schemes meant to ease the daily living of more than 210,000 aging victims of Nazi persecution.

However, Silberman, who volunteers his time at the charity, points out that while there are some 15 government and non-governmental organizations all working to aid Holocaust survivors here, there is no single authority that can fit all the pieces together. With none of the groups able to see beyond its own paradigm, survivors are forced to go through an intense bureaucratic process even before they can understand what exactly they should be asking for.

Only this past Wednesday – after some 60-plus years of continued disconnect between all the organizations – did the Welfare and Social Services Ministry finally bring representatives of all these bodies, including Aviv, together for a round-table discussion on how to work together to help thousands of survivors live out their final years in comfort and dignity.

Silberman says it’s frustrating:

The survivors have been crying for years, saying they cannot make ends meet or cannot pay for their medicines, [and] social workers and others tell them that they cannot help, but it’s only because they have no idea about the pension schemes for them.

He adds that

“in most situations when you deal with poor people, it is difficult to help them, but when you are talking about Holocaust survivors, there is money out there but no one knows how to get at it.”

AS PART of its outreach work for this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Aviv will release a series of 17 short video clips – available for download from its website and also to be screened throughout the day on Channel 2 – outlining what rights, benefits and compensation schemes are currently available for each specific group of survivors and how to apply for them, says Hagit Grubshtein, the organization’s deputy director.

“There is so much to understand that we felt the best way to explain would be to explain it visually,” says the 31-year-old trained lawyer who has been working with Aviv for three years.

“The problem is that there is no one body that can tell the survivor what his or her benefits should include; every organization does wonderful work but refuses to look at what the others are doing. At the moment, survivors come to us in order to understand the whole picture, and we try to help them.”

Among the videos to be released are ones outlining the eligibility guidelines and application procedures for the four Holocaust survivor compensation funds (two from Germany, administered by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, and two operated by the Israeli government’s Holocaust Survivors Rights Authority). There is also a rallying call to “thirdgeneration” Holocaust survivors, the grandchildren, to come forward and help the elderly survivors access their rights.

Silberman also highlights that one of the videos produced is in Russian, aimed at thousands of survivors who arrived in Israel during the 1990s from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who do not fit the criteria outlined by the four official funds.

“Some of them are not aware that they are in fact entitled to a one-time payment and numerous social benefits that could help ease their lives,” noted Silberman.

According to numerous NGOs working in the field, many of these survivors arrived in the country with nothing and today live in severe poverty, relying on various charities for their day-to-day survival.

“Our goal is to break the stigma that only a lawyer is able to help survivors understand and obtain their rights,” says Grubshtein, who herself is the presenter of most of these low-budget but informative videos.

“There is not much time left to help these survivors, and we need to reach as many people as we can in order to address the injustice of the last 60 years.”
AMONG THE estimated 10,000 people that Aviv has helped since its formation is Ela Yael Kasner, 75, from Rehovot. Two months ago, the Romanian-born grandmother and great-grandmother received a significant payout from the German government, some 3,800 euros, for the three years she spent in a Nazi-run ghetto, thanks to Aviv volunteers who helped her apply for the money.

“We had nothing to eat and no warm clothes to wear when we lived in the ghetto,” recalls Kasner, who was only a child when she moved with her mother and two brothers to the Mogilev ghetto in Transnistria. “I did not see an egg or cheese or bread during those years, I lived on water and corn flour… I did not learn to read or write and only received an education when I arrived in Israel at age 12.”

She clearly remembers how her mother would force her to hide beneath the floorboards whenever she heard the boots of SS soldiers.

“I had to stay down there for hours with the rats,” says Kasner, whose father was taken away from the family during the war and united with the family at its end. He died from typhus only a few months after their arrival in Israel.
Despite the obvious hardships of rebuilding her life here following the war, Kasner says life was bearable until a few years ago, when her husband, also a Holocaust survivor, passed away.
“I faced a dilemma, and I went to apply for additional benefits as his widow but was told I was not eligible,” says Kasner, who then turned to Aviv for help.

The organization helped her to obtain some additional funds from the government and also to apply for a state pension from Germany, where last year a federal court ruled that payments should be made to all those who had worked in a ghetto during the war years.

“My situation is not so bad now, there are many others who are worse off than I am,” says Kasner, who in addition to the back payment will also receive 41 euros a month from Germany.

What is most upsetting, she says, is “knowing there is money but for some reason it does not reach us, they do not hand it out. You have to fight or put on a lot of pressure to get that money.”

“Even after three years, it still kills me to hear these stories,” observes Grubshtein. “I know we have had many successes in helping people, but they are still so few compared to all the bad things and the injustice that has taken place over the last 60 years.”

She adds, “I know that we can’t fix all the evil that has happened, but it is time that all the organizations dealing with this issue put their egos aside and try to work together to tackle the problem before it’s too late.”