Monday, January 17, 2011
Jewish Self-Interest and Jewish Morality
Jeffrey Goldberg believes that the Jewish settlement in Sheikh Jarrah is "not necessarily" in the best Jewish self-interest. Why not? Because peace is important, and without a Palestinian East Jerusalem, there will be no Palestinian state, and hence, no possibility of peace. Israel will either cease to be a Jewish state (through the absorption of Arabs), or it will cease to be democratic. "It will not survive if it becomes a pariah state, and, in this unfortunate world in which we must exist, Israel is in danger of becoming an outcast among nations."
For Goldberg, the ultimate and overriding moral injunction is to preserve the state of Israel. All other considerations, if they obtain at all in this "unfortunate world in which we must exist," are secondary. If the Judaization of East Jerusalem conformed to Jewish self-interest – didn't Jewish self-interest dictate the Judaization of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem? -- Goldberg would apparently see no problem. After all, "Jerusalem is Judaism's holiest city" and "Jews have a right to live wherever they want in the Land of Israel". As for the Shepherd Hotel, "in and of itself, it is not a morally profound issue"
It was bought legally by Jewish buyers years ago; it did not house Palestinians, and it is associated with the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was an actual bona fide Nazi, so its disappearance does not cause me sorrow. The world's focus on Sheikh Jarrah is, of course, disproportionate in the larger scheme of thing.
Goldberg does not say whether the removal of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah is a "morally profound" issue; perhaps, he thinks that it is.
What is wrong with all this? In the end, Goldberg opposes the de-Arabification of East Jerusalem. What difference does it make how he reasons? Isn't he getting enough flak from his rightwing readers for his liberal-hawkish Zionist perspective. Shouldn't I be giving him a break?
No, I shouldn't, for two reasons. First, Goldberg's account is factually incorrect and tendentious. Second, it lacks what is lacking in almost all the liberal hawkish/neocon writing on Israel: holding Israel to a reasonable moral standard besides that of the Mafia.
First, the facts: Goldberg surely cannot be unaware that almost all of the "sales" of Arab property to Jews in East Jerusalem are at best legally and morally questionable, and at worst, bogus. Some properties have either been purchased by the state, often with secret funding funneled through groups like Ateret Kohanim, with the express purpose of Judaizing East Jerusalem and ridding it of its Arab heritage. This has been described in numerous books and articles (see, for example, Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem, pp. 216-218; the Ir Amim website should also be consulted.) Some of these sales have been judged bogus even by the Israeli Supreme Court. Most of the properties were transferred to Jewish owners on the basis of the Absentee Property Law of 1950, by which the state was allowed to take property of Arabs who left for, among other places, Jordan. In some cases, we have the absurd situation where property owners living in East Jerusalem, occupied by Jordan in 1948 and then by Israel in 1967, may have their title to ownership disputed because they "fled" to Jordan (i.e., East Jerusalem) in 1948. But even when this is not the case, the use of the Absentee Property Law is morally outrageous, even according to those liberal Zionists who justified its use in 1948. And how does the theft work? Settler groups try to find Arab homes whose owners are no longer there, have them registered with the custodian for absentee property, and then receive them from the government. This cooperation between settlers and government began in the late 80s and has continued ever since; since Nir Barkat was elected mayor of Jerusalem, it has become a national disgrace.
The Judaization of East Jerusalem is not the story of conventional real estate transactions in an open city; rather, it is the story of government-sponsored ethnic cleansing of occupied territory in an attempt to erase the historical and physical presence of Arabs in East Jerusalem – sixty-three years after the government did the same thing in the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem.
Goldberg also must be aware that the Jewish ownership of both the Sheikh Jarrah properties and the Shepherd Hotel is disputed. In the former case, the owners have Ottoman documents that they claim show that the land was rented to, and not purchased by the Sephardic committee. But even if the Sephardic committee was the owner before 1948, it is morally outrageous to evict Arab families who were not allowed to return to their homes in W. Jerusalem, and who were sold these homes by the Jordanian authorities over forty years ago. They have now become refugees twice – both times because of the state of Israel not allowing them to return to their homes. If it is just to transfer the Sheikh Jarrah homes to rightwing Jewish extremists on the grounds that it was owned by Jews in 1948, why is it not just to transfer homes in Talbieh, Baka, and Katamon, to their original Arab owners? The injustice cries to high heaven, which is why leading intellectuals and people of conscience find their way to the weekly Sheikh Jarrah protests.
And what of the Shepherd Hotel? Because nobody actually turned Palestinian residents into the streets, and because over sixty years ago it was associated with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Goldberg finds nothing morally problematic in a secret purchase by an American Jewish gambling mogul in order to eliminate the Arab presence in Jerusalem, and then tearing it down to put up Jewish apartments. (When was the last time Jewish property was torn down in Jerusalem in order to build housing for Palestinian residents of the city? When was the last time that any such housing was built?) He doesn't care that the hotel is claimed by the descendants of El-Husseini family and was questionably transferred – without any documentation, apparently -- to the custodian for absentee property? He doesn't care that another landmark of Arab Jerusalem is deliberately erased. He doesn't care that the final word on justice in Occupied Jerusalem (maybe not "occupied" according to Goldberg, but according to the rest of the world) is given to the Supreme Court of the Occupier, which can only judge according to laws that favor Jewish claims. None of these moral outrages bother him – what interests him is only Jewish self-interest.
Jewish self-interest will no doubt allow Jewish tourists to sleep in the five star Palace Hotel now being renovated in West Jerusalem (after being seized by the Israelis in 1948), despite the fact that it was built and owned by the Mufti.
In Jerusalem, Palestinians have suffered undeniable injustices for over sixty years, beginning with their expulsion from their homes in 1948, the subsequent theft of property and annexation (unrecognized by the world to this day), and ending with the annexation and Judaization of East Jerusalem, a process that only has accelerated in recent years. None of this matters to Israel supporters, unless it reduces the chance for peace.
Is Israel's conduct in East Jerusalemt bad, or merely bad for peace?
It is indeed bad for peace, but more importantly, it is just bad..
Labels: Illegal Settlements
Monday, January 25, 2010
My Mother
I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother
And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
with a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a god
If I touch the depths of your heart
If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand
I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest
Labels: Were should we go after the last sky
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
It's Palestine Solidarity Week at the University of Maryland, and the student branch of ZOA is bringing Khaled Abu Toameh to campus.
I can't blame Abu Toameh for being sponsored by an organization that claims that there is no Palestinian people, that the Arabs don't have any right to a state in Palestine; that none of the Israeli settlements, much less the outposts, are illegal. After all, it is hard to be a Palestinian journalist under any circumstances – if Abu Toameh can't liberate Palestine, he can at least liberate some of his honoraria money from the Zionists and their neocon allies.
But what the Maryland ZOA'ers probably don't know is that about a month ago, Abu Toameh gave a briefing to a group of American Israel advocates, on a tour sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, in which he said that Israel should offer the Palestinians a state on 98% of the West Bank, and to speak with Hamas.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
There's a majority of Jews today who want to disband most of the settlements and take only two percent of the West Bank. My Israeli Jewish friends say to me, "You know, Khaled. You Arabs can take whatever you want. Just leave us alone. It's no longer a territorial dispute for us. We'll give you anything you want if you just go and leave us alone." Some of them even go further than that. Some of them say "Just leave us Tel Aviv, the airport, and the beach."
In the wake of these positive changes that have happened inside Israel, all you need is a strong partner on the Palestinian side. There is some hope, but only if there is a strong partner on the Palestinian side.
General Tom McInerney:
Khaled Abu Toameh:
Mario Loyola:
Khaled Abu Toameh:
The entire "briefing" was published by rightwing blogger Michael J. Totten on Feburary 1. But later Totten took down the post, at the request of Abu Toameh and placed this note instead:
A Minority Report from the West Bank and Gaza (Deleted)
I had published the transcript of a talk and follow-up interview with a prominent and respectable Palestinian, and it caused a bit of trouble that neither he nor I anticpated or wanted. The transcript has been removed at his request.
The transcript of the "briefing" can be read in the comment section (!) of Phil Weiss's blog here and on another blog, here.
Should I speculate that Abu Toameh asked Michael J. Totten to take down the post because he didn't want to offend his rightwing hosts who bankroll his appeances? Who knows? Abu Toameh, is, after all, a man of principle. When he was threatened by Fatah, he didn't back down.
On the other hand, maybe ZOA's carrot is better than Fatah's stick
Labels: Neocolonialism
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Israel invaded Gaza on the ground to compliment its aerial bombardment. The Palestinian death toll has reached 660. The official Israeli death toll is up to 5, of whom 4 were civilians. Attacks on civilians, no matter who they are, is criminal.
Yet the US government, public relations officials, and mainstream media—unlike those of almost every other country in the world—continue to criminalize Palestinian violence while absolving Israel (the undisputed party in power) of almost any responsibility of its own. The official position seems clear: Israel can do as it likes until Hamas stops all violence.
The underlying assumption here is that Palestinians' human rights depend on the actions of their leaders. This is false. Palestinians do not have to earn the human rights inalienable to every person on Earth. Human rights are non-negotiable. Likewise, Israelis do not have to earn their human rights.
Israeli state terror notwithstanding, it would be criminal to bombard the entire population of Israel (in which, as in Gaza, fighters live alongside their families in civilian areas) for the crimes of its government. But this is exactly what Israel is doing in Gaza with US weapons before a seemingly impotent international community.
Every day the carnage unfolds on CNN-International (different from CNN-US—the United States is the only country in the world with domestically customized international news coverage): a mother and her 4 kids killed instantly; a 7-year-old shot twice in the chest (I'm not sure how that happens accidentally, but does that even matter?); more than 40 policemen in training obliterated (even Israel does not claim the Palestinian police orchestrates rocket attacks); TV stations and places of worship successfully destroyed; a mortuary out of room for bodies.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "sewage water is pouring into the streets in Beit Hanoun, following damage to the main pipeline between Beit Hanoun and the Beit Lahiya wastewater treatment plant." Save The Children reports that newborn baby Gazans are battling hypothermia due to power cuts and freezing winter winds.
Some of the worst news comes from the doctors. Can you imagine a hospital functioning without electricity? According to the mainstream British newspaper The Guardian, medics are working around the clock and running out of anesthesia. There is no more gauze so doctors are using cotton, which sticks to wounds. Nurses are forced to draw blood with the wrong sized syringes and without alcohol. The Guardian article was entitled, "The injured were lying there asking God to let them die." Many have gotten their last wish, dying as they wait in the emergency rooms.
Medical workers themselves have also been under fire, with at least 4 killed as they tried to reach victims. Ambulances are not safe, nor are the schools:
When I woke up yesterday a UN school had just been bombed, killing 3 of the civilians who had come to the school seeking shelter. Watching the news later in the evening, I learned the same UN school had been bombed again (twice in one day), killing 40 more. The British director of the school, having lost his usual calm, was irate and imploring the world to understand that nowhere in Gaza is safe anymore—there is nowhere left to go.
Yet reading the Washington Post and watching the nightly news you might believe that Israel's is in fact the most virtuous army in the world, going as far as sending text messages to and dropping leaflets in Palestinian areas explaining that unless civilians leave, they will be attacked. Reported alone, this might sound reasonable, but quickly
becomes absurd if you know that Gazans have no place to go to! Nowhere inside the strip of land is safe and there is no way to leave it, since the borders are sealed.
The bombing and invasion have clearly heightened the threat against Gazans' lives, but they did not start it. For the 18 months preceding the invasion, the average Gazan could not reliably go to school, make a living, contact the outside world, divert their sewage, heat their homes, drink clean water, or eat. This was due to the enclosure summed up in the words of the United Nations Special Reporters on Human Rights: "Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key." This was the reality of Israel's "ceasefire."
The closure pushed Gaza's humanitarian crisis to a new low, with poverty reaching 80%. Any attempt to counter poverty was thwarted. Gaza students dependent on transportation could not reach their schools, and those accepted at foreign universities in America, Europe, and the West Bank were denied permits to leave. Without enough fuel, industrial businesses were either shut down or running below 20% capacity, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
Contrary to Israeli court order, the Israeli army allowed just 15% of fuel needed for generators, wells, and transportation, resulting in garbage piled high in the streets while up to 15,000,000 gallons of raw or partially-treated sewage flowed into the sea every day. This was the reality of Israel's "ceasefire."
On November 4th and 5th, Israel broke the "ceasefire" by killing at least 6 Palestinians in Gaza, reported on CNN-International but unlikely by CNN-US. Of course, there was no ceasefire to begin with, since the main requirement on Israel was to sufficiently unseal Gaza's borders, a requirement that was consistently ignored. By the end of the "ceasefire," 262 had Gazans died due to lack of access to proper medical care during the blockade.
Hamas should be condemned for its attacks on civilians, but it is naïve to expect that they would renew a truce that Israel had never adhered to. Whether or not it would cease cross-border attacks in exchange for Israeli reciprocity—as Hamas continues to offer—is something we cannot know, since Israel has never given the offer a chance.
Know I ask you what did the Palestinians do to the Americans for some to go as far as saying they DESERVE IT, they have never attacked or harmed any Americans were on the flip side our biggest alias stole spayed killed Americans(intentionally) and sold our weapons to our potential anomy’s(China & Iran) so I say WWJS
Labels: Were should we go after the last sky
Saturday, January 03, 2009
*Barack Obama is presented with a t-shirt by Sderot mayor Eli Moyal*
But as more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured -- the majority civilians -- since Israel began its savage bombardment of Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media.
This convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.
The Mumbai attacks were a clear-cut case of innocent people being slaughtered. The situation in the Middle East however is seen as more "complicated" and so polite opinion accepts Obama's silence not as the approval for Israel's actions that it certainly is, but as responsible statesmanship.
It ought not to be difficult to condemn Israel's murder of civilians and bombing of civilian infrastructure including hundreds of private homes, universities, schools, mosques, civil police stations and ministries, and the building housing the only freely-elected Arab parliament.
It ought not to be risky or disruptive to US foreign policy to say that Israel has an unconditional obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention to lift its lethal, months-old blockade preventing adequate food, fuel, surgical supplies, medications and other basic necessities from reaching Gaza.
But in the looking-glass world of American politics, Israel, with its powerful first-world army, is the victim, and Gaza -- the besieged and blockaded home to 1.5 million immiserated people, half of them children and eighty percent refugees -- is the aggressor against whom no cruelty is apparently too extreme. While feigning restraint, Obama has telegraphed where he really stands; senior adviser David Axelrod told CBS on 28 December that Obama understood Israel's urge to "respond" to attacks on its citizens.
Axelrod claimed that "this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks as Hamas began its shelling [and] Israel responded."The truce Hamas had meticulously upheld was shattered when Israel attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinians, as The Guardian reported on 5 November.
A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems, will not leave the White House with George W. Bush on 20 January. Axelrod also recalled Obama's visit to Israel last July when he ignored Palestinians and visited the Israeli town of Sderot. There, Obama declared: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that.
I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."This should not surprise anyone. Despite pervasive wishful thinking that Obama would abandon America's pro-Israel bias, his approach has been almost indistinguishable from the Bush administrations.
Along with Tony Blair and George W. Bush, Obama staunchly supported Israel's war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, where it used cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing more than 1,000 people. Obama’s comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There, he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children at "joyful play just like my own daughters." He saw a home the Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizballah rocket (no one had been hurt in the incident).
Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children, while never having uttered a word about the thousands -- thousands -- of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always "terrorists."The problem is much wider than Obama: American liberals in general see no contradiction in espousing positions supporting Israel that they would deem extremist and racist in any other context.
The cream of America's allegedly "progressive" Democratic party vanguard -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman, New York Senator Charles Schumer, among others -- have all offered unequivocal support for Israel's massacres in Gaza, describing them as "self-defense.
"And then there's Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state and self-styled champion of women and the working classes, who won't let anyone outbid her anti-Palestinian positions.
Democrats are not simply indifferent to Palestinians. In the recent presidential election, their efforts to win swing states like Florida often involved espousing positions dehumanizing to Palestinians in particular and Arabs and Muslims in general. Many liberals know this is wrong but tolerate it silently as a price worth paying (though not to be paid by them) to see a Democrat in office. Even those further to the left implicitly accept Israel's logic.
Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, criticized Israel's attacks on Gaza as a "reckless" and "disproportionate response" to Hamas rocket attacks that he deemed "immoral." There are many others who do nothing to support nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and colonization, such as boycott, divestment and sanctions but who are quick to condemn any desperate Palestinian effort -- no matter how ineffectual and symbolic -- to resist Israel's relentless aggression.
Similarly, we can expect that the American university professors who have publicly opposed the academic boycott of Israel on grounds of protecting "academic freedom" will remain just as silent about Israel's bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza as they have about Israel's other attacks on Palestinian academic institutions. There is no silver lining to Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but the reactions to it should at least serve as a wake-up call:
When it comes to the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine, the American liberal elites who are about to assume power present as formidable an obstacle as the outgoing Bush administration and its neoconservative backers.
Labels: The Zone where the natives live
Thursday, January 01, 2009
But first, a word to my readers. Today is New Year's Eve. I pray for a better year to come, when both peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, live in dignity and peace. This year, as usual, there is no peace for either side -- but only one side robs the other side of its dignity, and dictates to it the terms of co-existence. This is not a war in Gaza; it is an assault on a the sovereign right of the Palestinian people to determine its destiny, and it began when one side refused to recognize the results of democratic elections.
Only when the Israelis view the Palestinians as equals – as possessing no less a right to a state, no less a right to security, no less a right to self-defence as they have – will there be the possibility of peace.
Happy New Year
Remy
This unnecessary war, which has claimed so many lives already, and which has kept two populations in terror (but only one in constant suffering) can be ended quickly. The cease-fire conditions are clear: ending the rocket fire from Gaza, ending the siege on Gaza, new elections in the West Bank and Gaza, which will be recognized by Israel. Beyond that, serious negotiations could be commenced for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Israel should not make the cessation of weapons smuggling a condition for a cease fire, or for indirect relations with Hamas. I am sorry to see that Meretz USA, which came out with a fine statement otherwise, has called for "the verifiable termination of weapons smuggling into the Gaza Strip" as a condition for a cease-fire.
Labels: Alex Trebek........What is PEACE
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