Three little syllables

Former US President Jimmy Carter goes from strength to strength. With just three syllables, the godfather of the Contras in Nicaragua and the Muhjahideen in Afghanistan has redeemed himself and become a hero of the left. His book’s Amazon sales rank has recovered to #11 after a temporary drop from its high at #6. A petition circulated demanding the removal of Jeffrey Goldberg’s unflattering Washington Post review from Amazon.com’s page for the book. Instead, they have inserted an interview they did with Carter. And he had an article of his own in Thursday’s Post. Clearly, if his critics really do want to silence him, they’re not doing a terribly good job.

There’s now a virtual industry defending Carter. I haven’t read all 482 Amazon customer reviews, but they give him an average of three and a half stars. In comparison, Ali Abunimah’s One country has eight customer reviews. I’ve discussed Finkelstein’s three articles in defense of Carter already elsewhere, as well as the supportive reviews that have pointed out his error in refusing to recognize what’s going on inside ‘Israel proper’. Now Alexander Cockburn has another defense on his Counterpunch site. Tony Karon has addressed te issue a couple of times on his Rootless cosmopolitan site, most recently yesterday. Also yesterday, Alternet’s Joshua Holland had quite a silly one entitled, ‘The assassination of Jimmy Carter continues …’

In his Amazon interview, Carter enunciates this bizarre view:

The book is about Palestine, the occupied territories, and not about Israel. Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word. I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded.

So, ‘Israel’ is not geographically part of Palestine, which comprises only the occupied territories. The book is about the occupied territories, but not about Israel, in other words, Israel’s occupation has nothing to do with the occupied territories? The word ‘apartheid’ accurately describes a situation where there is not only forced separation and terrible oppression, but also no freedom of movement, no work, and other features different from, and inmost cases, worse than, actual apartheid as practiced in South Africa. Racism is not a motivating factor, notwithstanding the systematic racism in Israeli law and in the concept of an ethnocratic state, as well as the attitudes betrayed in opinion polls. The desire to confiscate Palestinian land is not one of the principles on which the nation of Israel was founded – it was founded on wholly humanitarian principles.

It’s hard to imagine any Zionist objecting to Carter’s characterization of Israel unless they actually believe that the Palestinians deserve to suffer for being on the land that the Zionists covet. He agrees that there ought to be a Jewish state and argues that it is democratic and not racist, much less apartheid, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

Carter had declined an appearance at Brandeis University near Boston because he didn’t want to debate Alan Dershowitz. At the time, I criticized his decision as cowardly, particularly in light of his assertion that Dershowitz ‘knows nothing about the situation in Palestine’. Now, as if to underscore my point, Carter has agreed to speak at Brandeis, after all. As the Forward reports,

At the upcoming forum — which is not being run by the university’s administration but by a committee comprised of four faculty members and one student — Carter will speak for 15 minutes and then spend 45 minutes answering 15 pre-chosen questions, culled from queries submitted by students in advance via the Internet.

Returning to the apartheid analogy, Uri Avnery had a piece in today’s CounterPunch elucidating some of the similarities and differences. Two of these differences are not contentious,

In SA, a White minority (about 10 percent) ruled over a huge majority of Blacks (78 percent), people of mixed race (7 percent) and Asians (3 percent). Here, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are now 5.5 million Jewish-Israelis and an equal number of Palestinian-Arabs (including the 1.4 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel).

The SA economy was based on Black labor and could not possibly have existed without it. Here, the Israeli government has succeeded in excluding the non-Israeli Palestinians almost completely from the Israeli labor market and replacing them with foreign workers.

The other side of the coin that Avnery misses is that Israeli settler colonialism, like Australian and American settler colonialism, does not rely on indigenous labour and consequently regards the indigenous population as dispensible at best. This, as Moshe Machover has pointed out, is the fundamental difference with apartheid and it places the Palestinians in a particularly vulnerable position. ‘Transfer’ has always been at the centre of the Zionist project and Israeli society is now becoming more and more tolerant of discussing it openly.

But he also argues that there were another two differences,

In SA there was a conflict between Blacks and Whites, but both agreed that the state of South Africa must remain intact – the question was only who would rule it. Almost nobody proposed to partition the country between the Blacks and the Whites.

This simply isn’t the case. The existence of the Bantustans testifies that separation, at least political separation, was not only proposed, but implemented.

Our conflict is between two different nations with different national identities, each of which places the highest value on a national state of its own…

Here, the huge majority of the Palestinians want to be separated from Israel in order to establish a state of their own. The huge majority of Israelis, too, want to be separated from the Palestinians. Separation is the aspiration of the majority on both sides…

It’s apparent from what he writes here that when he says ‘both sides’, he means Israeli Jews and Palestinians resident in the West Bank and Gaza, or at least the leadership of those Palestinians. The Israeli Arabs, who he mentions in the same paragraph have disappeared. There is no question that the Israeli Arabs do not want to be separated from their kin in the occupied territories and do not want to be separated from their Israeli citizenship, either, as documented extensively in Joanthan Cook’s Blood and religion.

The other group he doesn’t appear to have taken into consideration in his analysis is the 1948 refugees. Of course nobody ever considers what they want. The ‘refugee issue’ has always been relegated to the back burner for ‘final status negotiations’ – negotiations in which they themselves of course are to have no part. If I had been languishing in a camp for the last sixty years, I’m pretty sure I’d consider resolution of the refugee issue a priority. And I’m pretty sure the resolution I’d favour didn’t include further separation between me and my homeland. But that’s just me. I’m sure Uri Avnery knows better.

Meanwhile, in a potentially encouraging development, Dershowitz himself, ‘speaking via satellite to the 7th Herzliya Conference of The Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS)’, identifies four new factors pointing to the need to ‘be strong and be prepared to go it alone.’ Pride of place among the four is…the publication of Palestine: peace not apartheid!. Apparently, ‘it legitimizes certain negative stereotypes’.

And if that’s not bizarre enough, he alleges ‘the rise of anti-Israel discussions in academic circles’, as if criticism of Zionism were at all commonplace on US campuses and weren’t ruthlessly suppressed by Dershowitz, Horowitz, ‘Campus Watch’, and their loyal minions. To top off the irony, the Harvard law professor whose claim to fame is his advocacy of needles under the fingernails, and who has been thoroughly outed as a plagiarist and a hack in Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah, derides the increasing prevalence of ‘trash academics’ which ‘could threaten the education of future American leaders.’ Just as well nothing like that threatened the education of America’s current leader.

The third factor is ‘the Media War being fought by Hizbullah & Hamas against Israel’ with the leering visages of Khalid Mashal and Hassan Nasrallah filling our tv screens night after night and endless coverage of the Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

The last threat to the cosy relationship between Israel and the US is that General Wesley Clark recently said, ‘New York money people are pushing the U.S. into war with Iran’. That sure would clinch it.

In any case, this is one time I sincerely hope Dershowitz is right. Nothing could contribute more to a just resolution of the ‘conflict in the Middle East’ than for the US to stop bankrolling it.

Also in Herzliya, Former CIA director James Woolsey asserted, ‘The destruction of Israel is not the policy of Iran, but its essence.’ He also said that the worst scenario would be to allow a nuclear Iran and ‘Israel should have made a move against Syria during the last war and that the U.S. should have supported such a move’. He may be a wingnut, but you couldn’t say he doesn’t know his audience.

Large scale

The Jerusalem Post reported the other day

If moderate elements in the Palestinian Authority don't get stronger, the IDF must prepare for a large-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip, said Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday.

What we have been witnessing since June, and before, in Gaza, must therefore be something other than a large scale military operation, presumably a small scale military operation, so watch out.

Gideon Levy points out what is apparently too obvious for anyone else to notice,

Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought… anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can't claim he didn't mean to kill innocent inhabitants.

In an article on CounterPunch, Norman Finkelstein quotes some ‘key statements’ from Jimmy Carter’s new book on Palestine, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, among them,

The United States has used its U.N. Security Council veto more than forty times to block resolutions critical of Israel. Some of these vetoes have brought international discredit on the United States, and there is little doubt that the lack of a persistent effort to resolve the Palestinian issue is a major source of anti-American sentiment and terrorist activity throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. (pp. 209-10)

I suppose it must be to Carter’s credit that there was only one such Security Council veto exercised during his administration, against draft resolution S/13911 on 30 April 1980. That draft, moved by Tunisia, basically reaffirmed previous UN resolutions calling for Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied since 1967 and so forth.

US Ambassador McHenry concluded his statement explaining the Carter regime’s objection to the draft resolution,

I know that in many quarters there is skepticism that negotiations in this [Camp David] framework can succeed. The road ahead will be difficult. But together with Israel and Egypt, we ask only that we be judged on the results we obtain.

…It is to the end - the attainment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East - that my government has committed itself. We solemnly reaffirm that commitment here today.

The United States will oppose the resolution before us. [emphasis added]

Thanks in large measure to the cynicism of Carter, his predecessors and successors, twenty-six years down the track, the results he obtained in this way are no peace and certainly no justice. But it seems he no longer wishes to be judged on that basis. At the risk of repeating myself, as the old saying goes, ‘Embarrassing a politician with accusations of hypocrisy is like embarrassing a dog with accusations that he licks his own balls.’

Israeli author David Grossman gave a speech at the Rabin memorial event on 5 November that has received a lot of comment. It was purportedly a masterpiece of Hebrew rhetorical prose, composed by a literary master. I won’t take issue with this assessment, because it is unsurprising in any case that the literary qualities are not evident in the translation.

Gilad Atzmon has already pointed out the contradiction inherent in Grossman’s ‘secular miracle’,

I am totally secular, and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts that happened to us as a nation - a political, national, human miracle.

Gilad also mentions his problem with Grossman’s ‘Jewish and universal values’. One of the thins that struck me about the speech was his description of Israel as

a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish identity and its Jewish ethos, the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens

Even if there weren’t a contradiction inherent between a state with a ‘Jewish identity’ and a ‘Jewish ethos’ somehow observing ‘full respect’ for non Jews, who do not comprise part of the state’s ‘identity’ and whose ‘ethos’ is excluded, it takes a very blinkered approach to the history of the Zionist project to miss one of its central aspects - ethnic cleansing of the non Jewish population and marginalization of those who managed to remain. Benny Morris was quite clear a couple of years ago when he characterized Ben Gurion’s failure to ‘cleanse the whole country’ as a ‘fatal mistake’. Ilan Pappe’s new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is now out and on its way from Amazon. I understand it fleshes out this story in considerable detail, amply documented.

Gilad also makes this cogent observation about Grossman’s quite blatant racism,

The critical reader may ask oneself what really Grossman refers to when he says “people with our powers of creativity and regeneration”? It is rather simple. Grossman truly believes in the uniqueness of the chosen people. In other words, Grossman is not more than a biological determinist…I find it hard to believe that the Guardian would give a voice to a German philosopher who praises Aryan people’s ‘powers of creativity and regeneration’.

Some comments that I’ve come across let Grossman get away with,

Yitzhak Rabin took the road of peace with the Palestinians, not because he possessed great affection for them or their leaders.

It’s true that the Nobel committee awarded Rabin its coveted Peace Prize, and I’ve written elsewhere what that indicates. The point is that Grossman accepts at face value and promulgates as fact that the Oslo Accords had something to do with achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians, when it was never anything other than a stalling tactic that created the bloated and ineffectual quisling Palestine Authority while doubling the Jewish population colonizing the West Bank with a view to its ultimate annexation.

One, however, published on the Electronic Intifada on the 9^th, by Raymond Deane, certainly hasn’t missed this crucial point, or many others.

With Lieberman you know where you stand, and self-styled democrats and peaceniks can polish their humanistic credentials by flinging mud at him. With David Grossman, however, the same premises lead to a discourse in which everything has become muddied and inverted, the occupier has become the victim, the victim has become a twisted fanatic, and only the humanistic man of letters has retained any kind of wistful integrity. This discourse is understandably popular with those who, sometimes with honourable if misguided motivation, wish to believe that Zionism can be a liberal, humanistic ideology rather than one that is supremacist and racist to the core.

His ‘Anatomy of a Beautiful Soul’ pulls no punches and I recommend it highly.

On a lighter note, I recently reminded myself to check out David Pope’s website, which I have to recommend visiting more conscientiously than I seem to manage. I reckon he is consistently the most incisive political cartoonist I know of, although some of his material will be obscure to those who do not recognize Australian politicians or keep track of developments in Australian politics. An example (which will not display in this blog)

For more laughs, I found a link to the Dilbert site not long ago from Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning blog, of all places!