Have your cake

By this time, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s common knowledge that what shattered the ceasefire Egypt brokered in June was not Qassams raining on Sderot, but Israel’s 4 November attack on Gaza, which killed six. Just coincidentally, that was the day of the historic US presidential election. As Jim Lobe and Ali Gharib reported on IPS 7 January

While the major U.S. news wire Associated Press (AP) reported that the attack, in which six members of Hamas's military wing were killed by Israeli ground forces, threatened the ceasefire, its report was carried by only a handful of small newspapers around the country.

The Nov 4 raid -- and the escalation that followed -- also went unreported by the major U.S. network and cable television new programmes, according to a search of the Nexis database for all English-language news coverage between Nov. 4 and 7.

Although I have not managed to find the text of the ceasefire document, if there ever was one, or even a summary of its terms, it’s hard to imagine that it countenanced attacks like Israel’s on 4 November. So it seems a trifle understated to assert that it ‘threatened the ceasefire’.

Lobe and Gharib quote Stephen Zunes, ‘an expert on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the University of San Francisco’, in much the same vein, ‘It was a huge, huge provocation, and it now appears to me that it was actually intended to get Hamas to break off the ceasefire’.

In his now famous letter to US Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice, Congressman Dennis Kucinich wrote,

I believe that Israel’s most recent attacks neither further internal security nor do they constitute “legitimate” acts of self-defense. They do, however, “increase the possibility of an outbreak or escalation of conflict,” because they are a vastly disproportionate response to the provocation, and because the Palestinian population is suffering from those military attacks in numbers far exceeding Israeli losses in life and property.

In reality, the slaughter Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is not a disproportionate response to the provocation. It is the provocation. As if to underscore Israel’s attitude to the truce, on the day the bombing started, Barak Ravid reported in Ha’aretz, ‘Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.’

Nor is this the first time that Israel has decided to interrupt a period of ‘calm’. In the Huffington Post on Tuesday, Nancy Kanwisher, Johannes Haushofer, & Anat Biletzki, discussing their study of ‘conflict pauses’, write,

We defined "conflict pauses" as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. As shown in Figure 2, this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.

My understanding is that the terms of the tahadiyeh required Israel to lift its siege. That it declined to do so suggests that the ceasefire was effectively unilateral on the part of Hamas in the first place. Of course, there are claims that Hamas was also in violation. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni addressing a press conference in Sderot on 31 December said,

Now, one of the elements of the truce declared six months ago was full cessation of the smuggling of weapons through these tunnels. Unfortunately, Hamas did not do that, and violated this agreement.

========

UPDATE:
Here is the text of the agreement according to the Working Group on the Middle East Peace Process blog [hat tip to Kathy Kelly]:

Ceasefire Understanding between Hamas and Israel as Mediated by Egypt

1. Mutual agreement to cease all military activities by the start of “zero hour” on Thursday, June 19, at 6:00AM.
2. Duration of ceasefire is six months according to agreement concluded among the national parties under Egyptian auspices.
3. Ceasefire will be implemented under national consensus and under the Egyptian auspices.
4. After seventy two hours from the start of the ceasefire, the crossing points will be opened to allow 30% more goods to enter the Gaza strip.
5. Ten days after that (i.e., 13 days after ceasefire begins), all crossings would be open between Gaza and Israel, and Israel will allow the transfer of all goods that were banned or restricted to go into Gaza.

Note that it does not mention 'smuggling of weapons'. Indeed, 'all goods that were banned or restricted' implicitly permits it.

==========

Clearly, there was no impediment under the terms of the agreement to Israel, already boasting the fourth most powerful military apparatus on the planet, from replenishing their own munitions. Indeed, according to a Reuters report carried today in Ha’aretz,

…the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as "ammunition" on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.

In the wake of the UN Security Council Resolution 1860 (cf. Jews sans frontières), calling for an ‘immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire’, the US is shipping arms to Israel in the midst of its gruesome attack on the Gaza Strip, just as it did as Israel was reducing much of Lebanon to rubble in 2006. But there is nothing to worry about, because according to the doubtless trustworthy Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, ‘The delivery of ammunition is to a pre-positioned U.S. munitions stockpile in Israel in accordance with a congressionally authorised 1990 agreement between the U.S. and Israel…This previously scheduled shipment is routine and not in support of the current situation in Gaza.’ Thankfully, the Greek government has prevented this from proceeding, for the time being.

Doubtless with a view to minimising civilian casualties, ‘In September, the U.S. Congress approved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world’, Reuters further reports.

The way the media have been reporting on this, you’d think it went without saying why Israel is entitled to exploit a ceasefire to prepare for its next onslaught and Hamas is not. And I suppose it does. After all, Hamas is among the 42 groups on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTO). Israel is not.

Section 140(d)(2) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1988 and 1989 defines "terrorism" as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents."

So that neatly gets Israel off the hook, whatever they do, however motivated. Similarly, echoing what has become a commonplace, ‘The [US] House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution Friday "recognizing Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza"…The bill, which was sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, passed by a vote of 390 to 5’, according to CNN. I have seen nothing from Pelosi or any of the others asserting this right that suggests that they have even considered the possibility that Hamas might be entitled to exercise such a right.

Although widely treated as such, Israel’s right to defend itself may not be such a trivial issue. As the Zionist colonial project is inherently racist and imperialist, and therefore indefensible, I’d argue that it does not. But surely it does have the right and obligation to protect its citizens. One way it could go about this might be to eschew provocations like the 4 November attack. Another would be to refrain from subjecting Palestinians to a suffocating siege. Or it could treat the occupied population with the consideration required by the Fourth Geneva Convention, or its own Palestinian citizens with the full rights of citizens. Or the Israeli government could provide for the wellbeing of the one third of Israeli children who go to bed hungry every night, according to the charities that claim to be trying to feed them. Or it could deploy the billions it extorted from Germany as Holocaust reparations to provide a dignified senescence for the tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors currently living in abject poverty there…

Another commonplace that keeps coming up is that while Hamas deliberately targets civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields, Israel is always conscientious to a fault not to harm non-combatants. On 2 January, infamous Harvard Law Professor Alan M Dershowitz, for instance, wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

Hamas has fired thousands of rockets designed to kill civilians into southern Israel… the terrorists exploit the morality of democracies…Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it…These despicable tactics -- targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians -- can only work against moral democracies that care deeply about minimizing civilian casualties…

With 1000 GPS-guided GBU-39 bunker busters, ‘one of the most accurate bombs in the world’, at its disposal, along with all the latest high tech ‘smart’ weapons, you’d think that the Israeli military could manage at least to kill more combatants than civilians. But now that the UN’s early estimate that ‘at least 25%’ of the dead – that is, women and children – were non-combatants, has been superseded by more accurate appraisals, it transpires that they comprise most of the killed and injured. There are all kinds of speculations about how the IDF manage to miss so often. Their Code of ethics prescribes

Purity of Arms - The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

Israel’s apologists opine that Hamas places non-combatants in the line of fire by using civilian facilities for military purposes. But that can’t be right because the IDF ‘will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants’. It could be that they’re not really sure how to use those smart weapons, or have poor aim. But by far the most plausible explanation is that the targeting of civilians is deliberate. The vacillating pretexts they’ve come up with for bombing UNWRA’s Fakhura and Asma schools where refugees were sheltering on Tuesday and eventual admission to UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness ‘that the attack on the UN site was unintentional’, strongly suggest that they think they have something to hide.

Dr Rice seems unconcerned about this. After all, to avoid slaughtering non-combatants ‘is very difficult in circumstances like Gaza, which is a very densely populated area…I might note it's also an area in which Hamas participates in activities like human shields, using buildings that are not designated as military buildings to hide their fighters. So it's hard’.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was more forthright at her Sderot press conference, admitting,

During this operation, Israel had a list of targets that are related directly to Hamas. We are talking about headquarters, we are talking about the places in which they gather; we are talking about the places where they manufacture missiles and we are talking about all of the places that are connected to Hamas as a government, not legitimate, but a government as a terrorist organization. All of these attacks are directly targeted at places that we know are part of Hamas…[emphasis added]

In other words, the objective is not just to remove ‘the infrastructure of terror’, but any infrastructure that Hamas currently controls, and if civilians get in the way, so be it.

The accusation that Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians is also problematical. Since the Qassam and other rockets in their armoury are not guided, it seems preposterous to suggest they are targeting anything in particular. Unless, of course, Sderot, and now Ashkelon and other nearby cities, are free of military targets. As Jonathan Cook pointed out during the assault on Lebanon in 2006, Israel doesn’t permit the locations of its military facilities, including arms factories, to be divulged. So for all we know, there may be legitimate military targets in or near Sderot, and that is where Gazans firing rockets hope they will land.

Use of weapons that can’t be aimed accurately does raise the question of whether they ought to be used at all. After all, as Chomsky and others argue, and I concur, actions that predictably harm civilians are morally equivalent to those that deliberately do so. But the only evidence we have that Qassam rockets predictably harm civilians is the hasbara establishment’s assertion that they deliberately target civilians, which is itself implausible. So I am not convinced that the few Israeli victims of Qassams were in fact predictable. Furthermore, I am not prepared to condemn Palestinians for resisting Israeli oppression, not to mention military assaults, using the only weapons at their disposal. That said, while I understand the impulse to retaliate, rocketing and suicide bombing Israeli targets of any kind has proven just as ineffective as nonviolent forms of resistance, and counterproductive to boot.

Furthermore, last February, there was a kerfuffle over the threat to sack Palestinian filmmaker, Nizar Hassam, from his post as a lecturer at Sderot’s Sapir College on the grounds that he had asked a student to come to class out of uniform and unarmed. The most recent information I’ve managed to find on this issue was a 7 March 2008 letter from Mervat Hatem, president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America to Dr. Ze’ev Tsahor, President of Sapir College, deploring the ad hoc procedures deployed in disciplining Hassan. At that point, Tsahor seemed to think Hassan’s sacking was imminent but I don’t know whether he was ultimately sacked or not. What is not in doubt is that armed and uniformed Israeli soldiers are lurking around Israeli academic institutions. Does that make the universities legitimate military targets? Or is it just a case of soldiers hiding behind noncombatants? Of course, the reservist in question was either off duty or AWOL, it might be objected. But then, when Israel dropped a one tonne bomb on Nizar Rayyan’s house on New Year’s Day, killing him along with his four wives and eleven children, surely he must have been off duty, too. Every time there’s a suicide bombing, the media shriek in unison how despicable, dastardly, and cowardly the terrorists are to target civilians like that. Anyone who’s been to Israel knows that armed and uniformed soldiers travel on public transport and frequent pizza parlours and felafel stalls. When Israeli soldiers eat a slice of pizza or catch the bus home for the weekend, they are noncombatants. When a ‘Hamas gunman’ does so, he’s hiding behind civilians.

Anyway, Israeli universities are not reticent about how much they contribute to training officers and developing military technology. The December 2008 University of Haifa Newsletter, for instance, boasts of its naval officers training course. By the standards Israel is applying in selecting targets in Gaza, that would make it perfectly legitimate to lob a rocket or two at Haifa University. Unless, that is, it’s argued that it’s ok for the University of Haifa because they’re training official, registered cadets for service in a legitimate navy of a recognised state, while the Islamic University and the Police Academy are just training terrorists. How do we know they’re terrorists? They work for the Hamas administration – ‘the infrastructure of terror’.

Getting back to IDF ethics, Dershowitz asserts, ‘It [Israel] goes to enormous lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties -- even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilians.’ (And see Franklin Lamb’s two Counterpunch articles.)

Writing in the erstwhile liberal magazines The new republic and Dissent, Michael Walzer, authority on ‘just war theory’ and professor emeritus at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton NJ, where Einstein used to work, reckons that in judging ‘proportionality’, you have to ask, ‘Is the attacking army acting in concrete ways to minimise the risks they impose on civilians? Are they taking risks themselves for that purpose?’ [Hat tip to the pseudonymous troll posting on the Alef list for the Walzer and Dershowitz articles.]

Jonathan Cook answers in Counterpunch on 9 January,

Criticism by international watchdog groups over the increasing death toll in Gaza mounted this week as the first legal actions inside Israel were launched accusing the army of intentionally harming the enclave’s civilian population.

The petitions – over attacks on medical personnel and the shelling of United Nations schools in Gaza – follow statements by senior Israeli commanders that they have been using heavy firepower to protect soldiers during their advance on built-up areas. “We are very violent,” one told Israeli media. [emphasis added]

And that’s apart from the hospitals, the ambulances, barring the Red Cross…the whole litany of atrocities that Israel is perpetrating day after day. ‘all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property’, indeed!

Even if it happens to be the case that Hamas deliberately targets, or predictably harms, Israeli noncombatants, it is indisputable that Israel routinely does so, along with other forms of collective punishment, like the siege of Gaza, the checkpoints, house demolitions, and so forth. The rationale is, ‘If we make their lives sufficiently miserable, they will overthrow Hamas’. Perhaps Hamas has simply borrowed a leaf out Israel’s book. Maybe they imagine that if they make life in Sderot uncomfortable enough, Israelis will rise up and overthrow their terrorist government. [Hat tip to Mark Marshall for the graphic]

In a similar vein, you see comments on blogs and elsewhere suggesting that civilians in Gaza deserve their fate because they elected ‘the terrorists’ in 2006. Those killing Israeli civilians might equally claim that they merit their fate because they elected an acknowledged war criminal, Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister. Some of his predecessors were also known terrorists, like former Irgun member Yitzchak Shamir. Menachem Begin, also of the Irgun, was one of the authors of the July 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, a terrorist act that killed 91 and that Israelis celebrated by erecting a plaque in July 2006. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those dancing in the streets of New York on 11 January in celebration of the carnage in Gaza were among those who took such umbrage at the callousness of Palestinians who were purported to have done so when the World Trade Center came down.

The double standards the apologists for Israel apply are not just completely over the top, but utterly transparent. Seriously, I’d be embarrassed to be so hypocritical, particularly with such deplorable motives. Imagine, trying to justify this slaughter!

Free Gaza rally

A few images from yesterday's rally, organised by Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine (AJPP). The rally, which attracted what looked to me about 400 people, including some who had come down from Sydney. It's Canberra, after all, not London.

We started with several speakers

Keisar Trad addresses the rally at the Israeli Embassy

at the Israeli Embassy at 1:00, where there was a shoe throwing exercise


that I understand received global coverage on al Jazeera. Then we marched to Fortress Doom (aka the US Embassy), with more speakers.

Then on to the Egyptian Embassy,

Rick Kuhn addresses the rally at the Egyptian Embassy

and finally on to the Prime Minister's Lodge.

Bomb it yourself

Sol Salbe sent this around this morning, and I couldn’t resist sharing it.

[Middle East News Service comments: I received this from a reliable friend in Israel without a copy of the Hebrew original. I therefore cannot vouch for the translation, even though I made a few corrections to obvious errors. It is an incredible example of the way war culture is inculcated into Israeli society. The need for groups like New Profile (The committee for the Civil-isation of Israeli society is stronger than ever before.). Yediot Acharonot is the country’s largest circulating newspaper. Hot is a popular pay TV service – Sol Salbe.]

Bomb it yourself

Television criticism, Raanan Shaked, Yediot Acharonot, January 6

The Cast Lead channel on Hot VOD

Listen, the lessons of the second Lebanon war really were learned. That Winograd guy is really something. Every word he said is gold. It is a good thing they listened to him, that wise old man, and really, in this war we are completely implementing “Wino’s” lessons and doing everything right and when victory is -- and it will be -- ours, I think we should have another commission of inquiry headed by him that will check, once and for all, how great we are.

The fact is, while in the second Lebanon war the home front suffered from terrible shortages -- and I'm talking about a shortage of basic living needs, namely television programming that makes people want to win -- this time they deployed correctly and everything is working smoothly, everything is under control and our photogenic and talented war is served to the public -- in case you missed something – on Hot’s VOD. For real.

How does it work? Let's say that after a full day of Yonit, Yaacov and Ronny Daniel [TV anchors] you're feeling a little low. War-shwmar, whatever, but what about a little entertainment? Escapism? Something for your soul? You calmly go into Hot’s VOD and there on the main menu waiting for you is the category of Cast Lead. You select it and there you are -- whole worlds of rich and entertaining content, courtesy of the IDF Spokesperson Office!

In the "operational activity" category, for instance, you are invited to choose between "Air Force assaults," "Navy assaults" and "humanitarian activities." -- just a minute, isn't that category included in the previous two anyway? -- and watch ourselves, as one poetic reserve soldier put it, give it to the Arabs in the whatever.

For starters I treated myself to a film of "assault on the Hulafaa Mosque," after the selection of which the screen wished me "pleasant viewing." I really did enjoy it like I haven't enjoyed anything since my circumcision. After the sights stop on the mosque, the business is bombed from above; a giant bright cloud fills the screen and then a close-up of the burning mosque. No plot, no acting, no sound, no nonsense: straight to the action. If only all porn was like this!

I went on to "attacking tunnels" (a little disappointing), "attacking rocket launching sites" (weak), "attack on Hamas government building" (bingo! Explosive special effects!) and "Typhoon fire on Hamas buildings" in the "Navy assaults" category (the peak moment: when they knock off a lifeguard shed. In general a good movie, even though not the epitome of the IDF spokesperson's work).

You are invited to guess the level of talkback shock and holy outrage with which we would react if an Arab channel were to offer its viewers footage of bombing IDF targets and synagogues as entertainment for adults on a pay per view channel. You are invited to guess how entertained we would be if the film "Wagging the Dog," that movie about a war for electoral purposes, had included such a screenwriting ploy. "What wonderful satire," we would say to ourselves on the way out

Well, why guess. Go in to VOD now and you too can win the war at no extra charge.

'Lethal effects targeting'

A couple of weeks ago, Louis Proyect posted a press release from Wikileaks which in turn linked to the just released US Human terrain team handbook, along with David Price’s Counterpunch article and an editorial in Nature.

It is doubtless pure coincidence that for our bosses, we humans are no more than ‘human resources’ to exploit, and for the forces of repression, we are ‘human terrain’, to stomp all over. Anyway, Human terrain teams, apparently the brainchild, so to speak, of one Montgomery McFate, are groups of embedded social scientists tasked with conducting anthropological research on occupied populations and feeding military commanders with relevant predigested ‘expert human terrain & social science advice based on a constantly updated, user-friendly ethnographic and socio-cultural database of the area of operations’, which they will of course never allow to influence their ‘Lethal Effects Targeting’.

Describing the Nature editorial as ‘fierce’, quoting its subtitle, ‘the US military's human-terrain programme needs to be brought to a swift close’, Price writes, ‘This position is all the more devastating when contrasted with an editorial supporting the principles of Human Terrain and other forms of military-funded anthropological work published by Nature just five months ago.’

In reality, Nature’s editors have not retreated from their basic position. In July, they entertained hopes that Human terrain systems, ‘…have potential to be a win–win for all concerned — including, most especially, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and regions of future conflict’. It reads as if they regard Iraq, Afghanistan, and other regions of conflict as mired in some sort of unavoidable natural calamity and US soldiers are just there to help them through it. If the soldiers sit on the ground and drink tea out of a glass, then that is a win for the occupied, even if those same culturally sensitive soldiers bash down your door at 3:00 in the morning and clobber your mother senseless with a rifle butt.

Nature, you will recall, is the estimable scholarly journal that published the groundbreaking research by epidemiologists associated with Johns Hopkins University showing the real costs of the US occupation of Iraq in 2004 and 2006. Yet in their July editorial, they write, as if adducing evidence, ‘According to Gates, one commander in Afghanistan says that using an HTS team has cut the number of armed attacks he has had to make by 60%’. Clearly, they don’t subject their own editorial comment to the same rigorous scrutiny as they do contributed articles.

This month, they have concluded that the scheme ‘…is failing on every level’.

In theory, it is a good idea. The Human Terrain System aims to embed anthropologists and other social scientists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to help improve understanding of local cultures and thus relieve tensions between civilians and soldiers…In practice, however, it has been a disaster. Questions have been raised about how well the programme vets its employees. Some scientists who have joined the system have complained about inadequate training. And qualified researchers have been dismissed for seemingly trivial reasons, even though much more questionable people seem to breeze onto the payroll.

…The immediate problems with the Human Terrain System can be traced to BAE Systems, the military contractor based in Rockville, Maryland, that screens potential employees, then trains those it hires. It has failed in every one of those functions, and army management has failed in its oversight of BAE.

So for them, it’s just a matter of human resources management issues, and professionalism, of course. After all, if human terrain research is carried out unprofessionally, it can hardly be expected to ‘relieve tensions between civilians and soldiers’. Realistically, though, considering that ‘the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has formally condemned it, saying that participants would find it difficult or impossible to follow the association's ethical guidelines in a combat zone…’, the program could only ever have hoped to atttract renegade anthropologists who reject their colleagues’ ethical principles. Furthermore, I think it is inevitable that the military itself would want to have a say, if not an outright veto, in the vetting process. They would want to feel that they can rely on Human terrain teams not to betray military movements, not to run to the media every time they observe perpetration of an atrocity, and so forth. Hardly propitious conditions to recruit the most competent anthropologists.

In July, Nature hoped the Human terrain project would address ‘the hard lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan — where troops with insufficient understanding of the cultural or political landscape have too often exacerbated the insurgency they were trying to control’, suggesting that troops with sufficient understanding of the cultural or political landscape would not exacerbate the insurgency. It’s as if they hadn’t considered the possibility that the occupation doesn’t exist to control the insurgency, that in fact the insurgency is a direct response to the occupation. What exacerbates the insurgency is not the occupying forces’ level of understanding, it’s that there are occupying forces.

In case there was any lingering doubt,

Nature is not opposed in principle to academics working with the military; we have said before that social science can and should inform military policy. We continue to believe that the insights of science have much to offer strategies in a war zone — not least through training combat troops to understand the local cultures within which they operate.

The only problem is that, ‘…as currently constituted, the Human Terrain System is not the way to do this. Unless the programme can be reborn in a format less plagued by deadly mistakes, it needs to be closed down’.

While I agree with Price that Nature’s call is welcome, they have not enunciated a principled objection on scientific, political, legal or moral grounds. Far from it. Their problem, it seems, is with BAE Systems.

Less still have they opposed the occupation of Afghanistan itself, which they apparently regard as just some phenomenon that NATO forces are dealing with as best they can.

To deal with it better, in October, Philip Dorling reported in the Canberra Times that the Australian Army has put out a request for tender ‘for a commercial supplier to deliver intensive training in the language for three years, beginning next January, with the likelihood of a two-year extension’.

Soldiers with no previous Pashto language training will undertake an anticipated 42-week course to successfully perform as ''military linguists using the ... language in a wide range of social situations, and specialised military subjects''

As the article’s headline cannily predicts, ‘Afghan language training hints at long haul’. As if to confirm this, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced on his return from a brief junket to Afghanistan and the UAE last week, ‘I've always said we're in Afghanistan for the long haul, for a long time. We've got to be serious. It's tough, protracted work. We're of a mind to see it through in partnership with our friends and allies.’

Dorling further reported that ‘Defence sources said Pashto was in demand for Afghanistan operations, but the language had little wider application’. Dorling may not be aware that an estimated 27 million Pashto speakers – more than twice as many as live in Afghanistan – inhabit the area east of the Durand Line that has been on the receiving end of US President-Elect Barack Obama’s most aggressive sabre rattling. But ‘Defence sources’ almost certainly are.

Humbug

It's true. I’ve been slack. I blame it on the capitalist system. If I didn’t have to squander so much of my waking life to ‘earning a living’, I’d have more time to think and write. When I last posted, I was thinking about a piece on racism, but eventually realised I needed to do a whole lot more reading and thinking before I’d have anything to say that I hadn’t already said. Maybe that’s what discouraged me. But more likely it’s just sloth.

Anyway, the spirit of xmas present has got the better of me. Like every year, I’m totally inundated with xmas hype, not just in the media and the shops. After all, as the fundamental underlying principle of xmas is an orgy of consumerism, you can hardly expect to escape it. But it still never fails to gives me the shits when it intrudes into my workplace, with all the xmas parties and xmas decorations and xmas decoration competitions... It would be an exaggeration to say I wish I was back in Pakistan, where xmas is nearly invisible, but that is one of the country’s many charms.

In deference to the festive season, Rasmussen reports on their 16 December poll, ‘…61% of adults nationwide say life in the United States would be better if more Americans lived as Christians…Just 13% disagree and say life would be worse’. Rasmussen acknowledge that ‘Living as a Christian can mean different things to different people’, but decline to tease out what those differences might be apart from a link to another recent poll that does nothing to clarify the issue. They are similarly silent on what respondents might think they meant by ‘life in the United States would be better’.

Presumably, few respondents would have had turn the other cheek pacifism in mind, as suggested by the discrepancy between responses from ‘political conservatives’ and ‘liberals’.

There is a strong ideological divide on this question. By an 80% to seven percent (7%) margin, political conservatives say life would be better if more lived as Christians. Among liberals, just 38% say life would be better with more Christian living…

On this occasion, Rasmussen uncharacteristically do not provide the questionnaire, crosstabulations (except to ‘Premium Members’), or even a fuller report. But I surmise that the classification of political ideologies comprises just ‘conservative’, ‘moderate’, and ‘liberal’, thereby exhausting the spectrum of bourgeois political opinion, and that respondents are classified strictly on the basis of self identification. I am deeply skeptical of self perception as a measure of political orientation. A point that Chomsky frequently makes, and Jon Stewart reiterates, is that many Americans who identify as conservative, actually support policies like free choice, universal health care…widely regarded as liberal. So I’m not convinced that any correlation was with actual political orientation, as distinct from self perception. As I understand the terms as used in the US, the range of political orientations from ‘liberal’ to ‘conservative’ is very narrow. Certainly I couldn’t place myself anywhere along that continuum. That said, I suspect that many of those identifying as conservative are not pacifists.

Another troubling finding is that, ‘Only 15% of those who rarely or never attend church say those who believe in Jesus as the Son of God are stupid’. The population in question probably comprises the 17% who ‘attend occasionally’, the 7% who ‘profess a religious belief other than Christianity’ and the 25% who ‘rarely or never attend church’. I gather those who profess no religious belief are among those who ‘rarely or never attend church’.

Maybe the other 85% were trying to be polite. Or maybe they were feeling insecure about their own weird beliefs. According to a Harris poll conducted in mid November,

80% of adult Americans believe in God…Large majorities of the public believe in miracles (75%), heaven (73%), angels (71%), that Jesus is God or the Son of God (71%), the resurrection of Jesus (70%), the survival of the soul after death (68%), hell (62%), the Virgin birth (Jesus born of Mary (61%) and the devil (59%).

In response to the question , ‘To what extent do you believe that the following represents the word of God?’, 37% said that all of the Old Testament is the word of god, while only 14% thought that the Torah deserved that status. As Harris astutely observe,

Interestingly, only 26% of all adults believe that [all or most of] the Torah is the word of God, even though it is the same as the first five books of the Old Testament. Presumably many people do not know this.

Not only don’t they know it, they clearly have not absorbed the maxim not to judge a book by its cover. Harris also reports that

Slightly more people – but both are minorities – believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution (47%) than in creationism (40%).

It’s kind of interesting that Harris reckon ‘Darwin’s theory of evolution’ is something you can ‘believe in’ in the same way as you might believe in virgin birth, and that 47% of their respondents bought into that fiction. If it’s any consolation, only 40% admitted to believing in creationism.

One hesitates to speculate how many believe in Santa Claus.

And now, for your holiday delectation, Miles Davis [hat tip to Roland Rance for the audio link] and Bob Dorough’s 1962 classic, ‘Blue xmas (To whom it may concern)’. I was surprised and delighted to learn, by the way, that Dorough, who celebrated his 85^th birthday on 12 December, is still around, still touring, and still recording.

Merry Christmas

I hope you have a white one, but for me it's blue

Blue Christmas, that's the way you see it when you're feeling blue

Blue Xmas, when you're blue at Christmastime

you see right through,

All the waste, all the sham, all the haste

and plain old bad taste

Sidewalk Santy Clauses are much, much, much too thin

They're wearing fancy rented costumes, false beards and big fat phony grins

And nearly everybody's standing round holding out their empty hand or tin cup

Gimme gimme gimme gimme, gimme gimme gimme

Fill my stocking up

All the way up

It's a time when the greedy give a dime to the needy

Blue Christmas, all the paper, tinsel and the fal-de-ral

Blue Xmas, people trading gifts that matter not at all

What I call

Fal-de-ral

Bitter gall.......Fal-de-ral

Lots of hungry, homeless children in your own backyards

While you're very, very busy addressing

Twenty zillion Christmas cards

Now, Yuletide is the season to receive and oh, to give and ahh, to share

But all you December do-gooders rush around and rant and rave and loudly blare

Merry Christmas

I hope yours is a bright one, but for me it bleeds

Human shields

Back in August, I posted on Jonathan Cook’s discussion of Israeli use of Israeli citizens as human shields in last year’s Lebanon war. In an important new article in yesterday’s Counterpunch, he provides new evidence that it was overwhelmingly Israel and not Hizb’allah that was ‘cowardly blending’ with the civilian population and the inconsistent approach that the Human Rights Watch reports adopted to war crimes.

HRW did made a brief reference to the possibility that Israeli military installations were located close to or inside civilian communities. It cited examples of a naval training base next to a hospital in Haifa and a weapons factory built in a civilian community. Its researchers even admitted to watching the Israeli army firing shells into Lebanon from a residential street of the Jewish community of Zarit.

This act of “cowardly blending” by the Israeli army -- to echo the UN envoy Jan Egeland’s unwarranted criticism of Hizbullah -- was a war crime. It made Israeli civilians a potential target for Hizbullah reprisal attacks.

So what was HRW’s position on this gross violation of the rules of war it had witnessed? After yet again denouncing Hizbullah for its rocket attacks, the report was mealy-mouthed: “Given that indiscriminate fire [by Hizbullah], there is no reason to believe that Israel’s placement of certain military assets within these cities added appreciably to the risk facing their residents.”

In other words, some are guilty unless proven innocent and others are innocent even after proven guilty.

Who pays the piper

Much quicker off the mark than me, within a day of the 11 December release of the latest AJC Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion (conducted 6-25 November 2007), Glenn Greenwald was writing in Salon on ‘How Unrepresentative Neocon Jewish Groups Are’, concluding,

One of the defining traits of war-loving neoconservatives is that their unrelenting and exclusive fixation on the Middle East...often casts the appearance that they are some sort of spokespeople for the “pro-Israel” agenda or the Jewish viewpoint.

Manifestly, they are nothing of the sort. Even among American Jews, they comprise only a small minority, and their generally discredited militarism is widely rejected by most Jews as well. It is always worth underscoring these points, which are so frequently (and deliberately) obscured, and this comprehensive poll provides potent — actually quite conclusive — evidence for doing so.

The same day, Yoshie, citing Greenwald, concurred on his own Critical montages blog, as well as in a guest post on Lenin’s tomb ‘that neo-conservatives are a tiny minority at odds with a great majority of Jewish Americans they claim to represent’, observing further that ‘after all these years, Jewish Americans still largely lean to the Left’.

Eric Alterman remarks in the Nation that

it's news only if you haven't been paying attention. An examination of past AJC surveys as well as a number of other polls of American Jews demonstrates that Jews have remained remarkably faithful to the values of liberal humanism. These views, however, have been obscured in our political discourse by an unholy alliance between conservative-dominated professional Jewish organizations and neoconservative Jewish pundits, aided by pliant and frequently clueless mainstream media that empower these right-wingers to speak for a people with values diametrically opposed to theirs.

These observers are quite emphatic – ‘It is beyond dispute that American Jews overwhelmingly oppose core neoconservative foreign policy principles’, ‘values diametrically opposed’, ‘at odds with a great majority’.

To be sure, only minorities claim to adhere to some of the positions of the Zionist organisations. For example, while the AJC itself appears to be on a campaign to discredit the NIE and keep Americans in fear of the Iranian nukes imminently raining onto Israel, or worse, only 35% of American Jews said that they ‘support the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons’, the same as last year, and before release of the new NIE asserting that Iran had a nuclear weapons program but discontinued it in 2003.

When I say, ‘the same as last year’, it is important to bear in mind that in a small sample like this, the ‘margin of error’ is three percentage points. So last year’s estimate of 35% could in fact be anywhere between 32% and 38%, as could this year’s. In other words, the same estimate could conceal either a rise or a fall of up to six percentage points, or more.

It might be worth reiterating that three percentage points is not the same as 3%. If, for example, we had an estimate of 50% of American Jews who claim to be members of synagogues, a margin of error of three points gives us a range of 47% to 53%. If the margin of error were 3%, 3% of 50% is 1.5%, so the range would be 48.5% to 51.5%. Quite a different kettle of fish. Furthermore, you would calculate the latter difference on the basis of the original absolute estimates, although in this case, it shouldn’t matter. The reason that these estimates may be off by more than 3 points either way is that there is a certain level of confidence that that is the margin of error, unstated in this case. It is definitely less than 100% for obvious reasons, and is probably about 85%.

In a 17 December article, ‘American Jews on War and Peace: What Do the Polls Tell Us and Not Tell Us?’, James Petras sets out to answer

How is it that a majority of US Jews who, according to the AJC poll (and several others going back over two decades) differ with the principal American Jewish organizations, have not or do not challenge the position of the dominant Jewish organization, have virtually no impact on the US Congress, the Executive and the mass media in comparison to the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations?

And I think Richard Silverstein has come up with a more plausible explanation than Petras’s.

Petras has a grasp of the organized Jewish community but no grasp at all of unaffiliated Jews, who constitute just under half of the population. The AJC survey includes ALL Jews whether affiliated or unaffiliated. Unaffiliated Jews are much more likely to have views to the left of the "dominant Jewish organizations." The reason that unaffiliated Jews do not challenge the prevailing wisdom in the mainstream community is that doing so does not interest them. That's why they're unaffiliated. It's a vicious circle really. So to blame those who have essentially opted out of the program for the perpetuation of noxious attitudes among those who are still with the program misses the point entirely.

Blaming Jewish peace groups for not moving the Jewish agenda toward the left is wrong-headed. These groups attempt to work with both affiliated and unaffiliated Jews to move the prevailing consensus in a leftward direction. There are many reasons why they have not had more success (lack of funds and powerful leaders, lack of strategic vision, strength of their opponents). And I think that most members and staff of these organizations realize they need to do more. But to denounce them for this lack of success and blame the troubling AJC results on them is mean-spirited and just flat out wrong.

While admitting that ‘it is surprising, and disturbing, that the result is as close as it is’, Silverstein finds comfort in the 46% plurality saying they ‘favor the establishment of a Palesitnian state’, in comparison to the 43% opposed. As it happens, the AJC have asked the same question every year since 2000, and this year’s 46% support is the lowest it’s stood over that period, significantly falling by eight points from last year’s 54%. Similarly, the proportion opposing a Palestinian state has increased from 38% last year and the year before to 43% in 2007, the second highest level recorded over the eight year period. (It was 47% in 2002.) As the margins of error overlap, this may or may not be significant, but the stability of many of the estimates over time suggests that a five point increase could be.

What’s interesting about the question, however, is not the numbers, but the wording, ‘In the current situation, do you favor or oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state?’ Without additional information, the answers to such a question don’t tell us very much. Some respondents may favour establishment of a Palestinian state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Others may favour a series of disconnected bantustans whose borders, airspace, port, communications infrastructure, etc. are under Israeli control. Some of those opposed may prefer a single democratic secular state throughout historic Palestine, or the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza to Israel and the expulsion of the remaining non Jewish population. So it is not at all obvious that favouring establishment of a Palestinian state is necessarily a progressive view, or that opposing it is not. In fact, even if it were safe to assume that all respondents understood the question the same way, as something like the Geneva initiative, with a return to more or less the Green Line and a ‘symbolic’ gesture towards justice for the refugees, that is a long way from progressive. As I’ve discussed before, it entails accepting that ethnic cleansing and terrorism are acceptable nation building strategies, that territory can legitimately be acquired by force of arms, that refugees deserve permanent exile and statelessness, that it’s ok to privilege one group over another on the basis of religion or ethnicity, and other positions that are prima facie anti progressive.

To understand what the opinions about the establishment of a Palestinian state mean, I would have liked to see answers to questions about the refugee issue, about Israel’s status as a Jewish state, whether a Jewish state can be democratic, the status of the Israeli Arabs, ‘targetted assassinations’, checkpoints, the boycott of Hamas and the siege of Gaza, the bypass roads, the future of the ‘large settlement blocs’, (In 2005, the last time they asked the question, 36% opposed dismantling any West Bank settlements, the highest ever and up seven points from 29% in 2004.), the construction and route of the wall (In 2006, 73% supported ‘the Israeli government's decision to build the security fence separating Israelis and Palestinians?’, up from 69% the previous year.), among other things. In particular, I’m interested in the proportion of US Jews who subscribe to views that I would define as Zionist, that is, who believe that a state that privileges Jews is acceptable. But I wasn’t really expecting them to ask that. I think it is clear from the phrasing of other questions, the ‘destruction of Israel’ question in particular, that those framing these questions simply assumed that it went without saying that all respondents do hold such views. It would be frightening, but not really surprising, if they are right.

A couple of questions touch on my concerns, if tangentially. When asked,

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "Caring about Israel is a very important part of my being a Jew."

69% agreed, 28% disagreed, and 3% weren’t sure. Now you can spin this question so that I could honestly agree. Indeed, caring about what Israel purports to do in my name is the most important part of my being a Jew. But in all likelihood, none of the respondents interpreted it that way. If not, then it may be of interest that the proportion agreeing is the lowest in the eight years for which data are available on the AJC site, falling five points from 74% last year.

The other,

How close do you feel to Israel?

is the nearest thing they ask to a measure of Zionist sentiment, as I define it. Still, without knowing respondents’ motivations – without asking why – we don’t know whether those who feel ‘very distant’ from Israel oppose any discussion of dismantling settlements and favour immediate forcible transfer of all Palestinians from ‘Eretz Yisra’el’, or object to the existence of a Jewish ethnocracy. I think we can, however, interpret those 70% who say they do feel close to Israel as among those who unequivocally do feel comfortable with a state that privileges Jews. It is mildly encouraging that the proportion who said they felt ‘slightly close’ or ‘very close’ has fallen six percentage points since 2006 to it’s lowest recorded level.

Returning to the issue of the Palestinian state, what we do know from the survey is how respondents answered

In the framework of a permanent peace with the Palestinians, should Israel be willing to compromise on the status of Jerusalem as a united city under Israeli jurisdiction?

Like most of the questions in the AJC survey, there are problems with the wording. To begin with, it rests on the assumption that ‘a permanent peace with the Palestinians’ is conceivable without a capital of the Palestinian state, whatever its configuration, in al Quds. And that already betrays further assumptions – that ‘the Palestinians’ means the PA; that anyone purporting to represent ‘the Palestinians’ could negotiate sovereignty over Jerusalem, that ‘peace’ means simply the end of all resistance. Furthermore, the question assumes that it would be a compromise for Israel to relinquish sovereignty, when not even the US recognises Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem. Anyway, the answers to this question do shed a little light on the Palestinian state question.

A majority of 58% said that Israel should not be willing to make this compromise. On the face of it, therefore, that would mean that at least 4% of the sample favour a Palestinian state with no sovereignty over Jerusalem. It could be, and probably is, much higher than that, but that is the extent of the overlap between the two proportions, so it’s all we can be sure of. Taking the three point margin of error into consideration, however, it is possible that the populations would not overlap at all, if both estimates were high, that is, if, say, the proportion that favoured the Palestinian state was actually as low as 43% and only 55% wanted Israel to keep Jerusalem.

At one level, it would be nice to have access to the raw data and run some cross tabulations. Then we could have estimates of the proportion, for example, who both favour a Palestinian state and think Israel should compromise over Jerusalem, in other words, the population close to a standard two state position. But that type of analysis effectively looks at smaller sub populations, so the sampling error would be much higher and the estimates less reliable. That said, the AJC itself has announced that 70% of those identifying as Democrats support Hillary Clinton. It’s a large enough proportion that it is probably meaningful, but the margin of error would be much higher than three points. Somewhat more suspect is Rebecca Spence’s report in this week’s Forward that

According to the AJCommittee survey for 2007, 42% of Orthodox respondents identified themselves as Democrats, while 30% identified as Republicans.

Since only 8% of the AJC sample identified as Orthodox, that is, between 75 and 84 of the 1000 respondents, the margin of error would be very high, or what amounts to the same thing, the confidence that the margin of error is three percentage points would be much lower than 85%, or whatever it is for proportions of the entire sample. The figures do, however, appear to coincide with those asserted by the Orthodox Union, however they were collected.

Notwithstanding the small consolation Silverstein finds in the possible plurality favouring a Palestinian state,

The remaining answers are flat out unnerving and make me realize how much work remains to be done if there is ever to be a realistic understanding of the IP conflict among American Jews. As a group we have swallowed hook, line and sinker some of the worst prejudices and ignorant attitudes toward Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole.

Most of the questions that concern him resemble the ‘How close’ question in that an affirmative response is more meaningful than a negative. For example,

Do you think that negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas can or cannot lead to peace in the foreseeable future?

The 55% who answered ‘Cannot’ may comprise those who don’t think there will ever be peace under any circumstances; those who think there will be peace, but not in the foreseeable future; those who think there will be peace in the foreseeable future, but not as a result of the negotiations; those who don’t agree that those two parties are negotiating; etc. Those who said, ‘Can’, on the other hand probably all share at least a desire to appear optimistic, and may actually believe that Olmert and abu Mazen both enjoy sufficient credibility among their purported constituencies and with each other to be able to negotiate in good faith, that their common objective is peace in the foreseeable future, and the other profoundly implausible assumptions that would make sense of an affirimative response.

What is rather alarming is the 82% majority agreeing

...with the following statement? "The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel."

What this question does above all else is invite the respondent to buy into racism. By refusing to specify whether ‘the Arabs’ are ‘the moderate Arab states’, the PA, the Palestinians in general, Arabs in general, or whatever, the question’s framers force the respondent to accept the racist presupposition that ‘the Arabs’ are of one mind. They are duplicitous in pretending to demand the return of the territories occupied in 1967, but in reality, they are bent on Israel’s destruction, a second Holocaust. Again, we can’t really tell much about those who disagreed without knowing why they did so. But it’s pretty clear that those who agreed were prepared to accept those assumptions.

Several of those writing about the poll have made much of the high proportion of American Jews identifying as ‘liberal’ and Democrat. On this, Petras is spot on.

Progressive analysts who cite overwhelming Jewish support for the Democratic Party, its top three Presidential candidates and their preference for the liberal label as differentiating them from the leaders of the major organizations, commit an elementary logical and substantive fallacy. Liberals, like the Clintons, supported the wars against Iraq and are among the driving forces promoting a military attack on Iran. The Democratic majority in Congress has backed every military appropriation demanded by the Republicans and the White House. Being Democrat and ‘liberal’ is no indicator of being ‘progressive’ using any foreign policy indicator, from the Middle East wars to destabilizations efforts in Venezuela.

The question asked is,

I’m going to read you a list of political views that people might hold. They are arranged from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Where would you place yourself on this scale?

Extremely liberal

Liberal

Slightly liberal

Moderate, middle of the road

Slightly conservative

Conservative

Extremely conservative

Not sure

When designing a question like this with a number of response categories among which the respondent must select just one, it is imperative to ensure that the response categories exhaust all the possible responses. This is easily accomplished by incorporating a residual ‘Other’ response, or, if you’re really interested, ‘Other, please specify’. In the US context, of course, liberal can only mean ‘small ‘l’ liberal’, vaguely progressive, perhaps, or ‘left of centre’. I would guess that ‘Extremely liberal’ corresponds to something along the lines of social democrat. It’s hard to imagine anyone to the left of that identifying as any kind of liberal, even in America. Another problem with this question, apart from omitting a category to accommodate revolutionary Marxists, is that the inclusion of a ‘Moderate’ category is likely to contaminate everything. After all, the only thing this question is testing is the rather unreliable measure of political self perception, and many people prefer to perceive themselves as moderate. ‘Moderation in all things’... Mhden agan ‘Nothing in excess’ – the Oracle’s wisdom.

Some of the other questions may shed some light on just how liberal American Jews really are. This year, 43% claimed to be either ‘Extremely liberal’(4%), ‘Liberal’(23%), or ‘Slightly liberal’ (16%), a little above the average for 2000-2008.

It’s true that 57% opposed ‘...the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons?’, so clearly at least some of the Moderates and/or Conservatives must have been among those opposed, suggesting that it’s not necessarily such a progressive position. In 2006, 54% were opposed, and only 46% the year before. Interestingly, however, when asked last year, with 42% saying they were liberal, 57% supported, ‘...Israel taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons’. Also in 2006, 55% approved ‘...of the way the Israeli government has handled the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon’, and 53% of how the United States government handled it.

‘Looking back,’ 67% said they thought the U.S. ‘should have have stayed out’ of Iraq. But since we don’t know why they think that, or what they think the US should do now, it is ambiguous whether they answered as they did because they oppose US imperialism, because they supported Hussein’s Ba’ath regime in Baghdad, because they were disappointed that US troops weren’t greeted with candy and flowers, or any one or more of numerous other reasons. In a CBS News/New York Times Poll conducted a couple of weeks after the AJC poll, only 54% said they thought the U.S. ‘should have have stayed out’ of Iraq. So insofar as this question is an indicator of progressive attitudes on US foreign policy issues, it would appear that the proportion of Jews with such attitudes is significantly higher than the proportion in the population at large.

This year, 59% said they were ‘very concerned’, and another 33% ‘somewhat concerned’, ‘about the prospect of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons’. So even while they reject some neocon positions, at least some self identified liberals are prepared to accept their propaganda. One of the more interesting findings of the poll is that even if everyone who was not concerned about Iranian nukes opposed a US attack, there is still a significant proportion who opposed the attack even though they were concerned.

In 2002, when 37% said they were liberal – not necessarily different from this year’s 43%, taking the margin of error into account – 57% approved ‘...of the United States taking military action against Iraq to try and remove Saddam Hussein from power?’

In 2001, with 42% claiming to be liberal, 91% favoured ‘...the United States taking direct military action in Afghanistan?’. Even if every one of the 58% of moderates and conservatives favoured attacking Afghanistan, that still leaves 33 of the 42% who were claimed to be liberal, that is, nearly four fifths of them, also supporting Bush’s imperialist rampage. And 85% approved ‘of the way President George W. Bush is handling the U.S. campaign against terrorism’. It is mildly encouraging that this proportion has fallen quite significantly, with only 31% approving ‘...of the way the United States government is handling the war against terrorism’ (the successor question asked since 2004). But to answer the question at all requires acceptance of the presupposition that the US is in fact engaged in a ‘war/campaign against terrorism’.

On domestic issues, I agree with Petras that identification with the Democratic Party is not an indicator of liberalism. But a couple of questions may touch on the matter. When asked how serious a problem illegal immigration was, 79% said it was ‘somewhat serious’ or ‘very serious’, a probably insignificant one point higher than in 2006; 95% said it was a problem both years. In answer to the question about policy, 15% said they should all be deported, one point more than last year, and 67% said they should be allowed to stay if they meet certain unspecified requirements. None of the response categories seems to accommodate the population who prefer open borders and the free movement of labour.

On the whole, the AJC Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion is a disappointment. Professional survey development involves study of focus group responses to the questions and runs pilot tests to determine whether the questions collect the intended concepts. I would like to give Synovate the benefit of the doubt, but it’s frankly hard to imagine that questions as conceputally suspect as these would have survived rigorous testing. Through carelessness or cynicism, Synovate (formerly Market Facts), ‘a leading survey-research organization’, has framed questions that beg other questions and delivered results that are in many cases ambiguous.

Assuming that neither Synovate nor the AJC has actually tampered with the results – and I do assume that, what they seem to indicate is that a plurality of American Jews like to think of themselves as liberal. On the question of whether the US should have invaded Iraq, whatever it may mean, more of them seem skeptical than the population at large. Large proportions are susceptible to panic at propaganda about a terrorist threat or a rogue state, but this appears to dissipate over a couple of years. On a range of foreign policy issues, significant minorities or even majorities – up to 67% in the case of the Iraq war – depart from positions advocated by AIPAC and other neocon organisations. When it comes to Israel, however, larger proportions take such positions. More than four out of every five American Jews were prepared to buy into the anti Arab racism measured by the ‘destruction of Israel’ question.

Alterman nails the reason for the apparent disconnect between mainstream Jewish opinion and the organisations that purport to speak for American Jewry.

In large part the trouble lies with the antidemocratic structures of these organizations and the apathy of most Jews with regard to organized Jewish life. Major Jewish groups respond to the demands of their top funders and best-organized constituencies. Most American Jews, however, have little or nothing to do with these groups. [my emphasis]

In other words, who pays the piper calls the tune. AIPAC and the other principal pro Israel lobby groups articulate the positions that suit their constituency – those with money to spare to make significant contributions to organisations to prosecute their interests, not as Jews, but as capitalists. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that it is in their current financial interests for Israel to carry out the policies it does with impunity.

The greatest beneficiary

Pakistan’s new civilian president, retired General Pervez Musharraf has announced a parcel of measures to lift the state of emergency he decreed on 3 November, just in time to ensure that next month’s general election will be seen as ‘free and fair’. The five presidential orders, according to Dawn’s Nasir Iqbal, are:

Revocation of Proclamation of Emergency Order 2007, Repeal of Provisional Constitution Order, Revival of Constitutional Order, Establishment of Islamabad High Court and grant of pension benefits to judges who had either refused or had not been invited by the government to take the oath under the PCO.

Talking to media personnel at the Supreme Court, he [Musharraf] said that with the lifting of the emergency and the repeal of the PCO, all fundamental rights would stand restored and the media would be the greatest beneficiary.

What Musharraf doesn’t mention is that, as Keith Jones reports on WSWS,

On Tuesday, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) issued a warning to the country’s private television stations, most of which only recently resumed broadcasting, threatening them with heavy fines and their personnel, including journalists, with jail sentences of up to three years if they violate a ban on live broadcasts or violate new regulations imposed during the emergency that forbid airing “anything which defames or brings into ridicule the head of state.”…The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists called the Pemra order “an attempt to silence the free media” and emasculate coverage of the election campaign.

With a Damoclean sword dangling precariously above them like that, Pakistani journalists will doutless derive great benefit from the sense of responsibility it imparts.

Although ‘deposed judges, including Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, would be granted pension benefits’,

“All judges of the superior courts who were not invited by the government to take oath under the PCO, or those who had declined to do so, will not be restored at all,” the attorney general said.

So there is no further danger of unruly activist judges finding that Musharraf was in fact not eligible to stand for election while in the employ of the state as the constitution provides. Under the circumstances, you can understand why

Pakistanis also do not accept Musharraf’s stated rationale for the state of emergency declaration. When given a choice between two options, 25 percent said that they thought Musharraf declared the emergency in order to better fight terrorists, while 66 percent said that it was to prevent the Supreme Court from overturning his re-election to another term as president.

Those figures come from a survey of ‘3,520 adult men and women from 223 rural and 127 urban locations in 51 districts in all four provinces of Pakistan’ conducted 19-28 November by the International Republican Institute (IRI), ‘A nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing democracy worldwide’. In reality, the IRI is the Republican Party’s branch of the US National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US government to advance its global war on democracy. Ordinarily, I am sceptical of surveys that don’t publish the questions asked and the other metadata that make the numbers intelligible. But in this case, the report of results seems fairly explicit and more importantly, the IRI favours the Musharraf regime, so I would expect any bias they might introduce to minimise opposition to Musharraf. And yet, they also found

When asked if they supported the recent re-election of Musharraf to another term as president, voters were overwhelmingly opposed; 26 percent said they supported his reelection and 72 percent said that they did not; 61 percent said that they strongly opposed Musharraf’s re-election.

A majority of Pakistanis want Musharraf to resign from office, with 67 percent wanting his resignation and 25 percent opposed.

To recap, the reason Musharraf could be elected with 72% opposed is that in Pakistan, it is not the electorate at large, but the National and Provincial Assemblies, who elect the president. Since Musharraf scheduled the presidential election before the parliamentary elections, and since the opposition boycotted the election and Benazir Bhutto’s PPP abstained, it was his tame legislators who voted for him.

Just to make sure that everything is aboveboard, Attorney-General

Mr [Mohammad] Qayyum said former prime minister Nawaz Sharif stood disqualified for the January 8 election. Shahbaz Sharif, he added, had not appealed against the rejection of his candidature during the stipulated time, so he also stood disqualified.

Furthermore, ‘The constitutional bar on a person to become prime minister for the third time would stay, he said.’ If correct, that means that in the unlikely case that the PPP should win enough seats to form government, Benazir will not be eligible to be PM. True to form, she and Nawaz have decided not to boycott the parliamentary election, even though

74 percent of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, voters said they would support the boycott, as did the same percentage of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) voters, the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

So, while six weeks of martial law may not have succeeded in eradicating terrorism in Pakistan, it has certainly served Musharraf’s interests very well indeed. Maybe two thirds of Pakistanis were right about that.

Amnesty!

As a confidence building measure, Israel has released 429 Palestinian political prisoners...and is incarcerating up to 42 new ones daily.
[Hat tip to Sol Salbe]