Wednesday 29 August 2012
israel
Rachel was standing in front of this home. As the bulldozer approached she stood her ground. Rachel was wearing an orange fluorescent jacket. She was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver as well as to the soldiers in the tank. The bulldozer began to push up the ground from beneath her feet. The pile of earth was mounding up and she tried her best to stay on top of it. As the ground continued to move Rachel went down on her knees. The bulldozer continued to move forward. Rachel began to become buried beneath the dirt. Still it did not stop. Finally, Rachel was beneath the bulldozer. The bulldozer did not even pick up its blade. It ran over her completely and continued to advance. It stopped when she was completely underneath the body of the bulldozer. It then moved backwards over her body. It moved clear of her and backed away. Four eyewitnesses describe the murder of Rachel Corrie ☀
How the US and Israeli justice systems whitewash state crimes ☀
The commonality in all three of these episodes is self-evident: the perversion of the justice system and rule of law as nothing more than a weapon to legitimize even the most destructive state actions, while severely punishing those who oppose them. The US and its loyal thinktank scholars have long demanded that other states maintain an “independent judiciary” as one of the key ingredients for living under the rule of law. But these latest episodes demonstrate, yet again, that the judiciary in the US, along with the one in its prime Middle East client state, is anything but “independent”: its primary function is to shield government actors from accountability.
The US military has continuously imposed pitifully light “punishments” on its soldiers even for the most heinous atrocities. The wanton slaughter of two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq and the severe and even lethal torture of Afghan detainees generated, at worst, shockingly short jail time for the killers and, usually, little more than letters of reprimand.
Contrast this tepid, reluctant wrist-slapping for the brutal crimes of occupying soldiers with what a UN investigation found was the US government’s “cruel and inhuman treatment” of Bradley Manning before he was convicted of anything. Manning has been imprisoned for more than two years now without having been found guilty of any crimes – already longer than any of the perpetrators of these fatal abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces life in prison at the age of 23 for the alleged “crime” of disclosing to the world overwhelming evidence of corruption, deceit and illegality on the part of the world’s most powerful factions: disclosures that helped thwart the Obama administration’s efforts to keep US troops in Iraq, and which, as even WikiLeaks’ harshest critics acknowledge, played some substantial role in helping to spark the Arab spring.
Notably, the first disclosure for which Manning was allegedly responsible – the videotape of an Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed Reuters journalists and then the rescuers who came to help the wounded, including two young children – resulted in zero accountability: the US military exonerated everyone involved. Instead, it is Manning, the person accused of exposing these crimes, who is punished as the real criminal.
Wednesday 8 August 2012
The Border Between Israel and Palestine ☀
Perhaps we need to look at the conflict with fresh eyes. For Jewish Israelis, the Biblical relation with the land of their forefathers is crucial to why they’re there. But in his controversial book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” Shlomo Sand argues that Judaism used to be a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam, and that consequently many of today’s Jewish Israelis are descendants of converts, without an ancestral link to Eretz-Israel. Inversely, many of the Palestinians may just be the descendants of the large Jewish community who remained to toil the land, even after the destruction of the Temple and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in the first and second centuries, respectively — and who gradually converted to Islam in the centuries after the Arab conquest.
These are highly controversial and extremely speculative notions, but they highlight an important underlying truth: Israeli Jews and Palestinians have much in common. Maybe — just maybe — one day the realization will dawn that the complicated, contested and highly lethal border between Palestinians and Israelis is separating brothers from brothers, and sisters from sisters.
So should the fence be torn down, the border erased? Considering the level of animosity on either side toward the other, arriving at a one-state solution would be nothing short of miraculous, even by Holy Land standards. But miracles are not only unlikely, they’re not always a good idea. The Holy Land has taught us some harsh truths about human nature: brotherhood does not necessarily imply brotherly love, and sometimes, as in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, it leads to its exact opposite — fratricide.
Until the day when the lamb will lie down with the lion and the lamb will live to tell it, only an equitable borderline between them will prevent carnage. Good borders, as an instrument of civil commerce between nations, are a godsend — literally: the Romans made yearly sacrifices to the god Terminus, offering him wine, honey and blood at boundary stones, thus hallowing the borderlines they marked. “Only when borders disappear,” remarks Régis Debray in his “Éloge des frontières,” “does the need arise to construct walls.”
Thursday 2 August 2012
Somewhere in one of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, a young boy stops on the sidewalk, looking up at the top of the town hall. He is troubled because he realizes he is seeing the town clock for the first time. He thinks to himself, “If I haven’t seen the clock before, what else have I missed?” It is a scary thought that our next president could be Mitt Romney, who traveled to Israel and ignored the obscene wall Israel has built to guarantee that the Palestinian people will have none of the freedoms he claims to espouse. If Romney failed to grasp the obscenity of Israel’s “security wall”, what else has he missed? Romney Visits Culturally “Superior” Israel; Totally Ignores the Occupation ☀
Romney’s Clueless Remark on Palestine ☀
Conspicuously missing was any mention of the huge, elephant-in-the-room reason for the dismal state of the Palestinian economy: the systematic Israeli suppression of Palestinian economic activity.
That suppression has included in the Gaza Strip a suffocating blockade and in the West Bank (the explicit subject of Romney’s comparison) a less all-encompassing but still pervasive system of restricting transportation, separating people’s homes from their livelihoods, denying access to natural markets, requiring and denying permission for the simplest transactions, and countless additional ways of turning into a struggle the daily task of earning a living.
A recent World Bank report on the Palestinian economy stated, “The major constraints to private sector activity are the tight Israeli restrictions, and growth will not be sustainable until Palestinians have access to resources and are allowed to move freely.”
We should not be surprised anymore that Romney, in his effort to win whatever votes he thinks he can win by posing as the most unquestioning and uncompromising lover of Israel in the presidential race, should offer such an absurdly biased and truncated picture of economic realities on the ground.
Weird as this may sound, Mormons consider themselves to be Jewish. Mitt Romney, like almost all Mormon adolescents, was given a blessing that named the lost tribe of Israel to which they belonged. My grandmother, and everyone else of her generation, referred to those who were not Mormon as “gentiles.” Ironically, that even included Jews. And Mormons secretly congratulate themselves for the creation of the State of Israel. Romney and the Lost Tribe of Israel ☀
Mitt, Jared and David ☀
Of course the difference between Israel and Palestine is not the same as the two Koreas. It was created by the migration of Jewish people, mostly after World War II. Many came from much more developed parts of the world than Palestine which had endured centuries of debilitating Ottoman and then British colonialism. They brought more advanced technologies and high levels of human capital, which in themselves were the result of the institutions and incentives that they faced. As Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein point out in their book The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, the origins of these very high human capital levels are in the historical adoption of institutions in Jewish society. This is where the roots of Isreal’s current prosperity lie. They have further been strengthened by Israel’s integration into the world economy, which has enabled it to continue the process of technology transfer and encouraged trade and investment.
Why hasn’t this prosperity spilled over to the Palestinians since the British left in 1948? A definitive answer would need to be based on much more research, but a plausible one comes from the reaction of Saeb Erekat, an aide to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, to Mitt´s remarks:
this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation.
It seems to us that Mr. Erekat, not Mitt Romney, has the right idea.
Sunday 25 March 2012
Iranians shocked by 'Israel loves Iran' Facebook initiative ☀
An Iranian landscape architect named Majid began an equivalent Iranian initiative, opening a Facebook page called “Iran loves Israel.” He says he heard about the Israeli page on a free radio station broadcasting to Iran from Prague, and immediately joined in.
Tuesday 6 March 2012
Stop selling weapons to Israel. Stop sending aid to Israel. Let it do as it wishes, on its own. Stop kowtowing to Tel Aviv Mr Obama, it’s shameful and absurd. Stop acting as if the United States needs Israel more than Israel needs the United States. Stop being a servant to Israel and be President of this Country. Or move to Israel and run for office there. And take Israel’s lobby in Congress with you along with Hagee and his heretical Christian Zionists and AIPAC. After all, if they really love Israel as much as they claim to, they should, by rights, live there. Mr Obama, Why Do You Want Israel To Be Our Master? ☀
Thursday 1 March 2012
Israel, Drones, and Iran ☀
One of the Stratfor research “findings” (culled from the Wikileaks stockpile) is that Israel claimed its upcoming strike on Iran would be “catastrophic enough” to cause a regime change. This claim was made both to dissuade Iran from going forward with its program, physically eliminating their ability to move forward with the program, and persuade the US to act instead of Israel.
Running through all of the potential scenarios, only one emerges that makes sense.
A strike on Iranian oil facilities. A strike so devastating that it disrupts all of its oil production, currently at 4 million barrels a day.
The logic of this is pretty clear: any strike on facilities wouldn’t have a high likelihood of failure. At most, it would only delay the program by months. Further, politically, there may not be a possibility for the second, third and fourth strikes necessary to keep kicking the ball down the road.
The strike that can do it one go is one that causes a massive economic failure that both a) creates the chance of regime change, or b) at a minimum starves the program of the copious amounts of funding it needs to keep going (it’s very expensive to move forward) for many years into the future.
The only way to do that, given Israel’s capabilities, is a strike on Iranian oil facilities. To knock them out of production for a year or more. The loss of its 4 m barrels of production.
How to do that? Drones.
Monday 6 February 2012
Tuesday 13 December 2011
If Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he’d be impeached ☀
Imagine if Israel would launch a successful preemptive strike against a country that is building a nuclear bomb that threatens its very existence, and the American president would describe it as “a tragedy”.
And then, not only would the U.S. administration fail to “stand by its ally”, as Republicans pledged this week, but it would actually lend its hand to a UN Security Council decision that condemns Israel, calls on it to place its nuclear facilities under international supervision and demands that it pay reparations (!) for the damage it had wrought.
And then, to add insult to injury, the U.S. president would impose an embargo on further sales of F-16 aircraft because Israel had “violated its commitment to use the planes only in self-defense”.
Can you imagine the uproar? Can you contemplate the brouhaha? I mean, if Mitt Romney believes that President Obama “threw Israel under the bus” just for suggesting that a peace settlement with Israel be based on the 1967 borders - what would he say about a president who actually turns his back on Israel in its greatest time of need? That he hurled Israel over the cliff with a live grenade in its pocket and into a burning volcano?
(via Homebrewed Theology)
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