As the much anticipated book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Walt and Mearsheimer is released this month, the liberal Jewish-spiritual progressive magazine Tikkun has its current issue devoted to the Israel Lobby (including, but not limited to, AIPAC) and its disproportionate and highly unrepresentative influence on US foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East.

The cover reads: The Israel Lobby: Bad for the U.S., Bad for Israel, Bad for the Jews. With an interview of Democratic Congressman Jim Moran as its centerpiece (interview excerpt follows), the Israel Lobby’s major role in the decision to go to war in Iraq and its position on calling for an attack on Iran is scrutinised.

Congressman Moran speaks sensibly about Iran, and reading his comments here was a breath of fresh air.

Jim Moran’s voicing of the obvious has however all too predictably earned the ire of Lobbyists and some MSM journalists who sing to the Lobby tune (see WaPo here and here—thanks Fanonite). Interviewer Rabbi Lerner defends Moran’s statements as observations with which he himself would agree, supporting his assertions with evidence and personal experience. Lerner writes:

To take an example from these past few months of the Israel Lobby exercising its power, liberals in the House of Representatives in the spring of 2007 sought to include in the defense-funding budget an amendment that would require specific authorization from Congress before the Administration could use the defense budget monies for a military strike at Iran. The amendment failed. Most liberals in the U.S. today oppose preventive wars in general and a military strike against Iran in particular. So who supports such a move? The answer is: the right wing government of Israel and its champion in the U.S., the Israel Lobby.

Don’t be surprised that Jim Moran was pushed from his office as one of the leaders of the Democrats in Congress by AIPAC and other elements of the Israel Lobby. Here is how it happened: Congressman Moran was asked at a constituents’ meeting by a woman identified with the Jewish community why we had gotten into the war in Iraq. Moran responded provocatively “If the Jewish community had organized against it, we wouldn’t be in this war.” It’s the kind of statement I would have made to any religious community, or to any labor movement audience, citing their own failures to act as a critical factor in why we had gotten involved. In the case of the Jewish community there is the added factor that leading people in the Israel Lobby actively supported and still support the war in Iraq and that some of the strong supporters of the Israel Lobby played central roles in the effort to push the Iraq war inside the Bush Administration.

Why the “Liberal” Media is Illiberal on Israel

I’ve had similar experiences with the Israel Lobby and the media. For the first few years of Tikkun’s existence Tikkun’s perspective was covered on many topics in American politics. But once we got on AIPAC’s radar screen, this began to change. I finally got the op-ed editor of The San Francisco Chronicle to tell me the story. He had been approached by the Executive Editor, Dick German and told by German in no uncertain terms to stop publishing op-eds from American Jews critical of Israel, because Israel had “too many enemies.” This is what he told me.

A similar thing happened to me at The New York Times. I was asked by The Times to do a review of a book on Israeli settlers. Without any shame, my editor insisted that I change what I had written so that it would accord with his politics. I was never again given a chance to write a review for The Times. Hundreds of other liberal Jews have had similar experiences trying to write for The Times op-ed or book review—the voices of those of us who are seriously and intensely critical of Israeli policy but still lovers of Israel and proudly committed to Judaism are rarely part of the acceptable discourse.

Here is an excerpt of the Tikkun interview between Rabbi Michael Lerner and Congressman Jim Moran on AIPAC and its role in pushing the United States into war with Iraq and calling for an attack on Iran:

TIKKUN: What do you think the reasoning is for the Democrats who voted against the amendment requiring that the president get authorization from Congress before attacking Iran?

JIM MORAN: Well, AIPAC strongly opposed it. In fact, Rep. Murtha, Rep. Obey, and myself wanted it in the supplemental. We had it in and then the leadership had to take it out because AIPAC was having a conference in Washington, and insisted with the leadership and many of the members with whom they have close alliances.Yesterday [NB. interview conducted in May], AIPAC had an amendment to recommit the whole Armed Services Bill in order to add language requiring America to develop missile defenses jointly with Israel, to share all its missile defense technology with Israel. That passed overwhelmingly. There were only thirty members—that’s less than 10 percent—who voted against sharing all our missile technology with Israel. It received about 400 votes in favor of it. I was one of the thirty.

My feeling was that it wasn’t just the incendiary language that Israel is under immediate attack and we need to protect it from another Holocaust, it was also the idea that the solution to Israel’s security is a militaristic one. I would urge you to read the Congressional record for the debate on the recommital. It put our loyalty to Israel in terms of complete military support. My feeling is that both America and Israel have acted in counterproductive fashion and have undermined their security by focusing exclusively on military capability.

That was a key vote yesterday. It was phrased by many as an “AIPAC vote.” As a result, it prevailed approximately 400 to thirty.

TIKKUN: In your estimation, how does AIPAC get that power?

MORAN: AIPAC is very well organized. The members are willing to be very generous with their personal wealth. But it’s a two edged sword. If you cross AIPAC, AIPAC is unforgiving and will destroy you politically. Their means of communications, their ties to certain newspapers and magazines, and individuals in the media are substantial and intimidating. Every member knows it’s the best-organized national lobbying force. The National Rifle Association comes a close second, but AIPAC can rightfully brag that they’re the most powerful lobbying force in the world today. Certainly they are in the United States. Not in Europe, obviously. Most people that are involved in foreign policy especially look at a broad range of issues and consider a person’s entire voting record. AIPAC considers the voting record only as it applies to Israel. Read the rest of this entry »

Mild Congressional Democrat-front group MoveOn.org have launched a full-page $65,000 ad in the New York Times entitled “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?: Cooking the Books for the White House.“

First, credit where its due: MoveOn recognises the obvious danger of General Petraeus (read his testimony here), like Colin Powell before him, serving as a shill to deliver the Bush-Cheney White House version in order to justify its agenda of prolonged war, as well as to downplay the extent of violence wracking Iraq. The advertisement (.pdf here) notes, for example, that “We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.” This is the type of public mainstream dissent that was altogether absent when it was Colin Powell justifying war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In terms of historic parallels, we are reminded about the Johnson administration’s General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War here (read Westmoreland’s address here). Are these former generals and administration officials troubled about their role? In Powell tried to talk Bush out of war (Sunday Times, 8 July), the former US secretary of state subsequently claimed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade Bush not to invade Iraq. He believes, moreover, that today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

While General Petraeus is rightly copping flak, he’s outranked by the Thief-Commander-in-Chief: he’ll ultimately deliver what’s favourable for the Bush-Cheney junta and the AIPAC lobby, and ultimately do as he’s told. He has been called the iPod general (Pepe Escobar), programmed to play the tune(s) selected by his owner, the White House.

A major glaring error of the advertisement, however, is MoveOn’s claim that

“Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

An unwinnable war, yes; a “religious” war, no. This claim altogether fails to address the fact that the root cause of violence is the occupation. Sunni and Shia have been living together and intermarrying for centuries here, why a sudden “religious” war? Any sectarian enmity that now exists is largely being created, its not pre-existing. This also deflects scrutiny from Bush administration culpability and attempts to instead pretend that the “real conflict” is between Shiites and Sunnis and has nothing or little to do with the US military presence. In his ‘progress report’ (video here), General Petraeus also spouted this notion in declaring that “the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources.”

Contrary to MoveOn’s and General Petraeus’s claim, the US-UK invasion, occupation and several psy-, black- and false flag-ops manufactured this sectarian conflict. We recall the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, which Mike Whitney argues has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event. We recall the two British SAS snipers who were caught out in Basra disguised as locals, captured with explosives in their car. We recall that the possibility of employing the Salvador Option to use Shia death squads against Sunnis had been openly entertained in the US, and the appointment of John Negroponte as US ambassador to Iraq—Negroponte oversaw death squad activity from Honduras in the 1980s—only added to the suspicions of US-Israeli designs for instigating a civil war in Iraq.

Why would the occupier and its neocon-AIPAC underwriters want to manufacture a civil war? At least three reasons. A civil war in Iraq serves the occupation’s interests not only in deflecting attention away from the crimes of the occupier, it furnishes further rationale for their continued presence, to “protect” the civilian population. This ignores, among other things, how US soldier atrocities in Iraq have been systemic and that increasing numbers of soldiers, already stretched, are resisting the war. Thirdly, it sets up the case for the ‘soft partition of Iraq‘, as raised openly by many punters, including columnist David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Dividing Iraq makes it easier to divide the spoils of war and removes the threat (primarily to Israel) of Iraqi regional hegemony.

As veteran correspondent Robert Fisk acknowledged last year in his suspicions about attempts by the occupation authorities to provoke a civil war in Iraq:

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much…We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested…Somebody is operating these people…Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians – Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis — suddenly all want to kill each other?…

We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we’re getting - that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide - is not possible, it’s not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq…something is wrong with the narrative we’re being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government.

MoveOn started with a strong antiwar message; after coopting 3 million antiwar activists, it watered down to insipid levels its antiwar agenda and became a front for the Democratic “impeachment is off the table” branch of the War Party. Recalling that most voters gave the Democrats a mandate to end the war, let us hope the MoveOn leadership does not betray its own constituency, never mind the contrived establishment outrage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Any intelligent observer can easily discern that the “new” anti-semitism today has little connection with discrimination against Jews. Anti-semitism nowadays is mostly about deplorable discrimination and racist attacks against Arabs. Right now in New York, the Likudnik thought police are trying their darndest to designate Arabic words like intifada and madrassa (which simply means ’school’ in Arabic, regardless of religious affiliation), treasonous. Madrassa does not mean religious school.

We see this playing out in the trumped-up brouhaha about the Kahlil Gibran International Academy, wherein Debbie Almontaser, the head, was branded a terrorist for not apologising enough (for the hardline-Zionists liking) about the word ‘intifada’ (which simply means ’shaking off’) on a T-Shirt–worn by someone else! The racist bullying and defamation resulted in Almontaser resigning.

This reflects poorly on NYC, which has a rich history of cosmopolitanism, the same American tradition that brought Kahlil Gibran, the timeless Lebanese-born poet and philosopher, to the shores of the US where he made such a lasting impact upon the world of literature.

As Anthony DiMaggio notes, Daniel Pipes is one of the reactionaries spouting utter rubbish about Arabic, such as: “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage” and “Muslims tend to see non-Muslims learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam…”

Islamophobe Pipes fails to mention that the most populous Muslim country is Indonesia (pop: 242 million), whose national language is Bahasa Indonesian. He neglects to mention that there are a great many Christian Arabic speakers too, such as myself. Yes, Arab culture is attached to Islam—since when then is that a crime?–but also to Christianity and Judaism, too. The demonisation of Islam and of Arabic as a language by ignoramuses and ideologues such as Pipes and Bella Rabinowitz is all in service of the terror-blather that has hijacked public discourse in the United States.

Samuel Freedman is one of the very few voices in the MSM to more accurately document the affair, as Richard Silverstein observes.

Press Picks:

• Anthony DiMaggio, The Right-Wing’s War on the Gibran Academy: Arabic as a Terrorist Language, Counterpunch
• Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) Statement on Debbie Almontaser

Al Jazeera news clip (Thanks Ressentiment)

Sign the Open Letter to the major television networks urging them to NOT follow FOX’s lead to another war. The video shows the evidence of how they are repeating the same distortions and fear mongering they did before the Iraq war.

RT 3.31

Gazan children are being denied the right to learn — the Israeli government is currently obstructing shipments of textbooks and printing paper (along with foodstuffs, trading, aid, money, resources and other items). While the shameful starvation and economic strangulation of Gaza weighs in most heavily, the denial of textbooks to schoolchildren is one denial of a basic human right that is being addressed in a campaign by The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI).

IPCRI are one of several grassroots examples of joint Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives, successfully working together while some of their government official counterparts woefully bluster. The small but significant successes are often achieved within and despite the overwhelming structural violence of the Israeli occupation; they offer hope and a way forward at the important community and grassroots level. Groups are variously collaborations by profession, cultural and interfaith exchanges, women, youth, sporting, dialogue and confidence-building based, and are both one and two state advocates.

In this particular case, ICPRI are a two-state proponent think-tank tasked with helping to develop practical solutions to the conflict, with Palestinian and Israeli experts working together to produce detailed proposals about security, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water, and, significantly, peace education textbooks.

As they write in their dispatches: “In light of the lack of confidence in peace on both sides of the conflict, we asked Israelis and Palestinians what would convince them that the other side was really interested in peace, the #1 answer was: when they begin teaching peace in their classrooms“.

Others include the PRIME curriculum project by the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). PRIME are history teachers—West Bank Palestinians and Israeli Jews—who develop texts for students presenting the Palestinian and Israeli narratives. 1948 is described both as the Israelis’ year of “independence” and the Palestinians’ “catastrophe,” or Naqba. This is a welcome improvement upon the fact that despite Israel having illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem (in violation of international law) for 40 years, maps in its school textbooks show these as part of Israel.

Peace education is an important part of meaningful peace initiatives. While it is not a substitute for the work to be done at the level of “high politics” and statecraft, it is a crucial foundation to it.

***I very highly recommend this powerful piece by Nurit Peled-Elhanan: For the children: Education or mind infection? and invite you to consider contributing to these worthwhile actions listed below.

1. From IPCRI:

IPCRI LAUNCHES PUBLIC AND DIPLOMATIC CAMPAIGN TO ALLOW THE CHILDREN OF GAZA TO HAVE SCHOOL BOOKS

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

To the Ambassadors, Consul Generals and Representatives to Israel and to the Palestinian Authority

Dear Friends,

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza most goods heading to Gaza from Israel or from abroad have been blocked as part of the policy of pressuring Hamas. One of the goods being blocked by the IDF is paper for the printing of text books for UNRWA schools in Gaza.

In the coming days the children of Gaza will return to school and they will not have text books in their school bags. Five truck loads of paper have been waiting for the Israeli Minister of Defense himself to decide that paper for the printing of text books for UNRWA schools is a “humanitarian need”.

Just imagine if it were your children who would be going to schools without text books! Read the rest of this entry »

A refreshingly honest and well-made 43 minute documentary from Canada’s CBC, notwithstanding the implicit acceptance of other official lines. This Fifth Estate installment looks at the lies that led to the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, and the Bush administration/PNAC’s manoeuverings (H/T: Fanonite). CBC is Canada’s national public broadcaster.

Meanwhile, a timely remainder about the reality of the grim conditions in Iraq, compiled by Steve Lendman.

Iraq’s real ‘Surge’

(T)he so-called “surge” is a bust. All that’s “surging” is the number of:

• daily attacks played down in the major media;
• deaths that a Just Foreign Policy report calculates at over 1 million since March, 2003 based on updating an earlier Lancet study estimating 655,000 or more deaths through July, 2006;
• uncontrollable violence throughout the country;
• refugees fleeing for safety; the International Rescue Committee and UNHCR estimate the number at around four million including the internally displaced with a further 40,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes each month; and
• a near-total breakdown of essential services like electricity, drinking water, sanitation, medical care, education, security and even food compounded by mass unemployment and extreme poverty; the result is a crisis level humanitarian disaster of epic proportions that continues to worsen.

A July 30, 2007 Oxfam International and NCCI network of aid organizations report had grim findings. It estimates:

• eight million Iraqis need emergency aid - one-third of the population;
• four million can’t buy enough to eat;
• 70% of Iraqis have no adequate water supply;
• 80% lack adequate sanitation;
• 28% of children are malnourished;
• the rate of underweight baby births has tripled;
• 92% of Iraqi children suffer learning problems due to fear; and
• there’s been a mass exodus of around 80% of doctors, nurses, teaching staff at schools and hospitals and other vitally needed professionals.

UPDATED with additional links

This image has already received a good airing in the blogosphere; following on the heels of Cheney’s near-sensible statements back in 1994 about the lunacy of invading and occupying Iraq, I thought it might be worthwhile to air again in service of a timely reminder about another Orwellian neoconservative policy backflip, this time on Iran and its national ambitions to go nuclear.

(NB. A colleague informed me the other day that former governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten had wryly observed that the prefix “neo” before a word might as well mean “not” in these times, particularly as they pertain to the terrible twins neocon and neoliberal. That is, neocons are really not true conservatives at all, neoliberals are really not genuine small ‘l’ liberals in the classical sense. I agree).

Click for larger image and better resolution

The above is an advertisement commissioned by US energy companies advocating nuclear energy for the US. It features the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was brought to power after 1953 after a CIA-supported coup ousted democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The Shah was in turn deposed with the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Iranian nuclear programme was launched with the active input of the US in the 1950s. Iran was urged to invest its oil profits in expensive US nuclear technology, on the rationale that Iran’s oil was a finite resource and going nuclear was an energy investment for the longer-term future. Read the rest of this entry »

Dick Cheney rendering a judgment, publicly, on the strategic ill-advisability of invading and occupying Iraq in 1994, before the full-throttle war-mongering of the Israel Lobby and the profiteering prospects of his own companies would change things. (R/T: 1:22)

UPDATED with transcript from Editor&Publisher after video clip

Read the rest of this entry »

Rightly finding the Bush neocons abhorrent doesn’t mean that the corollary is that Clinton is somehow held up as a paragon of virtue or that it was an administration that differentiated itself as a real alternative in this era of unilateralism in US foreign policy. This blog has been duly critical of both Congressional Democrats and Congressional Republicans and the current two party system has proved to be but wings of the same corporate war party. As John Pilger, in Good ‘Ol Bill, the liberal hero, reminds us:

Clinton is able to make a shedload because he is contrasted with the despised Bush as the flawed good guy who did his best for the world and brought economic boom to the US - the fabled American dream no less. Both notions are finely spun lies. What Clinton and Blair have most in common is that they are the most violent leaders of their countries in the modern era; that includes Bush.

Consider Clinton’s true record:

In 1993, he pursued George H W Bush’s invasion of Somalia. He invaded Haiti in 1994. He bombed Bosnia in 1995 and Serbia in 1999. In 1998, he bombed Afghanistan; and, at the height of his Monica Lewinsky troubles, he momentarily diverted the headline writers to a major “terrorist target” in Sudan that he ordered destroyed with an onslaught of missiles. It turned out to be sub-Saharan Africa’s largest pharmaceutical plant, the only source of chloroquine, the treatment for malaria, and other drugs that were lifelines to hundreds of thousands. As a result, wrote Jonathan Belke, then of the Near East Foundation, “tens of thousands of people - many of them children - have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases”.

Long before Shock and Awe, Clinton was destroying and killing in Iraq. Under the lawless pretence of a “no-fly zone”, he oversaw the longest allied aerial bombardment since the Second World War. This was hardly reported. At the same time, he imposed and tightened a Washington-led economic siege estimated to have killed a million civilians. “We think the price is worth it,” said his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, in an exquisite [not!]  moment of honesty.

ADDENDUM: A great flash animation by Mark Fiore on the topic at hand: with thanks to the wonderful David Baldinger

The Bush administration has just recently announced plans for a giant $60+ billion arms deal to a select number of client regimes in the Middle East. Primary beneficiaries are Israel ($30 billion alone, up 25%) and Saudi Arabia, but also Egypt, Jordan and five small Sunni Arab states in the Persian Gulf.

The administration’s sham claims about waging war for democracy in the Middle East are shown up most vividly in this monster arms deal. It arms and continues to arm a number of anti-democratic hereditary monarchs, military dictators and oil sheiks, propping up these corrupt despots against their own people, who often lack basic and fundamental political rights.

Initial Israeli opposition to the proposed sale of high-tech weapons to the Arab states was assuaged by agreeing to extend by ten years US military subsidies to Israel. Of course, as Curtis at CSTF points out, Olmert then issued a specious reference to Saudi Arabia and satellites as “moderate Arab states” after flushed with the 25% increase sweetener:

“We understand the need of the US to assist the moderate Arab states which are in one front with the US and us in the fight against Iran, and on the other hand we appreciate the renewed and re-emphasised support for Israel’s military and security advantage,” he said.

The keywords are “military and security advantage“: Iran poses a threat to Israeli regional hegemony, not its existence.

The military sales “package” to Sunni Saudi Arabia is outwardly rationalised as a counterweight to the claimed threat posed by Shia Iran. No mention of the bumper profits — as a Haaretz piece notes, the arms sales to Saudi Arabia is a highly profitable (for the US arms companies) circular transaction: Saudi Arabia will pay for the advanced U.S. weapons systems with profits from oil sales to the U.S. It may also represent a form of kickback paid to the US by the House of Saud so it won’t take over the country’s oil fields, as Jeff Blankfort suggests.

H/T: With thanks to Naj’s post ‘Can King Abdullah Walk Without Holding Hands?‘

The two major recipients of the US deals are the region’s two biggest human rights violators. The practices of both governments are most antithetical to the principles the current US administration claims to uphold, of course. Saudi Arabia has a despotic regime and many Saudis suffer from an absence of some of the most basic human rights; Israel is a worse than apartheid state that continues land theft and the displacement and occupation of a whole people with the largely unwitting and continued largesse of the US taxpayer.

According to Yasmine Ryan in her review of the book, Israel has just banned Franklin Lamb’s newly released The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon (1978-2006).

This is an update on Lamb’s first edition, Israel’s War on Lebanon. In 1984, The New York Times credited the book with gathering the evidence that spurred the Reagan administration into curtailing Israel’s supplies of US cluster bombs, according to Ryan.

Lamb looks at the legality and morality of the $15.1 million per day in US aid that Israel receives, more than half of which Israel spends on armaments and munitions. The pre-planned war on Lebanon last year claimed well over a thousand lives, the majority of them civilians. The Israeli casualty numbers were a fifth of Lebanon’s, and were mostly combatants. Whether civilians or combatants, Lebanese or Israeli, these were needless deaths in a sadistic war. Read the rest of this entry »

Avigail Abarbanel is a psychotherapist and former Israeli resident who left Israel for Australia in 1991. In The Israeli Police State, Abarbanel writes a revealing piece on the psychologically abusive and maliciously intimidatory tactics employed by the Israeli state even for people who simply want to leave; in this case, herself. Excerpted below; read in full at The Electronic Intifada (9 July 2007):

Up until the army found out that we were leaving, my husband as a career officer and myself as the “wife of,” were treated with great respect in Israeli society and in the military. We didn’t just belong, we had an honored place. The choice of a female sergeant was meant to humiliate him (I mean no offense to females but this is the culture in the Israeli military). Whoever dreamed up this intimidation attempt wanted to show my ex that his rank and status meant little if he was choosing the “wrong” path. We were angry but mostly shocked that he could be treated like this just because we wanted to leave Israel. It’s one thing to encounter the disapproval of friends and relatives in ordinary conversations. It’s quite another to be the subject of a menacing questioning by the MP. Our decision to leave apparently placed us in a new position in society, outside that comfortable mainstream. When we finally left at the end of ‘91 we did so with a bitter taste in our mouths having seen a glimpse of an Israel we didn’t know.

Ask any Palestinian and they will tell you much worse stories — frankly, there is no comparison. Palestinians cannot help but be seen as outsiders, whether they are citizens of Israel or whether they are refugees in the Occupied Territories, whether they are children or adults, male or female. All Palestinians live under constant military and police surveillance. They experience nothing of the mythical Israeli democracy. “Israeli democracy” is something reserved only for the privileged and mostly ignorant elite, of which I was also a member, until I decided to leave. Palestinian citizens of Israel live under an arbitrary and brutal police state. Their dealings with Israeli bureaucracy are not just frustrating but can be outright dangerous.

The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live under a Pinochet-like regime. They can and do disappear in the middle of the night. They are blindfolded, cuffed, beaten, humiliated, taken to unknown locations with no information given to them or their families, tortured physically and psychologically and incarcerated indefinitely, often without charges and regardless of whether they are guilty of anything. It is arbitrary and it can happen to anyone. This is a far worse version of the two incidents I described above but the basic principles are the same.

In a regime like that you don’t have to actually do anything wrong to receive this treatment. This is because it is not only designed to catch people who break the law, it is designed to be a kind of a warning, a hinted threat. It’s there to flaunt state power, show people how small and weak they are compared with the mighty state, and offer a taste of what would happen to them if they even think to go against it. In the case of the Palestinians such tactics are also designed to make daily life unbearable in order to break their spirit and intimidate them into leaving. After all, what Israel really wants is all the land but without the people, something that so many in the West still refuse to recognize.

Israel is not a nice country. It is a powerful police state founded on pathological paranoia with only a veneer of civility, carefully crafted and maintained for the consumption of those who still believe in the myth of Israeli democracy. Mainstream Israelis live in a fictional bubble that separates them from reality. If there is a democracy there, only this select group enjoys it — just like the conformist white population in old South Africa. Supporting Israel now is the same as claiming that South Africa under apartheid was an acceptable democracy. It also means abandoning the Palestinians, just like the world abandoned black South Africans (and white dissidents) for 45 long years.

Thanks as well as a hat tip to the great ladies at Jordan Journals for making this article available. Unless you have a print subscription to the Jordan Times, this article is not freely available o