The debate on Israel is changing. The assault on Gaza was a turning point. It is becoming clear to many as to the true face of Israel. Read this Greenwald piece and read his links. They are all a must read.
Anyone who doubts that there has been a substantial -- and very positive -- change in the rules for discussing American policy towards Israel should consider two recent episodes: (1) the last three New York Times columns by Roger Cohen; and (2) the very strong pushback from a diverse range of sources against the neoconservative lynch mob trying, in typical fashion, to smear and destroy Charles Freeman due to his critical (in all senses of the word) views of American policy towards Israel. One positive aspect of the wreckage left by the Bush presidency is that many of the most sacred Beltway pieties stand exposed as intolerable failures, prominently including our self-destructively blind enabling of virtually all Israeli actions.
Iran -- mocked the war-seeking cartoon caricature of that nation as The New Nazi Germany craving a Second Holocaust. To do so, Cohen reported on the relatively free and content Iranian Jewish community (25,000 strong). When that column prompted all sorts of predictable attacks on Cohen from the standard cast of Israel-centric thought enforcers (Jeffrey Goldberg, National Review, right-wing blogs, etc. etc.), Cohen wrote a second column breezily dismissing those smears and then bolstering his arguments further by pointing out that "significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist" in Iran; that "Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries"; and that "hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve" given the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman in Benjamin Netanyahu's new Israeli government.
Zionism is the problem The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.
It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.
Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.
To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.
For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.
Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.
One of the creators of the successful Israeli movie Waltz with Bashir has produced a new animated film to highlight the continued blockade of the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million Palestinian residents.
Yoni Goodman, who was director of animation for the Golden Globe-winning movie, said he was motivated to take part in the project by the recent war in Gaza. His 90-second animation, Closed Zone, follows a young boy chasing a bird through the Gaza Strip who finds his way out blocked at every turn.
"The issue was always important in my opinion, meaning the issue of the closure," said Goodman in a second video about the making of the Gaza animation.
In a small hotel in East Jerusalem last week, I met a Norwegian aid worker with many years of experience working in occupied Palestine, who told me the following story:
She and some colleagues went to visit a project their organization was running in one of the West Bank villages hard hit by the many land grabs Israel has undertaken since the 1993 conclusion of the "Oslo" agreement between Israel and the PLO. They met with a gathering of canny village elders, one of whom greeted them by saying this: "Welcome! Well, as you know we are simple people, and not all of us are good at reading your way of writing. But when we look at the word 'Oslo' the way you write it, it is clear to us that it begins with a zero and ends with a zero... "
That is indeed a great reading of the meaning of "Oslo" (the agreement) from the Palestinian point of view.
In the mechanistic template imposed by western leaders on the Middle East, of ‘moderates’ who must be supported versus ‘extremists’ who must be isolated and undermined, Hamas has to be painted, by mechanical necessity alone, as ‘extremists’. Hamas has become the ‘extremists’ to answer in neat symmetry to the ‘moderates’ of Ramallah, who for other reasons American and European leaders wish in any event to support.
generally accepted, force a deterministic interpretation that can blind its advocates to the perverse results of such narrow and rigid conceptualising: a defeated and humbled Hamas, western leaders suggested, was to be ‘welcomed’ as a blow to Hesballah, which in turn represented a strike at Syria, which weakened Iran - all of which strengthened the ‘moderates’; and, the model implies, serves to make Israel safer. It is a narrative that has reduced the Palestinian crisis to no more than a pawn in the new ‘Great Game’ of an existential global struggle waged against ‘extremism’
The appealing clarity of such a simple, and simplistic, model-making has however obscured its overriding flaw. The pursuit of this narrow formulation of moderates versus extremists has yielded the perverse result - not of bringing nearer a Palestinian state - but of pushing it beyond reach, possibly for good.
On the one hand, Mahmoud Abbas is left discredited, lacking the legitimacy to take forward any political solution: on the other, the ‘extremist’ branding of Hamas has enabled the West to block Hamas’ and other factions’ access to the Palestinian leadership institutions. Palestinian leadership institutions remain captive to one section of Fatah in Ramallah. In short, western policy has brought about a void in which no Palestinian leader, and no Palestinian movement, now has the potential to achieve a credible mandate - or to move forward politically.
Attempts to undermine Hamas have all failed - be they economic siege, political cleansing (with British and American experts grooming a special operations militia around Abbas in order to politically-cleanse the West Bank of Hamas influence), the repression of Hamas’ political and charitable institutions, or, more recently, the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza.
A study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has cast doubt over Israel's survival beyond the next 20 years.
The CIA report predicts "an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region."
The study, which has been made available only to a certain number of individuals, further forecasts the return of all Palestinian refugees to the occupied territories, and the exodus of two million Israeli - who would move to the US in the next fifteen years.
