Reports are still preliminary, but at 4 am local time this morning Israeli naval commandos boarded the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara, part of a self-proclaimed humanitarian aid "Freedom Flotilla" headed for the blockaded Hamas-run Gaza Strip, and in the process killed at least 10 passengers on board.
This bizarre and poorly executed high seas seizure, which was predictable in its unpredictability, is another in a string of serial outrages perpetrated by the right-wing government of Israel.
International condemnation of the Israeli military intervention against the aid flotilla has been swift and comprehensive. Protesters have appeared in Istanbul, Beirut, and London to denounce the Israeli operation. Inside Israel, Israeli Arab towns such as Umm al-Fahm have spontaneously exploded with street protests, tire burnings, and blockages of roads.
Israeli Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has cancelled his planned visit to the Obama White House scheduled for later this week, and is returning from Canada to direct the cleanup that will inevitably result from this public relations disaster.
The flotilla had multiple messages and objectives. Calling it an "aid flotilla" is to only capture part of its agenda. Certainly, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the result of an international embargo on allowing the free movement of materiel into Hamas-controlled Gaza. But part of this "aid flotilla"'s agenda was to legitimize the vicious and inhumane rule of Hamas over Gaza.
Some earlier media reports showed that some of the Arabic-speaking passengers of the Mavi Marmara were preparing for a mini-intifada on the ship. The Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, is pretending that it was a purely peaceful protest, not so much to provide aid as to try and break what it considers to be an illegal blockade. With some passengers on board chanting "Khaybar, Khaybar, Oh Jews! The army of Muhammad will return" (referring to one of the bloody confrontations between Muslims and the Jewish tribes of Medina in the 7th century), there was clearly a mix of naive Western activists and hardened veterans of the intifada sailing off to challenge the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Hamastan.
If the government of Israel has not abandoned completely the principles of democratic and orderly rule, a full-scale governmental commission of inquiry must be convened. The Netanyahu government has been careening towards a point of no return, setting a tone of international defiance that is crippling the country at home and abroad. Unlike the Olmert-designed fiasco of the 2007 war with Hizbollah and the equally idiotic Cast Lead campaign of December 2008-January 2009, this military operation which has turned into a national disgrace was devised by two of Israel's top military strategists, both former experienced Chiefs of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces: Defense Minister Ehud Barak and stand-in vice PM Moshe Yaalon. At the very least, the two of them must be held accountable in the court of public opinion.
It seems as if every action of this Israeli government is willfully designed to make those of us who dream of a just and peaceful Israel give up all hope. Yesterday one of the most remarkable Israeli leaders, an inspiration in a time of hopelessness, passed away at the age of 88. It was my distinct privilege to know Aryeh (Lova) Eliav for the past 15 years. He was a Zionist pioneer, a visionary who understood almost from the first moment that setting Zionism against Palestinian nationalism would lead to a disaster, a humane man of principles with a tremendous sense of humor. Lova ran a very different blockade back in the 1940s, the naval blockade set by the British to prevent the remnants of European Jewry from setting foot in Palestine. It was a humiliation for Britain, just as today's events will be a humiliation for Israel. Lova built Israeli cities, served in the Israeli parliament, rose to the highest ranks of power in the then-dominant Labor Party of Israel. After the victory of 1967, Lova put his entire career on the line to oppose the nascent settlement project in the newly occupied territories just beginning under Labor rule. He resigned from the Labor party, followed his own voice, became a writer and an educator, a builder of youth communties and peace monuments, and continued to serve his fellow man until the day he died.
Because I know that Israel is populated by hundreds of thousands of citizens committed to Lova's way, I will not give up hope on a country currently led by a "ship of fools." These last 48 hours the Arab-Israeli conflict has gotten a bit darker, a bit more vile, a bit more intractable. But because there were men like Lova, and because his spirit still persists amongst Jews and Arabs, I will not give up hope.
continued...
Monday, May 31, 2010
Friday, April 02, 2010
Bad Scheduling, Bad Invitation
This coming Tuesday, Dr. Norman Finkelstein is visiting my campus. For those of you who do not know who Norman Finkelstein is, I recommend you go to Pirate Bay or some other torrent index, and then bittorrent the file of a 2009 documentary entitled American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein. I recommend you bittorrent the movie so that you do no have to pay a single penny to the producers (Baraka Productions) of this tendentious film. Even though the movie is clearly pro-Finkelstein, the neuroses of the man come through so clear that you can develop a reasonable idea of just what kind of an individual Finkelstein is.
Dr. Finkelstein (Ph.D., Princeton, 1988), makes his mentor Noam Chomsky seem reasonable and rational. Finkelstein is today an out-of-work self-styled "esteemed scholar and expert on the politics of the Holocaust" (so says the preposterous Media Advisory put out by my college on its web site) who is the endless invited guest of campus organizations out to criticize Israel in the most underhanded, despicable manner possible.
It is an old trope first developed by the Church and its Inquisitors: march out onto the pulpit a Jew (or former Jew) to lambaste the Jews for their sins. If a Jew is doing it, how can it be anti-Semitic? But I contend that when precisely a Jew performs as a paid monkey for people who are blinded by a perverse kind of Israel-hatred, it certainly is anti-Semitic.
In this case, on my campus, I've seen it once before: find a critic of Israel with marginal academic credentials (in this case it was a researcher from Harvard, one Sara Roy), but make sure that person is not only a Jew, but a child of Holocaust survivors, and then make sure to promote his or her Jewish/Holocaust ties, and then let 'er rip. This all goes to contribute to the single most anti-Semitic variation of Israel criticism (which I readily agree is mostly not anti-Semitic): the Jews, victims of the Nazi Holocaust, are now perpetrating through a Jewish state the very genocidal crimes that they were once the victims of. Perfidious, blind, hypocritical Jews! And look -- here is an idignant Jew, a child of this great crime, willing to call an Israeli spade a spade. Like I said, it has happened on my campus once before, and here we go again -- calculatedly finding a Jew (a survivor child, no less) to do the job that hundreds of non-Jews can easily do -- not just "criticize" Israel, but call her an "insane, lunatic" state -- and be (supposedly) completely protected from the accusation of crossing the line into anti-Semitism.
Now I very much would like to go hear Dr. Finkelstein (downgraded to irrelevancy from Hunter College, denied tenure at DePaul University, apparently fluent in neither Hebrew nor Arabic -- and yet touted as an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict) this coming Tuesday. I've announced the lecture to my 40 students who take my course on the Arab-Israeli Conflict. I told them that some people shine light on the conflict, and other people simply generate heat. Finkelstein is these days exclusively the latter. He isn't a scholar -- he is a strident polemicist, an activist of a sort, a cause celebre to some.
Originally, the presentation by Dr. Finkelstein was scheduled by its organizers for Monday. I wrote to one of the student organizers that Monday is the 7th day of Passover, and I will not be on campus. One of my colleagues, who had nothing to do with the original invite but had talked to some of the student organizers, came to my office to discuss and apologize for the insensitivity of the scheduling conflict. I assured her it was no big deal -- very few students or faculty here at Trinity College observe these final days of Passover as days off. "Please don't change anything for my sake," I told her.
But this is the domain of politically correct higher education, and Finkelstein's Monday noon talk was switched to Tuesday. Unfortunately, this makes for an even more difficult obstacle for me and some of my colleagues. In the practice of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in the diaspora, the 8th day of Passover is also a day off, and it is made doubly sacrosanct because on the 8th day in synagogue occurs the recitation of the Yizkor memorial service to honor close departed family members. Now one learns from the documentary that Finkelstein is an atheist, so I am not at all surprised that the Yizkor service is not the way he honors his dead parents. (In the movie, he claims that he honors their memory by speaking out against the injustices perpetrated by Israel.) But I find it a bit strange that some student groups, in league with the International Studies Program (an academic program in which I teach a course, and which is led by a colleague who has publicly endorsed the academic boycott of Israeli scholars and higher education institutions), have managed to scrounge up this child of Holocaust survivors, this political activist posing as an academic expert, to launch into a well-constructed screed about Israel and the Gaza War of December 2008-January 2009 (and the Goldstone report too) on a day when some of us simply cannot come.
The truth is that there are many positions I think I share with Finkelstein. I have blogged in real time my opposition to both the 2006 war against Lebanon and the Gaza War of '08-'09, on not only strategic but also on moral grounds. I think the Goldstone report is a devastating critique of Israeli actions during that war. I have blogged my unequivocal opposition to the conduct of the Olmert and Netanyahu governments and their policies. I am absolutely opposed to the Israeli settlement project, and I believe that Israeli policies towards Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are and have been historically shameful.
What I do not do is go to Lebanon and praise Hezbollah as a legitimate resistance organization which should continue to pound Israel with missiles "to knock some sense into them." I do not use the characterization "Israeli Nazi" (though I have to acknowledge that there was at least one highly respected Israeli intellectual who used the term "Judeonazi" to refer to Israeli governmental policy towards the Palestinians.) I will not give a quote to a Turkish paper, then pasted on The Tehran Times , claiming that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Maybe if I were a political activist with a failed academic career and nothing left but my penchant for being my own worst enemy (or as the Trinity College media advisory puts it, an "independent scholar") I would do these things. Maybe not.
What I can do is this: I am sick and tired of participating in an academic program that is led by a signatory to an international academic boycott of Israeli academics, and which sponsors such drivel. I have two thesis advisees this semester that I have agreed to supervise through the International Studies Program. When I successfully get them through their graduation, I will sever all ties with this troubled academic unit.
Dr. Finkelstein (Ph.D., Princeton, 1988), makes his mentor Noam Chomsky seem reasonable and rational. Finkelstein is today an out-of-work self-styled "esteemed scholar and expert on the politics of the Holocaust" (so says the preposterous Media Advisory put out by my college on its web site) who is the endless invited guest of campus organizations out to criticize Israel in the most underhanded, despicable manner possible.
It is an old trope first developed by the Church and its Inquisitors: march out onto the pulpit a Jew (or former Jew) to lambaste the Jews for their sins. If a Jew is doing it, how can it be anti-Semitic? But I contend that when precisely a Jew performs as a paid monkey for people who are blinded by a perverse kind of Israel-hatred, it certainly is anti-Semitic.
In this case, on my campus, I've seen it once before: find a critic of Israel with marginal academic credentials (in this case it was a researcher from Harvard, one Sara Roy), but make sure that person is not only a Jew, but a child of Holocaust survivors, and then make sure to promote his or her Jewish/Holocaust ties, and then let 'er rip. This all goes to contribute to the single most anti-Semitic variation of Israel criticism (which I readily agree is mostly not anti-Semitic): the Jews, victims of the Nazi Holocaust, are now perpetrating through a Jewish state the very genocidal crimes that they were once the victims of. Perfidious, blind, hypocritical Jews! And look -- here is an idignant Jew, a child of this great crime, willing to call an Israeli spade a spade. Like I said, it has happened on my campus once before, and here we go again -- calculatedly finding a Jew (a survivor child, no less) to do the job that hundreds of non-Jews can easily do -- not just "criticize" Israel, but call her an "insane, lunatic" state -- and be (supposedly) completely protected from the accusation of crossing the line into anti-Semitism.
Now I very much would like to go hear Dr. Finkelstein (downgraded to irrelevancy from Hunter College, denied tenure at DePaul University, apparently fluent in neither Hebrew nor Arabic -- and yet touted as an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict) this coming Tuesday. I've announced the lecture to my 40 students who take my course on the Arab-Israeli Conflict. I told them that some people shine light on the conflict, and other people simply generate heat. Finkelstein is these days exclusively the latter. He isn't a scholar -- he is a strident polemicist, an activist of a sort, a cause celebre to some.
Originally, the presentation by Dr. Finkelstein was scheduled by its organizers for Monday. I wrote to one of the student organizers that Monday is the 7th day of Passover, and I will not be on campus. One of my colleagues, who had nothing to do with the original invite but had talked to some of the student organizers, came to my office to discuss and apologize for the insensitivity of the scheduling conflict. I assured her it was no big deal -- very few students or faculty here at Trinity College observe these final days of Passover as days off. "Please don't change anything for my sake," I told her.
But this is the domain of politically correct higher education, and Finkelstein's Monday noon talk was switched to Tuesday. Unfortunately, this makes for an even more difficult obstacle for me and some of my colleagues. In the practice of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in the diaspora, the 8th day of Passover is also a day off, and it is made doubly sacrosanct because on the 8th day in synagogue occurs the recitation of the Yizkor memorial service to honor close departed family members. Now one learns from the documentary that Finkelstein is an atheist, so I am not at all surprised that the Yizkor service is not the way he honors his dead parents. (In the movie, he claims that he honors their memory by speaking out against the injustices perpetrated by Israel.) But I find it a bit strange that some student groups, in league with the International Studies Program (an academic program in which I teach a course, and which is led by a colleague who has publicly endorsed the academic boycott of Israeli scholars and higher education institutions), have managed to scrounge up this child of Holocaust survivors, this political activist posing as an academic expert, to launch into a well-constructed screed about Israel and the Gaza War of December 2008-January 2009 (and the Goldstone report too) on a day when some of us simply cannot come.
The truth is that there are many positions I think I share with Finkelstein. I have blogged in real time my opposition to both the 2006 war against Lebanon and the Gaza War of '08-'09, on not only strategic but also on moral grounds. I think the Goldstone report is a devastating critique of Israeli actions during that war. I have blogged my unequivocal opposition to the conduct of the Olmert and Netanyahu governments and their policies. I am absolutely opposed to the Israeli settlement project, and I believe that Israeli policies towards Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are and have been historically shameful.
What I do not do is go to Lebanon and praise Hezbollah as a legitimate resistance organization which should continue to pound Israel with missiles "to knock some sense into them." I do not use the characterization "Israeli Nazi" (though I have to acknowledge that there was at least one highly respected Israeli intellectual who used the term "Judeonazi" to refer to Israeli governmental policy towards the Palestinians.) I will not give a quote to a Turkish paper, then pasted on The Tehran Times , claiming that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Maybe if I were a political activist with a failed academic career and nothing left but my penchant for being my own worst enemy (or as the Trinity College media advisory puts it, an "independent scholar") I would do these things. Maybe not.
What I can do is this: I am sick and tired of participating in an academic program that is led by a signatory to an international academic boycott of Israeli academics, and which sponsors such drivel. I have two thesis advisees this semester that I have agreed to supervise through the International Studies Program. When I successfully get them through their graduation, I will sever all ties with this troubled academic unit.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Time to Pile On
No doubt about it -- Bibi is in trouble. After insulting the Obama administration, Bibi ran to Washington to hear the adoring chirping of AIPAC and Congress, and then drove over to his home away from home - the White House. But wait Bibi -- its time for a little Chicago-style politics: "you shit on my alderman, I will shitstorm all over you in spades." So Bibi was humiliated in more-than-exact-measure at 1600 Pennsylvania (and at almost the same moment, at 10 Downing) and then was sent home to his residence in Jerusalem a disemboweled "ally." No sooner did Bibi get home to his right-wing coalition of home builders (is Bibi running a nation or a fly-by-night real estate development project?) than Hamas decides it's time to test Bibi the pugnacious epostulator to see what the former furniture salesman is really made of. People are starting to die on the Gaza-Israel border, troops and tanks and rockets are going every which way, and -- oh no! -- Passover is coming ("tell Barack we can't answer him just yet - we must take a break because we cannot engage in serious negotiations with anyone while we are constipated with matzoh"). Then it will be Holocaust Memorial Day, Independence Day, Shavuot -- and then before you know it, it's the High Holidays, and then Sukkot, and then -- whoops! -- it's mid-term US elections.
Taking a cue from the Yitzhak Shamir playbook, Bibi is now going to try a diplomatic rope-a-dope, and hope that the much friendlier Republicans can hand this Barack Obama fella a midterm setback. Seven months is a long time to say you'll do something, anything; while all the while do absolutely nothing. "Hell," thinks Bibi, "Shamir did it -- dammit, so can I."
Taking a cue from the Yitzhak Shamir playbook, Bibi is now going to try a diplomatic rope-a-dope, and hope that the much friendlier Republicans can hand this Barack Obama fella a midterm setback. Seven months is a long time to say you'll do something, anything; while all the while do absolutely nothing. "Hell," thinks Bibi, "Shamir did it -- dammit, so can I."
Thursday, March 25, 2010
How to Spin Nothing
Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu is on his way back to Jerusalem after an intensive 72 hours in Washington that may well have determined the future of his 2nd crack at leading his country. While Netanyahu's plane is still in the air, it is quite impossible to discern from the Israeli press what exactly transpired in Washington. It seems pretty clear that a document encompassing a statement of American-encouraged Israeli confidence-building moves designed to set the stage for "proximity talks" was not produced. Despite appealing to AIPAC and Congress, Bibi departed Washington without an understanding with the Obama White House. If you are to believe the left-leaning hyper-critical Haaretz, Bibi's visit to Washington has failed on all accounts and thus returns to Israel a humiliated PM who shot himself in his own foot, having completely overplayed his very weak hand. If you are to believe the right-leaning Jerusalem Post, Israel and the US made great progress in resolving disagreements (though the Post points out that all the rosy talk emanates exclusively from the departing Israeli delegation). When Bibi's plane lands, the knives will come out. A PM cannot come and go from the White House and actually worsen Israel-US relations without some political fallout at home. Expect in Israel for all political hell to break loose.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
High Drama in Washington
I've been on vacation this week in the UK, and haven't had a lot of time to blog. I've been busy with other things, like visiting two 3-star Michelin restaurants in 36 hours (and boy, is there ever a difference even within this lofty elite category). Let's put it this way: I liked Gordon Ramsay a lot as a television figure before I went to his flagship restaurant in Chelsea Monday night. Now I really have come to appreciate what he has accomplished as a restaurateur. But this is not a restaurant review. Maybe another time...
There has been great drama both here and overseas in Washington the last 36 hours over the actions of the government of the state of Israel, and while the British expulsion of the Mossad station chief in London is dominating the local media, it seems to me that the events going on between the White House and the Israeli embassy in Washington are far more important. Israeli media is reporting a fevered and angry and truly quite dramatic set of meetings that have been going on since Tuesday and continuing into Wednesday without cessation. Normally, marathon negotiating sessions over the Israeli-Arab conflict occur in the region or at the isolated presidential retreat of Camp David, MD. Israelis and Arabs (Egyptians, Palestinians, sometimes Syrians or Jordanians) would engage in marathon haggling sessions with American diplomats shuttling back and forth between bungalows, serving as trusted mediators, occasionally offering ideas. US negotiators were happy to advance the dialogue, and could match the late-night drama measure for measure.
The big difference this time -- and an indication of exactly how far matters have turned sour for both Israel and the US -- is that the late-night marathons are happening in downtown Washington not between Israelis and Palestinians, but rather between Israeli and American negotiators. Both sides are contributing their own missteps to this amazing and rare display of stark disagreement. But I still maintain that by pressing the government of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu on the question of Jewish construction in East Jerusalem (I note that on the BBC, it is always called "occupied East Jerusalem"), Barack Obama is trying to bring down the current Netanyahu government. I believe that the American negotiators (George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, and Dan Shapiro) have reached the conclusion that nothing can happen with Netanyahu's current coalition. Better to shuffle the deck now and quickly, than wait for the next Middle East war.
Netanyahu can choose if he so wishes to work with the Obama administration -- but he would then have to roll back the clock to a moment just after the 2009 elections 13 months ago and configure a new government under his leadership without the participation of the rightist nationalist and religious parties which dictate his current policy. Every indication suggests that Netanyahu is not going to forego his strongly mapped-out positions on settlements and East Jerusalem for a chance to roll up his sleeves and work with this new American administration on its suddenly new terms. The next few hours (and weeks) will quite possibly be the most diplomatically intensive evaluation of the Israel-US relationship since the "reassessment" of 1975. A domestically triumphant Barack Obama is trying to discard his weak hand (the Netanyahu government) and make a difference in the Middle East. Exciting -- quite possibly historic -- times.
There has been great drama both here and overseas in Washington the last 36 hours over the actions of the government of the state of Israel, and while the British expulsion of the Mossad station chief in London is dominating the local media, it seems to me that the events going on between the White House and the Israeli embassy in Washington are far more important. Israeli media is reporting a fevered and angry and truly quite dramatic set of meetings that have been going on since Tuesday and continuing into Wednesday without cessation. Normally, marathon negotiating sessions over the Israeli-Arab conflict occur in the region or at the isolated presidential retreat of Camp David, MD. Israelis and Arabs (Egyptians, Palestinians, sometimes Syrians or Jordanians) would engage in marathon haggling sessions with American diplomats shuttling back and forth between bungalows, serving as trusted mediators, occasionally offering ideas. US negotiators were happy to advance the dialogue, and could match the late-night drama measure for measure.
The big difference this time -- and an indication of exactly how far matters have turned sour for both Israel and the US -- is that the late-night marathons are happening in downtown Washington not between Israelis and Palestinians, but rather between Israeli and American negotiators. Both sides are contributing their own missteps to this amazing and rare display of stark disagreement. But I still maintain that by pressing the government of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu on the question of Jewish construction in East Jerusalem (I note that on the BBC, it is always called "occupied East Jerusalem"), Barack Obama is trying to bring down the current Netanyahu government. I believe that the American negotiators (George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, and Dan Shapiro) have reached the conclusion that nothing can happen with Netanyahu's current coalition. Better to shuffle the deck now and quickly, than wait for the next Middle East war.
Netanyahu can choose if he so wishes to work with the Obama administration -- but he would then have to roll back the clock to a moment just after the 2009 elections 13 months ago and configure a new government under his leadership without the participation of the rightist nationalist and religious parties which dictate his current policy. Every indication suggests that Netanyahu is not going to forego his strongly mapped-out positions on settlements and East Jerusalem for a chance to roll up his sleeves and work with this new American administration on its suddenly new terms. The next few hours (and weeks) will quite possibly be the most diplomatically intensive evaluation of the Israel-US relationship since the "reassessment" of 1975. A domestically triumphant Barack Obama is trying to discard his weak hand (the Netanyahu government) and make a difference in the Middle East. Exciting -- quite possibly historic -- times.
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