During this year’s AIPAC conference in Washington, Executive Director Howard Kohr warned the 7,000-plus crowd that the global movement to “delegitimize Israel” was gathering steam.

“These voices are laying the predicate for an abandonment,” he said. His sentiments were almost apocalyptic: “The stakes in that battle are nothing less than the survival of Israel, linked inexorably to the relationship between Israel and the United States. In this battle we are the firewall, the last rampart.”

The age of Barack Obama has unleashed a global wave of Jewish unease over Israel’s future and the Diaspora’s relationship to the self-described Jewish state. It’s a debate that is long overdue.

Zionist organizations in Australia campaigned loudly in May against the allegedly “anti-Semitic” play Seven Jewish Children, a ten-minute think-piece written by an English playwright accusing Jews of complicity in violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

A Jewish columnist for The New York Times, Roger Cohen, argued in June that the key word among Palestinians now is “humiliation.”

“It’s not good for the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Jewish soul,” he wrote. The Jewish Week editor chastised him for such views – for “the anger, blame and one-sidedness of his argument” – and wondered “whose heart?has grown brutal?”

An upcoming academic conference at York University in Toronto exploring the “one-state, bi-national solution” to the conflict was slammed last week by Gerald M. Steinberg, chair of the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University, for fueling “the vicious warfare and mass terror” against Israelis and Palestinians.

The decades-old ability of Zionist groups to manage the public narrative of Israeli victimhood is breaking down. Damning critics has therefore become a key method of control.

But, writes Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, a leading Jewish-American blogger, “whereas these smear tactics once inspired fear in many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work.”

He may be overly optimistic, but alternative Jewish voices are rising who are less concerned with being accused of “self-hatred” or treachery. They see it as their duty to damn what is wrong and not simply support Israeli government policies.

A thinking, more enlightened Judaism is emerging, a necessity in the face of apartheid realities. The cause is human rights, not Zionist exclusion.

Obama’s recent speech in Cairo reflected the new Jewish consciousness. American Jews were certainly an intended audience because if it this group that must challenge their conservative spokespeople to undo years of following Likudnik thinking. As a candidate in 2008, the then Illinois senator said that, “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel.”

Many Jews in the Diaspora have never imagined anything else; it’s been an imagined Israel in their minds for decades. Lawless behavior in the occupied territories is ignored through willful ignorance. Tellingly, the most reliable information about these truths in the West is found online, through blogs and activist Web sites, and not generally in the mainstream media. The gate-keepers are clinging on to the Exodus myths for dear life.

Defining a humane Judaism in the 21st century means condemning the brutal military occupation in the West Bank and resisting the ongoing siege of Gaza.

Jewish-American blogger Phil Weiss, who recently returned from the Strip, quoted a young Gazan saying in dismay: “We are being experimented on.”

The Palestinian narrative is routinely ignored or dismissed in the U.S. and beyond. This must change quickly for any chance of peace to break out in the Middle East. However, peace without justice is guaranteed to fail.

After Obama?s speech in Cairo, where which he almost acknowledged the Palestinian “Nakba” without mentioning it by name, most major Jewish-American groups reacted with caution.

The Anti-Defamation League said it was “disappointed that the President found the need to balance the suffering of the Jewish people in a genocide to the suffering of the Palestinian people resulting from Arab wars.”

This was code for “Nakba”-denial, as pernicious as Holocaust revisionism.

But the liberal J Street lobby, still clinging to the delusion of a viable two-state solution and a “democratic, Jewish homeland,” praised Obama?s “active diplomacy” and claimed that the “overwhelming majority of American Jews” supported an end to the West Bank colonies.

Consistent polls suggest they are right, but the devil is in the detail. Is there real will to back the necessary steps, namely the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank?

Co-Author of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt, said recently that he couldn’t understand why more American Jews didn’t realize the cliff Israel was running toward. Did they not see that repression in the occupied territories had defined Israel in the eyes of the world? Perhaps apartheid didn’t bother them. Out of sight and out of mind. Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech at Bar-Ilan University suggested he wasn’t too fussed, either.

I recently attended the Salute to Israel parade in New York ? picture 100,000 American Jews marching to celebrate the state, waving flags in praise of the IDF. It was a thoroughly depressing affair. Palestinians didn’t exist; they were invisible. The world’s biggest public display of pro-Israel feeling had no room for 20 percent of the Israeli population (let alone the millions in the West Bank and Gaza.)

These events are actually a sign of desperate projection, not strength. Mainstream Zionism wants to completely shield Jews from the uncomfortable facts of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-determination. Jews were a proud people, a clever people and a victimized people. There was no time to indulge in frivolous Arab trivialities.

But facts have an uncomfortable way of seeping back into view. Colonel Itai Virob, an IDF brigade commander in the West Bank, recently told an Israeli court that, “a slap, sometimes a punch to the scruff of the neck or the chest, sometimes a knee jab or strangulation to calm somebody [a Palestinian] down is reasonable.”

Where is the Jewish outrage over this?

Antony Loewenstein is a New York-based journalist and author of My Israel Question.

Tool of the Rich
Originally posted by peezfulmindz on the vetsandsurvivorsmarch list
Fri Jun 5, 2009 10:14 am (PDT)

What part of Obama’s speech in Cairo should give us hope for a new relationship with the Islamic world? Rhetoric is just rhetoric when actions contradict. Obama has become the new salesman for the American royalty of rich power brokers and entitled elitists.

The significance of Obama’s journey to the Middle East to give a polished speech he began writing before his election is window dressing and disingenuous. His destinations of Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the cues to his lack of sincerity toward the Muslim world. He chose the two most repressive regimes of the region to curry favor with the long misunderstood and vilified people of Islamic faith. He spoke eloquently about peace in Palestine and even dared to challenge Israel but his failure to speak of the repression of Egypt’s Mubarak and the Saudi royal family makes his words hollow and hypocritical.

Progressives and liberals may want us to give Obama time but families sending their sons and daughters off to the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan war wonder when enough is enough after multiple deployments of their loved ones. Yes, there is still two wars being waged in the name of this nation and billions each month is being spent to fund them. Billions that could be spent to “bail-out” the millions who have lost jobs due to the handling of the phony economic crisis.

What goodwill is being gained by this nation when we continue to wage illegal and immoral wars in nations of large Islamic populations? And how do we stem the hatred toward Americans when we send drones into Pakistan and make multiple mistakes in bombing the homes of innocent civilians instead of the alleged enemy?

As expected the new deal of Obama has turned out to be the same old deal of oligarchy, imperialism and nationalistic insanity. As expected Obama has sold out to the self appointed “royalty” of America. The richest families and multi-national corporations continue to wield the greatest influence and power in this alleged democracy. Locally and nationally special interests buy the elected political prostitutes while the poor and diminishing middle class go begging for table scraps of the great American dream.

While Obama speaks with a charisma not heard since JFK, like JFK he is merely a tool of a corrupted system never meant to be about “we, the people”.

Wm. Terry Leichner, RN

Denver VVAW member

Despite the difficulties with parking for an event downtown just after the Ithaca Festival parade, 50 people attended the screening and discussion. If you missed the Ithaca screening, you still can see it in Oneonata (May 29), Corning (June 1), Cortland (June 4), Binghamton (June 5), or other locations in the Mohawk Valley and Sugerties scroll down for schedule).

The Social Justice Council of the First Unitarian Church of Ithaca is screening “From Mills River to Babylon and back… the Jimmy Massey Story”, a 67-minute documentary by Otsego County filmmaker Joseph C. Stillman. The film chronicles the life of Jimmy Massey, a former twelve-year career Marine who refused to continue killing in Iraq, and examines the political, legal, moral, and human rights implications of the war.

Filmmaker Joseph Stillman and Massey himself will be present for discussion afterwards. A $10 donation is suggested to help cover part of the production cost of the film, but all who want to come are encouraged to attend.

The event, part of an eleven-city tour in Upstate New York, will be held in the sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church, at the corner of Buffalo and Aurora Streets in Ithaca, on Thursday, May 28 at 7:30 p.m.. Screenings are also being held in Syracuse, Cortland and Corning. For more information, go to the filmmaker’s web site: lapalomafilms.net.

This is the premier screening of the film, which was shot in 14 states over the past 4 years and features interviews with Scott Ritter, Cindy Sheehan, Martin Sheen, Maxine Waters and numerous other congresspersons and human rights activists.

The film shows Massey’s early life and the tragic death of his father, his decision to enlist in the marines due to economic hardship, illicit recruiting tactics that target single parent families by recruiters (Massey was a Marine recruiter), weapons of mass deception, depleted uranium use and its effects on soldiers and civilians. Stillman explains, “I believe it’s particularly important for parents and young people especially, to understand the tactics military recruiters will use to fill their quotas at the expense of the youth in our community.”

Stillman says, “This project has opened my eyes to many of the facts that Jimmy has raised and the tragedy of an ongoing war that didn’t have to be fought. I sadly learned, for instance, that the U.S. has dropped massive amounts of depleted uranium, used in ammunition and bombs, in Iraq and Afghanistan since the first Gulf War and that it is presently having disastrous effects on our returning military personnel and especially on the civilian populations in those countries.”

Jimmy Massey last visited Ithaca in March 2005, when he spoke at Cornell GIAC. and shared his first hand knowledge of how military recruiters lie and prey on our youth, especially low income kids, with promises that will seldom be fulfilled.

“FROM MILLS RIVER TO BAYLON AND BACK… THE JIMMY MASSEY STORY” DOCUMENTARY SCREENINGS
Contact: Joseph C. Stillman-Filmmaker 607.433.0811/267.6646 lapalomafilms@yahoo.net

Date | City/Organization | Screening Location | Time

May 27 (Wed) Syracuse Syracuse Peace Council, Jessica Maxwell TBA
315-472-5478 www.peacecouncil.net

May 28 (THU) Ithaca 1st Unitarian Church, Buffalo & Aurora 7:30
cris@tompkinsagainstwar.org
607.387.9830

May 29 (FRI) Oneonta Foothills Performing Arts Center 7:30
La Paloma Films, 607.433.0811

May 30 (SAT) Vestal H.S. Broome County Veterans for Peace 7:00
607.321.8537

May 31 (SUN) Hudson Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia St. 8:00
518.822.8100 fyi@timeandspace.org

June 1 (MON) Corning Palace Theater, 17 East Market Street 7:00
607.329.6173

June 2 (TUE) Hudson Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia St. 8:00
518.822.8100

June 3 (WED) Andes Roundtable, Andes Hotel 7:00

June 4 (THU) Cortland Lucky’s, 77 Main Street, 607.842.6801 7:00

June 5 (FRI) Binghamton Broome County Veterans for Peace 5:30/7:30
First Presbyterian Church 42 Chenango St. 607.321.8537

June 6 (SAT) Troy Bethleham Neighbors for Peace/NY Media 8:00
Alliance at The Sanctuary 518.321.8537

April 14, 2009 – 12:00am
By Ariela Rutkin-Becker

“If only the Palestinians had better leadership.” I often hear this point from well-intentioned, but in this case at least misguided, pro-Israeli friends and colleagues. They continue to bemoan, “If only they had a Ghandi or an MLK.”

And one can surely make a logical case about previous and current Palestinian (and other Arab) leadership missing the mark. But there are a few more interesting points here. First of all, a Ghandi or an MLK prototype a priori requires the background of either an oppressive colonizing regime or a brutally racist one. Either scenario is not quite ideal, and is fascinating to me that folks, in trying to highlight flawed Palestinian resistance, inadvertently draw this moral parallel to today’s Israel.

Go to story and comments on the Cornell Daily Sun web edition.

There is much anticipation that President Obama will use the April 17-19 Summit of the Americas to announce the lifting of Cuba travel and family-remittance restrictions for Cuban-Americans.

Although a welcome step toward crafting a common-sense U.S. policy toward Cuba, it is not enough. As a Cuban American, I benefit from the removal of these restrictions but am uncomfortable that my fellow Americans are denied the right to travel to Cuba by virtue of not having relatives living on the island.

Moreover, Cuba is the only country to which our government restricts travel by American citizens, a policy that makes little geopolitical sense.

One might think Cuban-Americans oppose lifting travel restrictions for all Americans, but the evidence suggests otherwise. A December poll by Florida International University showed that 67 percent of all Cuban-Americans support unrestricted travel to Cuba by all Americans. This is a substantial increase over the 55 percent who favored removing such restrictions when the same question was asked by the university in March 2007.

Congress appears to be listening. The House and Senate have each introduced legislation titled “The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act,” which proposes to lift all restrictions on travel to Cuba by American citizens. The proposed act has garnered an impressive 121 co-sponsors in the House and 18 in the Senate from across the ideological spectrum.

Passage of the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act would be an important step in lessening the isolation of the Cuban people at a time of change on the island. Isolation is also a two-way street, and the current travel restrictions have isolated the United States from Cubans likely to play leadership roles in a post-Castro Cuba.

We do not know how the Castro regime will respond to a unilateral lifting of American travel restrictions. However, such a move, at minimum, will heighten existing pressure on the Cuban government to grant greater freedom for its citizens to travel abroad.

The Cuban government’s response is not as important as ensuring that U.S. policy on Cuba is consistent with our values and possessive of common-sense objectives.

The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act is an important opportunity to end the isolation of the American and Cuban people from each other and bring new thinking to our relations with Cuba. All Americans should support passage of this important legal initiative.

Ignacio Sosa serves on the board of directors of several Cuba-related charities.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Israel on Trial

By GEORGE BISHARAT
Published: April 3, 2009

San Francisco

CHILLING testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that Israel’s Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international law. The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to come. Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also constituted war crimes, but do not excuse Israel’s transgressions. While Israel disputes some of the soldiers’ accounts, the evidence suggests that Israel committed the following six offenses:

• Violating its duty to protect the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. Despite Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, the territory remains occupied. Israel unleashed military firepower against a people it is legally bound to protect.

• Imposing collective punishment in the form of a blockade, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In June 2007, after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed suffocating restrictions on trade and movement. The blockade — an act of war in customary international law — has helped plunge families into poverty, children into malnutrition, and patients denied access to medical treatment into their graves. People in Gaza thus faced Israel’s winter onslaught in particularly weakened conditions.

• Deliberately attacking civilian targets. The laws of war permit attacking a civilian object only when it is making an effective contribution to military action and a definite military advantage is gained by its destruction. Yet an Israeli general, Dan Harel, said, “We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole Hamas government and all its wings.” An Israeli military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, avowed that “anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target.”

Israeli fire destroyed or damaged mosques, hospitals, factories, schools, a key sewage plant, institutions like the parliament, the main ministries, the central prison and police stations, and thousands of houses.

• Willfully killing civilians without military justification. When civilian institutions are struck, civilians — persons who are not members of the armed forces of a warring party, and are not taking direct part in hostilities — are killed.

International law authorizes killings of civilians if the objective of the attack is military, and the means are proportional to the advantage gained. Yet proportionality is irrelevant if the targets of attack were not military to begin with. Gaza government employees — traffic policemen, court clerks, secretaries and others — are not combatants merely because Israel considers Hamas, the governing party, a terrorist organization. Many countries do not regard violence against foreign military occupation as terrorism.

Of 1,434 Palestinians killed in the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians, including 121 women and 288 children, according to a United Nations special rapporteur, Richard Falk. Israeli military lawyers instructed army commanders that Palestinians who remained in a targeted building after having been warned to leave were “voluntary human shields,” and thus combatants. Israeli gunners “knocked on roofs” — that is, fired first at corners of buildings, before hitting more vulnerable points — to “warn” Palestinian residents to flee.

With nearly all exits from the densely populated Gaza Strip blocked by Israel, and chaos reigning within it, this was a particularly cruel flouting of international law. Willful killings of civilians that are not required by military necessity are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the Nuremberg principles.

• Deliberately employing disproportionate force. Last year, Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, head of Israel’s northern command, speaking on possible future conflicts with neighbors, stated, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction.” Such a frank admission of illegal intent can constitute evidence in a criminal prosecution.

• Illegal use of weapons, including white phosphorus. Israel was finally forced to admit, after initial denials, that it employed white phosphorous in the Gaza Strip, though Israel defended its use as legal. White phosphorous may be legally used as an obscurant, not as a weapon, as it burns deeply and is extremely difficult to extinguish.

Israeli political and military personnel who planned, ordered or executed these possible offenses should face criminal prosecution. The appointment of Richard Goldstone, the former war crimes prosecutor from South Africa, to head a fact-finding team into possible war crimes by both parties to the Gaza conflict is an important step in the right direction. The stature of international law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity.

George Bisharat is a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law

March 15, 2009

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.

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement — founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem — argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean “premeditated national suicide.”

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas’ ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take — a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system — would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.

It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.”

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel “The Suitors.”

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The outcome of the Israeli election has sounded the death knell for the two-state solution. There are not 61 votes for it in the new Knesset of 120 seats. A good 64 of the just-elected and/or re-elected Members of Parliament favor accelerated Israeli colonization of the West Bank and oppose Palestinian statehood. Most militant of all is Avigdor Lieberman, a former bouncer from Moldova who has risen in Israeli politics on a platform of racial hatred for Israeli-Palestinians (20% of the population), whom he has urged be “executed” or made to take loyalty oaths, stripped of their citizenship and possibly transferred to the Palestine Authority.

With Lieberman emerging as kingmaker in the new government, logically speaking, there are only three other plausible future relationships of Israel and the Palestinians:

1. Apartheid, with Israeli citizens dominating stateless Palestinians and controlling their borders, land, water and air. Apartheid would be accelerated under Lieberman’s baleful influence. Over time, this outcome would break down, since it will be unacceptable to the rest of the world over the coming decades).

2. Expulsion. The Israelis could try to violently expel the Palestinians (and possibly Israeli-Palestinians as well), creating a massive new wave of refugees in Jordan or Egypt’s Sinai. (This option would almost certainly end the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and might well push the Arab states into the arms of Iran, creating a powerful anti-Israel military coalition and a huge set of threats to the United States.)

3. One State. The Israelis could be forced over time, by economic and technological boycotts, to grant citizenship to the Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Some Neoconservatives have proposed that Jordan could take back part of the West Bank and Egypt could take back the Gaza Strip. However, the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes will absolutely not do so, leading back to option (2) above. Jordan’s government is based on the East Bank, Bedouin-origin population and has anxieties about the 60 percent of the population that is already of Palestinian origin. Egypt’s relatively secular elites are afraid of Muslim radicalism and would not want to have Hamas become part of Egypt. Both Egypt and Jordan bought into the Arab League position that the PLO is the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and they cannot go against this principle without enormous trouble, even from their own populations, who engaged in huge protests during the recent Gaza war against these governments continuing to have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Since President Obama sent out George Mitchell to attempt to kickstart the peace process and get back on track to a two-state solution, both have now had the rug pulled out from under tham by an Israeli public moving to the far right.

<<read more>>

Published on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.

Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”

But the “war on terrorism” rubric — increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” — kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize — or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.

Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.

And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.

“This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced,” Norman Mailer wrote in his book “Why Are We at War?” six years ago. “It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void…”

Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: “This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. … There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist.”

And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just has there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.

It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America — but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.

For anyone who believes that the war in Afghanistan makes sense, I recommend the Jan. 30 discussion on “Bill Moyers Journal” with historian Marilyn Young and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey. A chilling antidote to illusions that fuel the war can be found in the transcript.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about “the war on terror.” Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed.

And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.

Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For recent TV and radio interviews with him about President Obama and war policies, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win. [...]

There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. The destruction is just too obvious to miss, and too many people-especially in the Arab and Islamic world-care about the Palestinians’ fate. Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel’s reputation.

The bottom line is that no matter what happens on the battlefield, Israel cannot win its war in Gaza. In fact, it is pursuing a strategy-with lots of help from its so-called friends in the Diaspora-that is placing its long-term future at risk.” – Link