Israel has been "singled out" is based on what it has done - and is doing - in the Palestinian territories.
And fortunately, in this age of instant communication, cell phone cameras, etc., these human rights abuses cannot be hidden any more.
And fortunately, in this age of instant communication, cell phone cameras, etc., these human rights abuses cannot be hidden any more.
UN to open permanent probe on Israel
By TOVAH LAZAROFF
The United Nation's Human Rights Council is expected to place Israel under permanent investigation for its violations of international law in the territories - until such time as it withdraws to the pre-1967 border - according to Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.
(Interesting that this pro-Zionist source would contact UN Watch, and not the UN, for comment.)
Neuer added that he received that information from diplomatic sources.
It's one of at least four anti-Israel actions he expects the council to take during its fourth session, which started in Geneva on Monday and runs through April 5, Neuer told The Jerusalem Post from Geneva.
(They're not "anti-Israel", they're anti-criminal actions.)
The UN body was created in June to replace the Human Rights Commission, which was scrapped because it had a faulty membership composition and repeatedly singled out Israel.
(That's not exactly what happened, but whatever ...)
But since its inception, the 47-member body - which includes Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China - has continued to single out the Jewish State. It has issued eight anti-Israel resolutions, and none against any other nation. It has also held three special sessions on Israel.
(Perhaps if Israel would quit obstructing the peace process, in order to perpetuate its war against the Palestinian People, they'd start treating it as a compliant state.)
Neuer and Israel's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Yitzhak Levanon, said they expected this session to continue in that same pattern, although the council is also expected to discuss human rights abuses in other parts of the world, including in Darfur, Sudan.
(Since Israel has continued its pattern of abuses, there is no need to alter the body's activities.)
"I'm expecting there will be some clashes concerning Israel," Levanon told the Post.
Neuer said Israel would be rapped for the Antiquities Authority's construction of an access ramp to the Temple Mount's Mughrabi Gate.
(Actually, the manner in which this work is being carried out exposes this as another provocation, much like Sharon's in 2000, which also coincided with negotiations between Zionism and the Palestinians.)
The work has been widely condemned throughout the Muslim world.
Neuer said the council would also take Israel to task for refusing entry to inquiry teams in July and in November. The first team was sent to investigate Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip following the kidnapping by Hamas of Cpl. Gilad Schalit in June.
The second team was dispatched to investigate the accidental discharge of an IDF artillery barrage that killed 19 civilians in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip in November.
(The inquiry was to probe that unfounded allegation. Israel's refusal suggests that there was no such 'accident', but that Israel had intentionally fired into civilians.)
Levanon said the investigators were denied entry because they were overtly biased against Israel.
(Right, and Desmond Tutu's commission may have uncovered further Israeli War Crimes.)
The Human Rights Council is also set to hear a report compiled by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard that compares Israeli actions in the territories to that of the former apartheid system in South Africa.
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite
The entire UN report can be viewed here:
www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/4session/A.HRC.4.17.pdf
The Plant already said "Nazis hate free speech", so let's see what he does in order to block this from the site ... (The Plant subsequently Spammed the newswire twice, in order to push this from view)
"Only the truth will do that, a truth that will eventually lead to the establishment of a free Palestinian state."
That's why Zionism puts so much effort into hiding these uncomfortable truths. The net has impeded these efforts, which is why the Plant has attacked this very site.
"In the 24-page document, posted on the council's website, Dugard states: "The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights -- colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation" and accuses Israel of practising all three."
LIVE FROM PALESTINE~~ APARTHEID... DISAPPEARANCE THROUGH DENIAL
March 3, 2007
To many zionist supporters living abroad, the only real connection they have to Israel is the US tax deductable check they write to the various organisations they support. Many have never been here, most have never seen the wall of apartheid, needless to say, the 'other side' of it. They have not seen the suffering which results.
They are led to believe that the lives of the Palestinian people have not been affected by the creation of this monster.... led to believe that all is a myth perpetrated by some evil anti Semitic beast.
The continual denial of the apartheid system here in Israel is not changing the reality of it.
Yes Virginia, THERE IS APARTHEID IN ISRAEL. Denial of same, lying about same will not bring the wall down. Only the truth will do that, a truth that will eventually lead to the establishment of a free Palestinian state.
The following essay was written by Michael Jansen, a freelance journalist based in the Middle East. It is taken from the Palestine Chronicle.
Michael Jansen: Apartheid in Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is important for Israel to silence or smear anyone who compares Israel to apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, Israel argues that the Jewish state has a moral basis for existence: recompensing the Jews for centuries of Western persecution.
By Michael Jansen
The latest report published by the UN rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories compares Israel's policies there to those of South Africa during the apartheid era.
John Dugard, a South African law professor and former anti-apartheid campaigner, called upon the international community to give "serious consideration" to his recommendation that the International Court of Justice in The Hague issue an advisory opinion on Israel's policies and actions.
In the 24-page document, posted on the council's website, Dugard states: "The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights -- colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation" and accuses Israel of practising all three.
Of the three, Israel is most incensed by being accused of instituting apartheid in the occupied and colonised Palestinian territories.
Dugard says that Israel's policies "certainly resemble aspects of apartheid". He points out that Israel is committing many violations of the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and cites Israel's restriction of Palestinian movement, construction of walls and fences to separate Israelis and Palestinians, building of Israeli settler only cities, towns and roads, and demolition of Palestinian houses built without Israeli permits. He compares Israel's lists of security risks -- 180,000 names long -- who may not pass through the hundreds of checkpoints to South Africa's notorious "pass laws" which obstructed the free movement of black Africans.
Dugard challenges Israel's contention that West Bank checkpoints, barriers and blockades are intended to protect Israelis from attacks by Palestinian fighters and suicide bombers. He states: "It has become abundantly clear that the wall and checkpoints are principally aimed at advancing the safety, convenience and comfort of [Israel's 430,000] settlers" who live in the West Bank in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Dugard singles out the example of the wall being constructed in East Jerusalem, characterising it as an "instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaisation of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city". As proof, he states: "The wall is being built through Palestinian neighbourhoods, separating Palestinians from Palestinians, in a manner that cannot conceivably be justified on security grounds."
He asks: "Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group -- Jews -- over another racial group -- Palestinians -- and systematically oppress them?" He observes: "Such an intention or purpose may be inferred from the actions described in this report."
Israel and its apologists angrily reject the apartheid accusation, charge those who make it with being anti-Semites and call upon Israel's friends to refute the charge. Amongst those whom Israel has tried to censure or smear are former US president Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and head of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Other figures making the charge include Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma Gandhi; Winnie Mandela, former wife of South African leader Nelson Mandela; Michael Ben Yair, who served as Israel's attorney general from 1993-96; Ami Ayalon, a former admiral in Israel's navy and head of Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency; Tommy Lapid, head of Israel's Shinui Party; and Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem.
Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, warned that if a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not found, the two communities would be forced to dwell separately, with one living comfortably and the other in poverty. Brzezinski's prediction has come true.
According to the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, nearly half of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have no food security. In a report issued this week, these two agencies say that Israel's closures and blockades and the Western financial boycott of the Palestinian Authority are depriving Palestinians of essential nutrition.
Forty-six per cent of Palestinians are food insecure or vulnerable, in comparison to 35 per cent in 2004, even though during 2006, the WFP increased food aid by 25 per cent, providing for 260,000 non-refugees in Gaza and 400,000 in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees expanded its rolls of refugees entitled to food aid to meet the needs of those who had been self-sufficient as far as food was concerned.
It is important for Israel to silence or smear anyone who compares Israel to apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, Israel argues that the Jewish state has a moral basis for existence: recompensing the Jews for centuries of Western persecution. While Israel's founding fathers admitted that the creation of Israel involved the commission of injustices against the Palestinians, they argued that the Israeli option was the "line of least injustice", a contention which Palestinians could never accept. To maintain the notion that it is a moral entity, Israel must prevent the international community from accepting the contention that Israel, like South Africa, has adopted apartheid to deal with its native population.
On the other hand, Israel seeks to evade punishment through sanctions for practising racial discrimination to the same extent as the apartheid South African regime. Many critics of Israel's policies call for sanctions to be imposed on Israel until it ends its occupation of the territories conquered in 1967, halts settlement activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and reverses the apartheid measures it has adopted. Amongst the prime movers on the sanctions front have been mainstream Protestant churches in the US. They have called for divestment in US and other companies providing Israel with bulldozers to build settlements and destroy Palestinian houses and orchards.
Some have suggested divesting from US and other Western organisations -- like local pension funds -- which have links to Israeli public institutions.
These attempts to punish Israel have raised a storm of protest from Israel and its friends and forced the churches to reconsider their positions. If divestment becomes widespread, Israel will be under considerable public pressure to end the occupation and its colonisation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan, and renounce apartheid. Oddly, Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, which is far more damaging than separation to Palestinian interests and threatens to deprive Palestinians of self-determination, does not raise the sort of emotional objections apartheid does even though apartheid is, in this case, an ineluctable consequence of occupation and colonisation.
www.uruknet.de/
Here is the UN's initial report on Israeli Apartheid:
72.14.203.104/search
Honest Broker
Jimmy Carter’s book stirs a critical debate.
by Philip Weiss
Since the publication last November of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, his critics have pretty much held the floor.
In fact, days before the book was available, its argument that Palestinians suffer “abominable oppression and persecution” at the hands of the Israelis was dismissed outright by Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, as though it might harm their party in the midterm elections. Their disavowals gave way to the kind of vituperative feeling in pro-Israel quarters that is usually saved for Holocaust deniers and Nazis: Carter will go down in history as “a Jew-hater,” according to The New Republic’s Martin Peretz; the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg called him un-Christian; and Commentary published a long attack on Carter as “the very worst ex-President,” a would be “prince of peace” who was in fact a busybody with a martyr-wish, embittered by his 1980 re-election defeat.
In January came news that Carter’s views had cost him among his own former adherents. Saying that Carter had abandoned an honorable role as honest broker between two sides, 15 Jewish members of the Carter Center advisory board resigned en masse—the sort of thrilling moral stand I hoped for, and never got, during much bigger presidential flaps like Clinton’s sexual harassment saga and Bush’s descent into Iraq.
The conventional wisdom seemed to be that Carter had damaged himself, and badly.
But the fury has masked a quieter trend —nodding support for the president’s views across the country. The book still ranks sixth on the New York Times bestseller list three months after publication, and Carter has taken on a moral halo among progressives and realists, the shotgun marriage of the Bush years. Film director Jonathan Demme, who mainstreamed gay rights with “Philadelphia,” is making a documentary on the book tour. “NBC Nightly News” featured the former president breaking down in tears on a panel at the Carter Center when relating a story of praying to God to give him strength before he confronted Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978, when Carter forged an historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt.
“I think the attacks in some ways have made the book more effective,” says Michael Brown, a fellow at the Palestine Center. “It’s extraordinary, but when people oppose a book or a movie, and make a big fuss out of it, most Americans will say, ‘I want to know what this is about.’”
Some of the fury hides an old-fashioned power struggle. For the first time since the State of Israel was created in 1948, a prominent American politician has publicly taken up the cause of the Arabs, describing Israel’s practices as oppressive. Such voices are common in Europe and in Israel itself. But they are uncommon here, where staunchly Zionist voices routinely assert that Israeli and American interests are identical, a view uniformly reflected in our politics and policies. The Carter groundswell seems to represent a real political threat to that claim. A recent batch of letters to the Houston Chronicle ran three-to-one in Carter’s favor. “Can’t Israel defend itself without subjecting all Palestinians in the occupied territories to such shameful conditions?” one asked. “Nothing justifies treating an entire group of people as if they were second-class human beings.”
The education Americans are seeking began nearly a year ago with an academic paper widely circulated in intellectual circles. “The Israel Lobby,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, realist scholars at the University of Chicago and Harvard, sharply criticized the hegemony exercised by pro-Israel opinion makers in the United States. Famously, that piece was killed by the American magazine that commissioned it (The Atlantic) and eventually published by the London Review of Books. Now Jimmy Carter has brought some of the same arguments home and popularized them.
The ground seems to be shifting under our feet. M.J. Rosenberg, a progressive Zionist activist who works for Israel Policy Forum, wrote that he was surprised by the attitudes expressed at a Washington social gathering where Carter’s book had come up. The book had empowered gentiles to voice criticisms they have long held. One such person said that the Jewish community is “out of line for getting ‘bent out of shape’ by a book,” according to Rosenberg. “[N]on-Jewish Americans feel very inhibited . . . talking about Israel out of fear that any criticism will be labeled ‘anti-Semitism.’”
The Palestine Center’s Michael Brown has been pleased by the new turn in the conversation. “He has gotten the word ‘apartheid’ in the discussion. A lot of progressives used to roll their eyes at the comparison and said it’s too much. But Carter has put it out there. Carter has done an enormous service to the other narrative. Some of these groups are on the defensive for once.”
Carter’s first speech about his book was at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on Jan. 23. I was eager to go. As a Jew who believes that the Israeli occupation is harming American interests in the Middle East, I am interested in the internal debate over Carter in the Jewish community. Jews have generally led the discussion of Israel in this country—and often closed ranks. Had Carter caused any slippage in the bloc?
I got to Brandeis’s Gosman Center gym at 3 p.m., 90 minutes ahead of the speech, and the first signs I saw surprised me—literally. In the barricaded pen for demonstrators was a wide banner: “Jewish Voice for Peace Supports Jimmy Carter. End the Occupation.” The Boston chapter of the Oakland-based group had brought a dozen people. Each had a poster describing an atrocity, like how many Palestinian children the Israeli military has allegedly killed (153) or how many dunams of Palestinian land Israel has confiscated in the West Bank in 2006 (7,749). In this pen, Jewish diversity meant a sprinkling of Zionists. Three young people represented CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and handed out a leaflet titled “Carter’s Falsehoods,” which claimed that Carter misrepresented Palestinian leaders as moderates when they were actually extremists. The piece featured photographs of a Brandeis student killed by a suicide bomber in 1995 and of the Palestinian prime minister meeting with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The gym was jammed with 2,000 folding chairs. All soon filled. Carter was the first president to visit the campus in 50 years (Harry Truman being the last), and there was excitement, along with an air of respect and decorum. Another surprise: I’d been expecting rage. After all, Shulamit Reinharz, the wife of Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz, had called Carter a “plagiarist” in an article for The Jewish Advocate and said, in a vicious spirit, that Carter should have kept his thoughts to himself, just as he should have kept private the famous “lust in my heart” confession he made during his presidential campaign 30 years ago.
But Mrs. Reinharz was not in attendance (“major commitment out of town,” she told me later), and looking around, I saw only a handful of students wearing blue and white in solidarity with Israel, a common response when critics of Israel visit campus. I talked to four of them—all female members of Zionists for Historical Veracity, a Brandeis group dedicated to spreading the word that Israel is the only democracy in the region. This is a new tactic for responding to the criticism of Israel—showing that Israel guarantees free speech, gay rights and women’s rights, when Arab tyrannies do not. It sidesteps the question of human rights and political self-determination for the estimated 3 million Palestinians under Israeli authority. I brought up the occupied territories, and one girl said that I meant Judea and Samaria. “That’s the way it’s referred to in the Bible,” she noted.
I asked the girls why so many Arabs seem to hate Israel. “I wish we knew,” one answered. “I think it has a lot to do with the education system,” another said. “Sadly for the children being affected, they are not getting the correct historical account, and a new generation is brought up to hate Israel.”
My impression of diversity was reinforced by a talk with Getzel Davis, a long-haired kid whose t-shirt said in Hebrew, “You Should Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.” Davis criticized Carter as imbalanced, singling out the Israelis. Yes, it was time to acknowledge that there was a cycle of violence in Palestine, but it must be considered “holistically.” Then Davis told me how haunted he was by a visit to the Orthodox Jewish settlement in Hebron in the West Bank: “The most broken place I’ve ever been in my life.”
Carter arrived, and—what a surprise—no one booed. People rose to their feet and applauded strongly for a minute. Seventy minutes later, when Carter smiled his Cheshire cat grin and disappeared, the applause was even more sustained.
In the interim, he achieved a lot. His performance had a vulnerable, human manner. He flattered Brandeis by saying that it was the most exciting invitation to speak he had received since the Congress called on him to give his inaugural address exactly 30 years before. And this might have been a sincere statement; despite being a statesman whose every utterance has a public quality, Carter actually seemed nervous. He said, with a hint of defensiveness, “I don’t often write my speeches, but I decided to this morning. I read over it before I left home in Plains, Georgia. It took 15 minutes without any pauses for applause. So I can predict for you that I’ll be ready to answer questions in about 15 minutes.”
The second question, about the hurtfulness of the word “apartheid,” occasioned Carter’s broken moment, when in a halting voice he described his pain at the accusations against him:
I am deeply concerned about the tensions that might have arisen. That was not my intention at all. And I’ve been hurt and so has my family by some of the reaction. I’ve been through political campaigns for state senate and for governor and for president, and I’ve been stigmatized and condemned by my political opponents and their stories. But this is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist. This has hurt me. I can take it. But I think that that group of people who have made those statements — sometimes in full-page ads in the New York Times — I think they are an extreme minority.
Carter was trying to mend bridges. His book has pained many Jews for a reason. The strong feeling throughout the book is one progressives often have on visits to the Holy Land: that the Arabs we meet are kinder and more righteous than the Israelis, that the Israelis are the power. The moral core of Carter’s book can be seen is his treatment of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian dictator reviled in this country. Carter seems to see Assad as brilliant, and his text offers, without contradiction, Assad’s analysis of the Israelis as expansionist and racist, imitating the Jews’ European persecutors by performing ethnic cleansing on Arabs. At other times, Carter openly identifies, as a Christian, with the Christian Arabs whom Israel has pushed around. Israeli leaders, “[u]niversally . . . seem rather to evoke his dislike, and Israel as a whole seems to have the same effect on him,” neoconservative Joshua Muravchik wrote in Commentary. I share some of Carter’s anger, but it would have been diplomatic for him to say that some of his best friends are Jews, a statement he made at Brandeis when he reeled off the names of Jewish former aides.
The speech offered an ashen Carter who understood that Jews suffer too. When a youth asked about a line on page 213 of the book, Carter simply apologized for it. The sentence stated that Palestinians must abandon suicide bombing when they are granted a state. Of course, they ought to abandon such tactics right now, Carter said. “That sentence was worded in a completely improper and stupid way. … So again let me repeat, I apologize for the wording of that sentence. It was a mistake on my part, and it is now being corrected in future editions.”
No one lacking outsize political talents ever got to be president, and the ashen moments only bolstered Carter’s refrain: Jewish settlers have confiscated the best land in the West Bank, which is after all only 22 percent of the original Palestine, including choice hilltops and water sources. Israel has built a “spiderweb” of roads serving the settlers alone. This was wrong, indeed abominable, but this reality had not been reflected widely in the United States. That is why he wrote the book. Hard to argue with. And more than that, embarrassing to Jews.
While the audience may not have embraced Carter, it honored him, and having cut through the name-calling, he issued a challenge that hung in the air: Don’t believe me, he said. Find out for yourself. Observe the conditions of Palestinian life and see for yourself whether I am exaggerating. Bring back a report. It will have a huge impact—on Israel, on Brandeis, on Congress, and even on the president. (Brandeis has since taken up his challenge and will send a delegation.)
“Make it three professors and seven students, and go to the West Bank, and just spend three days. I can give you a list of people that you might want to talk to, or you can use your own judgment.”
As I walked out, I sensed a thrill in the crowd. I met two older Jews in the front hall who were as jangled as I was. Jack Porter was handing out copies of a positive review of Carter’s book by leftwing Knesset member Yossi Beilin, saying that the “agonizing” book correctly identifies the path Israelis and Palestinians are moving down. Porter said that he had never felt so empowered: “This is a watershed event. It’s about free speech in the Jewish community. For the first time in two decades, I’m not feeling guilty. I felt that criticizing Israel would be feeding its enemies. But now I see it’s just the opposite. A lot of us held back.”
Nearby was a man of about 80 with a middle-European accent, trembling with fury: “He is a politician, and he knows what to avoid and how to dodge questions. He didn’t tell any lies, he just didn’t tell the truth.” “Were you moved at all?” I asked. “Yes. I was moved to think: we survived Carter. The country was tanking under him because he told Americans to expect less.”
Neither of these men was a student. Not eligible for rationed tickets to the event, they watched on a remote feed in Shapiro Campus Center. They had come into the gym to hear Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, respond to Carter’s speech. Brandeis had at first demanded that Carter debate Dershowitz. The president had demurred, saying that the professor didn’t know anything about occupied Palestine, and Brandeis then invited him on his own, to be followed by Dershowitz. (The Radical Students Association subsequently demanded that Dershowitz be followed by his nemesis, Norman G. Finkelstein, who was tentatively scheduled to visit the campus this month.)
Carter showed tactical smarts by saying that he had declined to meet “a Harvard professor” who wanted to debate him. “I am that nameless Harvard professor,” Dershowitz announced, grinning, but it was plain that the comment upset him. He pointed out that he had met Carter on a few occasions, and Carter had once sought his opinion. Later, when he was interviewed by local television, Dershowitz said that Carter was a “little bit of a coward for not mentioning my name, and a little too cute.”
Of course, Alan Dershowitz and Jimmy Carter are very different types: one a combative defense lawyer, the other a lofty statesman. Having never seen the Dershowitz show before, I was impressed. He’s smart, informative, and quick on his feet. He makes jokes. He encourages students to challenge and rebut him. He doesn’t always like what they have to say. When a Palestinian girl nervously said that going through a checkpoint the previous summer was “the most humiliating experience that you ever have,” Dershowitz broke in: “You’re talking to the wrong people.” He meant that Palestinians could make the checkpoints disappear by ending violent attacks. (Yes, but what about the 500 checkpoints said to be inside the territories as opposed to the 30 on the Israeli border?)
When a student suggested that Hamas must be respected because it won an election, Dershowitz said that she was probably for the Nazis when they were elected in 1933. When another student said that he had lost count of the number of times Dershowitz cited Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Dershowitz stomped him by recounting anti-Jewish statements by Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, then saying, “Everyone thought Hitler was a tinhorn dictator” in the 1930s. If France and England had taken Hitler at his word and crushed him then, they would have gone down “as the bullyboys of history.” That was the great vice of preemption, he said. But it was also the great virtue: they would have “saved tens of millions of lives.” The kid shut up and sat down, punctured. Jonathan Demme’s documentary photographers, who had not been allowed in the hall for the Carter event, rushed over with a release for him to sign.
Dershowitz’s answer was brilliant, but it was incomplete. His references to Hitler and the Nazis were not confined to Iran. For instance, Dershowitz referred to the pre-1967 border in Israel as the “Auschwitz border.” After the speech, I stood with a group of students getting Dershowitz’s autograph and asked him what that meant. He said it was former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Abba Eban’s statement and referred to the fact that Israelis were extremely vulnerable to Palestinian attack inside the borders of the Jewish state from 1949-67.
I introduced myself to history professor Jacob Cohen, who had emceed the Dershowitz event, and asked him about my impression that Brandeis had showered Carter with respect. He said, “The respect and the open-mindedness was not an illusion. I think he speaks very naïvely and often harmfully. He speaks to a vein of idealism, and that’s what young people are.”
Well, I said, young people want to have a hopeful view of history. They don’t want to hear about the Holocaust all the time. They don’t want to see history as having a tragic destination.
Cohen became angry: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of which deeply hurts the Jewish people …” He went on to say that if I thought that “the elimination of Israel” would end Islamic world’s hatred of the West, I was wrong. “Osama bin Laden is still remembering the Crusades.”
It seemed to me that like the 80-year-old I had met in the hall, Cohen was hurt and frightened by Carter’s acceptance and felt that it might signal a period of renewed persecution of the Jews.
But that was the last I was to hear of the Holocaust that night. I spent the rest of the evening with Brandeis kids, none older than 21 or so, and the Holocaust isn’t nearly as real to them as it is to Cohen’s generation and not as prominent for them as it was for my generation. They have little personal connection to it and are imagining the world in different ways. I would say unencumbered by it, Cohen would say nescient.
In the road in front of the gym was a clump of five or six students, most of them Jews, three of them wearing Palestinian scarves (or kaffiyehs)—a defiant symbol. Jews like these are becoming more common in American cities. The kids were saying that Carter had not gone far enough, that he hadn’t talked about the Israel lobby. “There has been a dam of silence,” one of them said. I asked the kids how many Jews on the Brandeis campus felt the way they did. They looked around at one another. “About five,” one said, and they laughed.
Nearby, an Arab student wearing a kaffiyeh said that Arabs were gathering at 9 p.m. in Shapiro to discuss the Carter visit. I went but couldn’t find the Arabs. A kid working on a punk magazine hopped on his computer and said that Democracy for America, a group inspired by Howard Dean, was meeting in the university’s replica Scottish castle, a campus landmark.
I soon found myself with 18 kids in a circle. Most were Jewish, ranging from liberal to progressive. Fearing anger and dispute, Danielle Sunberg, the group’s chairman, had brought a stuffed teddy bear. The rule was that you could only talk when you were holding the bear. When you were finished, you could throw it to someone else.
For the second or third time that day, I was surprised. A couple of students were sharply critical of Carter, but mostly they were enthused. “The campus is on fire tonight,” one remarked. It was exciting to them that the president had visited. “He was making a mea culpa to the Jewish community. To correct things, to move forward…” said Ari Fertig. They were moved by his largeness of spirit. They felt that they had a positive role to play in this discussion; they wanted to play their part as young people. “We need a few generations to die out,” one said.
Several students said they were offended by Dershowitz’s tone. Even though they tended to agree with him more than Carter on substance, they were angered that he had been so disrespectful to students, jumping in on what they were saying. “He was rude,” one said.
Twenty feet away in the common room, two students watched a television airing George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech. Bush’s words broke in on our group’s conversation, but he was largely ignored. Whatever Jimmy Carter’s failings as president long ago, he has touched a moral chord in our public life, one that countless Americans want to rediscover, especially now that Bush’s militarism has created a bloody cul-de-sac in Iraq.
“Just now I heard George Bush saying, ‘We have to take the fight to our enemies,’” James Ansorge said. “I’m of Jewish blood, but I’m not an Israeli citizen, I’m an American citizen. I’m not much of a historian of Israel and Palestine, but I do see Israel in perpetual conflict with their neighbors ... and that seems to be extending to us now. Many Arab extremists seek the destruction of the Israeli state, and now they want the same for us. Things are becoming very belligerent. It’s at a breaking point. We must start the peace process.”
Again I heard the term “watershed.” Fertig, tall, curly-haired, and in a sweatshirt, said, “You know, before tonight, I was very hesitant to ever debate the Middle East. I think this is a watershed moment, both personally and for this community. . . . I am trained in the pro-Israeli way of thinking. This is the first time I came away from a forum more favorable to the Palestinians—the first time I ever came down more favorably on the guy supporting Palestinians than on Israel.”
The teddy bear was thrown this way and that until at the end it was passed around the circle for closing statements. When it came to me, I said that I hoped my generation’s attitudes died out and made way for theirs.
____________________________________________
Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He writes a blog for the New York Observer, Mondoweiss.
amconmag.com/2007/2007_02_26/article.html
"The committee, whose recommendations are not legally binding ..."
How far do you think this will get?
UN panel tells Israel to stop settler violence
Human rights watchdog group asks Israel to recalibrate security solutions to avoid discrimination against Palestinians, Arab Israelis
Reuters Published: 03.10.07, 00:15 / Israel News
Israel should ease roadblocks and other restrictions on Palestinians and put a stop to settler violence and hate speech, a United Nations rights watchdog said on Friday.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said Israel's security measures to ward off suicide bombings and other attacks must be recalibrated to avoid discrimination against Arab Israelis or Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.
The committee, which met for four weeks in Geneva, concluded that Israel should cease building the security fence in and around the West Bank and ensure that its various checkpoints and road closures do not reinforce segregation.
It also voiced concern at an unequal distribution of water resources, a disproportionate targeting of Palestinians in house demolitions and the "denial of the right of many Palestinians" to return to their land.
The committee, whose recommendations are not legally binding, also said that differing applications of criminal law between Jews and Arabs had caused "harsher punishments for Palestinians for the same offense."
A high number of complaints by Arab Israelis against police officers are not properly investigated and many Arabs suffer discriminatory work practices and high unemployment, it said.
Excavations beneath and around the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's holiest site in Jerusalem, should also be undertaken in a way that will "in no way endanger the mosque and impede access to it", it added.
Israel argues that the UN Committee's report, meant to ensure compliance with a 1965 international treaty against racial discrimination which Israel has ratified, does not apply to the Gaza and West Bank.
(Actually, according to international laws regarding occupations, this does apply)
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Itzhak Levanon, told the committee last month it was crucial to understand the pressing security threats faced by his country.
It's Israel that incites hate
March 11, 2007 12:36 am
BETHLEHEM, Palestine--I am surprised that you find so terrible some of the quotes you record ["A steady diet of hate for kids in Palestine," Feb. 11] from Palestinian textbooks, such as "Palestine will be liberated by its men, its women, its young ones and its elderly."
Surely something of this sort was said by Americans fighting for their independence during the Revolutionary War. Their desire to sacrifice for freedom echoes some of our first generals: "[A]ppealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free" (Joseph Warren, American account of the Battle of Lexington, 1775).
I spent three months in Palestine and Israel. I have been a witness to injustice that rarely makes it to mainstream news in the U.S.
I have spent time with families whose houses have been demolished; families who are left with no means of income after their fields have been destroyed; men who have been tortured in prison and who are nevertheless seeking a nonviolent way to resist; children who have been shot while playing; children who have been beaten by soldiers; and children whose siblings are in jail simply for being members of a political party.
The lives of Palestinians are devalued at the expense of Israelis. Palestinian children have little or no access to play areas, because of Israeli building restrictions and continued confiscation of land. While settlements atop hills in Palestine use water for swimming pools, gardens, and open spaces, Palestinians must pay four times as much to Israel for water.
Sewage from these settlements often runs directly onto Palestinian farmland.
Palestinian children in refugee camps face raids, where soldiers come in the middle of the night, break into their houses, and sometimes make an arrest or simply break things and leave.
You state that Palestinians do not learn about the Holocaust. Well, Israelis are not taught in school about the history of their country beyond the Jewish perspective. It is not taught, for example, that in the 1948 war more than 400 Palestinian towns were destroyed, and thousands of Palestinians were expelled or killed.
I have found that Israeli soldiers know little about why they receive orders, and Israeli civilians are ignorant of what happens in the West Bank. Please consider the following typical examples:
The first week I was here, I met a Palestinian family whose 11-year-old son was shot from a watchtower while playing on his porch.
I told an Israeli girl in her 20s about it. Her reply: "That couldn't have happened. It would have been on the news."
Two weeks ago we received a phone call from a family whose sons, 17 and 18 years old, had been beaten and arrested by the Israeli Defense Force in the village of Budrus.
I called the spokesperson for the IDF. I did not get in direct contact with the general. Instead I talked to an office worker. His response: "This doesn't have to do with us. We just talk to the media. But soldiers do not hurt innocent people. I am really sorry."
Last week I asked an Israeli soldier if he knew where the Green Line (the internationally recognized border that gives Palestine 22 percent of its original territory) is--since bulldozers, 12 kilometers away from this border, removed 700-year-old olive trees, the livelihood of 200 people.
His answer: "I don't know where the border is. I am just following orders."
There are actually many schools in Palestine that teach about Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully together. The Hope Flowers School near Bethlehem works to bring Palestinian and Jewish Israelis together to teach about reconciliation.
This school faces a court order--from Israel--that its cafeteria be demolished to make room for a security road. In addition, the school's water well will be taken. This school is even denied the right to repair the road that leads to the school.
Palestinians do not need to learn hate from textbooks. They can learn it when they see what happens to their friends and families, their schools, and their land. They learn it by having dignity and rights taken away.
The Web site Palestinian Media Watch teaches Americans to hate. It turns the parents and teachers of Palestine into caricatures of terrorists whom we can easily blame.
Every parent and teacher I have met here is struggling to meet basic needs--and at the same time is teaching children that education is the key to freedom. But you cannot tie a cat down and ask it to make peace.
It would be much more useful if the Web site were devoted to America's role in unilaterally supporting Israel and how we can reach a solution that is just.
It would also be helpful if Americans came to visit Palestine, to see for themselves.
Caroline Borden, from Catlett, works in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Copyright 2007 The Free Lance-Star Publishing Company.
By TOVAH LAZAROFF
The United Nation's Human Rights Council is expected to place Israel under permanent investigation for its violations of international law in the territories - until such time as it withdraws to the pre-1967 border - according to Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.
(Interesting that this pro-Zionist source would contact UN Watch, and not the UN, for comment.)
Neuer added that he received that information from diplomatic sources.
It's one of at least four anti-Israel actions he expects the council to take during its fourth session, which started in Geneva on Monday and runs through April 5, Neuer told The Jerusalem Post from Geneva.
(They're not "anti-Israel", they're anti-criminal actions.)
The UN body was created in June to replace the Human Rights Commission, which was scrapped because it had a faulty membership composition and repeatedly singled out Israel.
(That's not exactly what happened, but whatever ...)
But since its inception, the 47-member body - which includes Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China - has continued to single out the Jewish State. It has issued eight anti-Israel resolutions, and none against any other nation. It has also held three special sessions on Israel.
(Perhaps if Israel would quit obstructing the peace process, in order to perpetuate its war against the Palestinian People, they'd start treating it as a compliant state.)
Neuer and Israel's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Yitzhak Levanon, said they expected this session to continue in that same pattern, although the council is also expected to discuss human rights abuses in other parts of the world, including in Darfur, Sudan.
(Since Israel has continued its pattern of abuses, there is no need to alter the body's activities.)
"I'm expecting there will be some clashes concerning Israel," Levanon told the Post.
Neuer said Israel would be rapped for the Antiquities Authority's construction of an access ramp to the Temple Mount's Mughrabi Gate.
(Actually, the manner in which this work is being carried out exposes this as another provocation, much like Sharon's in 2000, which also coincided with negotiations between Zionism and the Palestinians.)
The work has been widely condemned throughout the Muslim world.
Neuer said the council would also take Israel to task for refusing entry to inquiry teams in July and in November. The first team was sent to investigate Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip following the kidnapping by Hamas of Cpl. Gilad Schalit in June.
The second team was dispatched to investigate the accidental discharge of an IDF artillery barrage that killed 19 civilians in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip in November.
(The inquiry was to probe that unfounded allegation. Israel's refusal suggests that there was no such 'accident', but that Israel had intentionally fired into civilians.)
Levanon said the investigators were denied entry because they were overtly biased against Israel.
(Right, and Desmond Tutu's commission may have uncovered further Israeli War Crimes.)
The Human Rights Council is also set to hear a report compiled by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard that compares Israeli actions in the territories to that of the former apartheid system in South Africa.
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite
The entire UN report can be viewed here:
www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/4session/A.HRC.4.17.pdf
The Plant already said "Nazis hate free speech", so let's see what he does in order to block this from the site ... (The Plant subsequently Spammed the newswire twice, in order to push this from view)
"Only the truth will do that, a truth that will eventually lead to the establishment of a free Palestinian state."
That's why Zionism puts so much effort into hiding these uncomfortable truths. The net has impeded these efforts, which is why the Plant has attacked this very site.
"In the 24-page document, posted on the council's website, Dugard states: "The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights -- colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation" and accuses Israel of practising all three."
LIVE FROM PALESTINE~~ APARTHEID... DISAPPEARANCE THROUGH DENIAL
March 3, 2007
To many zionist supporters living abroad, the only real connection they have to Israel is the US tax deductable check they write to the various organisations they support. Many have never been here, most have never seen the wall of apartheid, needless to say, the 'other side' of it. They have not seen the suffering which results.
They are led to believe that the lives of the Palestinian people have not been affected by the creation of this monster.... led to believe that all is a myth perpetrated by some evil anti Semitic beast.
The continual denial of the apartheid system here in Israel is not changing the reality of it.
Yes Virginia, THERE IS APARTHEID IN ISRAEL. Denial of same, lying about same will not bring the wall down. Only the truth will do that, a truth that will eventually lead to the establishment of a free Palestinian state.
The following essay was written by Michael Jansen, a freelance journalist based in the Middle East. It is taken from the Palestine Chronicle.
Michael Jansen: Apartheid in Israel
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is important for Israel to silence or smear anyone who compares Israel to apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, Israel argues that the Jewish state has a moral basis for existence: recompensing the Jews for centuries of Western persecution.
By Michael Jansen
The latest report published by the UN rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories compares Israel's policies there to those of South Africa during the apartheid era.
John Dugard, a South African law professor and former anti-apartheid campaigner, called upon the international community to give "serious consideration" to his recommendation that the International Court of Justice in The Hague issue an advisory opinion on Israel's policies and actions.
In the 24-page document, posted on the council's website, Dugard states: "The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights -- colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation" and accuses Israel of practising all three.
Of the three, Israel is most incensed by being accused of instituting apartheid in the occupied and colonised Palestinian territories.
Dugard says that Israel's policies "certainly resemble aspects of apartheid". He points out that Israel is committing many violations of the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and cites Israel's restriction of Palestinian movement, construction of walls and fences to separate Israelis and Palestinians, building of Israeli settler only cities, towns and roads, and demolition of Palestinian houses built without Israeli permits. He compares Israel's lists of security risks -- 180,000 names long -- who may not pass through the hundreds of checkpoints to South Africa's notorious "pass laws" which obstructed the free movement of black Africans.
Dugard challenges Israel's contention that West Bank checkpoints, barriers and blockades are intended to protect Israelis from attacks by Palestinian fighters and suicide bombers. He states: "It has become abundantly clear that the wall and checkpoints are principally aimed at advancing the safety, convenience and comfort of [Israel's 430,000] settlers" who live in the West Bank in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Dugard singles out the example of the wall being constructed in East Jerusalem, characterising it as an "instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaisation of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city". As proof, he states: "The wall is being built through Palestinian neighbourhoods, separating Palestinians from Palestinians, in a manner that cannot conceivably be justified on security grounds."
He asks: "Can it seriously be denied that the purpose of such action is to establish and maintain domination by one racial group -- Jews -- over another racial group -- Palestinians -- and systematically oppress them?" He observes: "Such an intention or purpose may be inferred from the actions described in this report."
Israel and its apologists angrily reject the apartheid accusation, charge those who make it with being anti-Semites and call upon Israel's friends to refute the charge. Amongst those whom Israel has tried to censure or smear are former US president Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and head of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Other figures making the charge include Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma Gandhi; Winnie Mandela, former wife of South African leader Nelson Mandela; Michael Ben Yair, who served as Israel's attorney general from 1993-96; Ami Ayalon, a former admiral in Israel's navy and head of Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency; Tommy Lapid, head of Israel's Shinui Party; and Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem.
Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, warned that if a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not found, the two communities would be forced to dwell separately, with one living comfortably and the other in poverty. Brzezinski's prediction has come true.
According to the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, nearly half of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza have no food security. In a report issued this week, these two agencies say that Israel's closures and blockades and the Western financial boycott of the Palestinian Authority are depriving Palestinians of essential nutrition.
Forty-six per cent of Palestinians are food insecure or vulnerable, in comparison to 35 per cent in 2004, even though during 2006, the WFP increased food aid by 25 per cent, providing for 260,000 non-refugees in Gaza and 400,000 in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees expanded its rolls of refugees entitled to food aid to meet the needs of those who had been self-sufficient as far as food was concerned.
It is important for Israel to silence or smear anyone who compares Israel to apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, Israel argues that the Jewish state has a moral basis for existence: recompensing the Jews for centuries of Western persecution. While Israel's founding fathers admitted that the creation of Israel involved the commission of injustices against the Palestinians, they argued that the Israeli option was the "line of least injustice", a contention which Palestinians could never accept. To maintain the notion that it is a moral entity, Israel must prevent the international community from accepting the contention that Israel, like South Africa, has adopted apartheid to deal with its native population.
On the other hand, Israel seeks to evade punishment through sanctions for practising racial discrimination to the same extent as the apartheid South African regime. Many critics of Israel's policies call for sanctions to be imposed on Israel until it ends its occupation of the territories conquered in 1967, halts settlement activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and reverses the apartheid measures it has adopted. Amongst the prime movers on the sanctions front have been mainstream Protestant churches in the US. They have called for divestment in US and other companies providing Israel with bulldozers to build settlements and destroy Palestinian houses and orchards.
Some have suggested divesting from US and other Western organisations -- like local pension funds -- which have links to Israeli public institutions.
These attempts to punish Israel have raised a storm of protest from Israel and its friends and forced the churches to reconsider their positions. If divestment becomes widespread, Israel will be under considerable public pressure to end the occupation and its colonisation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan, and renounce apartheid. Oddly, Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, which is far more damaging than separation to Palestinian interests and threatens to deprive Palestinians of self-determination, does not raise the sort of emotional objections apartheid does even though apartheid is, in this case, an ineluctable consequence of occupation and colonisation.
www.uruknet.de/
Here is the UN's initial report on Israeli Apartheid:
72.14.203.104/search
Honest Broker
Jimmy Carter’s book stirs a critical debate.
by Philip Weiss
Since the publication last November of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, his critics have pretty much held the floor.
In fact, days before the book was available, its argument that Palestinians suffer “abominable oppression and persecution” at the hands of the Israelis was dismissed outright by Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, as though it might harm their party in the midterm elections. Their disavowals gave way to the kind of vituperative feeling in pro-Israel quarters that is usually saved for Holocaust deniers and Nazis: Carter will go down in history as “a Jew-hater,” according to The New Republic’s Martin Peretz; the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg called him un-Christian; and Commentary published a long attack on Carter as “the very worst ex-President,” a would be “prince of peace” who was in fact a busybody with a martyr-wish, embittered by his 1980 re-election defeat.
In January came news that Carter’s views had cost him among his own former adherents. Saying that Carter had abandoned an honorable role as honest broker between two sides, 15 Jewish members of the Carter Center advisory board resigned en masse—the sort of thrilling moral stand I hoped for, and never got, during much bigger presidential flaps like Clinton’s sexual harassment saga and Bush’s descent into Iraq.
The conventional wisdom seemed to be that Carter had damaged himself, and badly.
But the fury has masked a quieter trend —nodding support for the president’s views across the country. The book still ranks sixth on the New York Times bestseller list three months after publication, and Carter has taken on a moral halo among progressives and realists, the shotgun marriage of the Bush years. Film director Jonathan Demme, who mainstreamed gay rights with “Philadelphia,” is making a documentary on the book tour. “NBC Nightly News” featured the former president breaking down in tears on a panel at the Carter Center when relating a story of praying to God to give him strength before he confronted Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978, when Carter forged an historic peace accord between Israel and Egypt.
“I think the attacks in some ways have made the book more effective,” says Michael Brown, a fellow at the Palestine Center. “It’s extraordinary, but when people oppose a book or a movie, and make a big fuss out of it, most Americans will say, ‘I want to know what this is about.’”
Some of the fury hides an old-fashioned power struggle. For the first time since the State of Israel was created in 1948, a prominent American politician has publicly taken up the cause of the Arabs, describing Israel’s practices as oppressive. Such voices are common in Europe and in Israel itself. But they are uncommon here, where staunchly Zionist voices routinely assert that Israeli and American interests are identical, a view uniformly reflected in our politics and policies. The Carter groundswell seems to represent a real political threat to that claim. A recent batch of letters to the Houston Chronicle ran three-to-one in Carter’s favor. “Can’t Israel defend itself without subjecting all Palestinians in the occupied territories to such shameful conditions?” one asked. “Nothing justifies treating an entire group of people as if they were second-class human beings.”
The education Americans are seeking began nearly a year ago with an academic paper widely circulated in intellectual circles. “The Israel Lobby,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, realist scholars at the University of Chicago and Harvard, sharply criticized the hegemony exercised by pro-Israel opinion makers in the United States. Famously, that piece was killed by the American magazine that commissioned it (The Atlantic) and eventually published by the London Review of Books. Now Jimmy Carter has brought some of the same arguments home and popularized them.
The ground seems to be shifting under our feet. M.J. Rosenberg, a progressive Zionist activist who works for Israel Policy Forum, wrote that he was surprised by the attitudes expressed at a Washington social gathering where Carter’s book had come up. The book had empowered gentiles to voice criticisms they have long held. One such person said that the Jewish community is “out of line for getting ‘bent out of shape’ by a book,” according to Rosenberg. “[N]on-Jewish Americans feel very inhibited . . . talking about Israel out of fear that any criticism will be labeled ‘anti-Semitism.’”
The Palestine Center’s Michael Brown has been pleased by the new turn in the conversation. “He has gotten the word ‘apartheid’ in the discussion. A lot of progressives used to roll their eyes at the comparison and said it’s too much. But Carter has put it out there. Carter has done an enormous service to the other narrative. Some of these groups are on the defensive for once.”
Carter’s first speech about his book was at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on Jan. 23. I was eager to go. As a Jew who believes that the Israeli occupation is harming American interests in the Middle East, I am interested in the internal debate over Carter in the Jewish community. Jews have generally led the discussion of Israel in this country—and often closed ranks. Had Carter caused any slippage in the bloc?
I got to Brandeis’s Gosman Center gym at 3 p.m., 90 minutes ahead of the speech, and the first signs I saw surprised me—literally. In the barricaded pen for demonstrators was a wide banner: “Jewish Voice for Peace Supports Jimmy Carter. End the Occupation.” The Boston chapter of the Oakland-based group had brought a dozen people. Each had a poster describing an atrocity, like how many Palestinian children the Israeli military has allegedly killed (153) or how many dunams of Palestinian land Israel has confiscated in the West Bank in 2006 (7,749). In this pen, Jewish diversity meant a sprinkling of Zionists. Three young people represented CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and handed out a leaflet titled “Carter’s Falsehoods,” which claimed that Carter misrepresented Palestinian leaders as moderates when they were actually extremists. The piece featured photographs of a Brandeis student killed by a suicide bomber in 1995 and of the Palestinian prime minister meeting with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The gym was jammed with 2,000 folding chairs. All soon filled. Carter was the first president to visit the campus in 50 years (Harry Truman being the last), and there was excitement, along with an air of respect and decorum. Another surprise: I’d been expecting rage. After all, Shulamit Reinharz, the wife of Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz, had called Carter a “plagiarist” in an article for The Jewish Advocate and said, in a vicious spirit, that Carter should have kept his thoughts to himself, just as he should have kept private the famous “lust in my heart” confession he made during his presidential campaign 30 years ago.
But Mrs. Reinharz was not in attendance (“major commitment out of town,” she told me later), and looking around, I saw only a handful of students wearing blue and white in solidarity with Israel, a common response when critics of Israel visit campus. I talked to four of them—all female members of Zionists for Historical Veracity, a Brandeis group dedicated to spreading the word that Israel is the only democracy in the region. This is a new tactic for responding to the criticism of Israel—showing that Israel guarantees free speech, gay rights and women’s rights, when Arab tyrannies do not. It sidesteps the question of human rights and political self-determination for the estimated 3 million Palestinians under Israeli authority. I brought up the occupied territories, and one girl said that I meant Judea and Samaria. “That’s the way it’s referred to in the Bible,” she noted.
I asked the girls why so many Arabs seem to hate Israel. “I wish we knew,” one answered. “I think it has a lot to do with the education system,” another said. “Sadly for the children being affected, they are not getting the correct historical account, and a new generation is brought up to hate Israel.”
My impression of diversity was reinforced by a talk with Getzel Davis, a long-haired kid whose t-shirt said in Hebrew, “You Should Love Your Neighbor as Yourself.” Davis criticized Carter as imbalanced, singling out the Israelis. Yes, it was time to acknowledge that there was a cycle of violence in Palestine, but it must be considered “holistically.” Then Davis told me how haunted he was by a visit to the Orthodox Jewish settlement in Hebron in the West Bank: “The most broken place I’ve ever been in my life.”
Carter arrived, and—what a surprise—no one booed. People rose to their feet and applauded strongly for a minute. Seventy minutes later, when Carter smiled his Cheshire cat grin and disappeared, the applause was even more sustained.
In the interim, he achieved a lot. His performance had a vulnerable, human manner. He flattered Brandeis by saying that it was the most exciting invitation to speak he had received since the Congress called on him to give his inaugural address exactly 30 years before. And this might have been a sincere statement; despite being a statesman whose every utterance has a public quality, Carter actually seemed nervous. He said, with a hint of defensiveness, “I don’t often write my speeches, but I decided to this morning. I read over it before I left home in Plains, Georgia. It took 15 minutes without any pauses for applause. So I can predict for you that I’ll be ready to answer questions in about 15 minutes.”
The second question, about the hurtfulness of the word “apartheid,” occasioned Carter’s broken moment, when in a halting voice he described his pain at the accusations against him:
I am deeply concerned about the tensions that might have arisen. That was not my intention at all. And I’ve been hurt and so has my family by some of the reaction. I’ve been through political campaigns for state senate and for governor and for president, and I’ve been stigmatized and condemned by my political opponents and their stories. But this is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist. This has hurt me. I can take it. But I think that that group of people who have made those statements — sometimes in full-page ads in the New York Times — I think they are an extreme minority.
Carter was trying to mend bridges. His book has pained many Jews for a reason. The strong feeling throughout the book is one progressives often have on visits to the Holy Land: that the Arabs we meet are kinder and more righteous than the Israelis, that the Israelis are the power. The moral core of Carter’s book can be seen is his treatment of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian dictator reviled in this country. Carter seems to see Assad as brilliant, and his text offers, without contradiction, Assad’s analysis of the Israelis as expansionist and racist, imitating the Jews’ European persecutors by performing ethnic cleansing on Arabs. At other times, Carter openly identifies, as a Christian, with the Christian Arabs whom Israel has pushed around. Israeli leaders, “[u]niversally . . . seem rather to evoke his dislike, and Israel as a whole seems to have the same effect on him,” neoconservative Joshua Muravchik wrote in Commentary. I share some of Carter’s anger, but it would have been diplomatic for him to say that some of his best friends are Jews, a statement he made at Brandeis when he reeled off the names of Jewish former aides.
The speech offered an ashen Carter who understood that Jews suffer too. When a youth asked about a line on page 213 of the book, Carter simply apologized for it. The sentence stated that Palestinians must abandon suicide bombing when they are granted a state. Of course, they ought to abandon such tactics right now, Carter said. “That sentence was worded in a completely improper and stupid way. … So again let me repeat, I apologize for the wording of that sentence. It was a mistake on my part, and it is now being corrected in future editions.”
No one lacking outsize political talents ever got to be president, and the ashen moments only bolstered Carter’s refrain: Jewish settlers have confiscated the best land in the West Bank, which is after all only 22 percent of the original Palestine, including choice hilltops and water sources. Israel has built a “spiderweb” of roads serving the settlers alone. This was wrong, indeed abominable, but this reality had not been reflected widely in the United States. That is why he wrote the book. Hard to argue with. And more than that, embarrassing to Jews.
While the audience may not have embraced Carter, it honored him, and having cut through the name-calling, he issued a challenge that hung in the air: Don’t believe me, he said. Find out for yourself. Observe the conditions of Palestinian life and see for yourself whether I am exaggerating. Bring back a report. It will have a huge impact—on Israel, on Brandeis, on Congress, and even on the president. (Brandeis has since taken up his challenge and will send a delegation.)
“Make it three professors and seven students, and go to the West Bank, and just spend three days. I can give you a list of people that you might want to talk to, or you can use your own judgment.”
As I walked out, I sensed a thrill in the crowd. I met two older Jews in the front hall who were as jangled as I was. Jack Porter was handing out copies of a positive review of Carter’s book by leftwing Knesset member Yossi Beilin, saying that the “agonizing” book correctly identifies the path Israelis and Palestinians are moving down. Porter said that he had never felt so empowered: “This is a watershed event. It’s about free speech in the Jewish community. For the first time in two decades, I’m not feeling guilty. I felt that criticizing Israel would be feeding its enemies. But now I see it’s just the opposite. A lot of us held back.”
Nearby was a man of about 80 with a middle-European accent, trembling with fury: “He is a politician, and he knows what to avoid and how to dodge questions. He didn’t tell any lies, he just didn’t tell the truth.” “Were you moved at all?” I asked. “Yes. I was moved to think: we survived Carter. The country was tanking under him because he told Americans to expect less.”
Neither of these men was a student. Not eligible for rationed tickets to the event, they watched on a remote feed in Shapiro Campus Center. They had come into the gym to hear Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, respond to Carter’s speech. Brandeis had at first demanded that Carter debate Dershowitz. The president had demurred, saying that the professor didn’t know anything about occupied Palestine, and Brandeis then invited him on his own, to be followed by Dershowitz. (The Radical Students Association subsequently demanded that Dershowitz be followed by his nemesis, Norman G. Finkelstein, who was tentatively scheduled to visit the campus this month.)
Carter showed tactical smarts by saying that he had declined to meet “a Harvard professor” who wanted to debate him. “I am that nameless Harvard professor,” Dershowitz announced, grinning, but it was plain that the comment upset him. He pointed out that he had met Carter on a few occasions, and Carter had once sought his opinion. Later, when he was interviewed by local television, Dershowitz said that Carter was a “little bit of a coward for not mentioning my name, and a little too cute.”
Of course, Alan Dershowitz and Jimmy Carter are very different types: one a combative defense lawyer, the other a lofty statesman. Having never seen the Dershowitz show before, I was impressed. He’s smart, informative, and quick on his feet. He makes jokes. He encourages students to challenge and rebut him. He doesn’t always like what they have to say. When a Palestinian girl nervously said that going through a checkpoint the previous summer was “the most humiliating experience that you ever have,” Dershowitz broke in: “You’re talking to the wrong people.” He meant that Palestinians could make the checkpoints disappear by ending violent attacks. (Yes, but what about the 500 checkpoints said to be inside the territories as opposed to the 30 on the Israeli border?)
When a student suggested that Hamas must be respected because it won an election, Dershowitz said that she was probably for the Nazis when they were elected in 1933. When another student said that he had lost count of the number of times Dershowitz cited Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Dershowitz stomped him by recounting anti-Jewish statements by Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, then saying, “Everyone thought Hitler was a tinhorn dictator” in the 1930s. If France and England had taken Hitler at his word and crushed him then, they would have gone down “as the bullyboys of history.” That was the great vice of preemption, he said. But it was also the great virtue: they would have “saved tens of millions of lives.” The kid shut up and sat down, punctured. Jonathan Demme’s documentary photographers, who had not been allowed in the hall for the Carter event, rushed over with a release for him to sign.
Dershowitz’s answer was brilliant, but it was incomplete. His references to Hitler and the Nazis were not confined to Iran. For instance, Dershowitz referred to the pre-1967 border in Israel as the “Auschwitz border.” After the speech, I stood with a group of students getting Dershowitz’s autograph and asked him what that meant. He said it was former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Abba Eban’s statement and referred to the fact that Israelis were extremely vulnerable to Palestinian attack inside the borders of the Jewish state from 1949-67.
I introduced myself to history professor Jacob Cohen, who had emceed the Dershowitz event, and asked him about my impression that Brandeis had showered Carter with respect. He said, “The respect and the open-mindedness was not an illusion. I think he speaks very naïvely and often harmfully. He speaks to a vein of idealism, and that’s what young people are.”
Well, I said, young people want to have a hopeful view of history. They don’t want to hear about the Holocaust all the time. They don’t want to see history as having a tragic destination.
Cohen became angry: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of which deeply hurts the Jewish people …” He went on to say that if I thought that “the elimination of Israel” would end Islamic world’s hatred of the West, I was wrong. “Osama bin Laden is still remembering the Crusades.”
It seemed to me that like the 80-year-old I had met in the hall, Cohen was hurt and frightened by Carter’s acceptance and felt that it might signal a period of renewed persecution of the Jews.
But that was the last I was to hear of the Holocaust that night. I spent the rest of the evening with Brandeis kids, none older than 21 or so, and the Holocaust isn’t nearly as real to them as it is to Cohen’s generation and not as prominent for them as it was for my generation. They have little personal connection to it and are imagining the world in different ways. I would say unencumbered by it, Cohen would say nescient.
In the road in front of the gym was a clump of five or six students, most of them Jews, three of them wearing Palestinian scarves (or kaffiyehs)—a defiant symbol. Jews like these are becoming more common in American cities. The kids were saying that Carter had not gone far enough, that he hadn’t talked about the Israel lobby. “There has been a dam of silence,” one of them said. I asked the kids how many Jews on the Brandeis campus felt the way they did. They looked around at one another. “About five,” one said, and they laughed.
Nearby, an Arab student wearing a kaffiyeh said that Arabs were gathering at 9 p.m. in Shapiro to discuss the Carter visit. I went but couldn’t find the Arabs. A kid working on a punk magazine hopped on his computer and said that Democracy for America, a group inspired by Howard Dean, was meeting in the university’s replica Scottish castle, a campus landmark.
I soon found myself with 18 kids in a circle. Most were Jewish, ranging from liberal to progressive. Fearing anger and dispute, Danielle Sunberg, the group’s chairman, had brought a stuffed teddy bear. The rule was that you could only talk when you were holding the bear. When you were finished, you could throw it to someone else.
For the second or third time that day, I was surprised. A couple of students were sharply critical of Carter, but mostly they were enthused. “The campus is on fire tonight,” one remarked. It was exciting to them that the president had visited. “He was making a mea culpa to the Jewish community. To correct things, to move forward…” said Ari Fertig. They were moved by his largeness of spirit. They felt that they had a positive role to play in this discussion; they wanted to play their part as young people. “We need a few generations to die out,” one said.
Several students said they were offended by Dershowitz’s tone. Even though they tended to agree with him more than Carter on substance, they were angered that he had been so disrespectful to students, jumping in on what they were saying. “He was rude,” one said.
Twenty feet away in the common room, two students watched a television airing George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech. Bush’s words broke in on our group’s conversation, but he was largely ignored. Whatever Jimmy Carter’s failings as president long ago, he has touched a moral chord in our public life, one that countless Americans want to rediscover, especially now that Bush’s militarism has created a bloody cul-de-sac in Iraq.
“Just now I heard George Bush saying, ‘We have to take the fight to our enemies,’” James Ansorge said. “I’m of Jewish blood, but I’m not an Israeli citizen, I’m an American citizen. I’m not much of a historian of Israel and Palestine, but I do see Israel in perpetual conflict with their neighbors ... and that seems to be extending to us now. Many Arab extremists seek the destruction of the Israeli state, and now they want the same for us. Things are becoming very belligerent. It’s at a breaking point. We must start the peace process.”
Again I heard the term “watershed.” Fertig, tall, curly-haired, and in a sweatshirt, said, “You know, before tonight, I was very hesitant to ever debate the Middle East. I think this is a watershed moment, both personally and for this community. . . . I am trained in the pro-Israeli way of thinking. This is the first time I came away from a forum more favorable to the Palestinians—the first time I ever came down more favorably on the guy supporting Palestinians than on Israel.”
The teddy bear was thrown this way and that until at the end it was passed around the circle for closing statements. When it came to me, I said that I hoped my generation’s attitudes died out and made way for theirs.
____________________________________________
Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He writes a blog for the New York Observer, Mondoweiss.
amconmag.com/2007/2007_02_26/article.html
"The committee, whose recommendations are not legally binding ..."
How far do you think this will get?
UN panel tells Israel to stop settler violence
Human rights watchdog group asks Israel to recalibrate security solutions to avoid discrimination against Palestinians, Arab Israelis
Reuters Published: 03.10.07, 00:15 / Israel News
Israel should ease roadblocks and other restrictions on Palestinians and put a stop to settler violence and hate speech, a United Nations rights watchdog said on Friday.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said Israel's security measures to ward off suicide bombings and other attacks must be recalibrated to avoid discrimination against Arab Israelis or Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.
The committee, which met for four weeks in Geneva, concluded that Israel should cease building the security fence in and around the West Bank and ensure that its various checkpoints and road closures do not reinforce segregation.
It also voiced concern at an unequal distribution of water resources, a disproportionate targeting of Palestinians in house demolitions and the "denial of the right of many Palestinians" to return to their land.
The committee, whose recommendations are not legally binding, also said that differing applications of criminal law between Jews and Arabs had caused "harsher punishments for Palestinians for the same offense."
A high number of complaints by Arab Israelis against police officers are not properly investigated and many Arabs suffer discriminatory work practices and high unemployment, it said.
Excavations beneath and around the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's holiest site in Jerusalem, should also be undertaken in a way that will "in no way endanger the mosque and impede access to it", it added.
Israel argues that the UN Committee's report, meant to ensure compliance with a 1965 international treaty against racial discrimination which Israel has ratified, does not apply to the Gaza and West Bank.
(Actually, according to international laws regarding occupations, this does apply)
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Itzhak Levanon, told the committee last month it was crucial to understand the pressing security threats faced by his country.
It's Israel that incites hate
March 11, 2007 12:36 am
BETHLEHEM, Palestine--I am surprised that you find so terrible some of the quotes you record ["A steady diet of hate for kids in Palestine," Feb. 11] from Palestinian textbooks, such as "Palestine will be liberated by its men, its women, its young ones and its elderly."
Surely something of this sort was said by Americans fighting for their independence during the Revolutionary War. Their desire to sacrifice for freedom echoes some of our first generals: "[A]ppealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free" (Joseph Warren, American account of the Battle of Lexington, 1775).
I spent three months in Palestine and Israel. I have been a witness to injustice that rarely makes it to mainstream news in the U.S.
I have spent time with families whose houses have been demolished; families who are left with no means of income after their fields have been destroyed; men who have been tortured in prison and who are nevertheless seeking a nonviolent way to resist; children who have been shot while playing; children who have been beaten by soldiers; and children whose siblings are in jail simply for being members of a political party.
The lives of Palestinians are devalued at the expense of Israelis. Palestinian children have little or no access to play areas, because of Israeli building restrictions and continued confiscation of land. While settlements atop hills in Palestine use water for swimming pools, gardens, and open spaces, Palestinians must pay four times as much to Israel for water.
Sewage from these settlements often runs directly onto Palestinian farmland.
Palestinian children in refugee camps face raids, where soldiers come in the middle of the night, break into their houses, and sometimes make an arrest or simply break things and leave.
You state that Palestinians do not learn about the Holocaust. Well, Israelis are not taught in school about the history of their country beyond the Jewish perspective. It is not taught, for example, that in the 1948 war more than 400 Palestinian towns were destroyed, and thousands of Palestinians were expelled or killed.
I have found that Israeli soldiers know little about why they receive orders, and Israeli civilians are ignorant of what happens in the West Bank. Please consider the following typical examples:
The first week I was here, I met a Palestinian family whose 11-year-old son was shot from a watchtower while playing on his porch.
I told an Israeli girl in her 20s about it. Her reply: "That couldn't have happened. It would have been on the news."
Two weeks ago we received a phone call from a family whose sons, 17 and 18 years old, had been beaten and arrested by the Israeli Defense Force in the village of Budrus.
I called the spokesperson for the IDF. I did not get in direct contact with the general. Instead I talked to an office worker. His response: "This doesn't have to do with us. We just talk to the media. But soldiers do not hurt innocent people. I am really sorry."
Last week I asked an Israeli soldier if he knew where the Green Line (the internationally recognized border that gives Palestine 22 percent of its original territory) is--since bulldozers, 12 kilometers away from this border, removed 700-year-old olive trees, the livelihood of 200 people.
His answer: "I don't know where the border is. I am just following orders."
There are actually many schools in Palestine that teach about Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully together. The Hope Flowers School near Bethlehem works to bring Palestinian and Jewish Israelis together to teach about reconciliation.
This school faces a court order--from Israel--that its cafeteria be demolished to make room for a security road. In addition, the school's water well will be taken. This school is even denied the right to repair the road that leads to the school.
Palestinians do not need to learn hate from textbooks. They can learn it when they see what happens to their friends and families, their schools, and their land. They learn it by having dignity and rights taken away.
The Web site Palestinian Media Watch teaches Americans to hate. It turns the parents and teachers of Palestine into caricatures of terrorists whom we can easily blame.
Every parent and teacher I have met here is struggling to meet basic needs--and at the same time is teaching children that education is the key to freedom. But you cannot tie a cat down and ask it to make peace.
It would be much more useful if the Web site were devoted to America's role in unilaterally supporting Israel and how we can reach a solution that is just.
It would also be helpful if Americans came to visit Palestine, to see for themselves.
Caroline Borden, from Catlett, works in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Copyright 2007 The Free Lance-Star Publishing Company.
Comments
Hide the following comment
copyright
14.03.2007 15:25
Antinazi