Israel/Palestine – Page 4

Apathic students are good for business

Published on February 25, 2009

Hicham Yezza looks at the student protests against the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza and what this meant for the political awareness of students:

For anyone interested in the health of our political system, these events are highly instructive. For a start, they would have been unthinkable a decade ago: everyone remembers the quasi-proverbial, and not wholly undeserved, reputation students have cultivated over the years for extreme political apathy. Indeed, the extent of the indifference to the political process among the youth was a source of national despair, wistfully and routinely bemoaned by politicians across the spectrum.

More importantly, these protests have also been very indicative of some larger truths: not only have they highlighted a rise in political awareness among a new generation raised in the shadow of the Iraq war debate, they have also exposed what has for long been a suspected but unspoken reality: rather than being the centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore, British universities are now little more than businesses purveying a product, employable students. The message is unambiguous: political engagement might be good for the mind but it is very, very bad for business.

Of course I doubt these “centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore” ever really existed apart from in golden Baby Boomer memories of ’68… Universities have always been as much if not more guardians of the existing order as incubators of radicalism and any room for political engagement has to be created by the students themselves. What has happened in the last few decades is that this room, hard won during the sixties, seventies and eighties, has disappeared as universities “went commercial” while succesive governements made it more difficult for students to do anything but study. If you have to depend on a student loan of several (tens of thousands) of pounds to be able to study, you’ll be less likely to waste your time with political activity, especially if, as in the Netherlands, your loan or grant is made dependent on your study results. It’s perhaps no coincidence that there was little if any student protest over here against the invasion of Gaza, certainly not on the scale of the UK protests.

If the name of Hicham Yezza sounds familiar, it’s because he was the student arrested for supposedly downloading an Al Queda terrorism manual, which turned out to be made available at the U.S. Department of Justice website and who, once he wasn’t charged under the anti-terrorism law, was re-arrested for unspecified offences against the Immigration Act — wouldn’t want to waste an investigation after all. Here’s what you can do to help him.

Waltz with Bashir: Israeli propaganda

Published on February 25, 2009

Gideon Levy demolishes the supposedly humanitarian message of Waltz with Bashir:

Hollywood will be enraptured, Europe will cheer and the Israeli Foreign Ministry will send the movie and its makers around the world to show off the country’s good side. But the truth is that it is propaganda. Stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful – but propaganda. A new ambassador of culture will now join Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, and he too will be considered fabulously enlightened – so different from the bloodthirsty soldiers at the checkpoints, the pilots who bomb residential neighborhoods, the artillerymen who shell women and children, and the combat engineers who rip up streets. Here, instead, is the opposite picture. Animated, too. Of enlightened, beautiful Israel, anguished and self-righteous, dancing a waltz, with and without Bashir. Why do we need propagandists, officers, commentators and spokespersons who will convey “information”? We have this waltz.

The waltz rests on two ideological foundations. One is the “we shot and we cried” syndrome: Oh, how we wept, yet our hands did not spill this blood. Add to this a pinch of Holocaust memories, without which there is no proper Israeli self-preoccupation. And a dash of victimization – another absolutely essential ingredient in public discourse here – and voila! You have the deceptive portrait of Israel 2008, in words and pictures.

This is not an uniquely Israeli disease of course. Just look at the endless stream of “sensitive”Vietnam movies that came out of Hollywood from the eighties onwards, which exclusively focused on American pain, with only lip service paid to what America did to Vietnam. Here in the Netherlands, we can’t shut up about what happened to us in World War II, but the independence struggle of Indonesia is only remembered in the context of Dutch suffering during the Japanese occupation.

(Via Socialist Unity.)

Turkish PM Erdogan slams Israel as murderer of children

Published on January 31, 2009

What’s interesting is that it’s the Turkish prime minister of all people to call out Israel in these terms, in such a public forum. Turkey has long been an ally of Israel, the two countries being relative outsiders to the Middle East, sharing security concerns regarding Iraq and Syria. Since the nineties especially the ties between these two countries have been tight, with their militaries training together and Turkey buying arms from the Israeli defence industry. These ties won’t be broken by one public outburst, but it does put a strain on them.

Erdogan is of course the leader of an explicitly Islamic party and it’s therefore no surprise he feels the plight of his co-religionists in Gaza. What I would like to konw is how his outburst was recieved by the Turkish establishment, especially the army, which is fiercly secular and dedicated to defending the secular nature of the Turkish state. This won’t have allayed their already existing suspicions about Erdogan, no matter how popular his outspokenis is with the Turkish public.

Finally there’s also the small matter of hypocrisy Erdogan has engaged in with this outburst. Turkey after all has a long history of repression itself, especially of the Kurds, including under Erdogan’s leadership.

The strictly impartial BBC, operating on behalf of the Israeli government

Published on January 26, 20092 Comments

To update an old Young Ones joke. As Palau posted, the current BBC’s director general is quite cozy with the Israeli government, which of course did not influence the decision to remain impartial by not broadcasting an appeal for the IDF’s victims. Now Ellis Sharp reminds us that he has been impartial towards Israel from the start of his tenure when in 2004 the then Middle East correspondent was transferred to Africa:

Orla Guerin’s offence was to run stories not just about the grief of Israeli families who had lost family members to suicide bombers but also stories about the grief and suffering of ordinary Palestinian families. As one blogger put it at the time:

Guerin’s real sin, of course, is to show some sympathy for the victims of the Israeli bombing (that’s enough to brand her a “terrorist”).

Within days of Thompson meeting Sharon, Guerin was sacked as BBC TV Middle East correspondent and transferred to Africa.

As you’ll remember, Thompson became director general because his predecessor had to resign after the BBC got caught on a technicality and was keelhauled for it in the aftermath of the Hutton Inquiry. Thompson was brought in as very much a pair of safe hands who wouldn’t rock the boat, follow the establishment line ever more so than his predecessors and not embarass the government. Despite this, there have been several scandals during his tenure, from running unwinnable contests to sexing up a documentary about the royal family to of course the Ross/Brands clusterfuck. This seemed to have made the BBC gunshy, prone to overreact and moreover, seemed to have lost the corporation its political nous.

So while the BBC has always been careful to not upset Israel or its zionist cheerleaders in the UK, always had an internal bias towards Israel, it used to be much more subtle about this. Even five years ago, I don’t think it would’ve been so blatant as to refuse air time to a genuinely humanitarian appeal for the inhabitants of Gaza. But because the corporation has been so battered by the same politicians and tabloids that are such great friends of Israel as well, because it has been caught with its pants down so often lately, it has overreacted. And now even those people who are noramlly the first to accuse it of a pro-Palestinian bias are disgusted.

Poor Auntie Beeb. It just cannot win.

Hate vs hope: struggling for the future of Israel

Published on January 12, 20091 Comment

The reality of the state of Israel in its current form:

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides’ commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu’s son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. “I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them.”

Eliyahu wrote that “This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses.”

A small ray of hope:

I could answer each and every one of these claims in turn, but I’m ready to stop this perverse game of rhetorical ping-pong. I don’t buy the rationalizations any more. I’m so tired of the apologetics. How on earth will squeezing the life out of Gaza, not to mention bombing the living hell out of it, ensure the safety of Israeli citizens?

We good liberal Jews are ready to protest oppression and human-rights abuse anywhere in the world, but are all too willing to give Israel a pass. It’s a fascinating double-standard, and one I understand all too well. I understand it because I’ve been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it.

Israel still enjoys a lot of legitamicy in the western media, a lot of support, but is it just me or has that support been waning? Even the BBC seems less eager to put up with the usual distortions and outright lies offered by IDF spokepersons. Has this ubercynical war perhaps been one bridge too far for Israel?