The Fanonite

‘Signs Indicate Less Fawning to Chutzpah By U.N., Quartet Officials’, reports Ian Williams.

ISRAEL’S POSTURE as a heavily armed victim is preposterous in face of the evidence, of course, but it has been remarkably successful in the mainstream U.S. media, totally successful in Washington, and almost as effective in Europe since the 9/11 attacks, when Ariel Sharon adroitly conflated Israel’s battle to hold down the Palestinian territories with Washington’s “war on terror.” Given the current demonization of Hezbollah and Hamas, it is worth remembering that the first victims of this mischaracterized vendetta were in fact Sharon’s old enemies: Yasser Arafat, Fateh and the Palestinian Authority.

The West seemed not to learn from this experience just how expedient Israel’s definition of terrorism is, and has not challenged this constant expansion of “terrorist” to any opponent of Israeli policies.

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Al Jazeera: The Bride in Exile — a special programme that looks at one street in Jaffa, Tel Aviv and how that street conveys the tragic narrative of the Palestinian ‘Nakba’.

Bill Moyers interviews the Reverend Jeremiah Wright in his first broadcast interview with a journalist since he became embroiled in a controversy for his remarks and his relationship with Barack Obama. Wright, who retired in early 2008 as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Senator Obama is a member, has been at the center of controversy for comments he made during sermons, which surfaced in the press in March. More here. (via Juan Cole)

Also check out ‘Amen, Rev. Wright!‘ by Laurie King-Irani.

As I type this, I am watching the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS here in the United States. It’s quite a revelation.

He is wonderful, wise, and brave. He’s speaking some harsh but necessary truths. The segments of his sermons knit together by the Clinton campaign and the likes of Fox News are a cynical attempt so sow hatred and discord, to win a political campaign by and through fear. If you have not seen this interview, you owe it to yourself and your country, if you are at all interested in justice, honesty, healing, and truth, to watch it all the way through.

He’s absolutely right about the fact that the United States of America was founded through injustice and ugly acts against Native Americans and African slaves. Why is this so hard to absorb? If a nation cannot face the truth about the past, it’s not likely to survive the challenges of the future.

In the last few years, it has pained me a lot to see friends and family rejoicing at the bombing of Iraq, at the killing of Palestinians, and the criminal torture of people at Guantanamo and in other legal black holes constructed and maintained by the US government across the globe. We don’t even know the full dimensions of this yet.

I’m horrified that family members and friends love the program “24″ and celebrate its hero, the fictional character of Jack Bauer. I’ve probably forgotten more about the history of US foreign policy and the extent and severity of violations of international humanitarian law in the Middle East than most of my family and friends will ever know. Yet my views are considered whacky. The delusions that sustain our body politic, the myths that we cling to in the face of reality about our history and our current world role, and the dangers that lie therein, never cease to stun me. We have to push beyond the imposed boundaries of “thinkable thought.” For years, I’ve experienced at a visceral and daily level how important this is with respect to US involvement in the madness, injustice, and suffering in the Middle East. Speak about this too much publicly in the US and you’ll hear from colleagues that it’s not good for one’s career to voice these perspectives.

Self-censorship is the by-word of academe and journalism where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned. I refuse to shut up. There are so many parallels with the injustices against Native Americans and African Americans in the Middle East today. Rational, open-minded, and intelligent discussion of perspectives other than those we are permitted to think, see and say in these United States might help us get past a lot of harm and hell. But then, it took about a century for people to realize that African Americans had been treated worse than animals here in the US. Hatred, racism, and violence of all kinds are enabled by implicit assumptions that we ignore at our peril, whether we are taking on domestic or foreign policy challenges.

I am very grateful that Bill Moyers, who represents the very best of American journalism, had the guts, gumption, and sense of responsibility to interview Rev. Wright and look at the story behind the story, to ask questions and examine contexts. That’s what sane, responsible, intelligent CITIZENS of a democracy are supposed to do: assume nothing; question authority; look beyond the spin and B.S. and ask “whose interests are being served by presenting history in a particular way?”

I agree with Barack Obama that the United States is at a very dangerous intersection. We have to look in all directions if we want to take the route that will lead us out of the darkness we’ve wandered into. That means looking in places and in directions we are usually happy to ignore and dismiss, and seeing what is there, not just choosing a narrow field of vision and insisting to ourselves and others that this is the only view, the only perspective, that one can possibly have or take.

And after watching this program tonight, I am more certain than ever that the Clinton campaign has sullied itself with the worst aspects of American history and politics. If they win, it will not be simply a loss for Barack Obama, but a loss of our better angels and the loss of a chance to take the right turn at a dangerous fork in the road, after taking (or being taken along) some very wrong turns over the last eight years.

Laurie King-Irani is the North American Coordinator of the International Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila ( ICJVSS)

‘If it runs like Apartheid, and it acts like Aparthei…’ From Yossi Sarid (via Norman Finkelstein). Also check out this April 15 editorial, entitled ‘Our Debt to Jimmy Carter‘, which states that the present situation ‘begs [the Apartheid comparison]‘.

The anchorwoman was clearly shocked: I don’t have time now to respond to what you have said, she told the former U.S. president, allowing Jimmy Carter to make a narrow escape from her clutches. Then she added that she did not want to imagine what would happen to him if he bumped into her colleague from the security affairs desk in Channel 2’s dark alley. And the pundit sitting there, sunk in deep thought as always, nodded his heavy head, confirming: He’s lucky, the bastard, that we didn’t gang up on him and cut him to shreds.

That’s how it is here: The rulers set the tone, and the media begins to gripe: Not only did Carter’s mission not help, it did damage. He alone was the reason Gilad Shalit was not ransomed out of captivity during the holiday. That’s what happens when an enemy of the human race, the twin of the Twin Towers’ bin Laden, sticks his nose where it does not belong.

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‘Facing widespread pressure, Nadine Gordimer may pull out of Israel writers meet,’ Haaretz reports. Also check out the BRICUP letter to Gordimer from Hilary and Steven Rose, and a moving one from Palestinian academic Haidar Eid.

South African writer Nadine Gordimer may pull out of her appearance next month at Jerusalem’s International Writers Festival in the face of a widespread campaign pressuring her to cancel.

The 84-year-old Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, is scheduled to make three appearances at the festival, which runs at Mishkenot Sha’ananim May 11-15.

Other writers slated to attend include Americans Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer and Russell Banks, as well as Israelis David Grossman and Amos Oz, the latter of whom is scheduled to share the stage with Gordimer on May 12.

“I am dealing with the issue now,” Gordimer told Haaretz in a telephone conversation from her home in Johannesburg on Friday. She refused to comment further on the controversy, except to say she would soon make a public statement on her decision.

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Strong stuff, from Amira Hass (via Norman Finkelstein)

In the middle of November a new method of “smuggling” Palestinians into Israel was exposed: in the northern Jordan Valley, two cars from East Jerusalem disguised to look “police-like” were used in an attempt to transport Palestinians without permits through the Bezek crossing. The same week a private smuggling attempt from the West Bank to Israel came to light: a woman was transporting someone concealed in her car, and by her behaviour she aroused the suspicions of soldiers at a checkpoint. This was reported in passing on the radio, as a curiosity. Neither of the two incidents represented a security danger; they were merely additional attempts by unemployed people to work in Israel. There are probably hundreds like them every month, who have not yet been discovered en route to “infiltration” into Israel in a desperate search for livelihood and food for their children. It could even be added: while heroically endangering themselves.

The discovery of a breach in the “separation wall” immediately sets off security alarms in Israeli ears. If those routes are known to workers, then they are probably also known to organizations that espouse suicide bombing. Can the fact that those routes have not been used lately to send suicide bombers be attributed only to the activities of Shabak [Israel's internal intelligence agency and security police -- trans.], or is it due in part — or perhaps mainly — to the fact that the various organizations have changed their approach? Or maybe there is something more: there are organizations and splinters of organizations that are probably looking for candidates for suicide attacks. But today, unlike in the past, the atmosphere of support for suicide attacks — which was motivated mainly by the desire to avenge the many civilians that the IDF killed immediately after September 2000 — is not prevalent.

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Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian author, on ‘How Arabs have been driven out of Hebron‘. I may not like Vargas Llosa’s politics — once a progressive, he made a sharp move to the right after a fistfight with Gabriel Garcia Marquez — but he is without a doubt one of Latin America’s greatest authors.

Hebron is the image of desolation and pain. I’m talking of the H-2 sector, the oldest part of this ancient city, which is under Israeli military control and where some 500 colonos – settlers – live in four settlements. It is one of the holiest places of Judaism and Islam, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where in February 1994, the settler Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned Muslims at prayer, killing 29 and wounding dozens.

To protect these settlers, the zone bristles with barriers, camps and military posts, and is overrun by Israeli patrols. But such mobilisation will soon be unnecessary because this part of Hebron, subject to ethnic and religious cleansing, will soon have no Arab residents.

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Senator Barack Obama addresses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) forum on Foreign Policy in Chicago, March 2007. (Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty Images)

Excellent commentary by Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada.

US senator Barack Obama was widely hailed for his 18 March speech calming the media furor about the sermons of his pastor for twenty years Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s remarks, Obama said, “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”

It might seem odd for Obama to mention Israel and “radical Islam” in a speech focused on US race relations, especially since Wright’s most widely reported comments were about America’s historic and ongoing oppression of its black citizens.

But for months, even before most Americans had heard of Wright, prominent pro-Israel activists were hounding Obama over Wright’s views on Israel and ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In January, Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), demanded that Obama denounce Farrakhan as an anti-Semite. The senator duly did so, but that was not enough. “[Obama has] distanced himself from his pastor’s decision to honor Farrakhan,” Foxman said, but “He has not distanced himself from his pastor. I think that’s the next step.” Foxman labeled Wright “a black racist,” adding in the same breath, “Certainly he has very strong anti-Israel views” (Larry Cohler-Esses, “ADL Chief To Obama: ‘Confront Your Pastor’ On Minister Farrakhan,” The Jewish Week, 16 January 2008). Criticism of Israel, one suspects, is Wright’s truly unforgivable crime and Foxman’s vitriol has echoed through dozens of pro-Israel blogs.

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He might have been better saying “as long as there is occupation, there will be resistance.”  However John Dugard, of the UN Human Rights Council, is to be commended for insisting the world recognise that violent acts committed by the Palestinian are part of an ongoing nationalist war being fought against colonialism, apartheid and military occupation. His goal? To understand the drivers behind the violence to gain peace for the region and for him that means ending the occupation. The following is from the Haaretz -

A report commissioned by the United Nations suggests that Palestinian terrorism is the inevitable consequence of Israeli occupation and laws that resemble South African apartheid - a claim Israel rejected Tuesday as enflaming hatred between Jews and Palestinians.

The report by John Dugard, independent investigator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the UN Human Rights Council, will be presented next month, but it has been posted on the body’s Web site.

In it, Dugard, a South African lawyer who campaigned against apartheid in the 1980s, says “common sense … dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al-Qaida, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation.”

“While Palestinian terrorist acts are to be deplored, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation,” writes Dugard, whose 25-page report accuses the Israel of acts and policies consistent with all three.

He cited checkpoints and roadblocks restricting Palestinian movement to house demolitions and what he terms the Judaization of Jerusalem.

“As long as there is occupation, there will be terrorism,” he argues.
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Ilan Pappe recently wrote an article stating that Israeli policy is implementing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza. It was always thought that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem were better off, but this article by Lubna Masarwa demonstrates that Palestinians are subject to a Kafkaesque regime: arbitrary searches and blockades, confiscation of identity papers (thus losing residency rights), blockade of entire sections of the city, intrusive video surveillance, etc. The relentless drive to Judaize entire neighborhoods in Jerusalem requires the constant screwing of the Palestinians — no matter how long they have lived there. Israelis refer to this as “ethnic thinning”, the oh-so-genteel form of ethnic cleansing. Masarwa writes:

I will present a partial picture of the life of East Jerusalem residents. I will attempt to touch on the heavy price paid by Palestinian society in al-Quds due to Israeli defined “security considerations,” a designation trotted out by Israeli authorities on almost every possible occasion with intent to win battles in the demographic war over it sees itself engaged in against the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. In fact, a central and publicized objective of Israel concerning everything related to East Jerusalem is the creation of a demographic and geographic reality that will bring about an increase in the number of Jews living in the city and the largest possible decrease in the number of Palestinians living there. In order to reach this objective, the state enlists all of its institutions. For instance, the National Insurance Institute (NII), intended to serve the welfare of residents, also acts as a supplementary political appendage, serving the Zionist vision of Israel and harming residents through the non-provision of social services that it is obligated to provide. Almost every day, we receive complaints from tens of East Jerusalem residents whose national security allowances have been terminated. From conversations I conduct with the NII clerks, it appears that residents of East Jerusalem, in order to receive their national insurance benefits as mandated by law, must meet near impossible conditions. They must provide receipts proving payment of city taxes and electricity for up to the past seven years, photographs of their house, and proof they have no property in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The waiting periods for these residents can last years, and, in the meantime, they remain without the ability to receive medical attention or their legally mandated benefits-in numerous instances, the sole family income.

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