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Israeli Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot
The Israeli government, its brutal war crimes in Gaza exposed in detail in the U.N. report by Justice Richard Goldstone, has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel that are accused-often falsely-of assisting Goldstone's U.N. investigators. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to shut down Israel's premier human rights organizations, including B'Tselem, the New Israel Fund (NIF) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. It is busy expelling or excluding peace activists and foreign nationals from the Palestinian territories. The campaign, if left unchecked, will be as catastrophic for Palestinians as it will be for Israel.
The Goldstone report, which is over 500 pages, investigated Israel's 22-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from Dec. 27, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009. The United Nations and the European Parliament have endorsed the report. The report found that Israel used disproportionate military force against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip while failing to take adequate precautions to protect the civilian population against the military assault. The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth. No Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the assault. The report did not limit itself to the 22-day attack; rather, it went on to indict the occupation itself. It examines the beginning of the occupation and condemns Israel for the border closures, the blockade and for the wall or security barrier in the West Bank. It has two references to the right of return, investigates Israeli torture and criticizes the willful destruction of the Palestinian economy.
"The impact of the Goldstone report is tremendous," the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein said when I reached him in New York. "It marks and catalyzes the breakup of the Diaspora Jewish support for Israel because Goldstone is the classical Diaspora Jew. He is a lawyer and upholder of human rights and a liberal. He has distinguished himself in the field of law and he is also a lover of Zion. He calls himself a Zionist. His mother was an activist in the Zionist movement. His daughter did aliyah. He sits on the board of governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has an honorary degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has said over and over again that he is a Zionist. He believes Jews have a right to a state in Palestine. His is a mostly emblematic profile of the classically liberal Jew."
"Liberal has a distinct connotation," Finkelstein went on. "It means to believe in the rule of law. It means to believe in international institutions. It means to believe in human rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are liberal organizations. What the Goldstone phenomenon registers and catalyzes is the fact that it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel's conduct; too much is now known about the history of the conflict and the human rights record and the so-called peace process. It is impossible to be both liberal and defend Israeli policy. That was the conflict that confronted Goldstone. I very much doubt he wanted to condemn Israel."
"Israeli liberalism always had a function in Israeli society," said Finkelstein, whose new book, "This Time We Went Too Far," examines the Israeli attack a year ago on Gaza. "When I talk about liberals I mean people like A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman and Amos Oz. Their function was to issue these anguished criticisms of Israel which not only extenuated Israeli crimes but exalted Israeli crimes. ‘Isn't it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done.' It is the classic case of having your cake and eating it. Not only were any crimes being committed extenuated, but they were beautiful. And now something strange happened. Along comes a Jewish liberal and he says, ‘Spare me your tears. I am only interested in the law.'
"Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal," Finkelstein said, "which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes. You don't just get to walk into the sunset and look beautiful. They can't believe it. They are genuinely shocked. ‘Aren't our tears consequences enough?' Aren't our long eyes and broken hearts consequences enough?' ‘No," he said, ‘you have to go to the criminal court.' "The campaign against Israeli dissidents has taken the form of venomous denunciations of activists and jurists, including Justice Goldstone. It includes a bill before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which will make it possible to imprison the leaders of Israeli human rights groups if they fail to comply with crippling new registration conditions. Human rights activists from outside Israel who work in the Palestinian territories are being rounded up and deported. The government is refusing to issue work visas to employees of 150 NGOs operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The new tourist visas effectively bar these employees from Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation. Professor Naomi Chazan, the Israeli head of the NIF, which has donors in the United States, is being publicly vilified by ultranationalist groups such as Im Tirzu. Foreign donors to the NIF, as well as other human rights groups, are being pressured by Israeli officials to halt contributions. Billboards have sprouted up around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with a grotesque caricature of Chazan, who has been branded by groups such as Im Tirzu as an agent for Hamas and Iran, with a horn growing from her forehead. "Naomi-Goldstone-Chazan" the caption on the billboard reads. Im Tirzu, the front organization behind many of the attacks, includes among its financial backers the John Hagee Ministries and the New York Central Fund, which also support extremist settler organizations.
The purge is under way because of the belief within the Netanyahu government that these groups and activists provided evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza to Justice Goldstone. Israel has no intention of lifting the blockade on Gaza, halting settlement expansion, including the 1,600 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem, or reversing its division of the West Bank into impoverished ghettos of Palestinians. The growing brutality and violence of the occupation, no longer easy to deny or hide, coupled with Israel's growing status as an international pariah, have unleashed a crackdown against all those within the Jewish state who are blamed for the bad publicity. Yuli Edelstein, the Diaspora affairs minister, summed up the witch hunt when he announced that the Cabinet had been "concerned for a time with a number of groups under the guise of NGOs that are funded by foreign agents."
The Knesset bill, if passed, will force human rights groups to register as political bodies and turn over identification numbers and addresses of all members to the government. These groups will lose their tax-exempt status. Most governmental organizations, such as the European Union, which is a large donor to Israeli human rights organizations, cannot legally pay taxes to another government, and the new law will effectively end European Union and other outside funding. The groups will be mandated to provide the government with the records of all foreign donations and account for how these donations were spent. Any public statement, event or speech, even if it lasts half a minute, by these groups must include a declaration that they are being supported and funded by a foreign power. Those who fail to follow these guidelines, including local volunteers, can face a year in jail.
"This is the first time the human rights dimension of the Israel Palestine conflict has moved center stage," Finkelstein said. "It has temporarily displaced the fatuous peace process. It is the first time that human rights reports have counted. There are literally, because I have read them, tens if not hundreds of thousands of pages of accumulation of human rights reports condemning Israel going back roughly to the first intifada to the present. The human rights organizations since the 1990s have been quite sharp in their criticism of Israel human rights policy, but nobody ever reads the reports. They are never reported on, with maybe a couple of exceptions, in the mainstream media. The Goldstone report was the first time the findings of these human rights organizations moved center stage. People stopped talking about the peace process and started talking about Israel's human rights record."
There is a growing disenchantment among Israelis with the endless occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as well as endemic government corruption. Maj. Gen. Avi Zamir, the head of the Israeli military's Personnel Directorate, admitted recently to UPI that increasing numbers of Israelis are refusing to serve in the occupied territories. "Taking into consideration Israeli Arab youth, we're facing a situation in which 70 percent of youths will not enlist in the military," the general told the news agency. The discontent, along with the international condemnation, is inhibiting Israel's ability to muster international support for further attacks.
"Israel attacked Gaza to restore what it called its deterrence capacity, its ability to terrorize the Arab world into submission," Finkelstein said. "But it actually diminished its deterrence capacity because it can't attack. If they were to attack now, anywhere, all hell would break loose and they wouldn't get sympathy."
The numbers of so-called refuseniks are proliferating with groups such as the Courage to Refuse, Shministim and New Profile supporting those who will not serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. It is not that many Israelis lack a conscience, it is not that many cannot delineate right from wrong; it is that the Netanyahu government is determined to see that these courageous voices within Israel will be silenced along with those of the Palestinians.
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114 Comments so far
Show AllGood piece, as usual, by Hedges. I must, however, take issue with his final statement:
"It is not that many Israelis lack a conscience, it is not that many cannot delineate right from wrong; it is that the Netanyahu government is determined to see that these courageous voices within Israel will be silenced along with those of the Palestinians."
During the savage attack on Gaza, mainstream Israeli polling sources found some 80 percent of those polled supported the action. This alone shows to me that many, indeed most, Israelis DO lack a conscience, let alone the fact that anti-Arab racism is so ingrained in them that it is part of "normal" discourse there.
Perhaps Hedges was afraid to step on some sensitive toes. That's too bad, because what his article most effectively points out is that the mask has now fallen off the shining Israeli face, perhaps for good. By repressing the small but vibrant minority of Israeli human-rights and humanitarian organizations, the Nit-and-Yahoo regime is stripping the "Jewish state" of its facade of democracy, decency, and civility, exposing the racist/supremacist ideological core that has been there from the start. This, in the long run, may be a good thing, as it will make clear, as the Gaza campaign did, for anyone who still has any doubts (namely those still numbed by the MSM propaganda apparatus in the US and Europe) that Israel is a gangster state of might-makes-right, a little mini-USA, and has never been interested in peace through compromise, but only in imposing its retrograde theocratic/ethnocentric ideology on the region and on the world.
How many americans polled, supported the u.s. invasion of iraq during the first few months, Clovis?
Just asking. I think it was about 80% if you check the polls at the time. A project for someone if they like.
I protested against both Gaza and Iraq invasions, so i get a bit impatient when i hear or read posters who try to play the high ground about living in the u.s. when finger pointing elsewhere. Get real!
I was merely stating a fact, not assuming any "high ground." If Americans supported the Gaza massacre by an 80 % majority, that's a good indication that the propaganda/PR machines operating in Israel and the US are pretty much one and the same. I have no illusions about the Murkans being any more enlightened than the Israelis on these matters. That's precisely the problem, in fact. If more Americans understood the reality of Israel (which is pretty much an extension of the US anyway), then more pressure might be brought to bear on it to solve its problems equitably.
And, incidentally, though I am indeed American, I don't live in the U.S. but in France, a country that is almost, but not quite, as brainwashed about Israel as the United States is.
I was going to ask if you lived outside the u.s.
Thank you for an insightful and thoughtful response.
I love France, by the way!
Thanks, ready. I love France, too, though, it's almost as screwed up as everywhere else. On the plus side, however, the 2009 Bordeaux vintage is superb, possibly even better than the 2005, and has a long life ahead of it.
As usual, CH is erudite and profound in laying bare subtexts of the issues. I am particularly happy to hear him distinguish so clearly between the liberal Jew who savors his angst as something of "beauty" and the no-nonsense "I am intersted in the law" approach of Goldstone in his report. Frankly said, the Jew who embraces perpetual victimization, even as they admit their crime, is not a partner for peace or negotiation. This self-adoring Jew still considers himself "better" than the rest of us. Whether it is during ecstacy or anguish, his experience overwhelms that of others. Witness the focus on soldiers "pain" as they kill and maim Palestinians. Its a perverse spin on the father who as he paddles the shit out of his son tells me, "son this is going to hurt me more than its going to hurt you..." When it comes to Israeli Jews and Palestinians however, there is no parent or child role. Its about two sets of people, the former having traumatized and brutally "raised" a generation of battered children. There will be consequences, for a very long time to come.
I find your reference to Jews to be offensive and inaccurate. The sins of Israel are properly laid at the feet of the zionists, none of whose leaders can properly be called religious.
Not all Jews are zionists and not all zionists are Jews.
q
Quick offense is typically taken as a kneejerk defense to silence valid criticism. It is as if some will go to any extremes to deny the ugly truth. I know Jews who were actually blacklisted who are BLIND when it comes to their allegiance to and defense of Israel--where they have no problem condemning the US. They--Jewish liberals advocating human rights actually prefer or encourage us to keep the focus on other troubled areas like Darfor--to deflect attention. The conditioning and victimization runs deep and operates on a irrational plane.
Typical American Jews are more likely to condemn Finkelstein than rally to his support whether they consider themselves Zionists or not.
"Typical American Jews are more likely to condemn Finkelstein than rally to his support whether they consider themselves Zionists or not."
I dispute this notion. Of all of the American Jews with whom I have associated and and currently associate, not a single one supports zionism in its current expression.
Supporting the notion of an Israeli state and advocating murderous violence against Palestinians are not the same thing.
It is inaccurate and unfair to discuss such issues as questions of Judaism.
q
PS If I truly wanted to silence posters who want to conflate zionism and judaism then I would have flagged the post to which I responded and yours. I find it much more productive to get these views out into the open where they can be discussed.
This is my third attempt to respond, but every attempt results in a blank screen--divine intervention...?
My reply to q is as follows: I am offended by American and European Jews who send money to Israel but still call themselves non-zionists. I am offended by the notion that the policies of Israel are somehow secular, and that true Judaism would not result in this catastrophe. This is blattantly wrong: the religious parties that make up the Israeli Knesset are perhaps most hawkish of all the groups. The religious Jews are primarily the ones who inhabit the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If you have ever been to Palestine, it is the keepah-wearing Jew who should frighten you most because they maim and kill with god-given impunity. Your apologetic stance is quite rubbish.
The folks whom you describe would more properly be identified as ethnic Jews. They may wear the religious garb and observe the rituals but they are not motivated by the religious precepts of Judaism.
To illustrate my point by analogy, in the US we have many groups on the Christian right who have adopted the words and practices of Christianity to justify their hatred of blacks and gays (and Jews), their oppression of women, their abuse of children, their support of fascism, and their willingness to use violence toward those ends.
None of their vile activities and beliefs, however, can honestly be called Christian (i.e. attributed to the teachings of Jesus Christ).
q
Why?
Is not Israel a Jewish state? And isn't that the problem? It's racist identity?
I just don't see or hear a chorus of Jewish voices willing to openly denounce the tribe by speaking out against the barbarism of Israel.
No problem condemning the US, no problem bashing the Catholic Church or any of those commies--but tread softly when it comes to Israel.
It is enforced taboo by making everyone walk on eggshells.
You see, you had to suppress your kneejerk reaction to flag---to SILENCE--whereas I would never, under any circumstances, have the impulse to flag.
Well, if we're going to put words in each other's mouths, I have more than equal justification to point out that your responses indicate a deeply seated and even pathological hatred for Jews on your part.
q
Oh please.
It is well and good to state that one hated Nazi Germany? And the Germans who supported it? Should they have been held in contempt? Then why should those who view the world through the lens of "what is good for Israel" be coddled?
When it comes down to it--you resort to your default accusation.
Actually, I'm just demonstrating the idiocy and dishonesty of your argumentation
q
Come on, quickstepper! You say, "Supporting the notion of an Israeli state and advocating murderous violence against Palestinians are not the same thing." That is like saying "Ordering an omelet is not the same thing as advocating for breaking eggs."
How else can you establish an "Israeli" state on land already occupied by other people? "Murderous violence" against the Palestinians has been Israel's M.O. since Israel's inception to this very day. Countless Israeli leaders have recognized this throughout the decades, and Ariel Sharon put it rather succinctly in 1998 when he was Israeli Foreign Minister:
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
The people already living in the area that the Zionists selected for their "Israeli state" did NOT agree to have their land confiscated, or to become second class citizens of a government based on ethnicity and religion. And despite more than 60 years of Israel's murderous violence and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, the Palestinians STILL do not consent to Zionist colonization of Palestinian land.
The age of colonialism ended long ago, and now that Israel has forced the world, through their vicious destruction of Gaza, to notice the extreme Israeli brutality and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, people worldwide are increasingly realizing that not only should Israel NOT exist, it does not have any RIGHT to exist. Lord Balfour and England had no right to give away the land of the Palestinians, and the Zionists had and have no right to impose their racist government on those people.
The accusation of "anti-semitism" no longer has the power to shield Israel from criticism and discussion, and that's why the present leaders of Israel are worried about what they call the "delegitimization" of Israel.
"The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to shut down Israel's premier human rights organizations, including B'Tselem, the New Israel Fund (NIF) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. It is busy expelling or excluding peace activists and foreign nationals from the Palestinian territories."
Well, we knew that it was simply a matter of time before the zionists/fascists in Israel moved to destroy these groups, the only voices of reason and humanity in the Third Reich on the Jordan.
Reading Hedges' article, I am struck by the parallels with Germany in the thirties as Hitler eliminated his opposition bit by bit.
To extend clovis' criticsm of Hedges' closing statement, I would remind everyone of the recent efforts by some scholars to debunk the myth that most German citizens during the NAZI reign of terror were ignorant of the horible crimes being committed in their name. Again, the parallel with current day Israel can't be denied.
q
District Nine speaks to this!
(sorry i couldn't resist, but its true)
rita
GOOD Jews protest Israel's apartheid policies.We should not be doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to my relatives.
By the way,
You can also join, 'Breaking the Law Of Return". I just signed the statement. They are trying to get u.s. Jews to sign, but anyone can join.
"GOOD Jews protest Israel's apartheid policies.We should not be doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to my relatives."
THIS is the point. Well said shach.
Liberal Jews? On the issue of Palestinians, there may be several ten thousands of them. In other words, a minority large enough to notice, but much too small to make a difference.
It really doesn't matter. Israel doesn't care.
You're right about that: Israel doesn't care. I remember reading somewhere recently of a Jewish American who attended a talk in the US by an Israel leader in the early 1980s, during or after Israel's Lebanon war. I forget who the leader was, but it was someone quite prominent. After the talk, the American Jew approached the Israeli politician and expressed his anguish about Israel's actions, saying it was making things difficult for his own Jewish community there in the States. Whereupon the Israeli looked at him coldly and said: "I don't give a damn about your community," and walked away.
Clovis: "Whereupon the Israeli looked at him coldly and said: "I don't give a damn about your community," and walked away."
The attitude of this Israeli politician is nothing new. David Ben-Gurion, revered as the chief architect of the state of Israel, had this to say:
"If I knew that it was possible to save all the (Jewish) children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel."
Ben-Gurion said also:
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Sadly, too many American Jews think that anybody who isn't Jewish who criticizes Israel hates Jews.
I'm not Black, but I've criticized numerous Black-African nations. I'm not Arab, but I criticized numerous Arab nations. I'm not Asian, but I criticized numerous Asian nations (Oriental). I'm not Hispanic, but I criticized numerous Latin-American nations. Nobody called me a bigot because of it. But when I criticize Israel, I get called a bigot.
This fallacious argument was also used to fight against affirmative action and place people like Clarence Thomas on the USSC. Historical context is everything.
http://inventionofthejewishpeople.com/
Historical context is everything.
I've been disturbed for quite a while now about the American left's mob mentality that dictates that Israel = evil. While I have a great deal of respect for CH, I have to say that his language on this subject reflects the kind of anti-Israel bias I have so often heard of late. It makes me distrust his motives and impartiality.
On the other hand, there is no misunderstanding of Bibi Netanyahu: he is a thoroughly despicable political monstrosity who loathes and hates the Palestinians every bit as much as they loathe and hate the Israelis - pretty much the Cheney of Israeli politics.
I don't think you have to look any deeper than Netanyahu's black heart for the cause of the current situation.
"he is a thoroughly despicable political monstrosity who loathes and hates the Palestinians every bit as much as they loathe and hate the Israelis"
Notice the presentation--as if all things were equal.
Dude, Israel, as a state does do great evil. It seems to me that this is as close to a fact as one can get. No 'mob mentality,' but 'fact-mentality.'
States are immoral entities, in general, and to my mind have no inherent legitimacy. However, some certainly are capable of more evil than others, and in the world today the US, Israel and a few close peers are dominating the 'evil-scene.' Finland, for example, doesn't come close. And to say that Netanyahu is 'the cause' is preposterous and ahistorical. Doesn't take much delving into history books to figure this out.
And I don't think Hedges is impartial, nor should he be. He seems to speak for the oppressed and victimized as opposed to those with power. Let's forget the false construct of 'objectivity' which is meant to stifle dissent and obscure.
Didn't Bibi just win a popular election?
Even in his first time around as PM, i thought he was CIA operative.
Maybe. But it is a sufficient explanation to say that he is just a spoiled selfish prick, whose personality fits Israel's current goals. I know an ex-Israeli who went to High School with him and says, half-jokingly, that he wished he had finished Bibi off back then.
Joe
craigdp: "I've been disturbed for quite a while now about the American left's mob mentality that dictates that Israel = evil. While I have a great deal of respect for CH, I have to say that his language on this subject reflects the kind of anti-Israel bias I have so often heard of late. It makes me distrust his motives and impartiality."
*Sigh* Another attempt to disparage anyone who criticizes Israel.
The root of today's problems are much deeper than Netanyahu's prejudices and were around before Bibi was born.
q
Soon after the German capitulation in 1945 Amsterdam became a "leave center" for Allied soldiers stationed in Germany. One day my sister came home with a Jewish soldier from Palestine who had volunteered there for the "Jewish Brigade" of the British Armed Forces. Soon he suggested that he could "smuggle" me into Palestine. When I asked "what for" he replied: "to kick the Arabs out". My response was: "kicking people out of the lands they live in must come to an end because they will then try to kick me out so don't count on me".
If "don't count on me" had been the response in 1947 not only of the so-called "liberal Jews" most of whom despise Palestinians as "Untermenschen" and of our own Government the repeated hitting of shxxx on the Middle Eastern fan would probably not have happened.
From this mornings news wire:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/100315/world/mideast_conflict_jerusalem_wbank_demo
It seems whenever the IDF gets it's back up, they have a tendency to deliberately do something that raises the ire of the Palestinians, then interpret the predictable and legitimate rage as an excuse to open fire.
And the apologists then trot out 'evil' the people being repressed are, how not worthy of human rights and dignity they are, because they refuse to roll over and be raped and murdered by the US backed thugs.
Everts that happened sixty years ago and hundreds of miles away are no longer acceptable excuses for Israeli brutality and genocide.
It is interesting to note how much of the discussion here gets diverted from CH's main point:
"The Israeli government, its brutal war crimes in Gaza exposed in detail in the U.N. report by Justice Richard Goldstone, has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel that are accused-often falsely-of assisting Goldstone's U.N. investigators."
If this is not true where is the refutation and why so many straw dogs?
The Gaza "war" was not a war at all, but was a massacre, in ways remarkably like the one in the WWII Warsaw Ghetto.
There have long been strident efforts to strangle criticism of Israel, often even more than in Israel, as Finlelstein well knows! (See the documentary about his experience: 'American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein')
Many, I would say nearly all, of these horrors stem from the failure of the human race to free itself from Iron Age explanations of the world, which go by the name "religion" and which have plagued us for thousands of years.
Either we free ourselves of it, or it will spell the end of us, one fine day.
I'm certain we and it cannot survive together for another two thousand years.
Mr. Former Divinity Student Hedges, and true American cultural heir, you seem to think people should be offended if they don't get to wear your glorious badge, "Liberal."
Really, who with an ounce of real thought gives a shit?
Actually, as a leftist, Hedges is pretty critical of liberals.
The fifth pargraph of this essay knocks me out.
It illustrates the function of liberal intellectuals in society today as it conforms to a quote of Thucydides that Chomsky refers to:
"For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences- either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
It's a definition of morality based on power (and its many euphemisms such as "pragmatism" or being "realistic") instead of human worth.
I think Goldstone's insistance on following the law may be rooted in justice which in turn is rooted in a moral definition of human worth.
You see in Hedges paragraph the effect of raw power on those with presumably good intentions and its distortion of their morality.
"He (the guy who lead the investigation into Israeli/Gaza war crimes) calls himself a Zionist. His mother was an activist in the Zionist movement. His daughter did aliyah. He sits on the board of governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has an honorary degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has said over and over again that he is a Zionist. He believes Jews have a right to a state in Palestine"
I like this article, but isn't it interesting that the "report" on an Israeli atrocity was inked by... the most Israeli of Israelis.
What kind of trial would the Nazis have gotten if an Aryan Master "whose children had all graduated from Hitler Youth with gold swastikas and who sits on the board of the New Polish Judenrein University" had been the judge?
Is it illegal for Israel to be judged by non-cult members?
Israel's policy toward the Palestinian Arabs was spoken of quite frankly and openly by Moshe Dyan decades ago.
I don't have the exact quote, but this is what he said to the Palestinians:
We will do nothing for you.
You will live like dogs.
You are free to leave.
Moshe Dyan also famously said:
"There is not one single place built in this country (Israel) that did not have a former Arab population."
"We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house."
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because geography books no longer exist."
"Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice."
The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was a team established by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) during the Gaza War as an independent international fact-finding mission to investigate violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, in connection with the conflict.
The mission was established on 3 April 2009, by the President of the UNHRC. Richard Goldstone, a respected international jurist from South Africa was appointed to head the mission, accompanied by Christine Chinkin of the United Kingdom, Hina Jilani of Pakistan and Desmond Travers of Ireland.
The mission's controversial final report was released 15 September 2009, and accused both Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
The UN then recommended that the individual nations resolve the problems pointed out in the Goldstone Report. If they don't, the UN will refer the matter to the International Criminal Court. Israel refused, but the Palestinians favor bringing the issues to court.
If the UN report shows that Israel, and to a much lesser degree, the militant arm of Hamas, committed war crimes, then why did Mitchell, Clinton and Biden not bring these issues up as a point to be resolved during their visits?
The UN does magnanimous things, but they need support of nations like the US if they are to be effective. The US needs to support the UN and bring Israel to the International Criminal Court. Then, a finding of guilt can not be hidden any longer and the world, even the US, will have to sanction Israel.
-Billboards have sprouted up around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with a grotesque caricature of Chazan, who has been branded by groups such as Im Tirzu as an agent for Hamas and Iran, with a horn growing from her forehead.
-Any public statement, event or speech, even if it lasts half a minute, by these groups must include a declaration that they are being supported and funded by a foreign power. Those who fail to follow these guidelines, including local volunteers, can face a year in jail.
I guess what they have been saying is true, you can't both be a democracy and an empire. The quality of Israeli democracy is diminishing. And maitaining a brutal occupation can't be good for the mental health of conscript soldiers.
But many immigrants to Israel don't even come from other democracies do they? Many come from Africa or Russia. They have never known liberalism. They are ripe for propaganda manipulation and draconian crackdowns on human rights.
jlocke, agreed, but remember who is backing and funding said billboards.
Christian fundamentalists in the u.s....Hagee!!
If some turd gives me money to do something I don't *really* want to do, I tell him to f*ck off.
What do you do?