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Israeli Official Compares Sharon's Action to Nazi's
(Guardian, May 23, 2004)
An Israeli Cabinet minister on Sunday said the army's demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip reminded him of actions the Nazis took against his family during World War II and called for a halt to the policy of destroying homes. . . . The remarks by Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, sparked an uproar at the weekly Cabinet meeting, officials at the meeting said. . . . The ministers were discussing Israel's demolition of homes in the Rafah refugee camp. Dozens of homes have been destroyed or damaged during an ongoing offensive along the Gaza-Egypt border. . . . Lapid was quoted by officials at the meeting as saying a picture of an old Palestinian woman on the rubble of her home reminded him "of my grandmother in the Holocaust." . . . Lapid said he was not comparing Israel to the Nazis but there "is no forgiveness for people who treat an old woman in this way."

posted by Lorenzo 8:18 PM

 

Bush checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move
(Rick Perlstein, The Village Voice, May 18th, 2004)
It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level" - this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios. . . . "Everything that you're discussing is information you're not supposed to have," barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice. . . . The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth. . . . Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip. . . . Affiliated with the United Pentecostal Church, the Apostolic Congress is part of an important and disciplined political constituency courted by recent Republican administrations. As a subset of the broader Christian Zionist movement, it has a lengthy history of opposition to any proposal that will not result in what it calls a "one-state solution" in Israel. . . . Ronald Reagan bore theological affinities with such Christians because of his belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. Reagan himself referenced this belief explicitly a half-dozen times during his presidency. . . . While the language of apocalyptic Christianity is absent from George W. Bush's speeches, he has proven eager to work with apocalyptics - a point of pride for Upton. "We're in constant contact with the White House," he boasts. "I'm briefed at least once a week via telephone briefings. . . . I was there about two weeks ago . . . At that time we met with the president." . . . Pastor Upton claimed personal responsibility for directing 50,000 postcards to the White House opposing the Road Map, which aims to create a Palestinian state. "I'm in total disagreement with any form of Palestinian state," Upton said. "Within a two-week period, getting 50,000 postcards saying the exact same thing from places all over the country, that resonated with the White House. That really caused [President Bush] to backpedal on the Road Map." . . . Tim Goeglein, deputy director of public liaison and the White House's point man with evangelical Christians, moderated, and he also spoke on the issue of same-sex marriage. According to the memo, he asked the rhetorical questions: "What will happen to our country if that actually happens? What do those pushing such hope to gain?" His answer: "They want to change America." How so? He quoted the research of Hoover Institute senior fellow Stanley Kurtz, who holds that since gay marriage was legalized in Scandinavia, marriage itself has virtually ceased to exist. (In fact, since Sweden instituted a registered-partnership law for same-sex couples in the mid '90s, there has been no overall change in the marriage and divorce rates there.) . . . It demonstrates, he says, "the absolute convergence of the neoconservatives with the Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby, driving U.S. Mideast policy." . . . The problem is not that George W. Bush is discussing policy with people who press right-wing solutions to achieve peace in the Middle East, or with devout Christians. It is that he is discussing policy with Christians who might not care about peace at all - at least until the rapture.

posted by Lorenzo 10:52 AM

 

Israeli Tanks and Helicopters Fire on Protesters in Gaza
(Cynthia Johnston, Reuters, May 19, 2004)
Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on protesters in a refugee camp on Wednesday, killing 10 Palestinians and raising a two-day death toll to 33 in Israel's bloodiest Gaza raid in years, witnesses said. . . . Medics said about 50 people were wounded at the besieged Rafah camp in southern Gaza and that the casualties included many children and teenagers. . . . The firing sent a marching crowd fleeing in terror, some dragging bloodied comrades and others carrying wounded children in their arms, demonstrators said. . . . "It was horrifying," said Mahmoud Abu Hashem, 35. "There was one person with his intestines coming out. Another had blood covering his face and you couldn't even make out his features." . . . The Palestinian Authority called it a "war crime" and demanded international protection for Palestinians. . . . In a rare but gently worded rebuff to its ally, Washington said it was "very concerned" about the number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza and had asked Israel to explain its actions. . . . Bodies carried on piling up in a flower freezer converted into a makeshift morgue after staff at the refugee camp's main hospital strained to cope with the dead along with dozens of wounded in two days of Israeli military assaults. . . . The firing began as marchers surged toward the Tel Sultan neighborhood, focal point of Israel's sweep into Rafah, to demand that humanitarian aid be allowed in. . . . Palestinians said the incident evoked bitter memories of the army's 2002 assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, where forces flattened an entire neighborhood during pitched battles with militants following suicide bombings in Israel. . . . Earlier on Wednesday, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in Rafah and demanded the surrender of militants. Troops searched house to house amid clashes with gunmen. . . . An international outcry was sparked by Israeli threats to flatten hundreds of Rafah homes to widen an army-controlled security corridor along the border with Egypt.

posted by Lorenzo 9:30 AM

 

Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
(David Hirst, The Nation, February 2, 2004)
In the minds of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced communism as perhaps the greatest single "threat" to the existing world order. From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just another episode in a "clash of civilizations." For them, there is an intrinsic link between Palestinian "terrorism" and, say, the al-Qaeda bombing of an American warship off Yemen. Almost totally absent from such arguments is any inclination to examine Jewish fundamentalism, or so much as to ask whether it, too, might be a factor in the conflict over Palestine, one of the reasons why it seems so insoluble. . . . American Jews, especially Orthodox ones, are generous financiers of the shock troops of fundamentalism, the religious settlers; indeed a good 10 percent of these, and among the most extreme, violent and sometimes patently deranged, are actually immigrants from America. They are, says Shahak, one of the "absolutely worst phenomena" in Israeli society, and "it is not by chance that they have their roots in the American-Jewish community." . . . The ignorance or indifference is all the more remiss in that Jewish fundamentalism is not, and cannot be, just a domestic Israeli question. Israel was always a highly ideological society; it is also a vastly outsized military power, both nuclear and conventional. That is a combination which, when the ideology in question is Zionism in its most extreme, theocratic form, is fraught with possible consequences for the region and the world, and, of course, for the world's only, Israeli-supporting superpower. . . . Like its Islamic counterpart, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel has grown enormously in political importance over the past quarter-century. Its committed, hard-core adherents, as distinct from a larger body of the more traditionally religious, are thought to account for some 20 to 25 percent of the population. They, and more particularly the settlers among them, have acquired an influence, disproportionate to their numbers, over the whole Israeli political process, and especially in relation to the ultra-nationalist right, which, beneath its secular exterior, actually shares much of their febrile, exalted outlook on the world. It is fundamentalism of a very special, ethnocentric and fiercely xenophobic kind, with beliefs and practices that are "even more extremist," says Shahak, "than those attributed to the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism," if not "the most totalitarian system ever invented." . . . Like fundamentalism everywhere, the Jewish variety seeks to restore an ideal, imagined past. If it ever managed to do so, the Israel celebrated by the American "friends of Israel" as a "bastion of democracy in the Middle East" would, most assuredly, be no more. For, in its full and perfect form, the Jewish Kingdom that arose in its place would elevate a stern and wrathful God's sovereignty over any new-fangled, heathen concepts such as the people's will, civil liberties or human rights. It would be governed by the Halacha, or Jewish religious law, of which the rabbis would be the sole interpreters, and whose observance clerical commissars, installed in every public and private institution, would rigorously enforce, with the help of citizens legally obligated to report any offense to the authorities. . . . Settlements are the citadels of their messianic ideology, the nucleus and inspiration of their theocratic state-in-the-making, the power base from which to conduct an internal struggle that is inseparable from the external one--the intra-Jewish struggle against that other Israel, the secular-modernist one of original, mainstream Zionism, which stands in their path. . . . The struggle between the religious--in its fundamentalist form--and the secular, between ancient and modern, ethnocentric and universal, is a struggle for Israel's very soul. The Gush settlements are at the heart of it. The struggle is intensifying and is wholly unresolved. The fundamentalists can never win it; they are simply too backward and benighted for that. But, appeased, surreptitiously connived with, or unashamedly supported down the years by Labor as much as by Likud, they have now acquired such an ascendancy over the whole political process, such a penetration of the apparatus of the state, military and administrative, executive and legislative branches, that no elected government can win it either. Meanwhile, they grow increasingly defiant, lawless and hysterical in pursuit of the millennium. . . . [COMMENT: This sounds hauntingly familiar ... something about fundamentalist Christians in the USA.] . . . The Zionist-colonial enterprise has always had a built-in propensity to gravitate towards its most extreme expression. And what, with the rise of the Begins and Shamirs, the Sharons and now a new breed of super-Sharons, has been true of the whole is bound to be even more true of its fanatical, fundamentalist particular. Its latest manifestation is the so-called "hilltop youth"; these sons and daughters of the original, post-1967 settlers, born and reared in the closed, homogenous, hothouse world of their West Bank and Gazan strongholds, surpass even their elders in militancy. In keeping with time-honored, Sharon-approved Zionist tradition, they have taken to seizing and staking out hilltops as the sites of settlements to come, and, in every neighborhood they claim as their own, they forcibly prevent the Palestinians from harvesting the fruit of their ancestral olive groves. There is surely worse--much worse--to come.

posted by Lorenzo 3:14 PM

 

WARNING! Sharon is now a wounded animal
(Uri Avnery, 4.5.04)
The Golem Turns on his Creator
Ariel Sharon is not a rabbi and the Kabbalah is a closed book to him. But he has created a Golem: the settlement movement in the occupied territories. . . . He was sure that the Golem would serve him. After all, the settlers owe him everything. It was he who nursed them for decades, diverted funding to them on a massive scale, put at their service all the political positions he occupied one after the other: the ministries of agriculture, defense, foreign affairs, housing, industry and trade, infrastructure, and, finally, the Prime Minister's office. . . . During all these years, ever since he served as the Commanding General of the Southern Sector in the early 70s, he preached to everybody he met, Israelis and foreigners alike, the gospel of the settlements, spreading maps in front of them (he always has maps) and demanding that they act. According to him, it was vitally important to set up settlements in order to turn all of Eretz Israel - from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, at least - into a Jewish State, to tear the Palestinian territories into ribbons and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, which would be an obstacle to the achievements of the full aims of Zionism. . . . Like a bulldozer without brakes, Sharon leveled all opposition. He saw to it that tens of billions of dollars were turned over to the settlements (the exact amount cannot be ascertained, being hidden in various corners of the budget), bent the laws to their benefit and enlisted the officers of the army in their service. In this way, a closely woven network of settlements and special roads came into being, with perhaps 250,000 settlers (who is counting?) . . . But the Golem, once the piece of paper is under his tongue, demonstrates a logic of his own. He does not intend to give up the dozens of small settlements, especially as that is were the hard core of Messianic fanatics lives. He also understood that the evacuation of the first settlement would create a precedent that would endanger all the others. . . . Like the Maharal, Sharon underrated his Golem. He treated him as a servant. How could he respect a creature that he had created with his own hands? Now he is learning that it is much easier to create a Golem than to reverse the process. . . . the numbers do not reflect their actual power. In a democratic society, a small, fanatical and highly motivated minority can influence matters more than a big but apathetic and flabby majority. . . . Sharon speculated on the unpopularity of the settlers in Israel. They are violent and unruly; they speak, dress and behave differently, even their body-language is different. The ordinary Israeli sees them as a bizarre sect. Also, at long last is has dawned on the Israelis that the settlements are devouring the billions that are needed for Israel's economic and social recovery. . . . But in the course of the decades, the settlers have set up an extensive apparatus of control and propaganda. Patiently, they have infiltrated the army, where they now occupy the key positions once held by Kibbutzniks. Their independent media are expanding, while the Left has in the course of the years given up literally all their independent media. The settlers are in possession of huge funds, not only the money that flows to them through hundreds of channels from the state coffers, and not only the lavish donations from American Jewish multi-millionaires, but also from the plentiful resources of the American Christian evangelists. . . . Most of the settlers constitute a disciplined body. Like any messianic sect, they unquestioningly obey their commanders, the "Yesha rabbis" (Yesha is the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza.) This is a totalitarian structure, in the true sense of the term: total faith, total organization, total discipline. . . . One good thing has come from this referendum: suddenly the public has woken up and seen the Golem that has come to life in their midst. From the first moment, the writing was on the wall: the settler movement is sucking the marrow from the state, it is an obstacle to peace, it is a danger to Israeli democracy and to the future of the state itself. Now the general public, too, sees the danger represented by this rampaging Golem. . . . It is not too late to remove the piece of paper from beneath the Golem's tongue. Not yet!

posted by Lorenzo 10:26 AM

 

No safe exit as Likud abandons Sharon
(Khalid Amayreh, Aljazeera.Net, 03 May 2004)
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suffered significant damage to his standing within his party and among Israelis following Likud's rejection of his "disengagement plan". . . . The results of the referendum, announced late on Sunday night, showed that around 60% of Likud party members voted against the plan, with less than 40% supporting it. . . . According to Uri Avnery, a veteran Israeli peace activist and political commentator, Sharon is already finding himself in a tough spot. . . . "He is now in an impossible situation. He has lost the confidence of his own party and it will be difficult for him to recover his stature." . . . Avnery believes that Sharon has incurred "this fiasco" upon himself because "he has never been serious about the plan". . . . "Look, he didn't present a real plan, there was no timetable, no details about the borders, no details about subsequent steps, the whole thing was incoherent and too general." . . . Asked what he thought Sharon would do now, having lost the referendum, the former Knesset member said Sharon was now "very dangerous". . . . "He is a wounded animal now. In ordinary times, he was dangerous and unpredictable. Now he is even more dangerous and more unpredictable." . . . Avnery hinted that Sharon might resort to assassinating Palestinian Authority Leader Yasir Arafat or carry out some theatrical operations against the Palestinians in order to appease the more jingoistic and extremist segments in his party. . . . "You see the basic situation in Israel today is that we have highly motivated and highly dedicated groups who reject peace or compromise with the Palestinians ... as a matter of principle. . . . "On the other hand, much of the Israeli public is apathetic and unwilling to put up a serious challenge to this fanatic anti-peace camp." . . . Sharon is unlikely to soon find an exit to political safety. . . . if he abandons the Gaza plan, he would also further embarrass the US - Israel's guardian-ally. . . . More to the point, Sharon would be effectively succumbing to the hawkish elements within the Likud and the religious-Zionist camp that espouse the ideology of "Erez Yisrael Hashlema" or "the Greater Land of Israel", which includes Israel proper, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan heights. . . . President George Bush put his prestige on the line at home and in the Arab world by throwing his weight behind Sharon ... just as President Bill Clinton did for Barak . . . Writing in Ha'aretz on Monday, Eldar said that peace forces in Israel, which advocate negotiations with the elected representatives of the Palestinians, ought to free themselves from the illusion that the Likud could make peace with the Palestinians. . . . Palestinian political analyst Hani al-Masri termed the result of the referendum "good news" for the Palestinians. . . . "The so-called disengagement plan is actually aimed at liquidating the Palestinian issue. It is a very dangerous plan. We should be happy that it didn't pass." . . . Al-Masri believes that not only Sharon but also the entire Israeli right has reached a dead end. . . . "Look, this [referendum outcome] shows that the Zionist right has failed on the two fronts, making peace and imposing a solution on the Palestinians by force." . . . And like Avnery, al-Masri believes that a weak Sharon is also a very dangerous one. . . . "I think he could carry out some atrocities in an effort to reunify the Likud around him.

posted by Lorenzo 2:32 PM