The weekend supplement of Ma’ariv ran an exhaustive investigation of the effect the Palestinian rocket threat has on Israeli children living within their range. On the left is the “illustration” by one Ophir Bagon, which opened the story. On the right is the original photo. See the difference?
And here is the pic as it first appeared, on Ma’ariv’s front page just two months ago:
h/t John Brown
The stray winds of the Internet brought to my desk the following piece by Rex Murphy. It doesn’t add much (anything) new to the debate, but it does offer a rather neat digest of a pseudo-liberal argument; the argument used by conservative commentators who enjoy applauding distant Middle Easterners fighting to find a voice, but quickly get cold feet when the same struggle erupts a little closer to home.
Serious protests, involving grave issues, with real risks and real moral purpose, are going on all over the world. They match life-and-death risk with the value of what is at stake: the human rights of citizens suffering under dictatorial governments. We can only hope that the eyes of the demonstrators in Syria don’t get the news of the tantrum going on in democratic Quebec… What’s going on in Quebec is not a protest. It’s a parody of one: the future elite of Quebec having a self-indulgent fit… Let’s just hope that no one in Syria has been paying attention.
Look: It doesn’t matter that in Cairo the original rallying flag was protesting a dictatorship, in Montreal – tuition fees and in Tel Aviv, originally, rent. Quebec, Wall Street, London, Tel Aviv, Madrid, Cairo, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain are all part of the same Spring, because in all those cases multitudes of people are realising that it’s not that they are apolitical, but that the political system in their countries is inadequate at safeguarding and expressing their interests. That each system is geared primarily to preserve the status quo, and that status quo no longer tolerable, and needs to and can be overthrown. So someone sneeringly comparing “future elites having a self-indulgent fit” to the Brave Egyptians or the Fearless Syrians isn’t supporting the Arab Revolution. He’s merely revealing what side he is really on, and, whatever plaudits he pays revolutions happening at a safe distance, what side he would probably be in any other place the Spring has visited: The side of the status quo.
A Swedish tourist trying to enter Israel was made to sign a “contract” promising she won’t get in touch with “pro-Palestinian” organisations, and acknowledging she’ll get deported if she “gets caught doing even one of these things.” Meanwhile, Prime Minister’s Office released a letter that will be handed to deported Flytilla activists: Go to Syria.
Check this out. This is a “contract” that a Swedish citizen was required to sign upon entering Israel via the Eilat land crossing:
Please, stop snickering at the “nine-tens,” the “passpot,” and the bizarre grammatical construct in the first sentence. This is quite serious. The person in question told +972:
I’ve been in East Jerusalem on and off for six months now, visiting friends. Since I am here on a tourist visa, I have to leave the country every three months and renew my visa at the border. No problem, until this time when me and a friend made an Easter trip to Jordan and planned to get a new visa stamp in my passport on our way back. I’ll go back to Sweden next week again, so I just need a visa for my last days here.
When we got to the Israeli section of the border crossing – that one between Aqaba and Eilat – we were asked to sit down and wait a moment while they kept my passport. Then I was invited into an office and was questioned about my religion, if I had contact with any religious organizations here, what I do during the day, how much money I have got to spend and where I got it, what I do in Sweden and so on. Then we had to wait again, not knowing what would happen. After 4 hours and 20 minutes, I was asked to sign this contract and got back my passport with visa stamp in which the expiration date (normally three months later) was corrected to April 19, which is when I have my plane ticket home. Then we could finally enter Israel again.
They retained the original “contract” at the border control, and mine is only a copy. I don’t know what consequences I could expect if I would break it. Personally, I am pleased that I was let in and can spend one last week in Jerusalem. I am five months pregnant and hardly look like any security risk. As far as I know, I haven’t done anything illegal during my stay here.
When reached for comment by my colleague Haggai Matar, Population and Immigration Authority spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said : “The purpose behind the document was to make sure the lady doesn’t visit friction areas. Nevertheless, we intend to check the issue and the document itself.”
Considering the inane phrasing, spelling errors and the fact the entire letter was custom-printed for the woman personally (as opposed to a form where her departure date would have been written in), I’ll go on to venture a highly charitable guess this is the local initiative of staff at this particular crossing, rather than a policy. The initiative might actually belong to the very same “Meital Yahud”, who appears as the other signatory to the contract and might be anxious to have an alibi (a rather weak one, mind you) in case the person she let in goes on to do something as dangerous, as, um, speak the word “Palestine”, or something. It’s still morbidly fascinating to see the Flytilla getting our authorities to make themselves look like complete buffoons even before a single activist actually boarded a plane.
Update 18:30 And as if to vindicate that last sentence, Netanyahu’s spokesman Ofir Gendelman tweeted the official letter Flytilla activists will be handed on arrival. The grammar is a little better. The content – judge for yourselves.
…Going back to the political “contract” document, immigration and human rights lawyer Yadin Elam told +972:
“This is the first time I have seen such a form but as someone who deals with the Ministry Of Interior on a daily basis, nothing can surprise me anymore. Legally, she is very fortunate that it is written so badly. If she “cannot” be a member of a pro-Palestinian organization then I guess she is not…”
As for the question of responsibility, Elam suggests:
…it does seems like a private initiative of a low-level clerk at the Ministry of the Interior but one should be worried why a low-level clerk has the powers to make such decisions. We all remember that Israel blamed immigration officials for the decision to deny entry to Noam Chomsky nearly two years ago. Would it be too much to hope that after such a mistake, the ministry would make sure that private initiatives would not take place? and if the didn’t, can we still call it a private initiative?
Anyway, at least they didn’t summarily execute the visitor’s laptop this time. Things are looking up.
Earlier this morning, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted this uncharacteristically laconic message:
The smug announcement was further drilled home by a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office, which gushed at the prime minister surpassing the 200,000 “likes” bar, noted opponents trail “far behind” and crowned the prime minister’s Facebook page as an instrument “linking the people and the leader.” The website of Labor leader Shelly Yachimovich (with a self-confessedly humble 20,000 plus ‘”likes”) quickly shot back with the following observation from the head of its Internet volunteer teams, Amichai Saragovi:
Some time ago us in the Internet team began talking about how something in Netanyahu’s growing Facebook clout doesn’t make sense, especially in a country as small as Israel. A quick search via Facebook [through the advertisement feature - D.R.] three weeks ago found, much to our astonishment, that only 17 percent of Netanyahu’s Facebook fans are Israeli. 52 percent hail from the United States, and, most amusingly, some 3 percent, approximately 5,000 Bibi fans (more than his fans in the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Mexico combined) come from Indonesia. Indonesia, as it is commonly known, is the largest Muslim country in the world, with which we have no diplomatic relations, and I somehow find it difficult to believe the objectively joyous news that our prime minister has been capturing Indonesian hearts and minds… by comparison, some 90 percent of Shelly’s 20,400 fans are Israeli, with the remaining ten percent spread across different countries, a pattern common for such fan pages.
Saragovi then takes the gloves off and proceeds to accuse Netanyahu of deliberately misleading the public.
The leader, according to his own press release, communicates with some 200,000 of his compatriots via Facebook. In truth, he’s communicating with some 30,000 of them, not much more than the actual number of fans on Shelly’s page… there’s also the feeling the numbers have been bloated artificially.
Screenshot of the searches can be found at the bottom of Saragovi’s post. It should be noted that Netanyahu has been advertising his page relentlessly in the last few months – even if none of the “likes” on his page have been purchased, as activists were quick to suggest, the financial investment in the page is a considerable one.
The Prime Minister’s Office is yet to respond to the stats.
Ami Kaufman has done the important work of translating a Channel 10 report on the vicious racism afflicting Israeli teens. The report was produced in the wake of the hideous comments made by some teens on the incineration of five Palestinian children in a bus crash in Jerusalem the other month. The first thing that comes to mind watching the video – in which some of the original teenage commentators are interviewed – is that they are no different from teens in any other area of sustained, protracted ethno-nationalist conflict. The other is that such discourse is nothing new in Israel, and is far from confined to teenagers.
The following paragraphs are excerpts from an email to a friend, written on my first solitary night shift on The Jerusalem Post news desk, in January 2008. I had just finished reading Shake Hands with the Devil, an account of the build-up and the actual genocide in Rwanda that sent chills down my spine – particularly when it described the atmosphere in the days preceding the butchery itself. From a distance of four years I can observe I knew little at the time of how slow-brewing ethnic conflicts are, and how Israel’s relatively strong institutions and heavy-handed military divert some of the pressure that can actually build up to murderous, neighbour-onto-neighbour, grassroots-based ethnic cleansing. Neither could I foresee the many powerful counter-currents underway – the renaissance of political and journalistic activism that so far culminated with the social justice protests being chief among them, even if, as we see, it is still far from enough to act as real counterbalance. It’s also worth noting the comments about the Palestinian kids in the bus crash were met with a strong backlash from other Israeli teenagers shocked by their own peers’ bloodthirstiness. And yet, the harmony between what was being said in Rwanda, what was being said that night I spent on my own between flickering monitors and murmuring radio sets, and what is being said in the video Ami posted is unmistakable.
It’s late at night. The newsroom’s television sets are open on the two commercial channels, Channel Two and Channel Ten. Both are re-running cringeworthy local teenage soaps; on both of them, all the characters are in IDF uniform. The radio is also open on the two main channels, Israel Radio and Army Radio. Both are transferring late-night agony aunt or uncle programs, slightly easier on the heart than the midday open-mike ones, where the real genocidal maniacs crop up to share your traffic jam.
But even now, at 2 A.M., a woman calls. She is in a relationship with a married man, she loves him but knows he won’t leave his family for her. She takes care to state the fact the man lives in East Jerusalem. The anchor’s first reaction consists of a single, carefully weighted word. An Arab, he says, and stops to think. You’re sleeping with a married Arab, he repeats. Yes, the woman sighs, and the anchor opens the floor to other listeners. The couple’s affair and the man’s marital status go out the window. Callers prefer instead to discuss “Arabs”; not even “Arab men” or “Arab women,” simply “Arabs.” The P word – Palestinians – goes unmentioned. One caller, a veteran of the 1948 war, relieves himself of a rant on the massacre of the fifty-six captive Palmach fighters in kibbutz Kfar Etzion. He talks for fifteen minutes straight, unhindered by the host. The word “Arabs” comes at almost regular intervals, like a refrain to chant. At length, he sums up: “In the Palmach I was not taught to hate the Arabs, I was taught to respect them. But ever since the death of the Thirty Five, I hate Arabs with all my heart and soul. If I was in power, If I got to rule, I would expel every one of them.” The anchor protests meekly, but then allows the man to rant for ten minutes more.
…On daytime radio, you hear people calling for genocide. Not the odd loons, nor even Negev civilians driven mad with fear by Palestinian missiles in Sderot. Average citizens of all backgrounds call in from towns and cities across, spouting racism that would make a BNP member leave the room. When the Qassam barrages get particularly harsh, even reasonably critical, respected journalists surrender to the tide of fear. Just the other day, one pundit, Yaron London wrote an op-ed in Israel’s Yediot Aharonot, calling to pull down a neighbourhood in Gaza in response for every shooting, or else to “starve them out”.This country is almost ripe for ethnic cleansing, much more so than it seems from Tel Aviv. It’s frighteningly close.
And as the night shifts draws on, web comments come rolling in to be filtered. Kill them. Transfer. Now. All Arabs. All Muslims. All “Palis”. Cockroaches, monsters, beasts, animals, scum. Kill everyone. Use nukes. Use gas. Use napalm. Slip sterilizing drugs into the Gaza water supply. Don’t trust anyone. The UN is anti-Semitic. The Europeans are anti-Semitic. Left-wing Jews are even worse. It seems like if I go to sleep and tune in two days later, I’ll hear the Hutu radio of Rwanada, giving directions to families still hiding out, and some self-proclaimed “liberal journalist” asking into the mike in a smoky voice: “The graves are only half-full. Who will help fill them?”
I don’t think anyone in Israel, certainly not anyone in power, is planning murderous ethnic cleansing; even if non-murderous ethnic cleansing – “population swaps” – has long since been on the agenda, partly normalised into the public discourse by the pro-partition Left’s braying support for the eviction of settlements. But if push comes to shove, if a population-swap goes awry, if the evacuees try to resist violently or turn on each other and someone somewhere panics and decides to take less “sentimental” measures, the silent build up toward active support or complacency for fully-fledged atrocities is already at work. The dry wood has been piling up for years now, and there’s no telling if we’ll be spared the spark.
The Central Bureau of Statistics announced it is changing its criteria for calculating unemployment. On the new list: Arab communities. Off the list: IDF conscripts who are now considered “employed” . The result: A quantum leap of 20 percent.
This isn’t even an April Fools joke. I wish it was. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) sheepishly announced that the criteria it’s been using to calculate the unemployment ratio in Israel don’t match the ones used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which Israel insisted upon joining two years back. Now that the CBS intends to switch over to the OECD’s standards, Israel’s unemployment rate goes from 5.6 to 6.5 percent practically overnight. As Globes reported this morning (Hebrew), CBS announced as recently as 28 February Israel had 174,000 unemployed. Beginning Friday, Israel has 227,000. In its statement (.pdf), the bureau suggests that the overall trend of gently sloping unemployment stays largely true, but the overall unemployment ratio is much higher than admitted to begin with.
Does any of it have anything to do with racism and militarism? Why, I’m very glad you asked. Globes suggest that the bulk of the change has been caused by the addition of “some one hundred communities that were not included in earlier CBS surveys.” The paper speculates that these communities, which Psagot Investment House analyst Uri Grienfield tactfully describes as “smaller, more peripheral and with a tendency to lower levels of employment than the big cities” are largely Arab villages and towns. Such forgetfulness has been demonstrated by Israeli media often enough – I vividly recall poverty indexes on TV news that would omit the country’s poorest 10 communities, all of them Arab, from their ratings, year after year after year – but it’s the first time, to my memory, that a government institution admits to similar selective amnesia.
“If indeed they failed to include certain Arab localities, this throws into doubt past data collection on unemployment in Arab community by CBS, considering how carefully unemployment is regularly monitored among both the Arab and Haredi communities, both traditionally underemployed,” my colleague Dahlia tells me when I consult her if the news were as bizarre as they seem . “In addition to civil society groups, the CBS itself tracks (.pdf) Arab unemployment levels. So it is hard to imagine how the CBS suddenly forgot about its own data.”
If this wasn’t enough, it seems the actual unemployment ratio is even higher, because the amended data lists all of the IDF – conscripts, NCOs and officers alike – as “employed.” Considering conscripts are paid something like NIS 350 ($95) a month and sustain themselves largely on army grub (=Israeli and American taxpayers money), on their parents’ income and on jobs that pay under-the-table, it seems they fall short of several economic aspects associated with employment’s role in an economy (giving vs. taking from public coffers and consumer spending power instantly come to mind).
While the CBS is keen to present this development as nothing out of the ordinary (they didn’t even hold a press conference, simply slipping the statement onto their website just before the weekend), few appear to be buying it. Psagot says it has updated its 2012 unemployment forecast for Israel to 7.5 percent. A “senior financial source” in Jerusalem told Globes that the top financial administrators of the country were “stunned” by the news and that the Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, is “asking for an explanation” of the change. As the paper notes, all this might help to explain why hundreds of thousands of Israelis went out to the streets last summer despite a rosy picture of the economy persistently painted by the government.
Will the anti-democratic legislation underway in Israel soon make progressive advocacy redundant? Is it an exaggeration to say Israel is on the high road to fascism? And what can the Left do to reverse the process? An interview with Israel’s pre-eminent human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard.
A courtroom in the Israeli Supreme Court (photo: Josh Yellin/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
It’s no longer a secret to anyone Israel is facing a rising tide of anti-democratic legislation – from new restrictions on free speech to the chipping away at the separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary. Earlier this month I took a broad look at these trends in a piece published two weeks back on the New York Review of Books website, titled “The Knesset vs Democracy.” Because the premise was so broad, only a handful of quotes from the interviews conducted for the piece made it into the final text, which is a pity, as my interviewees had stark and startling analysis to offer. With the NYRB’s kind permission I’ll be publishing the full transcripts here over the coming weeks, beginning with this interview with Michael Sfard – probably Israel’s most prominent human rights lawyer.
Can you imagine the constitutional situation becoming so dire NGOs stop petitioning the Supreme Court?
You’re going into murky waters here, but I want to make clear it’s not an option that isn’t being discussed. I wrote about it in 2004, in an article called “The human rights lawyers’ existential dilemma.” When you’re faced with a system that’s systematically violating human rights, on a huge scope, is it right or wrong to sustain internal, as opposed to external, resistance? Because when you resist from within, you legitimise the system. There are many prices that you pay. And it’s a very, very difficult question. The Supreme Court today is making a horrible, horrible mistake by rendering petitions by or on behalf of Palestinians less and less worthy of the effort. Really, even in simple terms of supply and demand. For years, the success rate of Palestinians approaching the Supreme Court has been absolutely appalling. There hasn’t been a single instrument the army wanted to use against the Palestinian that the Court failed to approve. However, the Court did provide – through informal pressure, through comments in the rulings and the hearings, what they call “in the shadow of the court” – some highly localised achievements for the Palestinians, as well as a handful of rulings that were later translated into English and seriously exploited for PR. And this constituted the oxygen that allowed this machine to work and made the Palestinians to remain willing to appeal.
Today, the Court is creating a situation that’s a lot less attractive for Palestinians. It sends a chill wind in the direction of everything concerning the human rights of Palestinians. It’s not happening all in one go, it’s a process. The latest ruling, on families, is practically a death blow. It prompted quite a few debates even among Palestinians on whether it’s right to go on petitioning the Supreme Court. And then we’ll see whether there’s a particular Palestinian individual who will still say that for even one percent chance of a success he has nothing to lose by going to the Supreme Court; or, the general feeling of collaborating with the occupant’s system will grow and grow. Because at the end of the day attorneys dealing directly with human rights, like myself, would find it very difficult to tell an individual Palestinian who wants to petition the court not to do that “for the greater good.” Because this is what we’d need to say to him: We won’t exhaust the one-percent chance you’ll get to reunite with your partner, because the Palestinian struggle for freedom will suffer for it. This is a legitimate statement, politically speaking, but it is not a legitimate position for a human rights lawyer to take, because this lawyer is supposed to always prefer the benefit of the individual person over some highly abstract political greater good. But this question is being constantly debated – both by human rights organisation and by individual lawyers who deal with such cases, and by the Palestinians. And I can tell you that there are cases that I’ve taken to court that I would take up today.
For instance?
I wouldn’t take up any principal cases, cases that don’t focus on the benefit of a particular individual. I’ve taken up such cases before, and I wouldn’t today, because in my estimate, the harm in taking them up will be greater than the good. When it’s about an individual, I don’t feel I have the privilege to refuse. Can I imagine a situation in which I would refuse to approach the court altogether? Well. If, say, a bill is passed saying that only IDF veterans can serve in the Supreme Court. I’ve brought this up as a hypothetical scenario with my colleagues, when we discussed the appointment of conservative judge and settler Noam Solberg to the Supreme Court. Here we have a situation in which one of the justices is a settler, which, to me, makes the Supreme Court less legitimate an institution. If it becomes an institution in which only Jews may sit, it will make it an illegitimate institution, period.
Solberg’s appointment is an interesting case in point, because it raises the question – where do you actually draw the red line? Why is the appointment of a settler such a big deal when the Justice Ministry itself constitutes a settlement by virtue of residing in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah?
Sometimes you need artificial red lines, lines that you draw yourself. Coming back to the frog in the cooking pot – that frog has to set itself a deadline. To say, when the water boil to forty degrees Celsius, we need to reconsider. Why forty and not thirty-nine or forty-one? Simply because you need to reevaluate your situation at some point. And you also need to decide, way in advance, what is the temperature at which you jump out and run for it. So I can tell you with absolute certainty that a court in which, by definition, only Jews may serve as justices, is an illegitimate court. Unequivocally illegitimate. But then what if you have a person who has a chance, via that illegitimate court, to obtain the rescinding of an order to uproot the orchard that sustains him, do we go to that court or do we not? Or if he can go to that illegitimate court and persuade it to let him leave the Gaza Strip and undergo a life-saving operation: Do we go to the court or do we not?
And then there’s also the issue that every ruling in favour of human rights group instantly becomes ammunition for politicians who want to curb the powers of the court.
That’s right – and don’t forget also that when you go to court you have to use a very particular language. I for instance had to insist to use the term “assassinations” rather than the official “targeted subversions”. To call the wall a “separation wall” rather than “security fence.” But then, in all honesty, this creates antagonism. If, tactically speaking, I want to win the sympathy of the justices, I can’t tell them, like I did in the permits system case, that this is apartheid. But there are things you simply have to do because you realise that otherwise you really do become complicit.
Looking at the bigger picture, how would you describe the transformation Israeli democracy is going through?
The attempts to define the Israeli regime in the past few decades have made use of many terms that will be familiar to your readers – an occupying regime, colonialism, imperialism, ethnocracy, and so on. Each of these has a role, even if none on its own paint the whole picture. But I think too little attention has been paid to fascization. And this is the process that we see. I don’t think you can presently describe the Israeli government as fascist – absolutely not. We can, however, see vectors that contain clearly fascist elements. Now, it’s an Israeli genre of fascism, not your classical European one. What makes this trend worthy of being described as fascism are the extreme nationalism that sees the People and the Nation as something metaphysical, organic, alive; and the rejection of liberal values that are seen as being detrimental to this nationalist zeitgeist. Israel has always been a very nationalist country – Zionism is, after all, a nationalist movement.But at least until today there was the aspiration and the pretence – pretence is important, even if it’s only pretence – that this can walk hand in hand with liberal values, especially where Jews are concerned. So we had this quaint mix – very strong nationalism hand in hand with freedom of speech, which was one of our strongest values, and as a lawyer who deals with this issue quite a lot, I can tell you that many Western countries could be proud of the way freedom of speech has been enshrined here in Israel. And these values are currently being taken apart.
The trends have always been there, but the point at which I think they really came into the open was Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report and the “realisation” on part of the Israeli public that our “enemies” have “allies” from within. And this really let all the demons loose and cracked the apparently all-too-thin surface of liberal values – even when applied to Jews.
It’s not that there haven’t been clampdowns on freedom of speech before. It’s not that there haven’t been attacks on liberal values. But now we are suddenly seeing it happen systematically, in legislation – not something abrupt like shutting down a particular newspaper. You have the Nakba Law, the Boycott Law – fully fledged assaults on freedom of speech, and not on any particular instances of freedom of speech, but on entire genres. This is a whole other story – it’s different even from someone saying or doing something and being prosecuted for it, like the Kamm-Blau affair. And looking at it altogether, the only term I find useful for understanding all of this is fascism. And I’m happy to admit I’ve been searching for a different name, because I felt it was all too convenient. But the more I think about it, the more it appears to line up.
And it’s not that there’s much support for civil society among the public, either. People won’t go onto barricades if the government actually clamps down on progressive NGOs.
I’m not sure you’re right, but it really is difficult to guess where is the actual red line might be. The metaphor most apt, I think, is that of the proverbial frog being cooked slowly and not necessarily knowing when to jump out of the pot. This is why the idea of attacking not the NGOs themselves but their sources of income is so sophisticated. To slowly starve them out without confronting what they actually do or outlawing their positions. I don’t think we’re far gone enough just yet, however. I do believe people will come out into the streets if B’tselem was to be abruptly banned. After all, considerably weaker moves, like the attempt to set up parliamentary inquiry commissions, do provoke very strong emotions. But what we have here is more than a political struggle; it is a culture war. We are fighting over the very character of the state, the regime that controls it and how this regime interacts with the civil society. And while one side of this struggle has reared its head and took the lead, it doesn’t mean it has taken over yet. They [the conservative legislators - DR] still discover on occasion that they’ve aimed too high. There’s a kind of a tussle of trial and error there. But the general direction is downward, no question about it. The fact that we have twenty monstrous bills and only ten of them pass into law, still leaves us with ten new monstrous laws.
Having said that, while we are sliding in a very negative direction, it’s not yet free-fall. What I often tell the folks at my office when they get depressed is that even if we are standing on the breaks and the car is still sliding towards the precipice, it doesn’t mean we can take our foot off the breaks. It also doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter whether we continue hitting the breaks or not – of course it matters. The speed of the slide, after all, also matters. So the struggle is still on. We might be retreating, but it’s not yet a rout. There is opposition here yet.
Is there anything that can reverse the process?
First of all, you have the wildcard – a war, some other kind of a disaster, would change everything. In the less-then-apocalyptic scenario, we should remember that we keep tightening the noose around ourselves as far as international isolation is concerned. I don’t accept the argument that this doesn’t matter. I don’t know at what point the isolation will grow bad enough for Israelis to say, alright, that’s too much, let’s toe the line that the international community draws. Now, it’s true that when you apply pressure, the first reaction that you get is resistance. At some point, though, this spring will begin to slack. I don’t know when and I certainly wouldn’t like that to have to be the way to make things right here. The world at large has an understandably complex relationship with Israel, and that makes it more difficult to apply pressure to us than to other countries. And even so, if you take a look at the past five years, you see a very clear change in how Europeans and Americans approach us. It hasn’t borne much fruit yet, but that doesn’t mean it never will.
A third scenario for change, and I wish I could see it happening, is a different kind of leadership appearing here. It’s hard for me to say how and when it can appear, but then again, who could possibly have foretold 400,000 people coming out into the streets over social justice? And who could have guessed this massive wave will simply sip away and leave us with nothing? Is it impossible then that 400,000 come out into the streets again over something different? I can’t tell. But there’s no doubt that leadership is something we very seriously lack.
Do you think all these negative trends will prompt American Jews to take some sort of action? And what if it does? After all, the States’ interest in Israel is not merely cultural – it’s also military…
I find American politics on Israel very complicated. I’ve been trying to understand it for years – both in the macro and in terms of the Jewish community, AIPAC, J-Street. I think I understand it better than the average Israeli but I still find it difficult to understand just how it works. I can tell you that although this may be naive, American elections are a cardinal event, not just domestically but also in terms of the relationship with Israel. Because despite the fact Obama’s administration didn’t manage to push Israel or lead Israel in a more desirable direction, there is still the feeling that this alliance based, at least rhetorically, on common values, is cracking up, not least because of the loss or change of values here in Israel. We had Hillary Clinton’s comments at the Saban forum, for instance, and comments from high up in the military that we are becoming a burden for the United States. And then the thing that keeps it together is the power of AIPAC. Which, I think, can only last for so much. Because if the American administration maintains, over time, that Israel’s values are changing to something very distant from the fundamental values to which the United States themselves lay claim, that Israel is becoming a security burden, AIPAC will not be able to keep it going for very long. Internal political interests, the courting for Jewish votes and Jewish donors will no longer be enough. Which is why the question of whether Obama gets reelected is so important. Republicans, obviously, have a very different view on this – significant parts of the American society are undergoing a change similar or parallel to Israel’s. So will the value gap change anything? It may, but right now I don’t have enough information to tell you if it will.
So what do you do for now- just keep hitting the breaks?
First of all, yes, you do not take your foot off the breaks. Second, I believe there’s a historical duty on our part to share with the world what is going on here – it’s not an internal, private Israeli matter. So long as there’s the Occupation, and even when it’s gone, what’s happening here is anything but our own private matter. And third, since I diagnose our disease as symptomatic of fascism, I think the situation calls on us to set up an anti-Fascist League. Such a league is an excellent endeavour to attempt because it can bring forces that will not come together under any other circumstances. I can clearly see parts of the Israeli public that cannot cooperate in almost any situation, but can join hands against this legislation. So for instance the fact that you had (Kadima) MK Meir Sheetrit speak at the protest against the non-profits law shows me that even if only subconsciously, people still sense this thing that I’m trying to name. It’s not happening yet but it has to happen, as it happened whenever fascism actually took power – and it’s yet to take full power here. I don’t think it will happen soon and in one fell swoop; we won’t have someone crank up the heat suddenly to 100 degrees. But, I think we are slowly being cooked, just like that frog in the pot.
On Saturday night, an Israeli couple – two graphic designers named Ronnie Edri and Michal Tamir – decided to cut across the growing anxiety and fear over the possibility of an Israel-Iran war, and address Iranian citizens directly. They created a slogan you can impose over your profile picture or any picture of your choice:
The Israeli meme nation is a harsh and biting one, and many of the first responses were on the cynical side:
But more and more Israelis took up the call in earnest,
and some added messages of their own; as these are also being enthusiastically copied and reproduced, it’s hard to establish authorship, but one of the more popular ones ran:
To the Iranian people
To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sistersFor there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate.
I’m not afraid of you, I don’t hate you.
I don t even know you. No Iranian ever did me no harm. I never even met an Iranian…Just one in Paris in a museum. Nice dude.I see sometime here, on the TV, an Iranian. He is talking about war.
I’m sure he does not represent all the people of Iran.
If you see someone on your TV talking about bombing you …be sure he does not represent all of us.I’m not an official representative of my country. I’m a father and a teacher. I know the streets of my town, I talk with my neighbors, my family, my students, my friends and in the name of all these people …we love you.
We mean you no harm.
On the contrary, we want to meet, have some coffee and talk about sports.To all those who feel the same, share this message and help it reach the Iranian people.
And then came the response:
The couple told “The Marker” they had received hundreds of private messages from Iranians saying they were deeply moved by the campaign.
So what does it all mean? Quite simply, that neither party has any appetite for a war right now. As an Iranian first strike on Israel is not even on the cards right now, Iranian opposition to war may come as no surprise. But it’s important to stress the Israeli opposition to war reflected above is also far from an abstract “make love not war” one. A recent survey found a whopping 50 percent of Israelis were totally opposed to an attack on Iran, even if the diplomatic efforts to stall the nuclear program failed. 43 supported the move, but 78 percent of those surveyed recognised that even a successful attack would at best delay Iran’s acquisition of an A-Bomb by a few years. Only 16 percent believed such an attack would wipe out the Iranian nuclear program for good. An earlier survey that specifically asked if Israel should attack on Iran on its own found 65 percent of Israelis were opposed.
Although I’m normally very cynical on just how much leaders care for public opinion when making a decision to go to war, we should remember Netanyahu is first and foremost a populist and that this is an election year. I’d be surprised if Netanyahu doesn’t repeatedly reminisce on the experience of his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, who went to a much more popular war in Lebanon, botched it, lost power and set in motion the destruction of his own party; although Olmert characteristically leeched on to power for another two and a half years, the inconclusive ending of the war and the severe casualty toll foretold Kadima’s downfall as soon as the ceasefire in Lebanon was enacted. A war with Iran has much higher chances of failure and much greater casualties are at stake. In this situation, such campaigns might – just might – add a few grams of pressure on Netanyahu to stay his hand.
More Iran coverage on +972 Magazine:
Poll: Most Israelis against attack on Iran
Author David Grossman against attack on Iran – by Israel or U.S.
U.S. embassy alarmed by ‘missile’ in anti-war art project
In front-page editorial, Pro-Netanyahu paper supports attack on Iran
Polls: Israelis fear unilateral strike more than Iranian bomb
Poll: Huge majority opposes unilateral Israeli war on Iran
The English National Opera is staging The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’s opera about the Achille Lauro hostage crisis. Ever since its premiere in 1991, the opera has been accused of “glorifying” and “romanticising” terrorism, and, almost inevitably, anti-Semitism. Ahead of the London premiere, The Frontline Club is hosting a panel on arts, politics and how they interact. The panelists will be authors Will Self and Ghada Karmi, conductor Baldur Bronniman and yours truly, and you can see us live via the streaming video below beginning at 7pm London time (2pm EST, 9pm in Israel-Palestine). Would love to hear your thoughts as we go along.
Video streaming by Ustream
Richard Silverstein reports on his blog that the aircraft that crashed in central Israel today was a “booby-trapped” foreign drone flown into the country, and that it crashed not in a field, but in a top-secret missile base (which I am not naming it here because I’m not entirely sure about my position vis-a-vis Israel’s military censors on this bit). Richard goes on to speculate the only enemy of Israel’s that can conceivably produce an aircraft such as this one is Iran, but that it’s unlikely Iran could control a drone from so far away, so it must’ve been Hezbollah, flying the drone 1,000 miles 160km* into Israeli airspace and right at one of Israel’s most sensitive military bases.
Richard attributes the information on the location and nature of the crash to a “ confidential highly-placed Israeli source.” He places considerable weight on the fact no drones are known to be operating from said missile base, and implies this strengthens the suspicion the drone must be a foreign one.
There are several problems to this story. According to current news reports, what crashed was Israel’s largest drone, known as “Eitan”. The drone took off from the Tel Nof airbase and crashed between kibbutz Hafetz Haim and the town of Gedera, some ten miles away from the missile base in question, but only two miles from Tel Nof. Two miles and a malfunctioning Israeli drone seem more plausible than 1,000 miles and an ultra-sophisticated enemy aircraft to me, especially as Richard’s source provides no proof whatsoever the aircraft crashed in some location other than the one reported in the media. Ever since the Night of the Gliders, Israel has been supremely paranoid about its airspace, with jets scrambling every time an unidentified aircraft comes within a few dozen miles of our borders (you can find several incidents from the past year alone). A few days ago they nearly scrambled to attack a particularly large flock of birds. The idea a foreign aircraft can go in and fly 1,000 miles 160km in broad daylight without detection and crash into one of Israel’s most sensitive military bases is bizarre – to say the least.
Richard also notes in his post that “the “beauty” (if such a phrase is appropriate) of a drone attack is that, like the Mossad assassination of nuclear scientists, it’s hard to figure out precisely who is to blame. In that sense, it raises the temperature, but does so in a carefully calibrated way.” Wrong. Drones are such complex and still reasonably rare machines it would actually be extremely easy to identify where one comes from. It doesn’t seem likely Iran built a perfect imitation Israeli drone, gave it to Hezbollah to fly it into Israel, only to have it crashed without causing any real damage.
Finally, eyewitnesses described seeing a typically dual-tailed drone clearly in distress with one wing bursting into flame shortly before impact – not exactly the behaviour of a kamikaze aircraft, manned or unmanned.
But the real question is: who would have us believe this highly improbable hypothesis is true? Iran is mostly trying to avoid escalation. Why it would to give Israel a perfect casus belli by launching such a blatant military attack, which causes no significant damage, is beyond me; but I can well imagine plenty of people within the IDF who would dearly like a casus belli to bolster their case for an attack on Iran. If I were Richard, I would be extremely suspicious of any information – especially uncorroborated information – that helps the pro-war camp in Israel. Not to mention that the source might be acting in good faith, but is being hoodwinked by his own sources within the system.
Richard has provided some of the more important exposes about top-secret development in Israel over the past two years, relying to quite a strong degree on his own faith in the integrity of his sources. Sometimes it’s all you have to go by. But if his source is who he says he is, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that someone in the Israeli establishment appears to have been tempted to use Richard’s blog as the perfect channel for a bit of psy-ops.
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*Correction 31/01 – I misread this particular detail in Richard’s post; and I should’ve realised as i typed the distance from our northern border to the crash site is 160kms at most. Silly me. But it’s little more than a typo that doesn’t in the least affect the implausibility of Richard’s source’s story. Hezbollah would still need to fly an aircraft through most of populated Israel undetected, which doesn’t make any sense, and then crash it, which makes even less sense.
Dimi (Dmitry) Reider is an Israeli journalist. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times,The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, and Index on Censorship. "Dimi's Notes" has been quoted and referenced by the following publications:
