Today is not only a day of sadness for fallen Israeli soldiers, it’s also one of public declarations that all those bloody conflicts were righteous and necessary – just like the current ones and those that lie ahead. 

Maybe in another country, a country that goes to war once in a generation or longer, Memorial Day can be a day strictly of sadness for the soldiers who were killed, and can even be a day to look back and ask: Was that war, or the one before it, really necessary? Did some of these soldiers we’re mourning, did this family’s son, really have to die like that, before his time?

But in Israel, where Memorial Day began last evening and ends this evening, the opposite happens: It is the one day of the year where it’s absolutely forbidden to question the justice of any war or clash in which any Israeli soldier ever died. On Israel’s Memorial Day, every war, every operation, every hostile encounter in this country’s history is implicitly declared to have been unavoidable, an unquestionable act of national self-defense. On Memorial Day, even Israel’s most controversial wars, those that are by now often described publicly as wars of choice, of missed opportunities, of aggression – the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982-85 Lebanon War, the late-1980s first Intifada, and the hundreds of attacks and counter-attacks of this occupation and that war of attrition – are implicitly declared to have been morally pure, and all the soldiers who were killed in them died for the most glorious possible cause. On Memorial Day, each and every one of this country’s thousands of bloody fights was a fight for its existence, freedom and security, as the nation’s leaders, followed by the media, solemnly intone.

But what else are they going to say? That some of these fallen soldiers, or a lot of these fallen soldiers, died in vain? That the government, backed by the public, sent them into wars that shouldn’t have been fought, or exposed them to guerrilla attack by acts of aggression? Obviously, no government or army leader wants to say that – on Memorial Day or any other day – and the great majority of the public doesn’t want to hear that, and I imagine that very few families of fallen soldiers want to hear it, either. (Although some do.)

So Memorial Day...

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In remarks to Haaretz today, ‘senior Israeli official’ shows Netanyahu to be the rejectionist, making it easier for Abbas to take ‘unilateral’ steps soon.  

Well, that was quick. No sooner does John Kerry wind up his first trip to Israel-Palestine to restart the peace process than the Netanyahu government publicly trashes his plans. Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid reported today that a “senior Israeli official” said Kerry asked Netanyahu to free prisoners, transfer weapons to the Palestinian Authority and give up control of certain parts of the West Bank for the sake of Palestinian economic projects. Netanyahu, however, won’t consider any of these “confidence-building measures” until after peace talks get underway, said the official.

The Catch-22 here is that Netanyahu’s conditions for starting negotiations ensure that they won’t start. Kerry, reasonably enough, wanted Israel and the Palestinians to try to solve their long list of disputes in stages, and to start with borders and security arrangements. That would require Netanyahu to delineate for the first time where he thinks the borders of a Palestinian state should lie, something PA President Mahmoud Abbas, reasonably enough, is asking for. Netanyahu, though, doesn’t want to give the Palestinians anything, certainly not a state, so he’s insisting that the peace talks address all the most contentious issues at once. Haaretz:

This is the argument of someone who has no intention of reaching an agreement, who only wants to structure the negotiations so the other guy says “no” before he does and thereby gets the blame for the talks’ failure. The truth is that in any good-faith negotiation, the more issues on which you reach agreement, the more incentive you have to compromise on the ones that remain. If the Palestinians got an acceptable deal from Israel on the borders of its state, they would have that much more motivation to give ground later on refugees, which is indeed necessary if they and Israel are ultimately to sign a peace treaty. Netanyahu, however, knows that if he divulges the borders he has in mind for this so-called Palestinian state, as well as the security arrangements he would demand of it, neither Abbas nor Kerry nor anyone else outside of Israel and the Republican Party would take him seriously as a partner for peace negotiations, and he would be blamed for torpedoing them at the start. Better, from Bibi’s point of view, to kick...

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The Holocaust lends itself perfectly to Israel’s two reigning ‘isms’ – nationalism and emotionalism. 

Aren’t historic events supposed to diminish in their impact over time? Not the Holocaust, not in Israel. Today’s Holocaust Remembrance Day just seems bigger, more enveloping, more sanctimonious, more commanding than ever.

John Kerry just arrived last night to kick off what is supposed to be the Obama administration’s last-gasp attempt at Middle East peacemaking, and I open up Yediot Aharonot – which, along with Channel 2, is the most accurate reflection of the Israeli public’s personality – and it’s page after page after page of Holocaust – more than half the paper.  I don’t remember Israeli newspapers giving that much space to Yom Hashoah. Even Haaretz went to town today.

The official explanation for this would be that the Holocaust survivors are dying of old age and soon there won’t be any of them left, so this is a way of hanging onto to them, or showing them respect at the end of their lives. But knowing how Israel has treated Holocaust survivors over the decades, especially when they first arrived, I’m not convinced. I think the reason for this counter-intuitively growing impact of the Holocaust, and by extension Yom Hashoah, is because it lends itself perfectly to the two reigning “isms” in this country – nationalism and emotionalism.

The connection between nationalism and the Holocaust isn’t new, of course, but with Bibi Netanyahu settling into his third term as prime minister, the association has become so much more raw and crude than ever before. Last night at Yad Vashem, Netanyahu delivered his annual Yom-Hashoah-bomb-Iran speech, and nobody raised an eyebrow – it’s become a ritual, like matza on Passover, and the idea of using the Holocaust to beat the drums for war with Iran has become so matter-of-fact around here, so embedded in the culture, that nobody notices it anymore.

The other factor in the Holocaust’s increasing impact – the rise of emotionalism, of tear-jerking as the key to mass appeal – is relatively new...

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Given the likely options, I’m glad Obama is coming here tomorrow to do nothing rather than to try to revive the peace process. Today, reviving the peace process, Obama-style, would mean coercing Mahmoud Abbas to enter negotiations with Netanyahu in return for nothing, or next to nothing, such as a token prisoner release, some musical chairs with a few checkpoints and a vague statement of good intentions. And for that, Netanyahu would get what he very much wants: “peace negotiations” with no end, which would provide diplomatic cover for his terribly right-wing, settlement-crazy new government. At the same time, Abbas would be constrained from taking any more “unilateral actions” like going to the U.N., or to The Hague, or seeking any advantage outside the framework of negotiations opposite Bibi Netanyahu and under the auspices of the United States, otherwise known as Israel’s lawyer.

That would be much, much worse than the nothing Obama reportedly plans to achieve in his visit this week (beyond getting the Israeli public to warm up to him, which I’m sure he’s capable of doing, and which will last until some future moment when he says one mildly critical word about Israeli policy or Israeli anything, at which point the Israeli public will forget this charm offensive in Jerusalem as if it never was).

Obama tried to revive the peace process once before, at the start of his presidency, when he demanded that Israel impose a total settlement freeze and agree to a Palestinian state on the pre-Six Day War borders with land swaps. Now that would have been something, had he stuck to his guns. But he “learned his lesson,” which is that the domestic political price for taking on the occupation is much, much higher than what he’s willing to pay, so the only real pressure Obama’s been willing to apply since then is on the Palestinian side, notably at the U.N.

Who needs more of that? I only hope he keeps to his plans this time, and that by the end of the visit, those of us who’d like to see freedom and democracy around here will be able to say, as sincerely as hell: Mr. President, thanks for nothing.

Related:
Ariel students call for Obama protest – in comically broken English
Waiting for Obama: Hebron youth take cue from U.S. civil rights movement

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Netanyahu used to be in a class by himself as a vainly handsome Israeli political leader obsessed with his appearance. Now he’s got company, and competition. 

Oh God — Netanyahu and Lapid in the same cabinet meetings. I don’t know if so much preening, posing and mugging can be contained in one room without the walls starting to buckle. One thing I advise Lapid — don’t wear a tie. Nobody, but nobody can knot a tie like the Beebs. Check out that knot — it’s so symmetrical, so solid and tightly-packed — and you rarely see even a sliver of white shirt between it and the collar. So Lapid, buddy, stick with the black T-shirts and blazers. If you really want to throw down on Bibi, wear the leather jacket. Do you have a motorcycle? If not, buy one.

It used to be that Bibi Netanyahu was in a class by himself as a vainly handsome Israeli political leader obsessed with his appearance, one who had a strange love affair going with the camera, who always seemed to be looking in the mirror. Ariel Sharon’s nickname for him was “ha’doogman” — the fashion model. The more up-to-date term is metrosexual. Not only does Netanyahu comb his hair over to hide the baldness, but he’s been dyeing his white hair gray for over a decade. You see him on TV and he doesn’t have a hair or a thread close to being out of place. He even keeps his facial expressions to a minimum, like he doesn’t want to spoil the look. He’s taken on the aspect of a wax figure, or a manikin in a Brooks Brothers store. He looks perfect — not particularly human, but perfect.

And now there are going to be two raging metrosexuals at the top of Israeli government. I don’t think I have to make the case that Yair Lapid is head over heels in love with his face, his hair, his body, his comforts. He’s given up the gel, and reportedly the cigars, too, but not all the million different little tilts of the head and grins and eyelash-battings, not the pouting stares. “We’ve come to make a change,” he says with that plaintive look. This guy is a...

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The controversial Venezuelan leader, who died Tuesday, did more good than bad – and the good he did was extraordinary.    

Any political leader who buddies up conspicuously with Ahmadinejad and Assad, showing indifference to their victims and freedom-seeking opponents at home, loses his shot at dying a hero, at least with me. So, like most left-liberals, I have mixed feelings about the legacy of Hugo Chavez. His alliance with the Iranian and Syrian regimes were the worst things that could be said against him, so I’ll deal with them first: They are black marks on his record, but they do not blacken it entirely. They do not make  Chavez a moral untouchable – because most respected modern Western leaders, certainly in the United States and Israel, have buddied up with any number of dictators across Asia, Africa and Latin America who made A’jad’s and even Assad’s crimes look tame.

There is one other capital offense that’s been associated with Chavez, but this charge is pretty hollow: that he fomented anti-Semitism. He was certainly hostile to Israel, comparing its bombing campaign in the Second Lebanon War to the Holocaust, which was typically reckless Chavez demagoguery, and breaking off relations with Israel after Operation Cast Lead, which I can’t fault him for on moral grounds. Regarding the claim that he encouraged the harassment of Venezuelan Jews, it’s based on a raid on a Caracas Jewish school by police who said they were looking for evidence in a crime, and the accusation by opposition journalists and local Jewish activists that state intelligence spied on a Jewish organization it considered a Mossad front. In all, I’d say that falls well short of the evidence necessary to call Chavez an anti-Semite. Also, it’s nothing compared to the truly vicious anti-Semitism practiced by some of the fascist South American generals of the past whom Israel did business with. Furthermore, Arabs in Israel suffer incomparably worse bigotry and abuse in a week than Jews in Venezuela did during Chavez’s 14 years as president. So I think the accusation against him of anti-Semitism not only doesn’t stand up, it backfires.

There are lots of other things to be said against him – he was an autocrat...

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People who see Netanyahu as the great Jewish avenger should know how low he’s willing to go in exploiting the memory of Jewish suffering.  

I can never get over the shamelessness with which Israeli nationalist power freaks will exploit people’s memories of anti-Semitic persecution for their own low purposes. Nobody’s better at it than Netanyahu; he can barely make a speech without waving around a document or two from some Holocaust-era archive. And he’s always got that furious expression on his face, as if to warn his audience not to even dare think that he’s faking it, that he’s using the memory of Jewish tragedy in the most calculated way, strictly to help him and his team get away with some new or old outrage – bombing Iran, killing Palestinians, building settlements, whatever. Netanyahu is very far from being the only Israeli nationalist known to work this scam, of course, but he’s the best at it. He looks so hurt and angry up there when he’s going on about Jewish victimhood, and he’s so audacious in wrapping himself in that mantle, that the average shmo is too intimidated to even say to himself that this guy is obviously laying it on too thick, he’s been doing it for 30 years, it’s a highly polished act. After all, that’s Bibi Netanyahu up there; snickering at him is like snickering at the Holocaust. So our leader goes on getting away with it.

I wish people who see Bibi as the Jewish avenger, brave and true, would be aware of how this guy used the memory of Jewish persecution yesterday. He broke new ground. For the purpose of removing Yair Lapid as the obstacle to his forming a right-wing/ultra-Orthodox government, Netanyahu likened the Yesh Atid party leader’s refusal to sit in a government with Haredi parties to past boycotts against Jews. He also identified Lapid’s stance with current international boycotts of Israel and of products made in the settlements. For the goal of pressuring Naftali Bennett, leader of the settler-backed Habayit Hayehudi party, to break his alliance with Lapid and join up with the Haredi parties in his next government, Netanyahu told a news conference last night:

As Jews who have suffered from bans, we cry out in protest. So, Mr. Bennett, are you with Lapid, that boycotter of Jews, or are you against him?

I suppose I should give Bibi...

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How the British Board of Jewish Deputies and its allies are smearing a decent critic of Israel as an anti-Semite – and the success they’re having.

The view in Israel of British Jewry is that they’re cowed by traditional British anti-Semitism and running scared from the “Muslim takeover” of the country. They’re not as chutzpahdik as the American Jews, supposedly. But I think Israel is selling the British Jews short, or at least their leaders. For the last month, the country’s Jewish machers have been smearing a member of Parliament as an anti-Semite with the sort of cynicism and relentlessness that could make their American counterparts envious. Chuck Hagel, meet David Ward.

A month ago, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ward, an MP from the Liberal Democratic party, posted this statement on his website:

Does that sound anti-Semitic? To the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and other stalwart communal bodies, it most certainly does. They immediately seized on Ward’s use of the term “the Jews” to accuse him of being an anti-Semite, and since then have been pressuring the Lib Dems to teach him a lesson. The party has obliged, chastising Ward publicly and ordering him this week to consult the party’s “Friends of Israel” organization to “identify and agree [on] language that will be proportionate and precise” when speaking out on the Mideast conflict, according to yesterday’s Jerusalem Post. (Note: In its properly outraged coverage of this story, the Jerusalem Post has taken to omitting Ward’s opening phrase, “Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools,” when quoting the statement from his website. Wonder why.)

Ward, an MP from Bradford East and a member of Parliament’s Britain-Palestine caucus, has been pretty defiant. While taking pains to say he didn’t mean to offend Jews, he’s stood by his statement about Israel. When Sky News suggested he was blaming Jews in general for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, he replied:

He went on to tell The Guardian:

The British macherdom is not amused. The Deputies and Leadership Council rebuked the Lib Dems for “a pedestrian and lackluster response to what amounts to anti-Semitism at the heart of parliament.” The Holocaust and Educational...

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Threat of Palestinian Authority’s collapse forces Netanyahu, who has humiliated Abbas and his people as often as possible, to try to placate them.

At the beginning of this week, when Palestinian riots threatened to get out of hand, especially if one of the hunger-striking prisoners died, what did Netanyahu do? He gave in. He announced on Sunday he was giving the Palestinian Authority its customs taxes for January, which he’d held back to punish Mahmoud Abbas for winning recognition for Palestinian statehood at the UN last November.

Palestinians throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, PA security troops do nothing to stop them – and Bibi Netanyahu immediately rewards them with a hundred million dollars! (That’s how he would frame it if some other prime minister had done what he just did.)

What’s going on here? Answer: Netanyahu is scared. What he’s scared of most, I think, is that the PA will collapse, or effectively collapse, meaning it will stop playing Israel’s collaborator by keeping a tight lid on Palestinian rebellion, and thereby force Israeli troops to go back into the cities, villages and refugee camps of the West Bank and do all the dirty work themselves – 24/7, just like they did before the Oslo Accords.

That is the Israeli nightmare, or at least the nightmare of Israelis who get paid to oversee the West Bank. If the PA stops policing the Palestinians and the IDF and Border Police take their place, not only is this going to require tens of thousands of Israelis, including reservists, to go put the Palestinians back in their cages and keep them there, it’s going to mean a return to the world’s TV screens of the David vs. Goliath scenes of the first Intifada 25 years ago. It’s going to mean not only Israeli deaths and injuries, but a much, much greater number of Palestinian ones.  If, in such a situation, the Palestinians were to stick to rocks and Molotov cocktails against Israel’s firepower, and, above all, if this were to happen on the watch of right-wing rejectionist Netanyahu, this would be a disaster for Israel and victory road for the Palestinians.

It may not happen, but that’s the direction things...

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After signing Tzipi Livni onto his coalition, Netanyahu doesn’t need Yair Lapid anymore – he can have the haredim and Naftali Bennett while pacifying Obama.   

Give the devil his due: Bibi pulled off a masterstroke yesterday by signing Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party to his coalition. Now he’s got clear sailing to his ideal government – one made up of the right wing and ultra-Orthodox, his base, but one that also keeps Obama and the Europeans off his back by giving the appearance – completely hollow – that he intends to try to move toward peace with the Palestinians. That’s Livni’s role, and she’ll be happy to play it; she’s been given the job of heading up negotiations with the Palestinians, which is what she always wanted, and it saves her from dying politically in the opposition with her six measly Knesset seats.

The important thing is that Netanyahu doesn’t need Yair Lapid anymore. Lapid was a problem – if Netanyahu gave in to his core demand to draft the haredim into military or civilian national service, he would have a haredi intifada on his hands and the haredim for enemies. But if on the other hand he rebuffed Lapid, whose Yesh Atid is the second largest party, he wouldn’t have enough support in hand to build a coalition, for which he needs a majority of the 120-member Knesset. But now he’s got Livni’s Hatnuah. Which means he can scoop up the haredim as well as Naftali Bennett’s far-right Jewish Home party, which, despite Bennett’s rhetoric, doesn’t want to draft the haredim because that would mean a schism with the settlers, and really only wants to expand settlements, strengthen Jewish nationalism and bash the Palestinians, which Likud-Beiteinu and the prospective haredi parties in the government want to do, too, and which Livni won’t have the power to stop.

Given the choice of making an enemy out of Lapid or out of the haredim, Netanyahu was always a thousand times more scared of alienating the haredim. After all, they will be around long after Lapid is gone, which may happen earlier than expected if and when he is consigned to the opposition, where neither he nor his middle-class constituency ever wanted to be.

So Bibi, after seemingly being stymied...

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Over the violent protests of its fascist fan club, Beitar Jerusalem makes good on its promise to bring two Muslim players onto team. A small victory over racism, but a victory nonetheless. 

Even if it’s a drop in the ocean, it’s a pretty big drop: the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team, symbol of Israeli racism at its rawest, has been integrated with Muslim players – and it was done, in a manner of speaking, over the dead bodies of the team’s fascist youth movement, La Famiglia. The turning point came in the middle of the night last Thursday when arsonists torched the team’s headquarters, destroying its old pennants, jerseys, photographs and other mementos of its 76-year history. At yesterday’s game, dozens of La Famiglia fans were barred by police from entering Teddy Stadium, another bunch were kicked out during the game (along with some Israeli Arab fans of the opposing Sakhnin team, who were whistling during the singing of “Hatikva”). When one of Beitar’s two Chechen Muslim players made his debut, the cheers from the home stands reportedly were louder than the boos.

“We took an important step and we’re moving forward. In the end all the fans will understand that this is a done deal and there’s no turning back,” Beitar chairman Itzik Kornfein told Yedioth Ahronot.

Still, La Famiglia, whose ranks number in the thousands and who scream every sort of filth at Arab and black players, is not going away. When the police presence at Beitar games starts to thin out, probably next weekend, they will be back in full cry, or close to it. Anti-Arab and anti-black racism is seen and heard from hardcore fans of many Israeli teams (and from those of many European teams, for a little perspective) and this disease is not about to be eradicated. But its spread in Israel was just stopped; in fact, it was forced to retreat. Beitar’s ban on Arab players, unique among Israeli sports teams, is La Famiglia’s honor, and it enforced this ban from year to year through a reign of terror on Beitar’s management. “70 years of principle,” as a placard at a recent game put it. But despite the movement’s best efforts, Muslims Jebrail Kadiev and Zaur Sadayev, even though they have to go around with bodyguards off the field, are playing for Beitar Jerusalem. The soccer fascists of Israel’s capital...

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This week’s publication of a U.S.-funded study cleared the Palestinians of charges that their schoolbooks ‘demonize’ Israel. This was not, however, the first hoop they’ve been made to jump through, and it won’t be the last.

The Israeli and U.S. Jewish establishment reaction to the terrible news that the Palestinians don’t demonize Jews in their textbooks reminded me of the long-forgotten uproar over the Palestinian Covenant.  Same bullshit. The stout-hearted nationalist Jews in the U.S. and Israel were saying in unison, “How can we ever trust the Palestinians to make peace when their covenant talks about ”liberating all of Palestine’?” And they made this their cause celebre – they lobbied Congress, they lobbied Clinton (this was in the mid-to-late 1990s), and Clinton pressured Arafat, until finally Arafat convened the relevant PLO council and they voted to take out the offending phrases. Clinton even went to Gaza at the end of 1998 for the historic event. He told the assembly: “You have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there.”

I loved that. Nobody in Israel, no Jew on earth gave a good goddamn that they changed the Palestinian Covenant. But then none of them cared about the original “liberating all of Palestine” Palestinian Covenant, either. As soon as the vote in Gaza to amend it was finally taken, the whole issue vanished for the Israeli and American Jewish right as if it had never existed. This particular orange had been squeezed dry, and now it was time to move on – to find another issue over which to put the Palestinians on the defensive, to keep the world’s flashlight in their eyes and not in Israel’s, to find another hoop for them to jump through before Israel might be asked to slow the occupation train down just a tad.

So it is with the Palestinian textbooks. All this supposed distress over what the Palestinians are teaching their children about Israel and the Jews, this insistence that they clean up their textbooks as a condition for “peace”  - it’s another one of the old “stop Oslo” ploys of the Israeli and American Jewish right. A bunch of right-wing propagandists like Itamar Marcus and Palestinian Media Watch have been harping on all this “demonization” in Palestinian textbooks,...

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Under pressure over the issues of Iran and Israel at his Senate confirmation hearing, Obama’s nominee for defense secretary caves in completely.

Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing of Chuck Hagel was something out of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” or the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee sessions. “Senator Hagel, are you now or have you ever been a realist?” “Your soul is in peril, Senator – recant!”

And Hagel recanted, over and over again. Under pressure on Iran and Israel (among other taboo subjects), he apologized to his inquisitors for referring to the “Jewish lobby” (“I should have said ‘pro-Israel lobby’”), apologized for saying it “intimidated” people (“I should have said ‘influenced’”), caved in over saying the lobby had gotten Congress to do “dumb” things (couldn’t think of a dumb thing it had ever gotten Congress to do).

On Iran he recanted for opposing military force to stop it from going nuclear (“All options must be on the table,” and “My policy is one of prevention, and not of containment”), recanted for suggesting that the Revolutionary Guard was not a terrorist organization, also recanted for suggesting that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization.

Best of all, he apologized for having said Israel was not justified in “keeping Palestinians caged up like animals.” (“If I had the opportunity to edit that, like many things I’ve said, I would like to go back and change the words and meaning. I regret using that choice of words.”)

What an embarrassing thing to watch. What a blood-chilling, Orwellian  bunch, these interrogators, especially Lindsey Graham. Feeding them is the most virulent branch of the pro-war/anti-Muslim lobby: Sheldon Adelson, the Emergency Committee for Israel and Weekly Standard magazine, led by their hit men William Kristol, Michael Goldfarb and Noah Pollak.

Hagel needs five Republican votes to get confirmed as secretary of defense; reports are that it’s touch and go. At this point, I don’t think it matters; he’s been so compromised, so smacked around by Israel’s enforcers, that he’d probably be afraid to say anything but “yes” to Netanyahu once he got to the Pentagon.

This was a spectacle of America and Israel at their worst. It was the worst of the Obama administration, too, a reminder of why this president’s second term is unlikely to be any better than his first as far as the Middle East...

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