Articles & Essays - May/June 2007

See below for excerpts to articles listed.

Abbas advisor says Hamas fighting collaborators - by Ali Waked - 06.28.07 - ynetnews.com

Tony Blair on Work Release: The Peace Envoy - by Gilad Atzmon - 06/29/07 - Counter Punch

Academic Injustices: Fasting for Justice at DePaul - by Daniel Klimek - 06/29/07 - Counter Punch

Six videos that document the horrors of the Israeli Occupation. - 06/29/07 - desertpeace.blogspot.com

The Mind in Chains: Why They Want to Fire Ward Churchill - by Eva Liddell - 06/26/07 - ICH

Ahmadinejad: “I am not anti-Semitic”: Palestinians should Decide on Two-State Solution - by Juan Cole - 06/27/07

Student Anger at the Denial of Tenure for Two Progressive Professors: Boycotting DePaul - by Kathryn Webber - 06/22/07 - Counter Punch

The Palestine follies - by Jeffrey D. Sachs - 06/23/07 - Jordan Times

Everything is possible [one state or two?] - by Yigal Bronner - 06/22/07 - Electronic Intifada

Hamas acted on a very real fear of a US-sponsored coup - by Jonathan Steele - 06/22/07 - Guardian

Report: High Court permits torture of Palestinians - by Aviram Zino -05/30/07 - ynetnews.com

The Situation in Gaza - by Juan Cole - 06/19/07

Hamas Holds the High Cards - by Robert Scheer - 06/19/07 - truthdig.com

Carter: Stop favoring Fatah over Hamas - 06/19/07 - Jerusalem Post

Crocodile Tears: The Gaza Cage - by Uri Avnery - 06/16-17/07 - Counter Punch

Not for sale: Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy government - by Khalid Amayreh - 06/18/07 - ICH

After Gaza, some question who was overthrowing whom - by Adam Entous - 06/17/07 - Reuters

Let Hamas govern - by Sami El-youssef - 06/18/07 - Independent

The Wages of Corruption and Occupation: Welcome to “Palestine” - by Robert Fisk - 06/16-17/07 - Counter Punch

Abbas sacks Hamas-led government - 06/15/07 - BBC

Gaza fighting descends into new brutality - by Nidal al-Mughrabi - 06/12/07 - Reuters

Hamas seizes Fatah security headquarters - by Sarah El Deeb - 06/12/07 - Yahoo

DePaul Genuflects to Dershowitz - by Howard Friel - 06/12/07 - ZNet

DePaul U. Turns Norman Finkelstein Down for Tenure - by Jennifer Howard - 06/11/07 - Chronicle of Higher Education

6 Days of War - Norman Finkelstein Interviewed - 06/06/07 - Chicago Public Radio

The Dangerous Potent Elixir of Christian Zionism - by Pat Morrison - April 2007 Issue - Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

FAQ on the 1967 War - by Haitham Sabbah - 05/31/07 - Sabbah

Good Riddance Attention Whore - by Cindy Sheehan - 05/30/07 - Peace Palestine

The Sixty Year Wound: To the Shores of Tripoli- by Uri Avnery - 05/30/07 - Counter Punch

Secret memo shows Israel knew Six Day War was illegal - 05/27/07 - Independent

The Commonplace Cowardice of Responsible Professors: What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia - by Robert Jensen - 05/25/07 - Counter Punch

Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg - Logos 6.1-2 - winter-spring 2007 - © Logosonline 2007

Abbas advisor says Hamas fighting collaborators - by Ali Waked - 06.28.07 - ynetnews.com

Tony Blair on Work Release: The Peace Envoy

What a great day for peace enthusiasts! A new envoy to the Middle East has been appointed for the Quartet, and it’s no other than the former British PM, Tony Blair. Blair, the man who gave the Israelis the green light to flatten Beirut. Blair, the man who started an illegal war in Iraq. Blair, a man who, according to the Geneva Conventions, is to be held personally responsible for more than 700,000 dead in Iraq for failing to ‘protect civilian populations against certain consequences of war [1]. A man who is supposed to be charged for genocide at The Hague. That’s right, a man who should end his life behind bars is now becoming a peace envoy.

by Gilad Atzmon - 06/29/07 - Counter Punch

Academic Injustices: Fasting for Justice at DePaul

It is absolutely astonishing to have to acknowledge the troubling truth underneath the reality that such an eminent and courageous scholar like Norman Finkelstein can be refused tenure. Dr. Finkelstein’s books are international bestsellers that have been translated into 46 foreign editions, more than the work of the entire faculty of DePaul’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences combined. His contributions to Middle Eastern studies are monumental both to our country and to our culture. However, it is no secret that the ideological, pro-Israeli bias of our government has historically penetrated other societal venues as well, such as academia, therefore influencing “scholarship.”

When Joan Peters explained to millions of Americans that there, in actuality, is no such thing as a Palestinian, writing the highly successful book From Time Immemorial and, in the process, distorting Middle Eastern history for our manipulated masses, a graduate student at Princeton exposed her work as a colossal hoax. Documenting the hoax, he reestablished an honest debate on Zionism and awakened the conscience of deceived audiences.

That student was Norman Finkelstein.

When Daniel Jonah Goldhagen purported that the secret of the Nazi Holocaust resided in the theory that ordinary Germans were driven to murder by fanatical anti-Semitism, writing the greatly successful book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a scholar exposed the misrepresentations of sources and contradictions within Goldhagen’s argument. That same scholar authored The Holocaust Industry, the international bestseller that Raul Hilberg, the most distinguished historian on the Nazi Holocaust, has hailed as “a breakthrough” in the field.

That breakthrough came from Norman Finkelstein.

When Alan Dershowitz argued to millions that Israel is a beacon of democracy and an almost ideal abider of human rights, in the vastly successful book The Case for Israel, a professor at DePaul exposed the book as a monumental fraud, plagiarized excessively from the Joan Peters tract and falsifying the human rights record in the Occupied Territories. Documenting the fraud through excessive detail and observance from the world’s mainstream human rights organizations-Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem-the DePaul professor again, through muckraking scholarship deserving of a Pulitzer, reestablished an honest debate on the Middle East by exposing another distorter of history and rebuffing all of his falsifications.

That DePaul professor was Norman Finkelstein, whose contributions to the scholarship of our time is irreplaceable and whose perpetual battle for social justice is a commendable example for all scholars and students to follow.

by Daniel Klimek - 06/29/07 - Counter Punch

Six videos that document the horrors of the Israeli Occupation.

Presented here are six videos that will not be screened on American or British televisions. Nor will they be shown in the Cinema Houses there. Six videos that document the horrors of the Israeli Occupation.

06/29/07 - desertpeace.blogspot.com

The Mind in Chains: Why They Want to Fire Ward Churchill

From the first grade on and up through the university system citizens are systemically taught not to judge for themselves. We are taught we have freedom of speech but we are trained not to think. We think we have academic freedom because we are trained to believe we are free. The ultimate goal of our educational system, the dogmatic smothering of minds is overseen by the Department of Education, state boards of regents and the university education departments. Universities are one of the most policed sectors of the State. Should a university professor happen to defy the knowledge factory he has defied the State which aggrandizes itself through the university system. …

It is interesting that Ward Churchill’s essay dealt with the fact that if we have a bad foreign policy like the one after 1945 we might get it thrown back in our faces sooner or later. But our foreign policies had been resisted long before 9/11. Native Americans fought a courageous war against the whites for four hundred years. When they formally surrendered, they were thrown into concentration camps euphemistically called “reservations” where they’ve been ever since. See what I mean about comparing ourselves to ourselves? What do we need the Germans for?

We need Germany as the ultimate evil because if Germany is the ultimate evil the U.S. is less evil. That could be one of the reasons that the university system supported Steven Spielberg’s project to bring in thousands of computers as instructional tools teaching the German Holocaust to students of color. Black and Hispanic kids are taught that if they think they had it bad look at the Jews they had it worse. Two hundred and fifty years of chattel slavery undermined. The American Mythos preserved.

by Eva Liddell - 06/26/07 - ICH

Ahmadinejad: “I am not anti-Semitic”: Palestinians should Decide on Two-State Solution

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be ‘wiped off the face of the map.’

As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street).

If Ahmadinejad is a genocidal maniac who just wants to kill Jews, then why are there 20,000 Jews in Iran with a member of parliament in Tehran? Couldn’t he start at home if that was what he is really about?

I was talking to two otherwise well-informed Israeli historians a couple of weeks ago, and they expressed the conviction that Ahmadinejad had threatened to nuke Israel. I was taken aback. First of all, Iran doesn’t have a nuke. Second, there is no proof that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. Third, Ahmadinejad has denied wanting a bomb. Fourth, Ahmadinejad has never threatened any sort of direct Iranian military action against Israel. In other words, that is a pretty dramatic fear for educated persons to feel, on the basis of . . . nothing.

I renew my call to readers to write protest letters to newspapers and other media every time they hear it alleged that Ahmadinejad (or “Iran”!) has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” There is no such idiom in Persian and it is not what he said, and the mistranslation gives entirely the wrong impression. Wars can start over bad translations.

by Juan Cole - 06/27/07

Student Anger at the Denial of Tenure for Two Progressive Professors: Boycotting DePaul

The students were thrown out of Holtschneider’s office under threat of expulsion, and a faculty member and two alumni attorneys were threatened with arrest if they remained. Students then moved the sit-in to the Student Center on DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus, where they remained until they were threatened with arrest. Two students then camped outside the campus rectory.

At graduation ceremonies on June 17, students in the audience dropped two banners reading “Tenure for Finkelstein and Larudee” when the university provost began to speak. Nearly 25 graduates refused to shake Holtschneider’s hand, instead handing him a letter to inform him they would not be supporting the university financially or otherwise because of the tenure decisions.

There is an ongoing dispute between the administration and faculty at DePaul over the question of an appeals process for tenure decisions. The administration maintains that there is no appeals process, and the faculty insists there is.

The Faculty Council of the university and the Faculty Governance Council of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences each voted to authorize an appeals process, and the Faculty Governance Council voted unanimously to investigate the UBTP [University Board on Tenure and Promotion]. Censure of the administration is also being discussed.

Students will begin a fast, starting June 25, to ensure that the administration knows their commitment is unwavering, and it will not be able to sweep this scandal under the rug during summer break.

A boycott of DePaul has been called, meaning that students are encouraged not to attend, and academics are asked not to speak on campus or apply for jobs there. The American Association of University Professors is considering censuring DePaul.

by Kathryn Webber - 06/22/07 - Counter Punch

The Palestine follies

American foreign policy in the Middle East experienced yet another major setback this month, when Hamas, whose Palestinian government the United States had tried to isolate, routed the rival Fateh movement in Gaza. In response, Israel sealed Gaza’s borders, making life even more unbearable in a place wracked by violence, poverty and despair.

It is important that we recognise the source of America’s failure, because it keeps recurring, making peace between Israel and Palestine more difficult. The roots of failure lie in the US and Israeli governments’ belief that military force and financial repression can lead to peace on their terms, rather than accepting a compromise on terms that the Middle East, the rest of the world and, crucially, most Israelis and Palestinians, accepted long ago. …

For the past 10 years, the greatest practical barrier to peace has been Israel’s failure to carry out any true withdrawal to its 1967 borders, owing to the political weight of hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and the religious and secular communities that support them. This remains the crucial truth; the rest follows as tragedy.

Even when the US or Israel have tabled peace offers, such as at Camp David in 2000, they have included convoluted ways to sustain the West Bank settlements and large settler populations, while denying an economically viable and contiguous Palestinian state.

by Jeffrey D. Sachs - 06/23/07 - Jordan Times

Everything is possible [one state or two?]

So, is a solution possible? Some say that the reality that Israel has created on the ground is irrecoverable and that the partition of the historical Palestine into two states is no longer practical. Others argue that it is the one-state solution which is infeasible, as Israelis will never agree to a power-sharing deal of the Northern Ireland type.

Both arguments are wrong — nothing is impossible. De Gaul pulled all of France’s million settlers out of Algeria when few believed he would. For decades, South African whites said they will never agree to share power with the country’s black majority, and then, overnight, they agreed to do exactly that. The Iron Wall fell, and so did the Berlin Wall. As we do not know the future, we have no way of ascertaining the impossible.

But if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to find a just and stable solution — one state, two states, some other solution — this will have to involve a true sharing of land, water, and, indeed, power. It will have to be the result of bilateral negotiation between two equal partners. It will have to allow both groups to exercise their cultural and political rights, to hold on to their narratives, languages, and religious traditions.

To such true sharing, the Zionist movement has never agreed. Some argue that the 1947 partition plan amounted to a sincere offer to share the land. But everyone who studied the history of the region knows that the Jewish subscription to this plan was meant to seize an “acre here” while waiting for the “acre there” to materialize. The Yeshuv had no intention to settle for what it was offered then. Others say that in Oslo Israel truly intended to share the land with the PLO, but ask any Palestinian in the West Bank: The Oslo 1990s, when Israel doubled the settlements’ population, built many new colonies, and erected the outposts, were the worst decade of Israeli occupation — until the 2000s, that is.

The well-oiled machine of push-and-grab has been running for decades without ever stopping. Indeed, it steadily gained momentum and has almost a life of its own now. The ears of Israelis have become so accustomed to its constant sound — the rattle-and-hum of demolition and uprooting to make room for new settlers — that they no longer hear it. They hear their occasional calls for peace. They hear when they are shot at. But they long ago stopped hearing the monotonous drilling of the colonizing machine, and they cannot imagine the quiet that will result from turning it off.

by Yigal Bronner - 06/22/07 - Electronic Intifada

Hamas acted on a very real fear of a US-sponsored coup

Reports have been circulating for months of a more sinister side to the boycott. According to them, the US decided last year on a plan to arm and train Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential guard in a deliberate effort to confront and defeat Hamas militarily. Israel has already locked up several dozen Hamas legislators and mayors from the West Bank. The next stage was to do the same in Gaza but have Palestinians, rather than Israelis, run the crackdown.

Arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan’s supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua’s elected government in the 1980s.

Documents doing the rounds in the Middle East purport to have evidence for Abrams’s “hard coup” strategy. One text recounts Washington’s objectives as expressed in US officials’ conversations with an Arab government. These are, among others, “to maintain President Abbas and Fatah as the centre of gravity on the Palestinian scene”, “avoid wasting time in accommodating Hamas’s ideological conditions”, “undermine Hamas’s political status through providing for Palestinian economic needs”, and “strengthen the Palestinian president’s authority to be able to call and conduct early elections by autumn 2007″.

by Jonathan Steele - 06/22/07 - Guardian

Report: High Court permits torture of Palestinians

PCATI [Public Committee Against Torture in Israel] said in the report that it is no longer possible to limit the practice of torture to exceptional cases.

“Today in Israel, there is no effective barrier – not legal and certainly not ethical – that stands in the way of using torture. A secret service organization such as the GSS (Shin Bet) decides independently to use torture and, afterwards, investigates itself as to whether the use of interrogation was justified.

“The Justice Ministry – from the Attorney General through the State Attorney’s Office and the nameless GSS Ombudsman of Interogees’ Complaints – gives systematic and blind backing to the interrogation methods of the GSS. The legal system tends to avoid torture victims’ complaints,” the report said.

PCATI director Hannah Friedman said in the report’s closing paragraph that “when the nations of the world decided in the wake of the world wars of the last century to prohibit the use of torture absolutely and with no reservations, this was an attempt to denote an ethical boundary between the nations of the world and the old, cruel, racist, un-discriminatingly murderous world – to declare that there are deeds that democracies and decent people do not commit.

“Torture victims, in their painful testimonies, serve to warn us that this ethical boundary is blurred in our society. A state that views itself as a democracy committed to the protection of human rights cannot allow torture that is derived from the darkness of the Middle Ages,” she said.

by Aviram Zino -05/30/07 - ynetnews.com

The Situation in Gaza

It is to be expected that a lot of comment in the United States on these events will be rife with racist attitudes and polemical dismissals. The Palestinians have long been demonized by the Western media, apparently for not going along quietly with their expulsion from their homes, the large scale theft of their land, and their reduction to an almost slave-like status of statelessness. Palestinians are not intrinsically more violent than anyone else, not essentially less able to administer or govern than anyone else. Few countries have not had civil wars or at least major civil conflicts. The question should be not “Why are Palestinians like that?”– which is a racist question– but what social and economic factors are driving the present conflict?

Why is it that so little analysis is offered of why things have developed as they have? Isn’t anyone interested in the important differences between Gaza’s economy and that of the West Bank? Gaza is much poorer and much more isolated from the world. Is it any big surprise that its population is more radicalized and might be drawn into supporting Hamas?

The Gazan population is being thrown into more misery by an Israeli blockade of electricity, fuel and even food. (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that it will be a humanitarian blockade; if you believe that, I have a bridge over the River Jordan you can purchase inexpensively from me). UNRWA is warning against the blockade. With an unemployment rate of 50% and widespread malnutrition, caused by the ordinary everyday Israeli pressure on Gaza, the territory’s population can’t take much more extra deprivation without an immense human toll being exacted.

It seems obvious that Hamas will be overthrown in Gaza, jointly by Mahmud Abbas, Israel and the United States. But it seems unlikely that Mahmud Abbas will gain any genuine authority there if that is how he comes to power. And, the events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush’s “democratization” program for the “Greater Middle East.” The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the “Greater Middle East” looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.

If Bush and the Israelis couldn’t live with a Hamas electoral victory, they should have exluded Hamas from running a year and a half ago. The Egyptians don’t let explicitly religious parties contest elections, and a similar rule could have been made in Palestine. Holding an election, having people win it with whom you won’t deal, and then overturning the election with militias, is a recipe for violence and instability. That’s what happened in Algeria in the early 1990s, and it caused untold suffering.

The Israelis may be sighing a sigh of relief that the Palestinians are busy fighting one another for the moment. But what has happened is not good for Israel in the medium to long term, since I suspect it signals the end of the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. And, if you don’t have a two-state solution, ultimately the likelihood is that Israel will be stuck with the Palestinians as citizens. The world is not going to look the other way forever as they are kept stateless, poor, landless and hungry.

by Juan Cole - 06/19/07

Hamas Holds the High Cards

… it is also too late for the remnants of the PLO to once again unilaterally assert a claim to lead the Palestinians. Sure, the United States, Israel and the EU can throw aid and tax dollars their way, but if the price is that the PLO assist in crushing Hamas, or even sit idly by while Israeli troops reoccupy Gaza, there will be chaos. The only hope is for the funders, including Israel (which has withheld the tax monies paid by the Palestinians from them), to recognize that the Palestinian people need to make their own history. At this point, that must include Hamas, which it is hoped will be moved, as was the PLO, to accept Israel’s right to exist within borders that permit a viable Palestinian state.

That lesson of empowerment must also be applied throughout the region, from Lebanon to Iraq and Iran, where election results subvert the ambitions of the foreigners. Elections are great if they give the conqueror the results they want, but it is in the nature of things that people will not use the ballot to legitimize their oppression for long. The democracy project, ballyhooed by President Bush, founders on its failure to allow the will of the voters to be heard when they dare vote against U.S. policy.

by Robert Scheer - 06/19/07 - truthdig.com

Carter: Stop favoring Fatah over Hamas

Far from encouraging Hamas’s move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

“That action was criminal,” he said in a news conference after his speech.

“The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah,” he said.

06/19/07 - Jerusalem Post

Crocodile Tears: The Gaza Cage

What has caused the present explosion in the Gaza Strip?

The timing of Hamas’ decision to take over the Strip by force was not accidental. Hamas had many good reasons to avoid it. The organization is unable to feed the population. It has no interest in provoking the Egyptian regime, which is busy fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother–organization of Hamas. Also, the organization has no interest in providing Israel with a pretext for tightening the blockade.

But the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organizations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organizations with large quantities of weapons, in order to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But our government obeyed American orders, as usual.

The American aim is clear. President Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Palestine.

Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, “moderate” (i.e. obedient to American orders) and “pragmatic” (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders). And the more the Americans and Israelis lauded Dahlan, the more they undermined his standing among the Palestinians. Especially as Dahlan was away in Cairo, as if waiting for his men to receive the promised arms.

In the eyes of Hamas, the attack on the Fatah strongholds in the Gaza Strip is a preventive war. The organizations of Abbas and Dahlan melted like snow in the Palestinian sun. Hamas has easily taken over the whole Gaza Strip.

How could the American and Israeli generals miscalculate so badly? They are able to think only in strictly military terms: so–and–so many soldiers, so–and–so many machine guns. But in interior struggles in particular, quantitative calculations are secondary. The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them.

That is not a matter of Islamic fundamentalism. In this respect all nations are the same: they hate collaborators of a foreign occupier, whether they are Norwegian (Quisling), French (Petain) or Palestinian.

by Uri Avnery - 06/16-17/07 - Counter Punch

Not for sale: Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy government

Predictably, the US and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government. Moreover, the US and Israel have already signaled their enthusiastic willingness to lift all financial sanctions against the occupied West Bank, apparently to strengthen the Dahlan-Abbas camp against other Palestinians who refuse to be bribed or intimidated into giving in to Israeli insolence and arrogance of power.

The Fayyad Government may be temporarily pleased by the American and Israeli support. However, it should understand that American and Israeli backing is like a poisoned chalice.

Experience proved that in the Middle East any government or faction or organization backed by the US will be reviled by the masses. This is especially true in the occupied Palestinian territories where collaboration with Israel, which controls America’s politics and policies, is seen as ultimate treason.

by Khalid Amayreh - 06/18/07 - ICH

After Gaza, some question who was overthrowing whom

Many Western officials and analysts see the offensive as a pre-emptive strike by Hamas before Washington could build up Fatah. Hamas says it made its move against a U.S.-backed “coup”.

“(Hamas leaders) knew what was going on,” one senior Western diplomat said. “They knew Abbas was going to try to establish his authority. They read it in the paper like everyone else.”

Exactly who was overthrowing whom is a fair question, said International Crisis Group analyst Mouin Rabbani.

by Adam Entous - 06/17/07 - Reuters

Let Hamas govern

Fatah’s staggering failure, however, came after the Oslo accord. Instead of transforming itself into a proper party of state and government it remained a broad and chaotic movement with no clear vision or political program, united by no other than clannish and cronies’ loyalties and the, now demised, charismatic leadership of Yasser Arafat. It failed to establish independent state and government institutions thus turning the increasingly impoverished and insecure Palestinian society into a discontented dependent of a corrupt and chaotic system. Most of all its peace negotiations and treaties with Israel failed to put an end not only to the Israeli military occupation - which what Palestinians hoped to see - but even the expansion of Jewish settlements.

Though this is largely the responsibility of Israel, it was Fatah’s leadership that was seen as too weak to stand up to the Israelis. Hamas won the last year elections not because it presented voters with a coherent and hopeful set of policies - the current confusion of its leaders attest to that. But because after more than a decade of Fatah’s rule, social and political conditions in the West Bank and Gaza have deteriorated back to what they were under military Israeli rule.

by Sami El-youssef - 06/18/07 - Independent

The Wages of Corruption and Occupation: Welcome to “Palestine”

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” - and let’s keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over?

by Robert Fisk - 06/16-17/07 - Counter Punch

Abbas sacks Hamas-led government

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has dismissed the Hamas-led coalition government and declared a state of emergency. Aides said the president would seek to call elections as soon as possible, after deadly clashes between his Fatah faction and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

06/15/07 - BBC

Gaza fighting descends into new brutality

For Gaza taxi driver Tamer Ammar, the internal fighting became all-out civil war when militants started killing their rivals by throwing them off 15-storey buildings and mutilating their bodies.

by Nidal al-Mughrabi - 06/12/07 - Reuters

Hamas seizes Fatah security headquarters

Hundreds of Hamas fighters firing rockets and mortar shells captured the headquarters of the Fatah-allied security forces in northern Gaza on Tuesday, scoring a key victory in the bloody battle for control of the seaside strip.

by Sarah El Deeb - 06/12/07 - Yahoo

DePaul Genuflects to Dershowitz

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.

Dershowitz’s intereference in the case was clearly extensive. According to the Chronicle, “Mr. Dershowitz sent the DePaul law school faculty and members of the political-science department what he described, in a letter dated October 3 [2006], as a ‘dossier of Norman Finkelstein’s most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions.’” Dershowitz told the Chronicle prior to the tenure decision: “It would be a disgrace to DePaul University if they were to grant tenure. It would make them the laughing stock of American universities.”[3] In a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Finkelstein’s Bigotry,” Dershowitz wrote about the vote by Finkelstein’s department: “Mr. Finkelstein’s radical colleagues voted for tenure, having cooked the books by seeking outside evaluations from two of his ideological soulmates.”[4] In the New Republic, Dershowitz called Finkelstein (who is Jewish) an “anti-Semite.”[5] And a few weeks before the tenure announcement was due, Dershowitz asked in print: “Will [Finkelstein’s] bigotry receive the imprimatur of the largest Catholic university in America?”[6]

Anyone with even minimal awareness of the politics of criticizing Israel in the United States understands the implied threats against DePaul that such statements from Dershowitz embodied. Clearly, Dershowitz sought to leverage Catholic vulnerability about the Holocaust, given the “neutrality” of Pope Pius XII in the midst of the genocide of European Jews, and Finkelstein’s scholarship on the Holocaust, which argues that it’s exploited by Israel to justify its otherwise illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Or perhaps President Holtschneider happened to see the photograph of Pope Benedict XVI placed next to one of David Duke on the homepage of the Anti-Defamation League in January of this year—an apparent co-conspirator (with the UN’s Kofi Annan) against Israel—and imagined his own picture there pursuant to a grant of tenure to Finkelstein. Or maybe he sought not to expose himself and his university to the kind of Dershowitzian slander that Finkelstein was subjected to, and which Holtschneider witnessed without a public word to Dershowitz that his interference in the case was improper and unacceptable.

by Howard Friel - 06/12/07 - ZNet

DePaul U. Turns Norman Finkelstein Down for Tenure

Norman G. Finkelstein, the controversial political scientist who has been engaged in a public battle for tenure at DePaul University, learned on Friday that he had lost that fight. In a written statement, the university confirmed that Mr. Finkelstein had been denied tenure.

by Jennifer Howard - 06/11/07 - Chronicle of Higher Education

6 Days of War: Day 2

And now the question was, you’ve won the borders, and now there’s a question of the refugees. It seems pretty clear after ‘67 Arab states — I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying it as a fact — the Arab states were open to the resolution of the refugee question which would be compensation instead of return.

So if Israel had been willing to accept the ‘67 borders and compensation — which would’ve been basically paid for internationally, not by Israel — and compensation for the refugees, they could’ve had peace since ‘68.

No question about it.

But, like most States, they just had this big victory, they are intoxicated by it, the Arabs are humiliated and the famous line by Moshe Dayan, we’re standing by the telephone, waiting for your call, and if you don’t call, too bad, we’re not leaving. And that’s why I think The Economist, this past week, it had an article on the 40th anniversary, and the title was not bad, I didn’t really agree with the content, but the title was not bad, it was called “The Wasted Victory,” because they could’ve gotten the ‘48 borders and the resolution of the refugee question. But they didn’t want it, they wanted more. They got greedy.

And the greediness, I think, history will show, destroyed the country. I don’t think pesonally any longer — and I don’t say it with any kind of satisfaction — I don’t think Israel has a future there anymore. It’s turned into a, you could call it, it’s turned into a crazy State because when you listen to the language of Israel, it’s totally out of sync with the rest of the world. You take the last war in Iraq. There’re only 2 countries in the world that supported the war, Kuwait, for reasons you can understand, and Israel — 70% of the population. Now, the war with Iran. There’s literally only 1 country in the world, you know, look at the polls — Israel. The population, the government pushing hard — war, war, war. Attacking Lebanon, attacking Gaza, it’s become a kind of crazy State and a lot of the craziness came out of this June ‘67 war. It could’ve had a relatively, you know, you can’t say it’s gonna be perfect, it’s not gonna be Scandinavia, but they could’ve resolved the major problems 40 years ago.

Two things. They got intoxicated with their power and secondly, they got entangled in ways which I think were very detrimental to them in this relationship with the United States.

Norman Finkelstein Interviewed - 06/06/07 - Chicago Public Radio

The Dangerous Potent Elixir of Christian Zionism

What Christian Zionists Believe

Christian Zionism centers on a literal and fundamentalist interpretation of five biblical beliefs—beliefs, it should be noted, that are not shared by most mainline Protestant churches, or by Roman Catholic or Orthodox Christians—and not even by many moderates who consider themselves Evangelicals.

Its core Bible interpretations are:

* That God’s covenant with Israel is eternal (including the promise of “the land” belonging to Israel in perpetuity;

* That God’s plan was always the redemption of Israel as God’s chosen people. When Israel rejected Christ, the Christian church replaced Israel, but only temporarily. At the Rapture, the church will again disappear and Israel will again become God’s primary agent in the world;

* That one verse in the Book of Genesis—12:3: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you”—is pivotal, must be taken literally and applied to the modern state of Israel. Hence, Christians are divinely mandated to support the state of Israel and will face divine wrath if they do not;

* That the Bible’s prophetic books—including references to events like the Babylonian Exile, which occurred in 800 B.C.—predict current and coming political events, especially cataclysmic natural disasters signaling Christ’s ­Second Coming. Favorite biblical books are Daniel and the Book of Revelation, both filled with obscure symbolism and elaborate descriptions of the end of the world;

* That modern Israel is the catalyst for the countdown to the End Times (persecution, the Rapture, coming of the Antichrist, etc.), and that current political alignments will determine the future. A major contemporary belief is that the state of Israel (with financial backing from Christians) is destined to war with the pagan nations (Iraq, Iran, etc.), thus bringing about Armageddon, or the end of the world, and thus hasten the Second Coming of Jesus.

Christian Zionists believe that support of the state of Israel is a divinely mandated obligation in order to ensure their own salvation and to hasten the Second Coming of Jesus. Ironically, Jews are then expected either to convert and accept Jesus (which Christian Zionists consider unlikely) or be damned along with other “infidels” (e.g., Muslims) with whom they war. God is only “using” Israel to save Christians, the new heirs to the new Israel. —PLM

by Pat Morrison - April 2007 Issue - Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

FAQ on the 1967 War

This June marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control maintained by force of arms have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and to remake them in its own image.

Here is FAQ on the 1967 war:

1. How did the 1967 war begin?

2. Which countries were involved in the fighting?

3. What was the outcome?

4. How did Israel justify its attack?

5. Is Israel’s version of the facts universally accepted?

6. If Israel’s claimed reasons for the attack were false, what were its true objectives?

7. What was the chain of events leading up to the war?

8. Why was the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) only on the Egyptian side of the border and not on the Israeli side as well?

9. Where were Egypt’s troops on the day preceding the war?

10. What role, if any, did the United States play in the diplomatic efforts to avert armed conflict?

11. What were the consequences of the 1967 war for Palestinians?

12. What is the legal status of the land Israel seized in 1967?

13. What were the long-term implications of the war for peace and stability in the region, and for the status of international law?

by Haitham Sabbah - 05/31/07 - Sabbah

Good Riddance Attention Whore

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me. The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party.

Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland.

by Cindy Sheehan - 05/30/07 - Peace Palestine

The Sixty Year Wound: To the Shores of Tripoli

The ordinary Israeli shrugs his shoulders when confronted with the suffering of the Palestinian refugees and dismisses it with five words: “They brought it on themselves.”

Learned professors and market vendors repeat that the Palestinians caused their own downfall when, in 1947, they rejected the Partition Plan of the United Nations and started a war to annihilate the Jewish community in the country.

That is a deeply rooted myth, one of the basic myths of Israeli consciousness. But it is far from reflecting what really happened.

by Uri Avnery - 05/30/07 - Counter Punch

Secret memo shows Israel knew Six Day War was illegal

A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel after the Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the first time, that he still believes that he was right.

The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser at the time and today one of the world’s leading international jurists, is a serious blow to Israel’s persistent argument that the settlements do not violate international law, particularly as Israel prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war in June 1967.

The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The Independent, was marked “Top Secret” and “Extremely Urgent” and reached the unequivocal conclusion, in the words of its author’s summary, “that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Judge Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia until 2005, said that, after 40 years of Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank - one of the main problems to be solved in any peace deal: “I believe that I would have given the same opinion today.”

Judge Meron, a holocaust survivor, also sheds new light on the aftermath of the 1967 war by disclosing that the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, was “sympathetic” to his view that civilian settlement would directly conflict with the Hague and Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.

05/27/07 - Independent

The Commonplace Cowardice of Responsible Professors: What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia

Finkelstein has been a provocative scholar since graduate school, when he dared to critique Joan Peters’ 1984 book From Time Immemorial, a fraudulent attempt to discredit Palestinian claims to their land occupied by Israel. Displaying considerable courage in the face of those happy to use Peters’ book to justify undermining the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, Finkelstein challenged the bogus factual claims of the book and embarrassed those in the political and academic establishment who had praised the book.

From there, Finkelstein has pursued research not only about the Israel/Palestine conflict but the Holocaust and the politics of reparations. His recent books and public comments have only increased the numbers who would like to silence him and the intensity of those campaigns. Finkelstein’s critique of the work of Alan Dershowitz has upped the ante; the media-savvy Harvard law professor has made it a point to torpedo Finkelstein’s career.

I have never met Finkelstein, though I did once interview him over the phone for a radio program I produced about Middle East issues. I have listened to, or read transcripts of, interviews with him, and I find him contentious but consistently insightful. I have read his well-researched and well-reasoned books on the Middle East and found them helpful in my work. I’ve concluded that Finkelstein is (1) probably not temperamentally suited for the role of a facilitator or mediator, and (2) unquestionably a first-rate intellectual doing important work to bring to light sometimes harsh truths about the way power is exercised in this world.

In short, Finkelstein is using his academic freedom responsibly.

by Robert Jensen - 05/25/07 - Counter Punch

Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg

Q: You have famously argued that there were three solutions to the Jewish problem; conversion, expulsion, and finally extermination. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Q: There was the revisionist conference in Iran several months ago. How worried should scholars and the general public be about the capacity of this kind of revisionism to engender anti-Semitism?

Q: Many of the recent anti-Semitic incidents in Europe have led people to talk of a new anti-Semitism. Is this really something we should take seriously or is this simply a continuance of the older anti-Semitism?

Q: What are your thoughts on the rhetorical and symbolic usage of the word “Holocaust”?

Q: Moving beyond the way these words are symbolically and rhetorically employed, what do you see as the kind of relation of the Holocaust to other historical and current genocides? How can we use the lessons of it to confront the kind of violence and persecution of groups which are occurring today, whether or not sociologically we consider them genocides?

Q: What are your thoughts on the current debates over how to interpret the Holocaust and its legacy in the work of people like Norman Finkelstein or Daniel Goldhagen?

Q: One last question, as time goes on in the twenty-first century what direction should research on the Holocaust take now?

Logos 6.1-2 - winter-spring 2007 - © Logosonline 2007

Related posts:

1. Understanding Lebanon’s June Elections Time for C
2. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Resolution: Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) - June 14, 2009 Adopted at
3. Hamas Delivers Peace Letter to President Obama June 4, 20
4. Obama-Netanyahu and the Fate of the Middle East May 18, 20
5. My Talk with Hamas about Peace with Israel The US sho

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.